Lt. Leary, Commanding (25 page)

"I see," he said, straightening. His smile had a degree of calculation in it. "I suppose we should be glad that they didn't have Uncle Stacey's logs, or our run from Cinnabar might not have been a record after all."

He straightened and gestured to Adele. She switched the console back to a full-sized image of the dock and stood, nodding to the midshipmen to show that she was aware of them. On the display Vaughn gripped arms with Mistress Zane, then got into the closed car with her help. Obviously, he wasn't fully recovered from the voyage.

Well, neither was Daniel, though he was getting there. He forced his face into a serious expression and said, "Dorst, Vesey, I have a favor to ask of you. I realize you have plans for your liberty—"

He was fairly confident that the midshipmen had no real plans, just concern sparked by the tall tales they were bound to have heard. They'd be afraid that they wouldn't measure up to what was expected of an RCN officer.

"—but I'm going to ask you to put them on hold for our first day here." Daniel cleared his throat. "Normally I'd escort Officer Mundy myself, but I have anchor watch for the next twenty-four hours. I don't want her to stumble around Spires alone, so I'd appreciate it if you'd accompany her. I won't make this an order, but—"

"Sir, we'd be happy—" Vesey said. Her tongue caught and she glanced at Dorst. "Ah, I'd be—"

"We'd be honored to join Officer Mundy!" Dorst said with relieved enthusiasm. "We'll keep her, ah . . ."

He wanted to say "safe," but he suddenly doubted that was the right word. Wisely, Daniel thought, he let his voice trail off.

Adele seemed to be on the verge of open laughter; which, if not a first, certainly wasn't something she had great experience with. Still working to keep his face straight, Daniel said, "This meets with your approval, Officer Mundy?"

You had to know what you were looking for to see the flat bulge in the side pocket of Adele's jacket. If the midshipmen had heard the stories about what Adele could and had done with her pistol, they probably classed them with the stories about the night Barnes serviced all thirty of the girls in a brothel on LaGrange, having reached the madam just as dawn broke.

"Yes it does," she said solemnly. "I'm afraid my taste in amusement is staid by any standards, but we can at least get the flavor of the city together. In future days you'll be free to indulge yourself."

"Oh, that'll be fine, ma'am," Dorst assured her. "To tell the truth, I was sort of looking forward to . . . I've never been out of the Cinnabar system, you know, and I'd like really to see some things besides—"

He broke off and pointedly didn't look at Vesey.

"We don't have to leave the
Sissie
to get drunk," Vesey said primly, her eyes fixed on the far bulkhead also. "Anyway, we're glad to join you, mistress."

"Then you'd best learn to call me Mundy," Adele said as she shepherded her charges toward the corridor. "I have the
Sailing Directions
—"

She tapped the pocket with her data unit.

"—and a map of Spires, so we should be all right if we stay together."

She nodded to Daniel as she followed the midshipmen down the companionway; a thin, stiff-looking woman in dress grays. He winked in reply. Yes, they'd be all right; no question about that.

The people telling about Barnes' exploit exaggerated: there'd only been fifteen women in the house, not thirty-one. And they exaggerated about Adele as well. She hadn't really killed a hundred Alliance soldiers on Kostroma with single shots to the head, snapping the rounds off every time a target offered.

But it probably wasn't as much of an exaggeration as the story about Barnes.

_N
ine funicular railways climbed from Flood Harbor to the city
of Spires on beyond the cliffs. Three were for personnel, leaving at fifteen-minute intervals according to the scarred metal plate in the shelter where Adele stood with the midshipmen. The others were much larger, with cogged rails to give positive traction to heavy loads. They hauled cargo to and from the freighters berthed in slips formed from golden limestone quarried from the cliffs themselves.

"How does the harbor flood?" Dorst said, looking back at the rounded hulls of starships which showed over the slips like so many oxen in their stalls. "It looks to me that the locks keep the water level pretty constant whatever the tide's doing."

"Captain Ludifica Flood refounded the colony from Earth after the Hiatus," Adele said, restraining the urge to bring out her personal data unit and
show
the boy the reference. "The harbor's named after her."

The funicular lines carried two cars in balance, going up and down simultaneously on a single set of tracks with a double-tracked shunt in the middle where they passed. The lower set of pulleys squealed loudly as the cars above reached midpoint.

Adele eyed them without pleasure. The cables were no thicker than her thumb, which seemed modest when they had to support forty-odd passengers and the vehicle against a thousand-foot fall. Deliberately she said, "I wonder, Dorst; are these—"

She gestured.

"—going to be thick enough to hold us?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am!" Dorst said, forgetting he was supposed to treat her as a peer. "This is beryllium monocrystal felted in an elastomer—single-strand, you see, not woven, to limit the stress. You could haul the
Princess Cecile
to the top if your motor was up to it."

"The strands are continuously tested for current path, Mundy," Vesey said. "The operator, well, the system itself I suppose, knows if there's any breakage. It'd shut down long before there was danger."

They both reacted to Adele with a sort of frightened deference. It wasn't her rank: though they were classed as petty officers for the time being, Dorst and Vesey were in line for commissions which would make them the titular superiors of any warrant officer, let alone a specialist like Adele who knew virtually nothing about the running of a starship.

Her question, crafted to emphasize that ignorance, must have relaxed them somewhat, though. Vesey, her eyes on the approaching car, added, "How long have you known Captain Leary, Mundy, if you don't mind . . . ?"

Good God,
they
thought she was Daniel's mistress.

"I met Mr. Leary on Kostroma, where I was working for the Elector," Adele said calmly, suppressing the urge to shout, "You idiots!" in anger at the obtuseness of people. "And Woetjans and most of the rest of the present crew, as a matter of fact. Our families had had dealings in our youth—"

That was an honest if incomplete way of describing the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Proscriptions that followed it.

"—but we didn't know of one another's existence until a few hours before the Alliance invasion."

She was tempted to add that they were doing Daniel a disservice in believing he was the sort of man whose penis made all his decisions. She didn't say that because it wasn't her place to; and in fairness to the midshipmen, Daniel's off-duty behavior could lead one to that conclusion.

The pulleys divided the waiting area. There was a mounting platform on either side of the tracks, though Adele could see that the descending car had a single bay. She and the midshipmen had walked to the right side because a dozen or so Sexburgan traders were already waiting on the left.

The locals, males and females both, wore loose blouses gathered at the openings, and drab-colored pantaloons with heavy sandals. One of the younger men carried two racks of candy trays, mostly emptied, on a yoke. He noticed Vesey—quite an attractive girl, now that Adele thought about it—and postured for her, arms akimbo.

Vesey deliberately turned her back on him and said, "I knew that Sexburga was a naval base, but I didn't realize there was so much civilian trade. What do they produce here?"

The question—the words couldn't be heard on the other side of the shrieking cable—was simply to remove the local man from her society. After a moment the fellow fluffed his full mustache and also turned away, though he was still puffed out like a rooster displaying.

Adele found it hard not to provide information even if it wasn't really expected. "Very little, actually," she said. "There's some small-scale manufacturing, mostly to rebuild systems for the ships that land here. Local agriculture's barely above subsistence level. But almost all the traffic into or out of the Sack touches on Sexburga so there's quite a lot of transshipment as well as resupply, even though almost everything but the reaction mass has to be imported."

The car shuddered to a halt. It was full, or nearly so, of spacers returning from liberty, and it looked to Adele as if there were as many planetary backgrounds represented as there were people.

That didn't necessarily mean they were from different ships. A dark-skinned woman whose rough-out leathers were embroidered in eye patterns helped a male shipmate who was thin, blond, and wore only a silk shift and a beret. They were both drunk, but the woman could at least walk; her companion, hopping up and down, babbled in accented Universal that his feet had been cut off.

The peddlers got on, nodding in tired acknowledgment as Adele and the midshipmen boarded the car from the other side. The locals had finished their day, going from ship to ship to serve the spacers still on duty.

Adele noticed from the way the returning panniers and satchels swung, they weren't always empty. Almost the first thing she'd learned when she began associating with spacers was that no matter how open a society might look from the outside, there was always
some
thing it considered contraband; and there were always smugglers ready to supply that contraband to whoever could afford it.

She smiled coldly. Since that seemed to be a universal trait, she supposed it was the way things were supposed to be. Adele had never been one to argue against observed reality.

Though that did leave the question of who or what had set up the system in the first place. Adele didn't believe in a supreme being; but occasionally it seemed that things couldn't possibly be so
damnably
absurd unless someone, Someone, was deliberately making them that way.

"My grandfather was on Sexburga with Admiral Perlot's squadron in '21," Dorst said, craning his neck to peer up the cableway. "He said it was a really wild port, but of course it would be with twenty thousand spacers based here before the Strymon fleet surrendered. It won't be like that now."

It was hard to tell from the midshipman's voice whether he was disappointed or relieved. Probably a little of both.

The top cable grew taut. Adele braced herself on one of the vertical poles that doubled as support for the canopy, and the car started upward with a jerk.

"I'm sure there'll be plenty of ways to get into trouble in Spires," Adele said dryly. "Whether they'll be much different from the entertainments of the Strip outside Harbor Three is another matter."

"What are the local animals like?" Vesey said; an apparent non sequitur until she added, "I saw a dog once in the New World Lounge."

Dorst gasped and turned away, coughing or laughing. Vesey's face lost all expression as she reviewed what she'd just blurted. She had a naturally dark complexion, so the blush took some moments to show on her cheeks.

"There's no proven native life above the invertebrate level," Adele said. She hid her smile, though perhaps Vesey would have felt better if she let it show. "With the flow of traffic through the port, I'm sure that the entertainment industry has as wide a range of options as the restauranteurs."

She frowned, looking back at the harbor now hundreds of feet below. The question reminded her that she wanted to find Daniel data on the natural history of all the planets in the region. That should be possible on Sexburga.

"The
Sailing Directions
mention rumors of large animals on South Land," she went on. "Sexburga has two continents, North and South, but South isn't settled and isn't often visited."

The young peddler with the candy trays leaned forward. "South Land is haunted, lady," he said with polite earnestness. "Nobody lives there, nobody goes there except foreigners."

"The Tombs of the Ancients are there," added a local woman, a substantial person holding a basket woven in slant patterns in varicolored straw. "The Ancients still live in them, but they only come out when nobody's looking."

The other peddlers nodded, all those who could hear over the sounds of the car rising. A more distant man held a whispered conversation with the woman with the basket, then nodded enthusiastic agreement.

"My grandfather heard about the ghosts," Dorst said. "I don't think he ever went there. What do the
Directions
say, mistress?"

"There are regular rock formations that look like the foundations of buildings," Adele said, speaking carefully. She was repeating what she'd read, and she didn't want to give the impression that she had an opinion beyond the words in the
Sailing Directions
. "Some people have conjectured that they're the remains of the first settlement, but judging by wind erosion they're far too old for that. The official explanation is that they're natural."

"There's nothing natural about the ghosts, lady," the man with the candy trays said fiercely. "You keep away from South Land. There's plenty of fun for rich spacers here in Spires, you bet!"

That was indeed a safe bet. This funicular rose very steeply, but the one halfway around the bowl to the left followed a notch at no more than 45 degrees. Spaced along the tracks were three taverns that had been cut into the cliff face. Bunting fluttered from their railings, and at the uppermost a naked girl danced on a barreltop to lure custom. There were mounting platforms set where the slow-moving cars would just clear them, but Adele couldn't imagine people as drunk as the spacers who'd descended in this car managing to board on the move.

"They must cater to riggers," said Dorst, who seemed to have been thinking along the same lines.

"And they're not thinking very hard about anything except the first drink," Vesey added. "If I had to spend all my duty hours out on the hull, I might feel the same way."