The Sea Without a Shore (10 page)

CHAPTER 8

Xenos on Cinnabar

Adele stepped back and looked critically at the row of clothing arranged neatly on her bed in Chatsworth Minor. The two bulkiest items were a 2nd Class uniform—her Grays—and a civilian suit of the highest quality in case she had to appear as Lady Mundy.

She did not expect to wear either garment when visiting a mining world as a civilian. She certainly hoped that she did not wear either.

Adele was used to living with very little in the way of personal possessions. She could have gotten along quite comfortably with a set of clothing sufficient to satisfy local propriety, the pistol she normally carried in her left tunic pocket, and her personal data unit.

She didn’t really need the pistol. She felt more comfortable armed, and the pistol had saved her life and the lives of her colleagues on a number of occasions, but comfort wasn’t something Adele Mundy expected from life.

Adele could even do without the data unit. On balance, though, she would rather die than to live without the data unit. Well, neither should be necessary.

The data unit projected an attention signal as a fist-sized ball of red light thirty inches in front of Adele’s nose. She took the unit out and saw that Bernis Sand was calling. Rather than hold the discussion as a text conversion as she normally would, Adele said, “Adele Mundy speaking.”

As best as Adele could remember, Mistress Sand had never before called her directly. Their meetings had always been arranged discretely by third parties. Adele supposed that the use of cut-outs had been chosen for security’s sake. That meant either that this call wasn’t anything to do with the Republic’s business—or that it was a sudden crisis.

Or both, of course.

“Mundy,” said Mistress Sand, “my son went out two hours ago. I learned from the attendant of his quarters that he had said that as a matter of ethics he needed to inform Captain Sorley that his ship would no longer be required. Rikard wasn’t a prisoner here, of course.”

She’s probably regretting that now,
Adele thought. Which was silly, of course: mother or not, Mistress Sand was not the sort to imprison her son because he had become ethical.

Adele’s own parents would not have had any hesitation about imprisoning their children, if their own principles required it. Her mother would have sacrificed things she held of more importance than her daughters if it would bring about the victory of the Common People. The Common People under the enlightened leadership of Esme Rolfe Mundy and her associates in the Popular Party, of course.

Lucius Mundy’s guiding principle was as starkly simple as the barrel of a gun: he would become speaker by whatever means were available. He wouldn’t have regarded imprisoning his bookish elder daughter as a sacrifice if it advanced his agenda.

“Just before I called you,” Sand continued, “a pair of porters arrived with a handcart and a note from Rikard saying that he was moving out. I was to give his luggage to the porters. There was only the little he’d brought from Corcyra and a few suits that I’d bought him to make him presentable while he was here in Xenos.”

“The note was in your son’s writing?” Adele said. Tovera had appeared in the doorway, silent and emotionless. She had listening devices all over Chatsworth Minor.

“Yes,” said Sand. “When asked in the correct fashion, the porters said that they were to take the luggage to the Dancing Girl, which I gather is a tavern. Money was a sufficient inducement. I sent them off with the luggage.”

“All right,” said Adele. She was looking at the address of the Dancing Girl, an establishment near Portinga Harbor. There was no imagery available, which irritated her but wouldn’t really matter. “I’ll discuss this with my colleagues and we’ll deal with it.”

She thought for a further eyeblink, too swiftly for the hesitation to register with the other party. “Mistress Sand,” she said. “Keep your people clear of the area. They would complicate matters. Good day.”

“Six and Hogg are packing in his suite,” Tovera said quietly. “Miranda is there, because they’re going out tonight.”

As Adele passed her on the way out the door, Tovera smiled and said, “I suppose we’re going out, too.”

Adele shrugged. Dockside taverns were out of her range of experience. Daniel would make the decisions this time.

His door opened off the next landing down. She rapped on the panel and said, “Daniel? A word.”

The door whipped open. “Come in,” said Daniel, wearing his Grays. Both couches in the sitting room were covered with clothing. “Can you convince Hogg that I won’t need my Dress Whites on a voyage to Corcyra?”

Miranda, wearing an attractive suit of pink and gray, sat on a chair. In her lap was a cape, gray on the outside with a pink lining. She was dressed for any gathering short of a dress ball, and her vivacity would probably carry her through even that. She smiled pleasantly at Adele.

Whereas Daniel’s servant had a truculent look. He stood arms akimbo with his fists clenched on his hips.

“No,” said Adele, “I can’t. Though of course you’re right.”

As she spoke, she realized that the question had been meant rhetorically. When Adele’s mind was on other things, she had a tendency to deal with statements at face value. Her mind was usually on other things.

“Cleveland went to see Captain Sorley in the Dancing Girl at Portinga Harbor,” Adele said. She realized that Daniel had held his tongue for her, waiting for her to explain her visit now that he’d seen her expression. “He’s just sent for his luggage. A handwritten note.”

“Everything in that part of town is a dive,” Hogg said, his expression changing subtly.

“I think I may have been there …” Daniel said, his eyes focused on things beyond the present room. “In my second year, with Fessenden, because his brother-in-law was a ship’s captain and we hoped to touch him for a loan.”

The lines of his face sharpened. “Which we did, enough to get extremely drunk on, at least,” he said. “Adele, how recently did this happen?”

“Cleveland has been gone for over two hours,” she said. “The porters to take the luggage just left Cleveland House.”

“Right, what I hoped,” said Daniel, nodding. “Hogg, you and I will fetch the boy immediately. I’ll wear these—”

He pinched the seam of his Grays. They were a new set, a proper male counterpart to Miranda’s suit.

“—to show Sorley that he’s dealing with gentlemen, not dockside trash who can be shanghaied without repercussions. The sooner the better, I think; before they settle down.”

“I’ll come along,” said Adele. She patted the closure over the data unit in her pocket. “It will be a new experience.”

Hogg and Daniel traded looks. “Ah, Adele?” Daniel said. “I’d really rather you not. I don’t expect trouble—Hogg and I will go in and come back with the boy before Sorley knows what’s happening. And I know that the Xenos docksides can be rough, but people
aren’t
shot here the way that can happen on some places we’ve landed. That isn’t something that I want to change, frankly.”

Adele looked at Daniel, then at Hogg, and back to Daniel.
They know the environment and think that I’d be in the way
.

“All right,” she said.

“Thank you!” Daniel said in relief. “Come along, Hogg. Darling—”

This to Miranda over his shoulder as he started down the stairs.

“—I’ll be back for dinner, I swear I will!”

The front door banged.
Boys off on an adventure,
Adele thought.
Without me
.

She took out her personal data unit. She planned to inform Mistress Sand about the situation, but that would wait.

Aloud, but without looking up from her work to the girl standing transfixed with her cape in her hands, Adele said, “Miranda, do you have a more pedestrian change of clothing here?”

* * *

The nearest tram stop was half a block from the Dancing Girl. Daniel had plenty of time to size the place up as he walked toward it. Daniel was striding briskly; Hogg was a half step behind him and to the side, shambling rather than properly walking. Hogg covered the ground, and though it didn’t matter here, he was just as quiet as he would have been in the Bantry woodlands.

“We better not stay long inside,” said Hogg. “It looks like it’s going to fall down the next time somebody inside farts.”

“It’s quite an interesting building, Hogg,” Daniel said. They walked in the center of the street, which was reasonably clean because a thunderstorm the previous evening had washed the garbage down the storm drains and into the nearby harbor. “It may be as much as a thousand years old. In another part of Xenos, it would be on the historic register and protected from demolition.”

“I said what I said,” grunted Hogg.

The Dancing Girl was in the middle of the block. All the buildings here had originally been freestanding, but with the years they had sagged outward in the middle so that they now touched one another and could only bulge farther toward the street.

The Dancing Girl’s sign was a wooden silhouette hanging by two rings above the sidewalk. The right leg above the knee had split off along the grain in past years, and it had been decades if not centuries since the paint had been renewed.

The sashes of the bay window covering one side of the front—the door and its jambs filled the left side—had small panes. They were protected by chain-link fencing in a steel frame rather than fancier grillwork.

The ancient timber posts had bowed but showed no signs of breaking, and the fabric of the walls must have been mesh covered with something either flexible or easily renewed. Originally that would have been mud under plaster; mud probably remained the choice, because nothing was cheaper.

Men and a few prostitutes loitered on the street in small groups. Most of them were standing, but boxes and an overturned bucket provided seats for a few. Two men leaned against the Dancing Girl’s window grate.

All the onlookers followed Daniel and Hogg with their eyes, but no one spoke. Daniel nodded to the pair in front of the tavern, much the way he would have acknowledged Bantry tenants who caught his eye from a distance.

Hogg stepped past him and pushed open the door, scanning the tavern’s interior with his right hand balled in the pocket of his loose jacket. Daniel entered, but until the door swung closed behind him he watched the pair on the sidewalk out of the corner of his eye.

The barman looked at him without emotion. Four male spacers sat dicing on a circular table, while a woman standing beside them watched. Two more spacers, one wearing a saucer hat with a circle of gold braid, sat in a corner banquette.

A staircase with a central landing angled upward between the banquette and the end of the bar. Removed from this place and refurbished, the stairs would probably be worth a great deal to a recently wealthy merchant who wanted to buy antiquity for his new townhouse.

“Captain Sorley?” Daniel said pleasantly to the man with the saucer hat.

There were two public houses in Bantry: laborers’ taverns, neither of them fancy. One still had a floor of rammed earth, covered with rushes from the banks of Hoppy Creek. The rushes weren’t replaced as often as they might have been, and the clientele of both houses included farmers just in from the fields and wearing lugged boots. Daniel didn’t expect ferns and soft music in a tavern.

That said, there wasn’t a pig run in Bantry as foul as the floor of the Dancing Girl. There seemed to be a layer of brick beneath the slime. Unlike the street outside it wasn’t sluiced clean by rainstorms, nor was it cleaned in any other fashion. The stink suggested there was excrement as old as the building itself.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” Sorley said. He was middle-aged, short, and could have looked trim if he’d made any effort; as it was, he was scruffy. Though Sorley remained seated, the man with him in the banquette stood up.

“I’m Captain Daniel Leary,” Daniel said, walking toward the stairs. “I’ve come to fetch Master Rikard Cleveland to a business meeting.”

“Well, he’s not here!” Sorley said. The men at the circular table were getting to their feet. “Look, buddy, get your ass out of here now while you can still walk!”

Daniel nodded acknowledgment and started up the stairs. The treads were as solid as bedrock, whatever the condition of the rest of the tavern.

“Hey!” Sorley shouted. “Schmidt, he’s coming up! Get ’em, boys!”

A large man holding an iron pipe the length of his forearm appeared at the top of the stairs. He was wearing an undershirt with a scoop neck; his beard merged indistinguishably with the black hair curling up from his chest. He grinned at Daniel and started down.

The bartender had moved to the far corner of the bar. He held the mallet he used to set the bung in barrels of beer, but he obviously didn’t intend to get involved in the customers’ affairs.

“It’s too late to leave now, smart-ass!” Sorley said. “I’ve got two of my boys posted in the back alley, too!”

Daniel leaned over the stair railing and gripped the neck of a stoneware bottle from the rack behind the bar. The bartender shouted and stepped forward. Daniel swung the bottle as though the bottom were a stamp and Schmidt’s right instep was the document he was sealing.

Schmidt was wearing spacer’s boots, soft and flexible so that they could be worn inside a rigging suit. The bottle didn’t break. The bones of the big man’s foot did. He screamed and pulled his foot up.

Daniel gripped Schmidt’s left ankle with his free hand and jerked his leg out from under him. Schmidt crashed down on the base of his spine and bounced to the landing. Daniel broke the bottle over Schmidt’s head, bathing both of them with gin. He shoved the unconscious man down the remainder of the staircase.

Hogg was at the base of the stairs, facing the rest of Sorley’s crewmen with a chair held out in his left hand and his knuckleduster—he hadn’t clicked open the knife—in his right. As though he really did have eyes in the back of his head, he dodged the slumping Schmidt.

Daniel didn’t see anybody following Schmidt, so he glanced back at the tap room. The bay window shattered, spraying glass onto the floor. The woven-wire screen held for the first blow, but a second bowed it inward. This time the frame and wire together flew into the room ahead of one of the spacers who had been loitering outside. His companion had probably been the first object to hit the window.