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CHAPTER TWO

_A monorail car stopped within moments to carry Daniel and
his uncle in the direction of Xenos West, but Adele Mundy would have thirty minutes on the platform before a car arrived for her. City Center wasn't a popular destination for those leaving Harbor Three by public transportation. Laborers and ships' crewmen stayed either in barracks near the port or in tenements ranged on the city's outskirts. Senior officers, let alone dignitaries like Delos Vaughn's party, arrived and left the harbor in personally owned monorail cars if they even used the system rather than aircars.

The wait wasn't a hardship. As soon as her companions had departed on the rising whine of an electric motor, Adele drew out her personal data unit and started to learn what could be known about Delos Vaughn.

Until very recently the only parts of Adele's life she would've called happy were those she'd spent finding and organizing information . . . which to be sure was more time than she devoted to any other pursuit. The place Adele's body slept had never been of much concern to her, and since the Proscriptions she hadn't had a home outside her head.

A heavy starship lifted from the pool in the center of the harbor, shaking everything for miles around as its thousands of tons rose from a plume first of steam, then the flaring iridescence of hydrogen ions when the plasma motors no longer licked the water's surface. Adele was barely conscious of the event, adjusting her control wands in the precise patterns that guided her search.

The personal data unit was a featureless rectangle, four inches by ten inches, and half an inch thick. Its display was holographic, cued to the focus of the user's eyes. Though the unit had a virtual keyboard or could respond to voice commands, Adele preferred the speed and flexibility of the slim wands. She held them at the balance between the thumb and first two fingers of either hand. An expert in their use—and Adele was that if ever there was one—could access information almost as fast as her brain could frame the questions.

Delos Vaughn of Strymon, age twenty-nine Earth years; sole offspring of Leland Vaughn, former President of Strymon. Strymon presidency, a lifetime elective office with candidacy and franchise limited to members of the Shipowning class. Shipowning class: a group of originally thirty-seven, but now expanded to over a hundred, families; actually owning a starship is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for membership in the Shipowning class. . . . 

Adele's little unit had a considerable storage capacity, but its real value on a developed world was to give her access to other databases. Here on Cinnabar she was linked—through the monorail control circuit—to the central records computer in the Navy Office, which she used as her base unit.

It had occurred to Adele as she set up the connection on her first day back on Cinnabar that she probably could've gotten authorization to use the system if she'd gone through some of the channels available to her. She'd decided it was simpler to circumvent the electronic barriers to what she was doing than it would've been to plow through bureaucratic inertia. Besides, it amused Adele to break rules when she'd spent all her previous life obeying them.

In the past month Adele had gained Daniel Leary for a friend and the whole Republic of Cinnabar Navy for home and family. Between them they gave her a remarkable feeling of security.

She grinned as she shifted back to another aspect of the problem she'd set herself. Delos Vaughn, arrived on Cinnabar aboard the RCS Tashkent as a guest of the Republic. . . . 

A car stopped in front of her with a clatter and squeal. She ignored it as she had the arrival of a party of laborers on the platform, shuffling heavy boots and talking about a ball game.

"Hey, Chief?" a laborer called.

Primary residence on Holroyd Square, Xenos, with secondary residences— 

A different voice bellowed, "Lady, ain't this one yours?"

Adele's mind rose shatteringly from depths of pure knowledge where she preferred to live; it reformed in the present. An empty car stood in front of her. The lighted banner over the open door read ITY ENTER. Fifty yards down the rail, slowing as it approached the platform, was the Manine Village car that would haul home the laborers, crammed in as tightly as books in dead storage.

"Thank you," she called, stowing her data unit in its pocket with the ease of long habit and a precise mind. She stepped aboard the car just before the door closed; touched the destination plate over the Pentacrest—the map's clear cover was smeared almost illegible by the fingers of previous users, so Adele had to peer in doubt before she made her choice; and then sat back on one of the pair of facing benches as the car rocked into motion.

She was alone in a car in which twelve could sit and thirty ride in some degree of comfort. She might have taken out her data unit again, but she decided to experience the trip instead. She wasn't going to enjoy the ride, but there were things she could usefully learn about Xenos after her fifteen years of exile.

Besides, she was punishing herself for not noticing the car's arrival. She could've spent all afternoon there on the platform, lost in personal researches when she had business for others to accomplish. Adele had never been one to shirk her responsibilities, but the very degree of focus that made her effective sometimes got in the way of carrying out social obligations.

Not that this meeting was social except in the general sense of being part of Adele's involvement in human society.

The car swerved and squealed along the serpentine track serving a section of three docks. The Aristotle dominated the whole area, an outward-curving wall of steel as viewed from the car's grimy windows. Even if Adele craned her neck, she couldn't have seen the midpoint where the curve of the battleship's cylindrical hull reversed.

In some places the shipfitters had removed plates, giving glimpses of tubing, vast machinery, and once an open space the size of the Senate Chamber. It would be daunting to a civilian and was impressive even to Adele, who was beginning to look at the world with the eyes of a naval officer.

A warship was a community. The Aristotle was a town of some size, with a complex street system and rituals shared only with similar towns. Its population would be standoffish with strangers, even strangers who wore the same uniform.

But the same was true of the Princess Cecile despite the corvette's lesser volume and crew. People went to and from their bunks and their duty stations in a certain way, the same way every time, because there was no physical room for individualism and in a crisis there would be no time for confusion.

Crises were common on a warship. Action against enemy forces was rare, but the universe was a constant opponent before which Alliance fleets paled to insignificance. Naval architects crammed as much heavy, powerful equipment as they could into each hull. The machinery was dangerous even when it worked properly, and when it malfunctioned—which it did as regularly as any other human contrivance—those in the cramped spaces nearby had to react precisely if they and their fellows were to survive.

Adele smiled, remembering the times during the voyage from Kostroma when a spacer had slung her down a passageway in zero gee or even wrapped her in flexible netting to keep her safe—and out of the way. If Adele put her mind to it, she could probably learn the various calls and responses expected of an RCN spacer. She doubted that she'd ever be able to transfer that intellectual knowledge into motor skills, however.

Nor did she need to, so long as she was part of an experienced crew who'd take care of her. One spacer, come to the RCN from a farm on North Cape, had remarked that she was clumsy as a hog on ice as he snatched Adele away from the mechanism of a rotating gun turret.

Adele knew she amused her fellow crewmen, but they didn't laugh at her. They'd all seen the way she danced through the maze of a communications screen; and the ones who'd seen her shoot told the others about that, too. No, they didn't laugh at Officer Mundy.

The car bumped and chattered over joints in the track. The vehicle had been steamed with disinfectant in the recent past—the odor clung to the benches' dimpled surfaces—but it was still scratched and grimy.

Adele had never thought about public transportation in her youth. The Mundys had private cars to be hooked onto rails, for Mistress Adele and the servants who accompanied her to the Library of Celsus or wherever else her studies took her. Less wealthy nobles summoned public cars. Their servants and retainers then emptied ordinary citizens out of the vehicle so that the master could ride surrounded only by those who owed him allegiance.

Displaced passengers could wait for another car to arrive, irritated but not particularly angry. The citizens of Cinnabar expected their leaders to be proud folk. However else would they be able to properly represent the Republic to the folk of lesser worlds?

Adele's car jolted sideways onto a shunt serving a rank of modern apartment blocks with brick facings and swags molded to look like carved limestone. On Kostroma carving had still been done by hand.

Three housewives got on, carrying rolled shopping baskets and wearing hats with long, soft brims. One of them touched the destination plate as they continued a conversation begun on the platform. The car accelerated slowly up the shunt, paused for a gap in the line of vehicles now using the rail, then groaned as the drive motors exerted maximum effort to get back into traffic.

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 fear—She'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 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 power—people like her own parents and Corder Leary—would 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 group—a gang—of servants pushed their way into the car. Several of them held the doors open as their fellows chivied those already aboard out onto the platform.

Their garments were gray and bright green in horizontal stripes. That would make them Tanisards, a minor house which hadn't had a member in the Senate until the last century. All of them were in the full livery of underlings. Senior servants like the majordomo and his/her section heads would wear business suits with only collar flashes to announce their affiliation.

Adele squirmed to look out the window at her back. More servants waited to board, but no member of the house was present: these servants were clearing the car for their personal whim.

A husky youth—they were all young, not surprisingly—stood squarely in front of Adele with two of his fellows at his elbows. He grinned in an attempt to look threatening, but there was a degree of caution in his expression. Adele was alone, but the RCN was a very large organization.

Adele remained seated with her left hand in her pocket. "If you touch me, scum," she said in a clear voice, "your master will answer for your presumption on the field of honor!"

"What?" said the Tanisard. He'd expected something when the woman didn't scuttle away from his advance but not that particular threat, delivered with such absolute conviction in an upper-class accent.

"And while that's happening," Adele continued, feeling the tremble of barely controlled rage in her voice, "a detachment from my ship will be leveling Tanisard House. That won't concern you, because you'll have died here as you stand."

The Tanisard glanced to his friends—and found they'd backed away. He lowered his eyes and did the same, snarling at the fellow servant who jostled him when the car rocked into motion again.

There was only one more shunt before the City Center terminus. The car whirred past it without slowing. Adele rode in a clear portion of a vehicle otherwise crowded; the Tanisards kept their backs to her. Her lips smiled, but her eyes were empty and a red rage filled her mind. She visualized Bosun Ellie Woetjans leading every member of the Princess Cecile's crew who was still on Cinnabar; with hammers and come-alongs, and very likely a section of mast to batter down the door.

Tanisards! How dare they?

The car reached the great roundabout of Pentacrest Vale, paused, and pulled into a shunt as the car that had just loaded there reentered the main line. A score of those waiting tried to board before the present passengers had disembarked, but the furious Tanisards rammed them back like the jet from a spillway. Well-justified fear had kept them from trying conclusions with the lone warrant officer, but they were too young to accept what had happened with philosophical resignation.

Adele followed closely in the Tanisards' wake, using the anger she'd engendered to shield her from the worst of the crowd's buffeting. She smiled faintly: this was almost like having servants again.

She'd never thought much about the servants when she was a girl on Cinnabar. Between Chatsworth Major and the townhouse there must have been a staff of a hundred or more, but they had less conscious impact on Adele than her bedroom furniture did.

Still, they'd existed. Even on public transit Adele would never have been faced with anything like this, because the Mundy retainers escorting her would have cleared the Tanisards out with the same ruthless unconcern as they'd have ousted dogs who'd somehow gotten into the car.

Tanisards block the path of a Mundy? Not till the sky falls!

The sky had fallen on the Mundys; fallen within days of when Adele boarded the packet that carried her to Blythe to continue her education in the Academic Collections there. Blythe was a core world of the Alliance of Free Stars, but what did that matter to Adele? She was a librarian, a member of that higher aristocracy of knowledge which cared nothing for mere politics.

As it turned out, politics had mattered a great deal.

The Speaker's Rock was a granite outcrop whose naturally level top had been improved by the first settlers; it stood at the west end of Pentacrest Vale. Adele edged out of the ruck around the transport terminus and eyed the Rock critically. Fifteen years ago the heads of her father, her mother, and her ten-year-old sister, Agatha, had hung from it in mesh bags to be viewed by all those who chose to do so.

There were many other heads as well, most of whom had as little to do with a conspiracy as Agatha did. Adele herself would have been there, save for the whim of sailing schedules. Political realities don't care whether their victims feel superior to them.

Because she'd found herself looking at the Rock with new eyes, Adele paused to survey the whole setting for what was in a way the first time. Even before she reached age ten, she'd spent more of her waking hours on the Pentacrest than she had in the Mundy townhouse; but she'd never looked at it the way a stranger would, taking in its magnificence instead of simply accepting it the way fishes do the sea through which they swim.

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, Fandler," 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 amplification 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.

" . . . as much of a pleasure as the circumstances allowed. And I of course would be pleased to serve aboard the Princess Cecile."

Sand nodded. "I try to make the lives of agents doing difficult jobs as comfortable as possible," she said. "I want to know whether or not the government of Strymon is intriguing with the Alliance. It's possible that you'll be able to determine this without ever leaving your vessel. On the other hand . . ."

She turned her left hand palm down. The ring on her middle finger was set with a blue-and-white sphinx cameo which looked extremely old.

" . . . the Republic requires an accurate assessment of the situation, regardless of the risk to those gathering the information."

Adele ran through a mental checklist of what would be required to carry out the assignment. The corvette had a full RCN communications suite which, coupled to Adele's own equipment, would see to the hardware needs. Much of the remaining background Adele could gather herself more easily than by having Sand retail it. One aspect, though—

"Will the arrival of an RCN squadron alert the plotters?" she asked. "Perhaps even precipitate events? If there is a plot, of course."

"It shouldn't," Sand said. "Strymon is a loyal Cinnabar ally—so long as it's watched. A naval visit every six months or so is normal. The present one is actually a little overdue because of the rush to refit the fighting squadrons."

Sand's left arm rested on the pad of the information console. When the machine was switched on it would become a virtual keyboard; the alternative control wands waited in a slot at the edge of the pad. It was an old system, though considerably updated since Adele's youthful visits to the Celsus.

"They'll expect Commodore Pettin's squadron," Sand continued. "They will not, I think, expect an information specialist of your abilities to accompany the ordinary naval personnel."

That raised another question. The RCN had its own channels and hierarchies; neither Adele nor Mistress Sand herself could give Daniel an order that he would obey. "I, ah, assume Lieutenant Leary will receive his assignment in the normal course of business?" she said.

Sand laughed, rising to her feet with the help of her hand against the desktop. "I'm afraid I rather anticipated your acceptance," she said to Adele. "I believe Lieutenant Leary is getting his orders even as we speak. Though I don't know about—"

She grinned, the satisfied expression of a person who does good work and knows it.

"—`the normal course of business.' Still, the orders will be coming from an acknowledged superior."

Still smiling, she waved Adele to the door ahead of her.

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Contents
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWO

_A monorail car stopped within moments to carry Daniel and
his uncle in the direction of Xenos West, but Adele Mundy would have thirty minutes on the platform before a car arrived for her. City Center wasn't a popular destination for those leaving Harbor Three by public transportation. Laborers and ships' crewmen stayed either in barracks near the port or in tenements ranged on the city's outskirts. Senior officers, let alone dignitaries like Delos Vaughn's party, arrived and left the harbor in personally owned monorail cars if they even used the system rather than aircars.

The wait wasn't a hardship. As soon as her companions had departed on the rising whine of an electric motor, Adele drew out her personal data unit and started to learn what could be known about Delos Vaughn.

Until very recently the only parts of Adele's life she would've called happy were those she'd spent finding and organizing information . . . which to be sure was more time than she devoted to any other pursuit. The place Adele's body slept had never been of much concern to her, and since the Proscriptions she hadn't had a home outside her head.

A heavy starship lifted from the pool in the center of the harbor, shaking everything for miles around as its thousands of tons rose from a plume first of steam, then the flaring iridescence of hydrogen ions when the plasma motors no longer licked the water's surface. Adele was barely conscious of the event, adjusting her control wands in the precise patterns that guided her search.

The personal data unit was a featureless rectangle, four inches by ten inches, and half an inch thick. Its display was holographic, cued to the focus of the user's eyes. Though the unit had a virtual keyboard or could respond to voice commands, Adele preferred the speed and flexibility of the slim wands. She held them at the balance between the thumb and first two fingers of either hand. An expert in their use—and Adele was that if ever there was one—could access information almost as fast as her brain could frame the questions.

Delos Vaughn of Strymon, age twenty-nine Earth years; sole offspring of Leland Vaughn, former President of Strymon. Strymon presidency, a lifetime elective office with candidacy and franchise limited to members of the Shipowning class. Shipowning class: a group of originally thirty-seven, but now expanded to over a hundred, families; actually owning a starship is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for membership in the Shipowning class. . . . 

Adele's little unit had a considerable storage capacity, but its real value on a developed world was to give her access to other databases. Here on Cinnabar she was linked—through the monorail control circuit—to the central records computer in the Navy Office, which she used as her base unit.

It had occurred to Adele as she set up the connection on her first day back on Cinnabar that she probably could've gotten authorization to use the system if she'd gone through some of the channels available to her. She'd decided it was simpler to circumvent the electronic barriers to what she was doing than it would've been to plow through bureaucratic inertia. Besides, it amused Adele to break rules when she'd spent all her previous life obeying them.

In the past month Adele had gained Daniel Leary for a friend and the whole Republic of Cinnabar Navy for home and family. Between them they gave her a remarkable feeling of security.

She grinned as she shifted back to another aspect of the problem she'd set herself. Delos Vaughn, arrived on Cinnabar aboard the RCS Tashkent as a guest of the Republic. . . . 

A car stopped in front of her with a clatter and squeal. She ignored it as she had the arrival of a party of laborers on the platform, shuffling heavy boots and talking about a ball game.

"Hey, Chief?" a laborer called.

Primary residence on Holroyd Square, Xenos, with secondary residences— 

A different voice bellowed, "Lady, ain't this one yours?"

Adele's mind rose shatteringly from depths of pure knowledge where she preferred to live; it reformed in the present. An empty car stood in front of her. The lighted banner over the open door read ITY ENTER. Fifty yards down the rail, slowing as it approached the platform, was the Manine Village car that would haul home the laborers, crammed in as tightly as books in dead storage.

"Thank you," she called, stowing her data unit in its pocket with the ease of long habit and a precise mind. She stepped aboard the car just before the door closed; touched the destination plate over the Pentacrest—the map's clear cover was smeared almost illegible by the fingers of previous users, so Adele had to peer in doubt before she made her choice; and then sat back on one of the pair of facing benches as the car rocked into motion.

She was alone in a car in which twelve could sit and thirty ride in some degree of comfort. She might have taken out her data unit again, but she decided to experience the trip instead. She wasn't going to enjoy the ride, but there were things she could usefully learn about Xenos after her fifteen years of exile.

Besides, she was punishing herself for not noticing the car's arrival. She could've spent all afternoon there on the platform, lost in personal researches when she had business for others to accomplish. Adele had never been one to shirk her responsibilities, but the very degree of focus that made her effective sometimes got in the way of carrying out social obligations.

Not that this meeting was social except in the general sense of being part of Adele's involvement in human society.

The car swerved and squealed along the serpentine track serving a section of three docks. The Aristotle dominated the whole area, an outward-curving wall of steel as viewed from the car's grimy windows. Even if Adele craned her neck, she couldn't have seen the midpoint where the curve of the battleship's cylindrical hull reversed.

In some places the shipfitters had removed plates, giving glimpses of tubing, vast machinery, and once an open space the size of the Senate Chamber. It would be daunting to a civilian and was impressive even to Adele, who was beginning to look at the world with the eyes of a naval officer.

A warship was a community. The Aristotle was a town of some size, with a complex street system and rituals shared only with similar towns. Its population would be standoffish with strangers, even strangers who wore the same uniform.

But the same was true of the Princess Cecile despite the corvette's lesser volume and crew. People went to and from their bunks and their duty stations in a certain way, the same way every time, because there was no physical room for individualism and in a crisis there would be no time for confusion.

Crises were common on a warship. Action against enemy forces was rare, but the universe was a constant opponent before which Alliance fleets paled to insignificance. Naval architects crammed as much heavy, powerful equipment as they could into each hull. The machinery was dangerous even when it worked properly, and when it malfunctioned—which it did as regularly as any other human contrivance—those in the cramped spaces nearby had to react precisely if they and their fellows were to survive.

Adele smiled, remembering the times during the voyage from Kostroma when a spacer had slung her down a passageway in zero gee or even wrapped her in flexible netting to keep her safe—and out of the way. If Adele put her mind to it, she could probably learn the various calls and responses expected of an RCN spacer. She doubted that she'd ever be able to transfer that intellectual knowledge into motor skills, however.

Nor did she need to, so long as she was part of an experienced crew who'd take care of her. One spacer, come to the RCN from a farm on North Cape, had remarked that she was clumsy as a hog on ice as he snatched Adele away from the mechanism of a rotating gun turret.

Adele knew she amused her fellow crewmen, but they didn't laugh at her. They'd all seen the way she danced through the maze of a communications screen; and the ones who'd seen her shoot told the others about that, too. No, they didn't laugh at Officer Mundy.

The car bumped and chattered over joints in the track. The vehicle had been steamed with disinfectant in the recent past—the odor clung to the benches' dimpled surfaces—but it was still scratched and grimy.

Adele had never thought about public transportation in her youth. The Mundys had private cars to be hooked onto rails, for Mistress Adele and the servants who accompanied her to the Library of Celsus or wherever else her studies took her. Less wealthy nobles summoned public cars. Their servants and retainers then emptied ordinary citizens out of the vehicle so that the master could ride surrounded only by those who owed him allegiance.

Displaced passengers could wait for another car to arrive, irritated but not particularly angry. The citizens of Cinnabar expected their leaders to be proud folk. However else would they be able to properly represent the Republic to the folk of lesser worlds?

Adele's car jolted sideways onto a shunt serving a rank of modern apartment blocks with brick facings and swags molded to look like carved limestone. On Kostroma carving had still been done by hand.

Three housewives got on, carrying rolled shopping baskets and wearing hats with long, soft brims. One of them touched the destination plate as they continued a conversation begun on the platform. The car accelerated slowly up the shunt, paused for a gap in the line of vehicles now using the rail, then groaned as the drive motors exerted maximum effort to get back into traffic.

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 fear—She'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 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 power—people like her own parents and Corder Leary—would 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 group—a gang—of servants pushed their way into the car. Several of them held the doors open as their fellows chivied those already aboard out onto the platform.

Their garments were gray and bright green in horizontal stripes. That would make them Tanisards, a minor house which hadn't had a member in the Senate until the last century. All of them were in the full livery of underlings. Senior servants like the majordomo and his/her section heads would wear business suits with only collar flashes to announce their affiliation.

Adele squirmed to look out the window at her back. More servants waited to board, but no member of the house was present: these servants were clearing the car for their personal whim.

A husky youth—they were all young, not surprisingly—stood squarely in front of Adele with two of his fellows at his elbows. He grinned in an attempt to look threatening, but there was a degree of caution in his expression. Adele was alone, but the RCN was a very large organization.

Adele remained seated with her left hand in her pocket. "If you touch me, scum," she said in a clear voice, "your master will answer for your presumption on the field of honor!"

"What?" said the Tanisard. He'd expected something when the woman didn't scuttle away from his advance but not that particular threat, delivered with such absolute conviction in an upper-class accent.

"And while that's happening," Adele continued, feeling the tremble of barely controlled rage in her voice, "a detachment from my ship will be leveling Tanisard House. That won't concern you, because you'll have died here as you stand."

The Tanisard glanced to his friends—and found they'd backed away. He lowered his eyes and did the same, snarling at the fellow servant who jostled him when the car rocked into motion again.

There was only one more shunt before the City Center terminus. The car whirred past it without slowing. Adele rode in a clear portion of a vehicle otherwise crowded; the Tanisards kept their backs to her. Her lips smiled, but her eyes were empty and a red rage filled her mind. She visualized Bosun Ellie Woetjans leading every member of the Princess Cecile's crew who was still on Cinnabar; with hammers and come-alongs, and very likely a section of mast to batter down the door.

Tanisards! How dare they?

The car reached the great roundabout of Pentacrest Vale, paused, and pulled into a shunt as the car that had just loaded there reentered the main line. A score of those waiting tried to board before the present passengers had disembarked, but the furious Tanisards rammed them back like the jet from a spillway. Well-justified fear had kept them from trying conclusions with the lone warrant officer, but they were too young to accept what had happened with philosophical resignation.

Adele followed closely in the Tanisards' wake, using the anger she'd engendered to shield her from the worst of the crowd's buffeting. She smiled faintly: this was almost like having servants again.

She'd never thought much about the servants when she was a girl on Cinnabar. Between Chatsworth Major and the townhouse there must have been a staff of a hundred or more, but they had less conscious impact on Adele than her bedroom furniture did.

Still, they'd existed. Even on public transit Adele would never have been faced with anything like this, because the Mundy retainers escorting her would have cleared the Tanisards out with the same ruthless unconcern as they'd have ousted dogs who'd somehow gotten into the car.

Tanisards block the path of a Mundy? Not till the sky falls!

The sky had fallen on the Mundys; fallen within days of when Adele boarded the packet that carried her to Blythe to continue her education in the Academic Collections there. Blythe was a core world of the Alliance of Free Stars, but what did that matter to Adele? She was a librarian, a member of that higher aristocracy of knowledge which cared nothing for mere politics.

As it turned out, politics had mattered a great deal.

The Speaker's Rock was a granite outcrop whose naturally level top had been improved by the first settlers; it stood at the west end of Pentacrest Vale. Adele edged out of the ruck around the transport terminus and eyed the Rock critically. Fifteen years ago the heads of her father, her mother, and her ten-year-old sister, Agatha, had hung from it in mesh bags to be viewed by all those who chose to do so.

There were many other heads as well, most of whom had as little to do with a conspiracy as Agatha did. Adele herself would have been there, save for the whim of sailing schedules. Political realities don't care whether their victims feel superior to them.

Because she'd found herself looking at the Rock with new eyes, Adele paused to survey the whole setting for what was in a way the first time. Even before she reached age ten, she'd spent more of her waking hours on the Pentacrest than she had in the Mundy townhouse; but she'd never looked at it the way a stranger would, taking in its magnificence instead of simply accepting it the way fishes do the sea through which they swim.

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, Fandler," 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 amplification 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.

" . . . as much of a pleasure as the circumstances allowed. And I of course would be pleased to serve aboard the Princess Cecile."

Sand nodded. "I try to make the lives of agents doing difficult jobs as comfortable as possible," she said. "I want to know whether or not the government of Strymon is intriguing with the Alliance. It's possible that you'll be able to determine this without ever leaving your vessel. On the other hand . . ."

She turned her left hand palm down. The ring on her middle finger was set with a blue-and-white sphinx cameo which looked extremely old.

" . . . the Republic requires an accurate assessment of the situation, regardless of the risk to those gathering the information."

Adele ran through a mental checklist of what would be required to carry out the assignment. The corvette had a full RCN communications suite which, coupled to Adele's own equipment, would see to the hardware needs. Much of the remaining background Adele could gather herself more easily than by having Sand retail it. One aspect, though—

"Will the arrival of an RCN squadron alert the plotters?" she asked. "Perhaps even precipitate events? If there is a plot, of course."

"It shouldn't," Sand said. "Strymon is a loyal Cinnabar ally—so long as it's watched. A naval visit every six months or so is normal. The present one is actually a little overdue because of the rush to refit the fighting squadrons."

Sand's left arm rested on the pad of the information console. When the machine was switched on it would become a virtual keyboard; the alternative control wands waited in a slot at the edge of the pad. It was an old system, though considerably updated since Adele's youthful visits to the Celsus.

"They'll expect Commodore Pettin's squadron," Sand continued. "They will not, I think, expect an information specialist of your abilities to accompany the ordinary naval personnel."

That raised another question. The RCN had its own channels and hierarchies; neither Adele nor Mistress Sand herself could give Daniel an order that he would obey. "I, ah, assume Lieutenant Leary will receive his assignment in the normal course of business?" she said.

Sand laughed, rising to her feet with the help of her hand against the desktop. "I'm afraid I rather anticipated your acceptance," she said to Adele. "I believe Lieutenant Leary is getting his orders even as we speak. Though I don't know about—"

She grinned, the satisfied expression of a person who does good work and knows it.

"—`the normal course of business.' Still, the orders will be coming from an acknowledged superior."

Still smiling, she waved Adele to the door ahead of her.

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