What Distant Deeps Page 8

  Right now my problem is how to get free of you without giving offense. Although—as a puzzle, Clothilde Brown was at least as interesting as entering the Euclid’s data banks, and the information to be gleaned was likely to be of more immediate importance.

  Instead of taking her leave immediately as she probably could now have done, Adele said, “The discomfort of the voyage will be over in a few weeks, mistress. And you may find cramped conditions less burdensome than you thought. I did.”

  “It isn’t that, Officer Mundy,” Clothilde said, “as I’m sure you know.”

  Unexpectedly she sat on the bunk, then slid over and patted the portion nearer Adele. Adele shrugged mentally—this was what she had decided she wanted, after all—and accepted the invitation. She preferred to have personal discussions while standing, but here as generally the other party’s ease was of more importance.

  “It’s Pavel’s career,” Clothilde said. She’d apparently decided to treat Tovera as a door panel rather than a pair of ears. “On non-career. I understand that one can’t expect a plum appointment immediately unless one is a member of one of the Great Houses—”

  Her face changed as her intellect caught up with her emotions. “Oh!” she said. “I didn’t mean you, La—”

  “The Mundy name took my family to a very high place, mistress,” Adele said dryly. “To the top of Speaker’s Rock, in fact.”

  Clothilde Brown wasn’t stupid, but the words came from so unexpected an angle that it took her a visible moment to process them. When she did understand, she lurched halfway to her feet, then sat down heavily. Her face was white.

  “I’m sorry, mistress,” Adele said in real embarrassment. “I’ve lived so closely with my family’s execution that I forget that treating it as simply a fact of existence will disturb other people. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Oh, not you, Your Ladyship,” Clothilde said. “How could I have been so, so . . . ?”

  Throwing the other party off-stride was sometimes a useful interrogation technique, but here the effect had been closer to having Woetjans club the poor woman over the head with a length of high-pressure tubing. At least Tovera hadn’t snickered, as she sometimes did when she saw a civilian discomfited by Adele’s sense of humor.

  “I misspoke, Mistress Brown,” Adele said. “You were discussing your husband’s career, I believe.”

  “So to speak, I was, yes,” Clothilde said, giving Adele a wry smile. “I’m—”

  She paused.

  “You are a very remarkable woman, Officer Mundy,” she said, fully composed again. “As I was saying, I know that one must expect to start at the bottom, but after Pavel accepted the posting, I learned that the previous Commissioner had been left on Zenobia fifteen years. Fifteen years. And he died there! I couldn’t bear that, and Hester shouldn’t have to bear that!”

  “Georg Brassey, the previous Commissioner,” Adele said, “was the third son of the Brasseys of Chorn. He wasn’t a professional diplomat, just an unambitious man whose family had enough influence to arrange for him to have the quiet life he wanted. Your husband won’t remain on Zenobia for longer than the normal two-year posting unless something goes badly wrong either there or in Xenos.”

  “I see,” said Clothilde, shaking her head with the same wry smile as a moment before. “My, it’s certainly my day for embarrassing myself, isn’t it?”

  With a slightly sharper expression, she said, “Do you know the Brasseys, Officer?”

  “I did, slightly,” Adele said in a neutral tone. “There were marriage connections. And I knew the de Sales family, to the same slight degree.”

  “Yes, of course you would have known my family,” Clothilde said. “The de Sales homestead wasn’t far from Chatsworth Major, though it was all gone by the time I was born; and my father was of the cadet line anyway. Well, I am a fool. You knew everything about me before I even came aboard.”

  “I’m a librarian by training and vocation, mistress,” Adele said, rising. “Information fills the part of my existence that others choose to give over to life. I think they’re wrong, of course, but I realize I’m in a minority.”

  The Princess Cecile began to shudder, and a low roar permeated the ship. Stains on the bulkheads blurred from the vibration.

  Clothilde jumped up again. “Is something wrong?” she asked in a tone that meant, “Are we all going to die?”

  “Chief Pasternak is testing the thrusters,” Adele said. “Which he wouldn’t do unless he and Captain Leary believed that everything is in order. It does mean that I need to return to my station, however.”

  Clothilde sucked her lower lip in and nodded. “Thank you, Officer Mundy,” she said.

  “If I may volunteer some advice,” Adele said, “your husband will need all the help he can get to be sure of obtaining a better posting for his next assignment.”

  “He’ll have it,” Clothilde said as she followed Adele out of the compartment. “And thank you again.”

  Adele Mundy understood better than most how much everyone needed help. Some of us need the help of others just to find a reason for going on with life.

  Daniel Leary, captain of the Cinnabar-registered private yacht Princess Cecile, stretched by working his muscles against the couch of his command console. He grinned and on a whim shrank his holographic display to look sternward across the bridge.

  All eight thrusters were running at half volume with the petals of their Stellite nozzles fully open. Their plasma exhaust sprayed into the water of Harbor Three, dissipating its energy as steam, while two great pumps in the vessel’s stern refilled the reaction mass tanks from the harbor. The noise would have been deafening if the commo helmets hadn’t had active sound cancellation; vibration made loose objects walk across flat surfaces.

  Everything was as it should be. Daniel was in his element.

  He’d lifted the Princess Cecile hundreds of times by now, and he’d commanded much bigger ships. There was still a unique thrill to this moment, a visceral memory of the first time they’d lifted from Kostroma—a newly made lieutenant at the controls of a corvette which had never been close to anything more dangerous than the fireworks of a national celebration.

  They’d showed the Alliance fireworks on that day, and on many later days.

  Daniel grinned. The Republic was at peace now, and that was a good thing; a necessary thing if the civil government was to survive. But by the gods, the Sissie and her crew had proved themselves against anything the Alliance could throw at them!

  Sun, the Gunner and one of the original Sissies, sat at the console to Daniel’s immediate left. With the record he’d compiled in the years since, he could choose his own assignment, up to and probably including a battleship.

  Sun had chosen to stay with the Princess Cecile and her meager two pairs of 4-inch cannon: a turret on the dorsal bow and another in the ventral stern. He liked using his guns, not just having the rank of gunner. If Captain Leary was commanding a corvette, then Sun was happy to be gunner on a corvette.

  On most warships, the Chief Missileer would be at the Attack Console on the port side of the bridge. Because Daniel liked to control at least the initial launches himself, that warrant officer—Chazanoff, on a corvette rated as a missileer’s mate—was in the Battle Direction Center in the stern. The Sissie would be fought from the BDC if the bridge were destroyed.

  At the console here sat an engineering tech named Fiducia who was striking for a missileer’s rating. He was compulsively checking the status of the Sissie’s missiles, the two ready to launch in her tubes and the eighteen additional rounds in her magazines. A corvette’s punch was minuscule compared with the eighty and more missiles which a battleship could launch in a single salvo, but used shrewdly she could be effective.

  Daniel grinned. Many of the Republic’s enemies could testify to how effective the Sissie had been in the past.

  Lieutenant Cory was at the Astrogation Console to Daniel’s immediate right; there was unlikely to b
e anything for him to do in that line. Lieutenant Vesey, in the BDC as normal for the first lieutenant, had started as an exceptionally skilled astrogator and had become better: long service with Daniel Leary had taught her to read the Matrix the way his uncle, Stacey Bergen, had taught him.

  But Cory’s position wasn’t as much of a joke as it would have seemed a few years ago. He had become a pretty fair astrogator, which initially Daniel would have said was as unlikely as a pig learning to dance ballet.

  The final console on the bridge was Signals. Midshipman Cazelet, in the backup postition in the BDC, could do everything an ordinary signals officer did. Nobody—nobody in the human universe, in Daniel’s considered opinion—could equal Adele. The chance that brought her and Daniel together had been fortunate for both of them, and more fortunate still for the Republic of Cinnabar.

  Daniel stretched again. Everything that could be checked in harbor was in the green. The thrusters’ steady output was rocking the Sissie as plasma boiled away the water in which she floated. The input hoses had withdrawn into the hull.

  “Ship,” said Daniel on the general push, “this is Six. We will lift under my control in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds. Prepare to lift.”

  “Ready/ready/ready,” replied Pasternak, Vesey, and Woetjans.

  The bosun stood in the forward rotunda with a crew of riggers wearing hard suits. They were prepared to go onto the hull as soon as the Sissie reached orbit. The antennas and sails were hydraulically controlled, but the hard knocks the rigs took on liftoff through an atmosphere meant that there were always kinked cables and frozen joints to clear.

  “Ship,” said Daniel, his left hand on the throttle control of his virtual keyboard, “we are lifting—”

  He ran the thrusters up to full output; then, with his right hand, he sphinctered the thruster nozzles to narrow aperture.

  “Now!”

  The Princess Cecile trembled thunderously, then started to rise. Daniel laughed with joy. It was pure magic and wonder, this time and every time.

  “Up Cinnabar!” he shouted, and the crew’s triumphant cries echoed him.

  CHAPTER 5

  En Route to Stahl’s World

  “Why, this is interesting,” said Cazelet from what was meant for a training position across from Adele at the back of the signals console. “The Councillors of Zenobia, that’s the oligarchy, claim to be autochthones.”

  “That’s odd,” Adele said. “The record of the settlement vessel Lombard arriving from Earth are quite detailed, including passenger lists. Hmm. It must have been one of the last settlement ships, too; it landed less than a generation before the wars that led to the Hiatus. Zenobians wouldn’t have had as much contact with Earth as most colonies, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that they know they were an Earth colony.”

  The compartment was quiet enough that they could have talked directly. Besides the two of them and Sun at the gunnery console, nobody was on the bridge. Vesey was conning the Sissie from the BDC, though while they were in the Matrix there wasn’t really anything for her to do either.

  Nonetheless, by mutual choice Adele and Cazelet used a two-way link. It wasn’t that she was worried about Sun overhearing them while he set up gunnery simulations—besides being totally disinterested, the gunner was as trustworthy as Daniel himself—or that the discussion involved anything that could be considered a security matter.

  Adele had gotten into the habit of not talking about the things that interested her in front of spacers, however. Cazelet had automatically followed her lead in this as in all other matters. A starship was a tightly closed environment, and spacers tended to think the worst of any situation.

  People who reacted fifty times as if to a threat when they were faced with unfamiliar occurrences would live to be embarrassed when the events turned out to be benign. Ignoring what was a real danger was likely to be fatal the first time. Spacers might not be logicians, but the survivors didn’t have to be.

  Because of who Adele was, whatever she said aboard the Princess Cecile would be the subject of general attention, and she had learned that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that there wouldn’t be somebody who could give it a negative spin. That interpretation would become the common property—and common dread—of the company.

  Spacers were used to operating in a state of dread, so it wouldn’t affect their efficiency. Nonetheless, it offended Adele to be—no matter how innocently—the instrument of negative misinformation. If she kept her thoughts secret, that wouldn’t happen . . . though she supposed the secrecy itself caused rumors.

  “My goodness,” Cazelet said in wonder. “Zenobia retains blood sacrifice, can you imagine that. The Councillors slaughter a bird on the altar after they elect the new Founder following the death of his predecessor. Or her predecessor. I can’t recall a planet with star travel where they were still sacrificing living creatures.”

  “Perhaps the Browns’ former governess was right,” said Adele as her wands raked data through her holographic display. “She claimed the Zenobians were barbarians who might eat strangers. Do you find any reference to cannibalism?”

  “No, but they’d probably hide that from outsiders,” Cazelet said. “I could do a search for records of off-planet visitors disappearing on nights of the full moon if you’d like.”

  “Perhaps later,” Adele said. “Though if I remember correctly—”

  Her wands flicked.

  “—yes, there it is. Zenobia has three moons, but none of them are large enough to be distinguished from stars without a telescope.”

  The most interesting thing Adele had learned thus far from the great mass of data was that Zenobian singing marmosets were not only popular pets in the Qaboosh Region but also were widely distributed throughout the Alliance. She didn’t imagine that would affect her own mission one way or another, but she copied the material in case Daniel would be interested in it.

  Reminded by that thought, Adele began sorting out information on Zenobian natural history from the material which she had acquired as soon as she learned where they were going. The Sailing Directions for the Qaboosh Region would be adequate for most purposes, but they were unlikely to differentiate among, say, the amphibian species to be found on the margins of Calvary Harbor. And Daniel might want to know.

  “Adele?” Cazelet said. He was properly formal in public, but though he was now wearing an RCN uniform he remained, like her, a civilian of the better classes in his self-conception. “This may be significant. We’ll be arriving just after the closing of the Qaboosh Assembly. On Stahl’s World, that is, not Zenobia.”

  Adele switched her search parameters. She’d put Cazelet to combing the data for regional data; she, using the same material, had been sorting for items specific to Zenobia.

  In the days before liftoff from Cinnabar, she had busied herself in gathering as much information as she could which might be useful for the current mission. Anything with possible bearing was grist for her mill: memoirs, logbooks, histories; even fiction which touched on the Qaboosh Region. The Mundy name, her personal connections, and her very considerable experience in knowing where something of significance might be stored, had allowed her to cast a very wide net.

  All the material had been converted to electronic form. Adele had an affection for hardcopy documents that went well beyond their utility, but what she needed now was the ability to search quickly.

  She’d retained electronic facsimiles of the documents, however, to edit and inform what the text-only versions provided. If she wanted to, she could pore to her heart’s content over the manuscript records of Captain Christopher French, the semi-literate drunk who had made the initial landing on the world now called Zenobia.

  “Yes,” she said, scrolling quickly through the data. She had two streams running on her display simultaneously, a regional handbook from External Affairs and news reports from Stahl’s World as archived in the Library of Celsus in Xenos. “Yes, good work, Daniel will want to k
now about this.”

  The Qaboosh Assembly had been instituted some three hundred years in the past, but the leaders who set it up claimed to be reinstituting a pre-Hiatus gathering. Such statements were common—every other planetary strongman claimed to be of pure Earth blood descended in direct succession from the captain of a colony ship—but in this case there was some substance to them.

  One of the documents Adele had just perused, The Rambles of a Misspent Life, described the author, the younger son of an unnamed family, posing as an official observer from Cinnabar at a meeting of the Qaboosh Assembly and profiting from the bribes he took from all sides. The work had been published in Xenos in the year 878 Old Style, thus antedating the Hiatus by almost a century.

  “The Assembly is supposed to occur every other year,” Cazelet said, “but this will be the first in eight years because of the war. Since they’re held on Stahl’s World from before it was a Friend of Cinnabar.”

  “And before Palmyra became so important in the region,” Adele noted aloud. But the Autocrator of Palmyra had been present eight years ago, and so were heads of state or at least delegations from a score of other worlds in the region—including the Founder of Zenobia.

  “A pity we’re not going to arrive a little sooner,” Cazelet said. “The Assembly will be over by two days by the time we reach Stahl’s World. Though perhaps at least some of the dignitaries will still be present.”

  “And perhaps . . . ,” said Adele, “when Daniel learns about the timing, he’ll find a way to shave a little more time off our run. Break. Lieutenant Vesey, where is Six now, if you please, over?”

  “Mistress,” Vesey said, replying instantly. “The Captain has taken Commissioner Brown out to show him the Matrix. Would you like me to summon him, over?”

  “No, thank you, Vesey,” Adele said. She grinned ruefully. “I’ll get him when he returns. Mundy out.”