What Distant Deeps-ARC Read online

  Peterleigh jumped and would have spilled ale if he hadn't emptied his mug. Waldmiller and Broma masked their amusement—Broma more effectively than his elder colleague. The tenants, Foiles and Higgenson, maintained their frozen silence. They'd been quiet even before Maud Steen had torn a strip off her husband, and that had chilled them further.

  "Didn't mean to break in unannounced," Sand said. "I'm Tom Sand and I built the hall there."

  He nodded in the direction of it.

  "And not a half-bad job, if I do say so myself."

  "These are my neighbors," said Daniel. "Waldmiller, Broma, and you've already met Peterleigh, so to speak. Have some ale, Sand. We're setting a good example for the tenants so that none of them bring out the kelp liquor they brew in their sheds."

  Sand laughed, drawing a mug of ale. "I understand, Leary," he said. "I have a capping party for the crew on each job, but it's beer there too. It doesn't hurt a man to get drunk every once in a while, but I'd as lief give them guns as hard liquor for the chances that they'd all survive the night."

  He shook his head, then added, "No offense meant about trade being strangled. The RCN did a fine job. But any shipowner who lifted at all got a letter of marque and converted his hull into a privateer. In the neutral worlds, chances are he's got warrants from both us and the Alliance. That was better business than hauling a load of wheat from Ewer to Cinnabar—and likely being captured by some privateer besides."

  "No offense taken, Sand," Daniel said. "Every word you say is true."

  He swept his neighbors with his eyes. "You see, Peterleigh," he said, "our tenants work hard and they live bloody hard by city standards. But they never doubt there'll be food on the table in the evening, even if it's dried fish and potatoes. The folk in the housing blocks around Xenos don't know that, and I'm told there were riots already last year."

  He flashed a broad grin and added, "I wasn't around to see them, of course."

  "Right!" said Sand, turning from the keg with a full mug of ale. To the others in the circle he said, "Captain Leary was chasing the Alliance out of the Montserrat Stars with their tails between their legs. Splendid work, Leary! Makes me proud to be a citizen of Cinnabar."

  "That's the Squire for you!" blurted Higgenson, pride freeing his tongue. "Burned them wogs a new one, he did!"

  There was commotion and a loud rattle from the Hall. Hogg and a tenant of roughly his age were dancing with rams' horns strapped to their feet. The curved horns made an almighty clatter on the concrete floor, but the men with their arms akimbo were impressive as they banged through a measure to the sound of the bagpipe.

  "That's Hogg himself, isn't it, Leary?" asked Broma. The hammering dance had drawn all eyes, though the tenants around the Hall limited what Daniel and his fellows could see from the seafront.

  "Aye, and that's Des Cranbrook who's got a grain allotment in the northeast district and a prime orchard tract," said Foiles. Since Higgenson had spoken without being struck by lightning, the fisherman had decided it was safe for him to say something also.

  "Plus the common pasturage, of course," Daniel said, speaking to Sand; his fellow landowners took that for granted. The dancers—both stout; neither of them young nor likely to have been handsome even in youth—hopped with the majesty of clock movements, slowly pirouetting as they circled one another.

  "Haven't seen a real horn dance in law! twenty years if it's been one," said Higgenson. His social betters were intent on the dancing, which gave him a chance to speak from personal knowledge. "The young folk don't pick it up, seems like."

  "That'll change now," said Foiles. "The young ones, the ones that didn't know Hogg before he went away with you, Squire—"

  He dipped his head toward Daniel.

  "—they all think the sun shines out of his asshole. And some of the women as did know him and so ought to know better, they're near as bad."

  The dancers collapsed into one another's arms, then wobbled laughing back to their seats. Girls pushed each other to be the ones unstrapping the rams' horns. Cranbrook was getting his share of the attention. The lass hugging him and offering a mug of ale might have been his granddaughter, but Daniel was pretty sure that she wasn't. He grinned.

  "Ah . . . ?" said Higgenson in sudden concern—though he hadn't been the one who'd actually commented on Hogg's former reputation. "Not that we meant anything, Squire. You know how folks used to say things, and no truth in them, like as not."

  "I suspect there was a lot of truth in what was said about Hogg," Daniel said, thinking back on the past and feeling his smile slip. "And about me, I shouldn't wonder. It's probably to Bantry's benefit as well as the Republic's that the RCN has found the two of us occupation at a distance from the estate."

  Georg Hofmann approached the group. He looked older and more stooped than Daniel had remembered him, but that was years since, of course. His estate, Brightness Landing, was well up the coast.

  "I didn't recognize the woman who got out of the car with Hofmann," Daniel said in a low voice. She was in her early forties and had been poured into a dress considerably too small and too youthful for her.

  "He remarried, a widow from Xenos," said Waldmiller with a snort. "Damned if I can see the attraction."

  "And she brought a son besides," said Peterleigh. "Chuckie, I believe his name is; Platt, from the first husband. That one might better stay in Xenos, I think."

  The youth was tall and well set up. He looked twenty from Daniel's distance, but his size may have given him a year or two more than time had. Accompanied by two servants in pink-and-buff livery—those weren't Hofmann's colors, so they may have been Platt's—he was sauntering toward a group of the younger tenants on the seawall not far from the manor house.

  Daniel's eyes narrowed. Platt took a pull from a gallon jug as he walked, then handed it to a servant. His other servant held what looked very much like a case of dueling pistols.

  Hofmann joined the group around Daniel. Up close, he looked even more tired than he had at a distance. He exchanged nods with his neighbors, then said, "It's been years, Leary. Good years for you, from what I hear."

  "It's good to see the old place, Hofmann," Daniel said, "though I don't really fit here any more, I'm afraid. Hofmann, this is Tom Sand, who built the new hall."

  "I heard you were doing that work, Sand," said Hofmann, extending his hand to shake. Hofmann was the other member of the local gentry who'd been active in national affairs; though not to the extent of Corder Leary, of course. "How did that come to happen, if I may ask. It's not—"

  He gestured toward the new building.

  "—on your usual scale, I should have said."

  Daniel heard the low-frequency thrum of the big surface effect transport he'd been expecting and gave a sigh of relief. He'd set the arrival for mid-afternoon. He hadn't wanted his Sissies to party for the full day and night with the Bantry tenants, but he'd been so long in the company of spacers that the rural society in which he'd been raised had become strange to him.

  "I asked for the job," said Sand, squaring his broad shoulders. "I wanted a chance to do something for a real hero of the Republic."

  He gave Daniel a challenging grin and a nod that was almost a bow. "Hear hear!" said Peterleigh, and the others in the group echoed him.

  "Much obliged," said Daniel in embarrassment. He drew a mug of ale for an excuse to turn away.

  The bid for the Community Hall had seemed fair. Deirdre, Daniel's older sister, had handled the matter for him; she'd been handling all his business since prize money had made that more complex than finding a few florins to pay a bar tab. Deirdre had followed their father into finance with a ruthless intelligence that would doubtless serve her well in politics also when she chose to enter the Senate.

  The building that appeared wasn't the simple barn that Daniel had envisaged, though. The wall mechanisms were extremely sophisticated—and solid: Daniel had gone over them with the attention he'd have given the lock mechanisms of a ship he commanded. Onl
y then had he realized that this was more than a commercial proposition for the builder; as, of course, it was for Daniel Leary himself.

  The transport rumbled in from the sea, a great aerofoil with a catamaran hull. It slid up the processing plant's ramp—which had been extended north to support the starboard outrigger—and settled to a halt.

  The reel dance had broken up for the time being. All eyes were on the big vehicle.

  "This something you were expecting, Leary?" said Waldmiller, frowning. To him such craft were strictly for trade, hauling his estate's produce to market in the cities of the east.

  The hatches opened. Even before the ramps had fully deployed, spacers were hopping to the ground wearing their liberty suits. Their embroidered patches were bright, and ribbons fluttered from all the seams.

  "Up the Sissie!" someone shouted. The group headed for the Hall and the promised ale with the same quick enthusiasm that they'd have shown in storming Hell if Captain Leary had ordered it.

  "It is indeed, Waldmiller," Daniel said. "These are the spacers who've served with me since before I took command of the Princess Cecile. I invited them and some of my other shipmates to share the fun today."

  Officers waited for the ramp, not that they couldn't have jumped if they'd thought the situation required speed rather than decorum. For the most part they wore their 2nd Class uniforms, their Grays, but Mon—a reserve lieutenant, though he'd for several years managed Bergen and Associates Shipyard in Daniel's name—had made a point of wearing his full-dress Whites.

  The shipyard had been doing very well under Mon's leadership. That had allowed him to have the uniform let out professionally, since his girth had also expanded notably.

  Two slightly built women were the last people out of the transport. Adele wore an unobtrusively good suit, since she was appearing as Lady Adele Mundy rather than as Signals Officer Mundy of the Princess Cecile. Tovera, her servant, was neat and nondescript, as easy to overlook as a viper in dried leaves.

  "I say, Leary?" said Broma. "Who's the civilian women there? Your Miranda's meeting them, I see."

  Miranda, accompanied by another flock of children—generally girls this time—waited at the bottom of the ramp. Mothers and older sisters were running to grab them when they noticed what was happening.

  "That's my friend Adele and her aide," Daniel said with satisfaction. "And I'm very glad to seem them again!"

  * * *

  The transport had four files of seats running the length of the fuselage, arranged in facing pairs. Only when the exit ramps began to open did Adele shut off her personal data unit and slide it into the pocket which she had added to the right thigh of all her dress clothes. The cargo pocket of RCN utilities worked very well without modification.

  Adele had found over the years that bespoke tailors gave her more trouble when she demanded the PDU pocket on civilian suits than RCN officers did when they saw her out of uniform. On the other hand, even the snootiest tailor gave in eventually for the honor of dressing Mundy of Chatsworth, a member of one of the oldest families of the Republic and a decorated hero besides.

  Adele was in fact the only member of the Mundys of Chatsworth to have survived the Proscriptions which had decapitated the Three Circles Conspiracy nearly twenty years earlier. At the time she was a sixteen-year-old student in the Academic Collections on Blythe, the second world and intellectual capital of the Alliance of Free Stars. Though her family had been extremely wealthy, her personal tastes were simple. That fitted her to survive if not flourish in a poverty too deep to be described as genteel.

  Recently, the prize money that had accrued to her as an RCN warrant officer in the crew of the most successful captain in a generation had allowed Adele to live and dress in a fashion that befit her rank in society. She was amused to reflect that she owed the recovery of her fortunes to the son of Speaker Leary, the man who had directed the execution of every other member of her family.

  She stood; Tovera, with her usual neutral expression, waited in the aisle to precede Adele as soon as she decided to leave the transport. Tovera's expression sometimes implied that the pale, slender woman was pleased about something. Those "somethings" weren't the sort of matters that amused most other people, however.

  Adele shared much of her servant's sense of humor. That, and the fact that Adele was a crack shot whose pistol had killed indeterminate scores of people during her service in the RCN, made her a suitable role model for Tovera. In order to survive in society, a murderous sociopath needs someone to translate the rules of acceptable behavior for her.

  Adele started down the aisle. Lieutenant Cory and Midshipman Cazelet were waiting by the hatch. Tovera gave them a minuscule nod which sent them down the ramp. This wasn't a social event for Adele; at least not yet.

  The two young officers were her protégés, though she wasn't sure how that had happened. Rene Cazelet was the grandson of her mentor at the Academic Collections, Mistress Boileau. When the boy's parents were executed for plotting against Guarantor Porra, Boileau had sent him to Adele.

  That was perfectly reasonable. Adele didn't understand why, however, after she'd helped Rene get his feet under him on Cinnabar, he'd continued to follow her in the RCN instead of finding a civilian occupation. Adele's contacts could have opened almost any door for him.

  Cory was even more puzzling. He'd been a barely marginal midshipman when he was assigned to the Princess Cecile. Some of his classmates had blossomed under Daniel's training, but Cory had remained a thumb-fingered embarrassment . . . until Adele had more or less by accident found that the boy had a talent for communications—and used him. To the amazement of herself and Daniel both, Cory had managed to become a more-than-passable astrogator as well.

  Well and good; Adele was of course pleased. But Cory apparently credited her with his turnaround, whereas Adele would be the first to say that she would be better able to fly by flapping her arms than she would be to astrogate. She didn't even know how to direct the astrogation computer to find a solution the way many of the senior enlisted personnel could.

  Tovera led the way out of the transport, her hand within the half-open attaché case she carried in all circumstances which didn't allow her to show weapons openly. There was almost no chance of someone trying to attack Adele here at Bantry, but Tovera would say that no one had ever been murdered because their bodyguard was too careful. Tovera wasn't going to change her behavior, so it was a matter on which mistress and servant would simply disagree.

  The assorted spacers were already mixing with the crowd of Bantry tenants. Both groups were in their party clothes, but they were as distinct as birds from lizards. The Sissies wore ribbons and patches, while the Bantries were in solid bright colors—generally in combinations that clashed. Muted good taste wasn't seen as a virtue either by spacers or farmers, it appeared.

  Adele smiled. "Mistress?" said Tovera, who flicked quick glances behind her as well. Presumably she was concerned that the transport's driver might enter to creep from the cockpit to shoot Lady Mundy in the back.

  "I was wondering . . . ," Adele said. "How my tailor would react if I asked him to run me up a liberty suit."

  "Any of the Sissies would be proud to do the work, Mistress," Tovera said with a straight face and no inflection. "They'd fight each other for the honor."

  She paused, then added, "Woetjans would win."

  "Yes," Adele agreed dryly. "Woetjans would win."

  A sociopath shouldn't be able to joke, but Tovera had certainly learned to counterfeit the act. At least the comment was probably meant as a joke.

  The Princess Cecile's bosun was six-foot-six and rangy rather than heavy. She—Woetjans was biologically female—had always struck Adele as abnormally strong even for her size, and the length of high-pressure tubing she swung in a melee was more effective than a sawed-off shotgun.

  Miranda Dorst had just reached the bottom of the ramp. She waited in the middle of a group of children, smiling up at Adele.

  Daniel had
kept company with many women in the years Adele had known him. Most of them had been prettier than Miranda—a healthy girl, but not a raging beauty; and none of them had displayed half Miranda's intelligence.

  Adele respected Miranda, which permitted her to like the younger woman as well. She hoped that matters went well for her and Daniel, which didn't—Adele smiled briefly, coldly—necessarily mean that they would marry. But Miranda was adult, quite smart, and certainly knew her own mind.

  Women with floral aprons and contrasting bonnets were descending on Miranda's gaggle of children like jays on a swarm of termites, whisking them off one at a time by a sleeve or an ear. A boy remained, but a girl of sixteen or so was coming at a run with her eye on him.

  "Adele, I'm so glad to see you," Miranda said, sounding as though she meant it. "Is this your first visit to Bantry? I'm sure it's a wonderful place when one learns to appreciate it, but I'll admit that I've always been a city girl."

  "Lady Mundy Lady Mundy!" squealed the boy. He couldn't have been more than six.

  "Robbie!" cried the girl running toward him.

  "Are you the Squire's girlfriend, Lady Mundy?" Robbie demanded. "We all think you are!"

  The girl clouted Robbie over the ear. He yelped; she smothered his outrage in folds of her scarlet apron which overlay the blue/green/yellow checks of her skirt.

  "Your ladyship I'm so sorry!" the girl said. Her cheeks were almost as bright as the fabric. "He's my brother and it's my fault, I was supposed to watch him, I'm so sorry! I'm Susie Maynor and I shouldn't have let it happen!"

  "Thank you, Mistress Maynor," Adele said. Her voice and expression were emotionless, but she had made the intellectual decision to find the business amusing. That was the proper response, especially with a child; though it wasn't the direction her thoughts had first turned. "You may assure Master Robbie when he reappears that I am not the Squire's girlfriend."

  "Oh your ladyship!" the girl gasped. She strode toward the main gathering with determination, ignoring the muted wails from her apron.