The Way to Glory Read online

  A westbound car was hissing toward the shunt, shifting the polarity of its magnetic levitators to trail rather than lead that of the support rail. From outside the car seemed to be full to capacity. The doors didn't open as they normally would when the vehicle stopped.

  "Go back and wait for me, Tovera," Adele said. She reached for the latchplate, but the door accordianed open before she touched it. There were three figures inside, wearing cloaks over gray 2nd Class RCN uniforms. The rest of the crowd was an illusion caused by patterned film over the windows.

  "As the mistress orders," Tovera said politely, but she didn't move until the door had closed and the tram began to whine away.

  Personal transportation in Xenos was by foot or—most generally—by the monorail trams which covered all parts of the city and suburbs. The cars seated twelve and held twenty in reasonable comfort, though at rush hours they might carry double that number. They were individually programmed: a rider chose his destination on the touch pad at the stop where he waited. The system's central computer then directed to him the nearest car headed in the correct direction.

  The wait for a car was rarely more than twenty minutes except perhaps at the farthest reaches of the line. There was a great circular exchange at the Pentacrest, the physical and administrative center of Xenos, where riders might have to transfer; otherwise the cars took them to their destinations by the least circuitous route possible.

  Many wealthy families had private cars which retainers set onto the tramline when the master or mistress had an appointment. Only governmental agencies had aircars, and wheeled transport was limited to delivery vehicles during the hours of darkness. Both prohibitions were enforced not by the police but by other nobles, who wouldn't hesitate to have their guards shoot a rival's aircar into a collander.

  "Where's Mistress Sand?" Adele said with scant courtesy. The three officers—all men—in the car were strangers to her. She wasn't worried, but the situation wasn't what she'd expected and she didn't like it.

  "She sent us to brief you," said the eldest of the three. "Because of the delicacy of this matter, you're not to contact her directly while the operation is running."

  The fellow was in his fifties; he had sunken cheeks and a high forehead. The cloaks covered rank insignia and name tags, but if still on active duty he was at least a captain and possibly an admiral. His two companions were younger: a soft-featured blond in his twenties and a black-haired man of thirty-odd with the build of an athlete who'd let himself go to seed.

  Adele glanced at a window; the film that counterfeited a carload of passengers also prevented her from seeing out. The tram was proceeding according to directions these men had programmed into it. There was no way that she could tell where they were going; they might simply be riding in a circle back to where she'd gotten on.

  She didn't like this at all. Well, she'd been involved in many things that she didn't like, especially during the fourteen years she'd lived as a penniless orphan.

  "There isn't an operation till I've agreed to it," Adele said to the leader. "What are you proposing?"

  "If you think—" the blond man began hotly. His superior silenced him with a raised finger, continuing to hold Adele's eyes.

  The tram bounced hard at a junction. They were all standing. Adele and the blond man grabbed stanchions; the heavy-set man stumbled backward and had to stick out his hand to keep from falling on a seat. The leader rode the shock with the ease of a man who'd spent much of his life on maneuvering starships.

  The jolt had broken the serious edge of tension filling the car. The leader smiled curtly and said without preamble, "The most serious danger to the Republic at the moment, mistress, isn't the Alliance of Free Stars but rather Radical agitation here on Cinnabar. Though of course the Alliance is funding it, you can be sure of that."

  "I'm not sure of that," Adele said evenly. "But my duties have nothing to do with Cinnabar politics, so my ignorance is unimportant."

  "Your duties are what the Republic says they are, mistress," the heavy-set man growled.

  Adele looked at him; she didn't speak. The leader pursed his lips in irritation and said, "I'll handle this, More."

  Smoothing his face, he resumed to Adele, "Mistress, you can be certain that the Republic wouldn't call you to this duty were it not important. You lived within the Alliance for many years. You know that the so-called Alliance of Free Stars is really the brutal dictatorship of Guarantor Porra, enforced by military power and a ruthless security apparatus."

  "I agree," Adele said, smiling faintly. People tended to think "ruthless" meant "cruel." It didn't: it meant doing what was logically required without factoring in mercy.

  She herself wasn't cruel; but she'd shot her way out of a trap on Kostroma, changing 20-round magazines several times. If any of the scores of people she'd shot that night weren't dead, it was simply because the light pellets from her pocket pistol hadn't penetrated their skulls as she'd intended.

  She'd been aiming at their eyes because the bone behind the orbits is very thin, so almost all of the pellets would've penetrated.

  In the hours before dawn Adele saw those faces and other dead faces more nights than she didn't. Nonetheless she'd do the same thing again if the situation logically required it. She knew what ruthless meant.

  "The trouble is, most of the common people, especially in Xenos, don't have your experience," the leader continued. "They're easy marks for Porra's agitators and also for irresponsible Cinnabar politicians who think they'll gain votes by turning the common people against their natural leaders."

  "A cancer," the blond man said, his head turned to the side as though he were addressing the images pasted onto the windows. "A cancer in the heart of the Republic!"

  "Your late father is a hero to many of these people, Mistress Mundy," the leader said earnestly. "Because you've been operating away from Cinnabar, they won't realize you've changed sides. You'll be able to infiltrate the traitors' inner circles very easily."

  "I haven't changed sides," Adele said, reaching into her left side-pocket.

  She wondered what Daniel would've said if some fool had made him a comparable proposition. He'd have been loud, she was certain; but that was Daniel, and she was Adele Mundy who rarely raised her voice.

  "I don't have a side, gentlemen," Adele said. "I've never had politics. Politics were my parents' affair, and I fail to see the attraction of what their interest resulted in. Set me out of this car at once, if you please."

  "Don't get above yourself, mistress!" the leader said sharply. "This isn't some academic game where you can choose whether or not to play. This is the safety of the Republic!"

  Adele brought the little pistol out of her pocket. Lucius Mundy knew that his politics would lead to duels—unless his would-be challengers learned that calling out a Mundy was tantamount to suicide. He'd seen to it that every Mundy practiced long hours in the target ranges both at Chatsworth and the townhouse, Chatsworth Minor. Young Adele had a natural skill with pistols that had stood her in good stead in recent years. . . .

  "Say!" said the blond fellow. His voice rose abruptly in the course of that single syllable. "What do you think you're doing with that?"

  "Are you willing to kill me, gentlemen?" Adele said mildly. "Because I'm certainly willing to kill you."

  She fired into the tram's control panel. The pellet from the little electromotive pistol snap/cracked, the supersonic shock wave blurring into the impact that blew a divot from the plastic panel.

  "Bloody Hell!" the heavy-set man squealed, throwing an arm over his eyes. Fragments of projectile or target must've splashed him.

  "All right!" the leader said. Then, quieter but with real venom, "All right, we'll put you down. But don't think you've heard the last of this!"

  He cuffed the blond man. "You have the key, don't you Dagenham? Well, use it!"

  Adele lowered the pistol to her side, keeping the barrel well out from her trousers leg. The flux from even a single shot heated the mu
zzle enough to char cloth. Her face was as still as those on the film covering the car's windows.

  The blond man took a key card from his breast pocket and inserted it into the control slot that allowed specified users to use the pad on the panel to direct the vehicle, overriding the central computer. He met his leader's eyes, got a snarled, "Yes, you bloody fool!" and shunted the tram car onto the next stop.

  The doors didn't open. Adele slapped the latchplate with her right hand, then deliberately slipped the pistol into her pocket—it cooled quickly. She turned her back on the men as she stepped out of the car. She had no idea where she was.

  The tram hummed off behind her. She'd expected one of the officers to shout some final threat, but they remained silent.

  There were a dozen people on the platform, but they appeared to be sheltering here rather than waiting for a tram. The buildings nearby were four- and five-story apartments, probably tenements for the very poor. The spill-over, the poorer yet, was here at the tram stop. A pair of men hunched toward Adele, then stopped when they saw her face, cold as death, in the light over the call plate.

  With her left hand in her pocket, Adele walked to the public phone on the other side of the kiosk from the call plate. A woman with an infant was huddled against the panel below it.

  "Pardon," Adele said. "I need this."

  "Hey, who do you think you are?" the woman said in a shrill whine.

  "Shall I have you whipped out of the city?" shouted Mundy of Chatsworth, scion of one of the oldest houses in the Republic. "Get out of my way, you scum, or I'll do that and worse!"

  The woman crabbed herself away. Her infant began to complain at increasing volume.

  Adele punched a series of numbers into the keypad, hit the pause symbol, and then typed an almost identical sequence on top of the first. Almost instantly a woman's voice, cultured despite the tinny speaker, said, "Yes?"

  "This is Mundy," Adele said. "I resign, effective immediately."

  "Where are you now?" Mistress Sand said.

  "I'm where your damned stooges left me!" Adele said, her voice rising despite herself. She knew she had an audience listening from the darkness around her, and she didn't care. "Somewhere near the outskirts of Xenos, I suppose. The number of the stop is—"

  She paused to remember the number in stencilled in black letters above the call plate on the other side.

  "Four four seven one, I believe," she added.

  "I had nothing to do with whatever happened to you tonight, mistress," Bernis Sand said. "I'll be with you in fifteen minutes, less if I can manage it. Don't leave the spot."

  The line went dead. Adele stepped back from the phone and looked around. A dozen pairs of eyes were on her. The platform smelled of spoiled food, human waste and other, sharper odors. So, she realized, did the people staring at her.

  Adele began to laugh. At least I'm in better company than I was a few minutes ago, she thought.

  CHAPTER 3

  Xenos on Cinnabar

  Adele, her back to the panel mounting the public phone, didn't hear the aircar approaching. While she worked with her personal data unit, the locals had circled her like animals watching a campfire. As they scattered they called, "The cops! The cops!" loudly enough to break her concentration.

  She sighed, shutting down the air-projected holographic display and tucking the control wands away into the case. The unit didn't hold all knowledge, not even when it was linked—as it was now—to the enormous database in the Library of Thomas Celsus with all its attendant links, but it held enough to engulf any number of troubles and disappointments. In fact its ocean of knowledge was deep enough to swallow the cold, killing rage which a few minutes ago had filled Adele Mundy's mind.

  She stood, sliding the data unit into its special thigh pocket and dusted the trousers with her palms. For the meeting Adele had worn unobtrusive civilian clothing, in excellent condition but similar in type to the cast-off garments of the residents of the tram stop.

  Adele had a thigh pocket in every outfit she owned, including her 1st Class RCN uniform where it was very much against regulations. She occasionally went out without her pistol because her destination banned weapons and enforced it with detectors; she was never willingly without the personal data unit.

  A covered eight-place aircar set down beside the tram stop. The flanks of the vehicle were marked MILITIA in large letters; searchlights and loudspeaker cones were attached to short posts at the front and rear.

  Mistress Bernis Sand got out. She was a short, heavy-set woman who looked bulkier for being in formal garb: white shirt and white cummerbund, with black trousers and frock coat. Adele wondered fleetingly what excuse the spymaster had made to leave some high-level gathering when Adele called.

  "Do you mind walking with me?" Sand said. She loosened her cummerbund. "Stuffy doesn't begin to describe a Regents' Dinner—the atmosphere, mind, not the Temple Hall."

  "As you like," Adele said, falling in to Sand's left. Up the street in the direction they were going was a construction site. She slanted them toward the middle of the pavement out of long-trained reflex.

  "We're being watched discreetly," the older woman said. "You needn't worry."

  "Mistress, I've lived most of my adult life in districts like this," Adele said in a thin voice. "I'm not worried. I'd just rather not have to shoot some fourteen-year-old sniffing solvent in a culvert, waiting to mug somebody for pocket change."

  "Your pardon, mistress," Sand said, nodding toward Adele to make it more than a formal apology. "I'm upset about your other trouble tonight; for which I also apologize. I assure you I wasn't aware of it, but obviously it wouldn't have happened in the way it did were you not associated with me."

  "The person involved . . ." Adele said. They were the only pedestrians out on the street, but scuttling from the darkness to either side hinted that scavengers of various kinds were active. "Is a retired admiral named Elric Kahn. He didn't use his own name, but he named his two flunkies. It was easy enough to find them on the Navy List and track their associations back to him."

  "Was it indeed?" Sand said. She barked out a laugh. "For you I dare say it was, Mundy."

  Sobering, she went on, "Being Kahn, he'll have been asking you to infiltrate the radical fringe of the Progressive Party, I suppose. A bloody fool thing to ask you, but I don't blame him for trying. God knows it's a real problem."

  Sand jerked her thumb back toward the aircar, now nearly a block behind them. "There's riots tonight in three districts downtown. We were shot at on our way here, though it must've been a pistol and barely flecked the paint. Over the Slidell acquittal, you know."

  "Is Senator Kearnes behind it?" Adele said, remembering her host's violent rage two weeks before.

  "No, this is at a much lower level," Sand said, turning her hands palms-up as if weighing souls. "It's not about young Kearnes, it's the two common spacers murdered by uncaring aristocrats. But that's nothing to do with you, Mundy; as I would've told Kahn if he'd asked me."

  Sand looked sharply at Adele. Without raising her voice, but in a tone that would've served for pronouncing a death sentence, she said, "Did they use my name?"

  "Yes," Adele said. "They delivered your card with instructions on the back to my doorman."

  She cleared her throat and added, "I destroyed the card immediately."

  "Of course you did!" Sand snapped. "And of course that makes no difference. Mundy, I've been a fool in various fashions over the years, but never such a fool as to imagine that you'd lie to me."

  She snorted another laugh. "You might shoot me; that I can imagine. But not lie."

  "I'd regret shooting you, mistress," Adele said, smiling faintly. It wasn't really a joke, of course.

  Sand sighed. "They shouldn't have used my name," she said. "For the rest, well, I'd say Kahn was a fool but I've always thought that."

  Adele grimaced. "I was angry because I thought the approach had been made by you, mistress," she said. "Since it wasn't—Kahn and his
flunkies are scarcely the only fools on Cinnabar. No doubt they meant well."

  Shrugging, she added, "No harm done."

  Sand turned to look at her as they sauntered along the empty street. The pavement was cracked and half the street lights were out, but they weren't in a hurry. "They used my name, Mundy," Sand said in the same flat tone as before. "I will deal with the matter."

  A man shambled from between two buildings, holding out a bottle in his left hand. He kept his right hand close to his body. "Have a drinkie with me, girls!" he called. "Drinkie, drinkie!"

  Adele stepped in front of Sand, pulling the pistol from her pocket. She fired into the pavement between the man's feet. The air at the muzzle fluoresced as the coil gun's magnetic flux ionized the light-metal driving band. The ceramic pellet sparkled like stardust, gouging a narrow trench in the street.

  "God help me!" the man screamed, twitching both arms convulsively. The bottle flew in one direction, a knuckleduster in the other. He ran back toward the alley, moving much more purposefully than he'd approached.

  Adele smiled coldly. Perhaps the fright had sobered him; and perhaps the rattle of trash in the alley was from stray dogs, not a pack of three of four other thugs waiting to rush onto their victims when their front man had grabbed them.

  "The troubles mean we need to get you off Cinnabar, though," Sand said. If she had an opinion about what'd just happened, she kept it to herself. "If matters get much worse, one side or the other will decide you're working for their enemies and target you. Because of your father, you know."

  Sand paused, grimaced, and added, "One side or another. These civil messes aren't limited to two parties."

  Adele held the pistol out to the side to cool. She had eighteen rounds remaining; she hadn't brought extra magazines.