Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  The buildings on the five hills framing the Vale shone with marble, polished granite, and bronze. The only exception was the Old Senate House which had burned three centuries before during the Succession Riots. The shell of concrete with brick accents remained as a relic of Xenos—and Cinnabar—before the Hiatus.

  The present Senate House embraced and towered above the original. The business of a planet had been conducted in the older building; the new one served an empire. As Adele watched, builders were working on an additional fourth floor in place of the Senate Roof Garden.

  Before the Succession Riots, the palaces of wealthy families had covered the slopes of Dobbins Hill and a part of the Divan, on the south and southeast margins of the Vale. Most of those structures, that of the Mundys included, had burned with the Senate House. Rebuilding had taken place at a safer distance from the Vale, where political protest generally took form.

  Now, even the palaces surviving from the time of the Riots had been converted to government use. The entire Pentacrest was given over to structures which either carried out the work of the Republic or vaunted the Republic’s power.

  Adele made her way through the crowd, around the statues and other monuments studding the Vale like tucks in upholstery. A juggler performed with burning torches while an animal resembling a bipedal armadillo paced a circle about him, holding up a hat for donations. A woman with the flying hair of a Maenad shouted the truths of her revelation—amusingly to Adele, from the shade of a stele commemorating Admiral Duclon. Duclon, a hero of the First Alliance War, was reputedly the most profane man ever to wear an RCN uniform.

  The Church of the Redeeming Spirit stood on Progress Hill. Students filled both bays of the domed portico sheltering the foot of the stairs serving it, declaiming under the eyes of their rival rhetoric professors. As Adele passed between the groups, the girl to her left trilled, ” … nor could the Republic long survive!” while the boy to the left boomed hoarsely, ” … nor can the Republic long survive!”

  Adele wondered whether they’d been set the same proposition or if chance had merely doubled an oratorical commonplace. She wasn’t curious enough to listen for more; and anyway, time was short. Briskly she climbed the broad treads. They were hewn from hard sandstone, but nonetheless the feet of a millennium of passersby had polished them.

  How would the Pentacrest look to a visitor from Rodalpa, say, or an even more rural world like Kerrace? Would he be impressed, or would it seem the mad chaos of an overturned ants’ nest?

  To Adele, sophisticated and dispassionate but not even now a stranger, the Pentacrest was the most amazing sight of her personal experience. It made her—unwillingly and amused by her own sentimental weakness—proud to be a citizen of Cinnabar.

  The stairs mounted the face of Progress Hill steeply. Every generation or so, some politician moved to put in an elevator. The proposal was always defeated on the twin grounds of tradition and fear of defacing the Pentacrest. Retainers carried members of most wealthy families, and citizens in more moderate circumstances could hire a chair and two husky laborers to bear it.

  Adele’s mouth quirked a wry smile. The Mundys had courted the popular vote by walking on their own feet so long as health permitted them to. Her father would have said he supported the people as a matter of principle; and no doubt he did. But in the end principle boiled down to personal power, as surely for Lucius Mundy as it did for Corder Leary; and it was the Mundys whose associates—not Lucius himself, of that Adele was certain—took Alliance money to further their plans.

  The open staircase ended in a terrace eighty feet above the Vale. Several of the city government offices were located here, their facades set back enough that they couldn’t be seen from below. An archway enclosing more stairs zigzagged across the face of the hill, leading to the nave of the church and the wings flanking the main courtyard.

  Adele stepped into the tunnel, ignoring the beggars around the entrance. Church ushers—guards—prevented mendicants from climbing farther into the complex, so they clustered here on the lower parterre. Adele knew what it was to be poor, but she wasn’t wealthy now; and the sympathy for the poor that the political members of her family had shown as a matter of policy had died with them during the Proscriptions.

  Electroluminescent strips along the axis of the tunnel’s roof cast a cool glow over the interior. Mosaics made from glass chips, sometimes with foil backing, lined the walls. The images portrayed the settlement of Cinnabar in the third wave of human expansion.

  The first colonists built with slabs of stabilized dirt extruded by vast machines carried in the bellies of four starships. In the artist’s rendering, bladed tractors crawled across a forested landscape, leaving behind them fields green with human crops.

  But the tractors and the furnaces forming construction material wore out. Later buildings were of wood, stone, and concrete, because Cinnabar’s industry was incapable of repairing the equipment which had come from Earth. Cattle imported for meat and milk drew the plows.

  Because the colony was less than a generation old when the Population Wars began, Cinnabar wasn’t dragged into the fighting as a participant. The complete collapse of interstellar transport threw the planet onto her own weak resources, but she escaped the rain of redirected asteroids which wreaked cataclysmic destruction on the more developed worlds—Earth herself foremost among the victims.

  There were perhaps more humans alive in the universe today than there had been at the start of the Population Wars, but the most populous single planet had only a fraction of the numbers which had caused the Earth government to pursue a policy of forcing its excess on daughter worlds because sending out further organized colonies would have been too expensive.

  The population of the few remaining habitable portions of Earth was modest. In a manner of speaking, Adele thought with a cold smile, Earth’s policy had achieved its stated objective.

  The final panels at the tunnel’s upper end showed the rebirth of space travel on Cinnabar. To the left, a multistage rocket rose on a plume of chemical flame; to the right, a starship using rediscovered principles spread its sails, slipping from the sidereal universe in a haze of Casimir radiation.

  Adele stepped into daylight again. The church rose before her in polished splendor; if she turned, she would look out over the length of Pentacrest Vale to the notch between Dobbins Hill and the Castle, with the western suburbs of Xenos visible as far as the eye could see.

  A starship was rising from Harbor Three. It was huge, though despite wearing the uniform of the RCN Adele didn’t pretend to be able to identify vessels.

  She sighed and walked across the marble pavers to the cantilevered gateway of the Library of Thomas Celsus, which filled both levels of the church’s west portico. On the pediment was a statue of the founder—business agent to Speaker Ramsey, the unchallenged ruler of the Republic two centuries in the past—offering a scroll to the People, represented as a woman in flowing robes.

  The Celsus served as the national collection and was the greatest library on Cinnabar. When Adele was nine, her tutor had told her that the Celsus was the foremost repository of knowledge in the human universe. Adele had immediately used the resources of the library to check his statement—and learned there were several collections on the older worlds of the Alliance which could put the Celsus to shame.

  Adele had immediately ordered the man out of her sight with a fury that shocked her parents and frightened him—rightly, because at that age she might well have shot him if he’d attempted to justify his falsehood. He’d lied to her out of patriotism; error has no right to exist!

  The usher inside the bronze doors nodded warmly to Adele. She blinked in surprise. “Fandler, isn’t it? Good to see you still here.”

  The usher stepped out from his kiosk so that he could bow properly to her. “Good to see you, Ms. Mundy. All of us here at the Celsus were afraid something had happened to you during the late unpleasantness.”

  “Nothing worth mentioning, Fa
ndler,” Adele said. That was true enough, in absolute terms—what human activity is really worth mentioning?—and true also relative to those whose heads had decorated the Speaker’s Rock.

  She strode on through the cool rotunda, her steps echoing. It really was like coming home.

  Banks of data consoles, separated from one another by panels of soundproofing foam for modest privacy, lined the tables of the wings on either side of the rotunda. There were three hundred and twelve consoles; there had been when Adele last entered the Celsus, at any rate, and it all appeared the same. Forty or so were occupied at the moment.

  She walked to the desk across from the entrance, glancing down at the pavement tessellated in bands of soft grays and blues. It hadn’t changed since the day Adele Mundy left Cinnabar.

  She herself had changed, though.

  Clerks sat behind the counter, working at consoles of their own. A page sorted volumes from a large table onto a cart, looking up at the sound of Adele’s footsteps.

  The official at the desk flanking the passage to the stacks of hard copy within the building was only a few years older than Adele; she’d never met him. His eyes glanced from the naval uniform to her face as she approached, his expression giving nothing away.

  Adele handed him the access chip instead of inserting it into the reader herself. It was the one she’d carried with her to Blythe; she had no idea whether it would still work.

  The official glanced at the number engraved on the flat. His eyebrows raised. He set the chip on his desk and stood.

  “Ms. Adele Mundy?” he said, offering her his right hand. “I’m Lees Klopfer, Third Assistant Administrator. I’ve followed your work at the Academic Collections. We’re honored to have you here.”

  Adele shook Klopfer’s hand firmly, feeling a little disconcerted. So far as she could tell, the man was quite genuine. Only a guilty conscience made her wonder if he’d been told to greet her in that fashion—and if so, by whom?

  The words “guilty conscience” raised another image in Adele’s mind: a boy lurching backward, his duelling pistol flying from his hand; his brains a fluid splash in the air behind him.

  Something of that image must have shown in her eyes, because Klopfer straightened with surprise and with perhaps a touch of fear. “Ms. Mundy?” he said. “If I gave offense, I assure you I—”

  “No, no, not at all,” Adele said, doing her best to force a smile. She probably looked as if she were being crucified! “Just a touch of an old pain.”

  Quite true: the pain of remembering the first person she’d killed. No longer the only person, not by a considerable number. Oh, yes, Adele Mundy had changed—and not even she was cynical enough to believe that she’d changed for the better.

  Klopfer returned the chip to her. “You have complete access, of course, Ms. Mundy,” he said. “If there’s anything I or the staff can do to help, of course let us know.”

  “Thank you,” she said as she entered the passage to the stacks, “I certainly will.”

  Klopfer’s enthusiasm had to be genuine. It was odd to be honored again as a librarian, though that was the profession to which she’d devoted her whole life until the past few months. More recently compliments she’d received were for her ability to decrypt coded files, to explore and reroute communications pathways—and to fire a pistol with a skill unmatched by any of those who had faced her.

  In another life Adele Mundy might have spent her whole existence in this library or a greater one, surrounded by knowledge and oblivious of her lack of friends. Well, service with the RCN didn’t keep her from gaining and organizing knowledge. As for the other, she’d now rather die than lose the awareness that Daniel Leary trusted her implicitly with his life and honor, because they were friends.

  She climbed the slotted steel stairs to the fourth level of the stacks, then turned left through art history … physics and cosmology … engineering. Pages wandered by, glancing at her with mild interest. Naval uniforms are never common in the heart of great libraries.

  At the end of the aisle were rooms looking out through the upper colonnade to the main courtyard of the church. Cataloguing had the bank to the east; the five doors there were open, and the sound of chatting clerks drifted into the collection. On the west were a score of smaller rooms reserved for scholars visiting the stacks.

  A pair of men stood facing the stacks while their eyes searched every other direction. They were making a half-hearted effort at pretending to be pages. As well dress Adele in a tutu and claim she was a ballet dancer!

  The older of the pair nodded to her. She ignored them—she didn’t need a guard’s permission to do as she pleased in what had been her second home—and tapped on the door with a stencilled 6. A poster was taped over the inside of the little window.

  Bernis Sand, a stocky woman of sixty, dressed in plain but very expensive good taste, opened the thin door. There was a second chair inside along with the spartan desk and workstation, cramping the cubicle even more than usually would have been the case.

  Adele felt a surge of nostalgia. She’d spent years closeted with a tutor in this cubicle and the others in the rank, learning the most important part of an education: how to learn.

  Now she was getting further lessons; this time from the head of the Republic’s intelligence service.

  “You’re looking fit, mistress,” Mistress Sand said, stepping back and gesturing to the nearer chair. “Was your voyage comfortable?”

  Adele closed the door and seated herself, scraping the chair an inch back to give her knees and those of the older woman more room. “Lieutenant Leary assures me that almost everyone gets used to the experience of entering the Matrix,” she said. “I have no evidence as yet that I’m among that fortunate majority. Apart from that, yes. The Princess Cecile and her crew performed in accordance with the traditions of the RCN.”

  She permitted herself a smile to show that she wasn’t trying to sell Mistress Sand on the virtues of Daniel and his temporary command. Nonetheless, what she said was literally true. Insofar as possible, everything Adele said was the literal truth.

  Sand chuckled, appreciating the subtlety of Adele’s presentation. She took a conical ivory container from her sleeve and poured a dose of snuff into the cup between her clenched thumb and the back of her left hand. She didn’t bother offering what Adele had refused in the past; Mistress Sand didn’t waste motion—or anything else that Adele had noticed in their short acquaintance.

  “What do you know about Strymon, mistress?” Sand asked as she lifted the snuff, blocking her right nostril with that index finger.

  “I made a cursory search yesterday, before you called me to this meeting,” Adele said. Her face remained calm, but her brain was racing to correlate Sand’s question with Delos Vaughn’s visit to the Princess Cecile. “Not a great deal.”

  “There’s rumors on Pleasaunce that Councillor Nunes is intriguing with the Alliance,” Sand said. “Nothing from Strymon itself, though.”

  She snorted the dose of snuff, grimaced, and sneezed explosively into a lacy handkerchief from the same sleeve as the snuffbox.

  “There’s rarely fewer than a dozen Cinnabar-registered vessels on Strymon at any time,” Adele said, ignoring Sand’s satisfied dabbing at her nose. “Cursory search” in Adele’s terminology was more inclusive than many people’s “full briefing” would be. “Generally twenty or more. Word would get out.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Sand said, looking up again. Her eyes were mottled brown, as hard as chips of agate. “What about the rumors on Pleasaunce?”

  “The Fifth Bureau—” Guarantor Porra’s personal security service “—spreads lies,” Adele said. “Bureaucrats lie to make themselves look effective without anyone else’s encouragement.”

  “All true, all true,” Sand said; her tone didn’t imply agreement. “Regardless, I have a bad feeling about Strymon.”

  Adele said nothing. She hadn’t been asked a question, and she didn’t require amplificati
on of what she’d just been told. Mistress Sand had remained in her position too long for her intuitions to be safely disregarded.

  “The Navy’s sent a squadron to Strymon to show the flag,” Sand said. She eyed the snuffbox judiciously, then set it back within the sleeve of her frock coat. “Two destroyers and an old cruiser. They left Cinnabar a week ago Thursday.”

  Adele smiled faintly to hear Sand, an outsider for all her rank and knowledge, speak of what Warrant Officer Adele Mundy would have referred to as “the RCN.” Her smile faded. If the squadron had already set out, why had Sand called her to this meeting?

  “There was a bit of a communications failure between the Navy Office and my staff,” Sand said, answering Adele’s unspoken question. “It won’t be repeated, at any rate not by the same people; and it’s nothing that can’t be remedied. A fast vessel can join the squadron en route.”

  Adele had never met any member of Sand’s organization except the spymaster herself. Adele couldn’t imagine that Sand personally controlled all her agents, but neither did she have evidence to the contrary.

  “I’d like you to be on that vessel,” Sand concluded, raising her eyebrow minutely to elicit a response.

  “The Princess Cecile, you mean?” Adele asked; a genuine question because she didn’t care to assume Sand’s intentions. “Under Lieutenant Leary?”

  “Both would be eminently suitable choices,” Sand said mildly, her eyes on Adele’s. There was nothing threatening in Sand’s tone or appearance, but both commanded respect. “Cruises of this sort normally involve ships no longer fit for frontline use, but a foreign-built vessel like the Princess Cecile should fit in admirably.”

  Sand coughed into her hand without lowering her eyes. “Lieutenant Leary would accept the posting, you think?”

  Daniel would turn nude cartwheels down Mission Boulevard if that were required to get the posting. Aloud Adele said, “I believe he will. I, ah, have in the past found working with Lieutenant Leary to be …”

  She smiled; humor was only a part of the expression.