"David Drake - RCN 02 - Lt. Leary Commanding" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

They settled into place, thirty yards behind one car, thirty yards ahead of another. Adele tried to guess
where the women came from. Not Cinnabar, certainly. They were speaking a language that was neither a
Cinnabar dialect nor Universal, and their fluidly attractive costume wasn't native to Cinnabar either.

Xenos had become a microcosm of the whole Cinnabar empire. Adele could access a rental list from the
apartment building where the women boarded. She could then match the frequency of names with those
of various worlds protected by the Republic, giving her a high probability of identifying the women's
planet of origin.

Or of course she could ask them; and watch their faces freeze, and wait for one of them to answer in a
voice either dead with fear or shrill, trying with anger to cover that fearтАФShe's in uniform. Why does
she want to know? What does it mean? But they would answer.

Adele smiled faintly; at life, at herself. They wouldn't believe it was merely curiosity, useless information
being gathered by a person to whom nothing had use except information.

Half a mile from the apartments the car pulled into another shunt. The ground floors of the nearby
buildings were given over to expensive shops, while the windows of the floor above were stenciled with
business logos.

The housewives got off and were replaced by a score of officeworkers dressed in styles as stratified as
those of the RCN. The one senior clerk wore a jacket with wide fur cuffs, showing that she didn't need
to use her hands. The clothes of her underlings grew brighter with each step down in status; the trio of
messenger boys chattered together like warblers in yellow and green and azure tawdriness.

The car staggered into motion again, sluggish with its load though not quite full. Close to the city center
the cars ran slower than in the suburbs, so they bounced back onto the main line directly despite the
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traffic.

A woman sat next to Adele, talking with animation to the companion on her other side. The man
standing in front of them joined in the conversation, his calf brushing Adele's knees as the vehicle swayed.

When Adele was last on Cinnabar, she couldn't have imagined being a part of this scene. Literally: she
wouldn't have had the data to visualize being jostled and crowded on a public conveyance. How matters
had changed. . . .

Not necessarily for the worse. She'd learned many things through disgrace and poverty that she never
would have known in the ordinary course of things. She smiled. And she'd gained a family and a friend
more trustworthy than those at the apex of powerтАФpeople like her own parents and Corder
LearyтАФwould ever know.

The car groaned to a halt again. They'd reached the district ringing the Pentacrest, where the lesser
nobility owned houses and rented ground-floor space to expensive shops. A groupтАФa gangтАФof
servants pushed their way into the car. Several of them held the doors open as their fellows chivied those