Lt. Leary, Commanding (10 page)

She'd learned all she could from documentary sources. Perhaps the party would give her some useful insight.

Aloud she said, "Delos Vaughn isn't just a playboy, so why does he go to so much effort to pretend otherwise?"

Tovera smiled without humor or emotion as she took the garments Adele handed her. She looked like a menial servant, too downtrodden to have a personality, let alone opinions.

And that of course was the answer: because she looked harmless, nobody noticed Tovera until she struck. So when did Delos Vaughn intend to strike?

And where would Adele Mundy be when the blow fell?

The service area was a hollow rectangle and all four walls of the wine bar were mirrored. When Daniel heard over the hubbub the call, "There you are, Leary! Good to see you!" he had no idea where the voice was coming from. He looked to his left, turned to his right; saw hundreds of well-dressed men and women, infinitely multiplied in reflection, and Wex Bending slid in behind him. He'd come from the left after all.

It had to be Bending, though the goatee and flaring sideburns Daniel's childhood friend now affected had changed his appearance almost beyond recognition. He hugged Daniel around the shoulders and went on, "How's the Speaker keeping, Daniel? A splendid man, splendid!"

Daniel blinked, wondering if there was some mistake after all. Surely Bending would know that he and his father were on bad terms—or rather, on no terms at all?

"I haven't seen my father in six years and more, Wex," Daniel said. "From what I see on the news, he's much the same as always. But I don't have much call to watch the news, even now that I'm back on Cinnabar."

One of the three liveried bartenders set a drink in a fluted glass in front of Bending without being asked. He'd obviously suggested the location because he was a regular here.

"Thank you, Torvaldo," he said. He glanced at Daniel meaningfully. "Ah . . . ?"

"On my tab, waiter," Daniel said, catching the drift quickly enough. A junior lieutenant's pay was well beneath whatever Bending must be making in the Ministry of External Affairs, but Bending's upkeep must be equally high. Certainly the mauve suit he wore was several times as expensive as Daniel's uniform.

Daniel wasn't the sort to object to buying someone a drink, even at the prices this place charged. He'd called Bending on a whim when he realized they'd have time to meet before Vaughn's party, but he'd wondered if he'd be conspicuous in his Dress Whites. In fact, the doorman might not have passed him if he'd worn anything less pretentious.

In Bending's lapel was a small silver pin, three stylized knifefish leaping: the crest of the Learys of Bantry. Bending's father had been a Leary retainer with a post in the Agriculture department through Speaker Leary's influence. The son had obviously followed the same route to preferment and had already done rather better from it.

Awareness of the pin made pieces click together in Daniel's mind. "I gather you called my father's office after I called you, Wex?" he said. "To see whether you were permitted to talk to me, that is."

Corder Leary's goatee and sideburns framed his thin, ascetic visage to form a portrait of devilish wisdom. The same style made a clown of the round-faced Bending.

"Well, not permitted, Daniel," Bending said with a hurt expression. "But despite a friendship as close as ours, I couldn't dishonor my name by acting against the wishes of my patron."

"I know exactly what you mean!" Daniel said, slapping the bureaucrat on the back with a broad grin. He did indeed realize that the friend who'd played hide-and-seek with him in the gardens of the Leary townhouse when he visited his father had become a poncing little courtier to whom position was everything. Daniel hoped his smile hid that knowledge, but it really didn't matter: Bending wouldn't have met Daniel if he didn't think that was Speaker Leary's desire. That being the case, he would have grinned and obeyed if Daniel ordered him to hop around like a gerbil.

Which left the question of why Father had approved the meeting, but that wasn't the matter that brought Daniel to this place. They charged a florin a glass for wine that didn't hold a buzz in a caskful. "So Wex," Daniel said. "What can you tell me about Delos Vaughn? I saw him at Harbor Three yesterday."

"Oh, he's mad for warships, they tell me," Bending burbled, sipping his own faintly violet concoction. "Strymon had quite a fleet in its day, you know. But they're held to a few dozen antipirate frigates by treaty—and anyway, he's never going to leave Cinnabar, no matter how many senators he bribes."

"Ah," Daniel said, nodding to show that he was listening. He took a sip of his wine and found he'd drained the glass. The stuff had no more body than seafoam! "Someone's spending money to keep him here, then?"

Bending turned so that he faced Daniel directly. His right hand was on the bar; the left held his glass at a calculated angle. Unless Daniel was badly mistaken, he was admiring his pose in the mirror beyond.

"Oh, there's a certain amount of that, sure, Daniel," he said, puffing his chest out slightly. "Being appointed Observer on Strymon is known to be quite a political plum. No senator's ever come back poor from there, and the staff does itself bloody well too, let me tell you."

Bending drank, then lifted his glass slightly and appeared to admire the remaining liquid as he swirled it. "But that's not the real reason, you see," he said. He leaned closer to Daniel and added in a conspiratorial whisper, "Our Delos is too bloody sharp,
that's
the problem. Better for the Republic that he never goes home, do you see?"

Daniel frowned. Claiming to be a babe in the woods of interstellar relations was the right way to draw confidences out of a man who obviously delighted in playing the learned insider. It was also God's truth in this instance.

"To tell the truth, I
don't
understand, Wex," he said. "Surely nobody's concerned that Vaughn would try to claim independence again? We've crushed Strymon twice, and that was before Uncle Stacey cut the travel time to a fraction of what it'd been for Admiral Perlot's squadron."

"Ah, that's right, you're a navy man," Bending said in what seemed to be genuine surprise. Daniel would've thought a 1st Class uniform made that about as obvious as you could wish, but apparently rising members of the Ministry of External Relations operated in a sphere which didn't involve using their own senses. "It's easy enough to talk about sending a squadron heaven knows how far, but quite another thing to pay for it."

"I can see that's true," Daniel lied. What he really saw was that Bending had no idea of what was involved in manning, arming, and equipping a fighting squadron. For that matter, Bending probably had no real idea of what the Treasury had to go through either: those were just words to show that he was knowledgeable about government. "But we'd still send a squadron, despite the cost, and it seems to me that if Vaughn's as smart as he's well connected here on Cinnabar, he knows we'd break him as sure as we broke his predecessors."

Bending drained his glass and set it on the bar, looking obviously uncomfortable. Daniel set his own glass beside the bureaucrat's and signalled the bartender. God knew how much this afternoon was going to cost, but it was better to go ahead rather than waste the money already invested.

"Well, the truth is, Daniel . . . " Bending said. He seemed to have sunk in from his posturing frog manner of a moment before. "It's all very well to say that the Republic wants its allies to prosper—and we do, of course. But under Leland Vaughn, the Strymon fleet kept down piracy and regional traffic was almost entirely in Strymon freighters. Nowadays the pirates get a subsidy from shipping firms, a transit tax you could call it . . . and Cinnabar firms have deeper pockets than the locals do. More than half the trade's in Cinnabar hulls now."

"Ah," said Daniel again. He drank in order to hide what otherwise would have been a disgusted expression. "I see. And Delos is of the same mettle as his father, is that it?"

"Delos is twice anything his father dreamed of being, we think in the ministry," Bending said, showing the decency to be a little embarrassed. "I know it may not seem proper to a navy man—"
He was right about that!
"—but it really is the best option for the Republic."

For Cinnabar shippers to lick the boots of pirates? No, I don't think so.
 

Aloud Daniel said, "What do you suppose Vaughn was doing at Harbor Three yesterday, Wex?"

Bending laughed and drained his own glass. He set it upside down on the bar to indicate he was through with his liquid lunch.

"I suspect it's the reason a prisoner looks at the sky, Daniel," he said. "To remind himself of what he doesn't have."

He slapped Daniel on the shoulder again and pushed off through the crowd. "Remember me to the Speaker, Daniel," he called back.

"The very next time I see him!" Daniel replied cheerfully. He looked at the chit the bartender set between the empty glasses and raised an eyebrow, then rooted through his purse for a ten-florin coin.

And if I do ever see Father, we'll probably have another flaming row when I tell him what despicable toadies he has wearing the Leary collar flash.
 

_T
he lane for aircars approaching Anadyomene Gardens was at
four hundred feet over the road for ground transport, too low to gain a full panorama of the site. Nonetheless what Adele could see out the side window was impressive enough.

"Good heavens, do they have a pike tree?" said Daniel, peering through the window on the other side of the car. He had his naval goggles down over his eyes either for magnification or to view the scene in something other than the normal optical spectrum. "I believe they do. Adele, they've got a pike tree from Rouge and it must be over a century old! However do you suppose they transported it?"

A tree with branches fluting up from only the last ten feet of a trunk nearly two hundred feet tall grew from one of the Gardens' scores of artificial islands. Adele had seen it as the car followed the curve of the road below, though it meant no more to her than any of the other types of vegetation separated by the narrow waterways.

Still, with Daniel's identification of the imported tree to go by, it shouldn't be too hard to answer the question. Obediently she drew the personal data unit from her purse—the garments Tovera bought her for the party weren't fitted to carry it, and Adele certainly wasn't going to leave it behind—and set it on her knees.

A professional chauffeur drove the hired aircar. Hogg sat with Tovera on the rear-facing seat behind the driver's compartment, looking glum. He'd rented the limousine and had been looking forward to driving it himself, only to have his hopes dashed when the firm checked his professional credentials—Hogg had none—and put in their own driver as a condition of the lease.

Adele suppressed a smile lest Hogg realize what had amused her. He could have driven the aircar, true enough, but Adele would've been holding on with both hands, let alone expecting her data unit to stay on her knees.

"Oh, heavens, I didn't mean you should do that, Adele," Daniel said, sliding his goggles onto his forehead again. He looked apologetic. "I just meant, well, the Gardens were only built five years ago and I was surprised to see an adult specimen of so large a tree."

"But I
can
learn how they transported it, Daniel," Adele said. "I'm sure there's a record, in the construction files if nowhere else. It probably won't take more than ten minutes."

Daniel laughed and patted her hand. "I know you could, Adele," he said, "and at leisure I'd appreciate you doing that. Right now we have a party to attend."

He leaned back in his seat and looked at her appraisingly, though in the past few months he must have seen her thousands of times. "You know, I keep forgetting that you're always
on
," he said. "I ought to be used to that by now."

Adele put the data unit away, a trifle awkward because she wasn't used to keeping it in this purse. "I've been accused of being overly literal," she said dryly. "It appears to me that that wouldn't be a problem if fewer people were underprecise."

The car dropped to ground level to enter a parking lot covered by a marquee of frothy plastic. Scores of vehicles were already within, both aircars and ground transportation. Many of the former bore the flashes of houses of importance in the Republic; even the rental cars were, like this one, of a high class. Other guests wearing either civilian finery or dress uniforms were walking through the seashell-shaped entrance. Each was accompanied by a servant.

Despite its name and the marquee's decor, the Gardens arose not from seafoam but from channels cut across a bend of the Pearl River thirty miles from Xenos. The coast had been in sight as the aircar neared the location, but there was no actual connection.

Adele thought of checking a topographical display on her data unit, but after the business of the pike tree she was vaguely embarrassed to take it out again. Instead she said, "Wouldn't it have been better to join it to the sea? Surely the developers could afford coastal frontage."

Daniel paused in the door Hogg was holding open for him and looked surprised. "Well, the salt would kill the vegetation, Adele," he said. He didn't sound condescending, just puzzled. "Certainly most native and Terran species, and that of almost any plant that comes from a world that humans could live on."

"Oh," Adele said, suppressing an irrational desire to check what Daniel said on a natural-history database. The chance that he'd be wrong was beneath computation, but she still didn't in her heart of hearts believe anything she hadn't looked up for herself.

Tovera held the door for her mistress with one hand; her slim attaché case was in the other. Adele hadn't asked what Tovera had in the case, in part because her "servant" was likely to say, "Equipment," and refuse to amplify the statement. Barely aloud, Adele muttered, "Then they really ought to change the name of the place to something less confusing, you know."

Though that was probably another instance of her being overly literal.