Lt. Leary, Commanding (13 page)

"I think," he amplified, "that Vaughn expects to leave Cinnabar very shortly. I don't know of any reason he should expect that . . . but it seems he's confident enough that he's making sure as many movers and shakers as possible `know' that he's planning to stay."

Guests were moving toward the boats under the gentle urging of the aides from Strymon. Many were under the weather, and a few were being supported or even carried by servants: Vaughn's hospitality had been lavish and of high alcoholic content.

"Lieutenant Leary?" Vaughn called. He stood with Tredegar beside the four-seat craft which had led the flotilla to Rakoscy Islet. "I'd appreciate it if you and your guest would ride back with me. I'd like to hear from your own lips how you captured the
Princess Cecile
."

Daniel hid his frown, but he darted a quick glance at Adele. She smiled thinly—her back was to their host—and said in a soft voice, "Yes, of course he's lying, but we may as well go along with it."

"Delighted, sir," Daniel said cheerfully as he strode over to the nobleman. "And I should say at the outset that Officer Mundy here had more to do with the success of the operation than any other person."

They got into the small vessel, Daniel and Adele sitting behind Vaughn and Tredegar respectively. Two well-dressed Cinnabar nobles and a woman whom Daniel recognized as a senator's widow had been standing close by. They looked vaguely put out as they moved off in search of other seating for the trip back to the entrance.

Mistress Zane had returned to the larger boat which she'd ridden on the way in. Unlike the trio, she seemed quite at ease to be separated from her host.

"I really would be delighted to hear about your exploits, Lieutenant," Vaughn said in an undertone. "And yours as well, Officer Mundy. But I have to admit to a small subterfuge—I've just short of promised three of your fellow guests that I'd rent a house from each of them, and in truth I don't intend to go through with any of the deals. If I were alone with one of them I'd have to descend to flat lies, and if I rode in a larger craft with all three together, my entire imposture would be exposed."

Tredegar reached past the steering column to touch the joystick on the dashboard; the trolling motor whined and the boat started to back away from the shore. Vaughn put his hand over the aide's and said, "Wait for the others to board, Cornelius. We're not in a hurry, after all."

Tredegar turned to look at Vaughn. His expression was empty, his eyes glazed in a taut face. He didn't seem to be taking in the words, but at last he glanced down at the control and lifted his hand away.

"Are you all right, Tredegar?" Daniel said sharply. "You don't look well, if you don't mind my saying."

Or if you do.
The aide looked as if he'd been poisoned; that, or he was utterly terrified.

"Sun," Tredegar said. "Just a touch of sun. I'm all right now."

The blood had indeed returned to his cheeks, but as he spoke he engaged the motor again as if he'd forgotten the exchange of a few seconds earlier. Vaughn looked puzzled, but the other vessels were loaded by now so there was no further reason to delay.

The boat eased into the channel. Tredegar centered the joystick, then clicked it upward to send them toward the entrance. In the clear water beneath, fish like strands of gilded tinsel schooled in the waterweed. They reminded Daniel of lightning flashing among the clouds.

"If you'll permit a question, Mr. Vaughn," Adele said coolly, "why
did
you suggest you were going to rent a house if you didn't intend to do so?"

"Am I simply a pathological liar, you mean, mistress?" Vaughn translated with a laugh. "No, or at any rate I don't see it that way. But you see, if my enemies—Friderik Nunes and his friends from the Alliance of Free Stars—learn that the Republic is sending me home, they'll try to eliminate me before I leave. I'm practicing a mild deception to encourage spies here on Cinnabar to believe that I expect to remain on your planet for the foreseeable future."

"It's not safe for you to go back," Tredegar said. He kept his face straight ahead so that he didn't have to meet his superior's eyes. "You trust Zane but she'll be your death. Death, Delos!"

"Cinnabar is a wonderful planet, Lieutenant," Vaughn said, seeming to have ignored Tredegar's words. "She isn't my planet, however. I'm looking forward to returning to a home I haven't seen in fifteen years."

To the left was an islet whose trees seemed swathed in cobwebs instead of having ordinary foliage. Daniel couldn't place their origin and suddenly regretted not having made more of an exploration of the Gardens. Even though the habitats were selective and thus artificial, the vegetation and the few permitted animal species were real so far as they went.

"Why are you telling Daniel and me the truth if you're lying to others?" Adele said, pressing the point with a lack of tact that made Daniel smile. They were very different people, he and Adele, but they both had a capacity for directness that startled others. "Our social superiors, many would say."

Vaughn smiled at her. His expression was perfectly open and natural—and false. Daniel was convinced of that, though he had no more evidence to go on than he did about the state of the universe before time began.

"Well, Officer Mundy," he said. "I don't believe you're going to help my enemies, knowing that you would thereby help the Alliance. And if you'll forgive a foreigner a bit of romance—I don't care to lie to officers of the Cinnabar fleet. We on Strymon have had ample reason to respect you and the ships you crew."

You know Adele's been listening to your conversations,
Daniel realized.
You're telling us a story that fits what we already know, but that doesn't make it true.
 

"I see," Adele said. "I wish your endeavors well, Mr. Vaughn."

Albirus Islet with its wall of amber trees was coming up on the left. Tredegar had gone rigid again, except that he kept sucking his lower lip in and out over his teeth. He kept pressing the joystick but the trolling motor's throttle was already full-open.

"Is Mistress Zane here to make arrangements for your return, then?" Adele asked. Daniel saw her fingers twitch and almost smiled: Adele desperately wanted to enter the data somewhere to make it real to her.

"Well, Thea is a friend," Vaughn said. "I don't think I should—"

There was a fresh hole in the sheets of hardened sap, a saucer-sized window from the interior of Albirus Islet that hadn't been there when the party entered. It could've been casual vandalism, but that wasn't the first explanation that went through Daniel's mind.

"Watch out!" Daniel said, pointing to the opening. The boat was coming parallel to it. "There's a—"

Only shadows showed through the amber curtain, but metal glinted on the other side of the hole. Vaughn was looking at Daniel in surprise; Adele groped in her left pocket for the pistol she'd been forced to leave behind. Tredegar, his face set and tears streaming down his cheeks, gripped the joystick as if it were his last hope of life.

There was no time for thought, only instinct. Daniel seized the aide's throat with both hands, lifted him bodily from the seat, and threw him into the crystal water.

The boat pitched wildly, but craft in the Gardens were broad-beamed with the expectation that many passengers would be clumsy and no few of them drunk besides. Daniel stepped into the pilot's seat, jerked the separate steering wheel to the left, and stamped on the foot throttle which controlled the main motor. The boat surged toward the islet, the bow lifting to a thirty-degree angle as the powerful waterjet torqued the vessel around its center of mass before accelerating it.

"
Are you
—" Vaughn said, grabbing Daniel around the shoulders. Adele threw herself over the Strymonian's face. She wasn't strong enough to break the grip of a well-built man, but suddenly being blindfolded made Vaughn jerk away.

The world exploded in heat and the flash of a sun going nova. What was left of the boat flew over on its back, flinging its three remaining passengers into the canal not far from Tredegar.

Air, fiercely hot and compressed by a thunderclap to the density of tons of sand, enveloped Adele. She thought she'd let go of Vaughn, but she couldn't be sure. She felt nothing—not even the pull of gravity—until she slammed into the canal.

She rose spluttering. The canal's knee-high water was clean and sweet; it must be filtered with the same care that the proprietors showed with every other aspect of the Gardens. Except that occasionally they failed to prevent assassins from bringing heavy weapons into their emasculated precincts. . . .

The weight of the motor held the boat's stern down, so the remainder of the plastic hull stuck up in the air. The dashboard had survived but the lower portion of the bow had been converted into a stench of resin matrix. Only a few tatters of fiberglass reinforcement were still attached to the undamaged mid-hull.

A gray fog hung above the wreckage, and a few wisps of ionized air were dissipating like yesterday's rainbow. A plasma bolt, then, from a weapon concealed behind the wall of amber sap. The light-speed particles liberated their energy on the first solid object they encountered. They'd destroyed the boat, but they hadn't been able to penetrate even the thin hull when Daniel lifted it with the throttle.

Daniel sloshed toward the islet, staying to the left of a direct line with the gunport. He should have looked silly, unarmed and dressed in a dripping uniform. Adele doubted that he looked silly to the gunmen, though. As the commendation for his activities on Kostroma had put it, "
Faced with a superior enemy, Lt. Leary chose to attack in accordance with the finest traditions of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.
"

Feeling extremely foolish, Adele also started toward the islet, keeping to the right of the opening. If she'd had her pistol she might have done some good. So far as she could tell, this was no better than suicide. Still, she was acting out of cold analysis, not passion: she knew she'd rather be killed than live to remember that she'd let her only real friend die alone.

It occurred to Adele to wonder what had happened to her purse with the personal data unit, dropped when she tried to get Vaughn out of the way. She hadn't the least notion of what Daniel was doing, but she knew
him
well enough to support him regardless.

The boat's hull had reflected some of the bolt's energy back toward the weapon, eating away a fan of hardened sap and fracturing the smooth amber wall for ten feet in either direction. A man wearing a poncho of light-scattering cloth ran past the enlarged opening, holding a handgun.
Why didn't I insist on keeping my—
 

A bow wave washed Adele to the side as the barge carrying the servants surged between her and Daniel. She had to splash forward clumsily to keep from being pushed onto her face.

The craft had a small cockpit in the rear. The aide who'd been at the controls floundered in the water thirty feet back while Hogg drove the vessel at a slant toward the islet. Several of the servants had jumped overboard; all but one of the remainder had ducked behind the gunwales.

The exception, Tovera, stood in the bow. Her left arm was locked at an angle before her; across the crooked elbow rested her right hand holding a pistol.

The ship slid onto the islet, pushing over the amber trees and shattering the hardened sap. The louder crash was the vessel's lower hull breaking on the concrete retaining wall. Three men wearing camouflage capes were running across ground covered with flowers like a carpet of tiny flags. The assassins' primary weapon, a bipod-mounted plasma cannon, rested on the ground behind them. They couldn't fire it again till the white-hot barrel had cooled from the previous discharge, and they showed no signs of planning to use the pistols each waved in his hand.

Tovera shot—with a very compact submachine gun, not a pistol, and how
had
she gotten it through the detection screen at the entrance? Despite the light-scattering garments and the fact that the boat was breaking up beneath her, Tovera's first burst sent the most distant assassin onto his face with his arms flapping.

Tovera stepped to the islet just before the impact. The posts supporting the vessel's canopy flexed till they cracked, slamming her in the middle of the back with the whole structure, frame and fabric together. She fell under a pile of debris.

The remaining assassins reached a skiff nestled onto the shore across the islet; on that side, the branches of the amber trees hadn't been pleached together to form a continuous wall. One of the men settled behind the controls while the other turned, aiming toward the pursuit just as Daniel and Adele squelched onto the islet.

Tovera's weapon crackled from the tangled wreckage. Its electromotive coils accelerated pellets up the short barrel at several times the speed of sound. The gunman fell backward, dropping his pistol. The driver slumped on his face, half out of the skiff as it rose on the balanced static charges induced in the ground and its own hull. The pilot's weight dragged the little craft into a slow circle like a horse guided by a lunge line.

Daniel ran toward the fallen assassins. Adele instead waded back into the water. The rest of the flotilla clogged the channel, some vessels halting on reversed thrust while others chose to ground on the fern-covered islet to the right.

Delos Vaughn hunched below the retaining wall where undamaged sap still provided a curtain from sight. Tredegar stood in the middle of the canal, his eyes wild and his mouth open though speechless.

There's my purse.
Despite the violence, the water remained clear except for swirls of weed and air bubbles. The channel was concrete colored to give it the appearance of mud.

Adele raised the purse and took the data unit from it.
Pray whatever Gods there were that its seals are as good as they're supposed to be.
 

Tredegar came to his senses from watching Adele's organized action. He sloshed toward the nearest of the undamaged boats, the ten-seater which had brought Daniel and Adele into the Gardens. Shawna and Elinor stood in the bow, watching events with perfect aplomb while everyone else on the craft lay flat on the deck.