Lt. Leary, Commanding (26 page)

The car was nearing the upper terminus; brakes within the take-up drum began to groan as they slowed the rig. Down in the harbor a bell chimed faintly, calling watch changes within a ship which had been opened to the world around it.

"M-Mundy?" Dorst said. "They say . . . that is, I've heard that Captain Leary can read the Matrix. Is that true?"

"What?" Adele said. Why were they asking her about shiphandling? That was
their
business! "Well, yes, I suppose so. I believe I've heard him say as much."

"But
how
, mistress?" Vesey said. Her face was screwed up with the tension of someone who knows there's a secret key to the universe and that someone else has it. "I can memorize the sail plan, but then Captain Leary goes topside and takes a reef here, changes an angle there. And I don't see any reason for it, but when we next check our position we've gained six hours!"

"I calculated the time from Cinnabar to Sexburga," Dorst said. "Without allowing anything for position checks and using the course plotted by Commander Bergen, the best time mathematically
possible
was twenty-one days, ten hours and fifty-one minutes. But Commander Bergen himself made the distance in twelve hours less than that, and Captain Leary cut cut off three and a half more days."

The car shuddered to what Adele thought was a halt. She would have stepped—up a handsbreadth—to the platform, but she noticed that the peddlers were waiting. She waited also; thus the final jolt upward didn't throw her onto her face.

"I'm really not sure what Daniel does," Adele said. "When I look at the Matrix when I'm on the hull, I just see swirls of light. But then, I can't tell much from clouds—"

She stepped onto the platform, then gestured at the pale blue sky streaked by horsetails of vapor.

"—either. Unless they're raining on me. Don't they teach you whatever it is you need to know at the Academy?"

"Mistress," Vesey said, "the patterns of the Matrix show energy levels between universes. Go here, go there, and your velocity relative to the sidereal universe increases or decreases. We understand the theory—that's what astrogation
is
, after all. But you can't take a computer out on the hull, and I don't see how anybody can read the Matrix with his eyes alone."

The upper platform was crowded with hawkers, touts, and pimps. The peddlers passed through them as water does a screen, but they were around Adele and her companions like goldfish feeding. The voices babbled in Universal—

"
Never food like it in your lives!
"

"
Sheets clean this morning, on my soul as a woman!
"

"
The delicacy of the carving by Blind Master Shen!
"

—but it was spoken in a singsong that had nothing to do with the normal accent and ictus of the lines. After a moment it was perfectly understandable, like a document printed in an unfamiliar typeface. The pack wasn't saying anything Adele
wanted
to understand, of course.

Dorst's broad shoulders led the trio through without real difficulty. Adele, last in line, saw an old fellow with a waxed mustache try to grope Vesey. She slapped him away with a practiced reflex. Nobody offered Adele indignities.

A wide roadway paralleled the line of the cliffs. Traffic was heavy, but it was almost entirely of pedestrians or slow-moving vehicles with four large wheels. They were geared for the steep slopes on all the city's other streets.

Adele nodded and the three of them started across. On the other side were five- and six-story buildings. The windows of the lower floors advertised business premises, but the railed balconies higher up had flower boxes and lounging spectators.

"Any of the riggers can tell me things that I can't see," Dorst said glumly as the trio waited in mid-street for an electric-powered dray to crawl past on tracks instead of wheels. "They all think Captain Leary's a wizard, though. Except for Old Hagar who served with Commander Bergen; she says the captain's a babe in arms compared to his uncle."

"Daniel says the same," Adele agreed, "though I gather there's more to promotion in the RCN than skill at astrogation. Daniel may have things to teach you that his uncle couldn't."

"Oh, heavens yes!" Vesey said. "Oh, we're so lucky to serve under him!"

Dorst leaned forward to see past the dray. "Now!" he shouted.

They sprinted to the overlook. Traffic direction wasn't controlled by which side of the street it was on, but the midshipmen seemed to have the spacers' ability to look all ways at once. Adele didn't and by now had determined that she never would, but by staying between her companions she managed to make it across with no worse problem than tripping on a crack between paving blocks. Vesey caught her.

The view was breathtaking. Though not nearly as steep as the cliffs they'd just climbed, the ground to the east sloped down for as far as Adele could see. Beyond the buildings of Spires stretched fields separated by drystone walls. The crops were planted so thinly that the predominant color was that of the russet soil, not green leaves.

"It's impressive," Adele said, "but with so many worlds available I don't know why this place was colonized. And recolonized after the Hiatus."

"Why, for its location," Vesey said in surprise. "Twenty days from Earth, forty days from Cinnabar even before Commander Bergen's survey."

"Even from Pleasaunce it's only sixty days," Dorst added. "And I'm sure you could cut that by a third with a proper survey, which
isn't
going to happen while the RCN controls the region."

"And there's plenty of water for reaction mass," Vesey said. "It's really an ideal location."

Adele nodded slowly as she viewed her surroundings. Plenty of reaction mass, even if it didn't fall as rain. She was a spacer now, so she had to remind herself to think like one.

"The pirates track ships by the disturbance they leave across the Matrix," Dorst said, reverting to the earlier subject. "They follow ships there, then drop into normal space with them and strip their sails with plasma cannon. Strymon's patrol ships do the same thing to take pirates."

Scattered across the landscape were buttes standing a hundred feet above the plain around them. One was topped by a man-made wall; a dusty road led to it from the city proper.

"Daniel's talked about that," Adele said, bringing her data unit out and—after a moment of trepidation—setting it on the stone railing instead of sitting crosslegged on the pavement to use it. The rail was flat and six inches wide, so there was no real danger that she'd bump the unit down the other side. "Woetjans and some of the other riggers say it's quite true, that you can see wakes."

She scrolled across a street plan of Spires till she found what she was looking for, then compared it with her own location according to the data unit's inertial navigation system. Sexburga didn't have positioning satellites, just a handful of ground beacons for the rare traveller who went any distance from Spires.

"There's a pre-Hiatus church that's been converted to a museum and library," she said, nodding toward her display. She couldn't point because she held a wand in either hand. "I'd like to see that. But first, shall we try a local meal? The tomato-stuffed potatoes are supposed to be the local specialty."

"Granddad said the potato lager's something, too," Dorst said with enthusiasm.

"We'll try that as well," Adele said. She put her data unit away and started toward the nearest of the streets leading down into the city proper.

"Mundy, do you think we'll ever learn how to see wakes?" Vesey asked in a tiny voice.

"If it's something about starships that can be taught," Adele said in a tone of confidence that surprised her, "Captain Leary is the best person I know to teach you. And Dorst?"

"Ma'am?"

"He's equally skilled at picking up company when he's off-duty," Adele went on in the same crisp voice. "But if you study his technique, I do hope you'll use it on women of better quality than he does."

Dorst and Vesey both hesitated a half step, then burst out laughing. Adele allowed herself a smile as well.

She found the presence of the midshipmen oddly pleasant, rather like having a pair of intelligent dogs along to share her interests without imposing their own. This layover on Sexburga promised to be quite relaxing.

"Well, this
is
a bloody fort, ain't it?" Hogg said as he hauled hard on the steering wheel to bring them around the final switchback. Hogg had rented the car to bring them to Vaughn's party, but Daniel was half wishing he'd simply paid for a cabman to drive instead. "That or a bloody prison!"

The vehicle couldn't manage more than twenty miles an hour with the throttle flat against the firewall, but steering required a lot less effort than Hogg put into it since the wheel adjusted power to the hub-center electric motors, speeding or slowing them as the turn required.

That offended Hogg. He needed to hear chirps and moans from a vehicle to be sure it was really under his control.

"It's a fortress," Daniel said, looking into the compound past the attendant at the open gate. The walls were seven feet thick. "That's the cap of a vertical-launch missile system in the middle of the courtyard. They're ready to fight off an attack by starships."

Hogg stopped smoothly beside the attendant despite his effort to get the regenerative brakes to jerk them to a halt. "Bloody foreign crap!" he muttered. The comment seemed intended to inform the car that no matter how well it had been designed, it was still crap because it hadn't been made on Cinnabar.

The attendant wore boots to mid calf, checked trousers, and a red frock coat with a gold dicky. He wasn't dressed like a Sexburgan or like anybody else Daniel remembered seeing, though some clowns came close. Mind, the Dress Whites Daniel was wearing weren't the most practical garments either.

"State your business with the Captal da Lund so that I can admit you," the fellow said. "Please."

Daniel frowned. There was no question of his having gotten the address wrong: this walled compound on a hill ten miles east of Spires was the only possible structure that matched Vaughn's directions. Besides, from the dozen vehicles—two of them aircars—already in the courtyard, there was a party going on.

"He's Lieutenant Daniel Leary, commanding the
Princess Cecile
!" Hogg said, sounding more disgusted than angry. "Delos Vaughn invited him, if you know who that is."

"You're expected, Lieutenant," the attendant said, waving to the guard watching from the tower above the gate. The tower windows were beveled sharply so that the automatic impeller mounted there could fire down onto the access road. "Nothing personal. You see, the Captal's got to be careful."

He waved to the courtyard. "Park where you please. Ferde will take you to the third floor where the party is."

Another attendant waved from the door of the narrow three-story building directly across the courtyard. He was dressed like the gate man, but his coat was azure blue instead of scarlet. Apparently it was a national style rather than livery.

Hogg engaged the motors. Over their whine he muttered, "They look like bloody clowns!"

"We're guests in their master's house, Hogg," Daniel said. He cleared his throat. "And after all, their liquor should be perfectly good even if it comes in a funny-shaped bottle."

Weeks in the Matrix had roughened Hogg's personality beyond its normal degree of abrasiveness. Daniel understood his servant's xenophobia, but it couldn't be allowed to get out of hand.

Daniel didn't share Hogg's attitude. So far as he was concerned, foreigners were perfectly all right. Some of them were almost the equal of Cinnabar citizens.

The building's top story was completely glazed; from there figures with drinks in their hands looked down. Most of them wore flashy Strymon costumes, though one was in garb cut like that of the attendants. His coat was black over a white cummerbund rather than of bright colors.

"Yeah, I'll be better for a drink," Hogg muttered as he pulled in at the end of a row of similar though more ornate vehicles. "And I guess you'll be doing some drinking too, young master, because none of the women upstairs looked worth even
my
time."

Before Daniel had managed the car door—it hinged at the back edge, not the front as he was used to—Delos Vaughn himself brushed past the attendant and called, "Lieutenant! Very pleased to see you. Come up and meet my friends and our host."

Besides the residence, the compound held a power room—the blow-off roof on a squat, thick-walled structure pointed to a fusion bottle inside—and a utility building holding shops, a kitchen, and a laundry. The long, one-story building along the back wall was a barracks if Daniel had ever seen one. Fortress indeed!

Daniel let Vaughn take his arm because the other choice was to slap the fellow's hand away. No point in coming at all if he was going to do that.

"I'd thought you were the host, actually, Vaughn," he said as they entered the building. The walls were decorated with a mural of lush meadows, an incongruous contrast to Sexburga's sere landscape. An open elevator waited across the tiled foyer.

"Well, I don't have a suitable place of my own on Sexburga," Vaughn said with a chuckle. The elevator door closed behind them without any command that Daniel noticed. "The Captal is an old friend of my father, you see. He was Lord Protector of the Berengian Stars until he decided to retire a few years ago. Mistress Zane contacted him, and he was glad to lend his premises."

The Berengians were five—or occasionally seven—stars in loose confederation. The little Daniel knew of their political history reminded him of watching piglets squirming against a sow with two more offspring than teats.

The elevator started with a gentle hum. There weren't any controls inside the circular cage. The curved mirror of the walls gave Daniel a view of himself looking uncomfortable in the white-and-gold of his 1st Class uniform.

"Retired?" Daniel said. "Not that I want to pry, but . . ."

Of course he wanted to pry. This place was defended like an outpost on the edge of Alliance territory.