Lt. Leary, Commanding (11 page)

The hired car slid off in the direction of long-term parking, leaving Daniel's group to walk through the gateway. The breeze from its fans was barely noticeable. Adele imagined the plume of dust and flying debris that Hogg would have raised. He was behind her and Daniel, so she allowed herself to smile as broadly as she ever did.

An unctuous man—short, dark, and topped with a head of luxurious chestnut hair that certainly hadn't appeared without the aid of science—greeted guests as they entered, shaking their hands with his right and gesturing with his left toward a hallway with a very prominent sign:

The main entrance beyond the greeter was framed by the cage of a sophisticated detector screen. It could easily have been concealed within the molded wall coverings, but its very prominence was part of the message. Two immaculately dressed but burly attendants stood beside the apparatus.

Of course,
Adele thought with a grimace. The Gardens would otherwise be a choice site for duels, which would drive away the ordinary visitors come to spend the day in a variety of exotic settings.

She sighed and stepped down the hallway to an unoccupied dressing room. Daniel made a small finger gesture to show that he understood. He waited, whistling a rigadoon softly while later guests passed by.

Adele closed the door behind her and examined the bank of lockers with thumbprint latches in the sidewall. Only two of the twenty were closed, that is, in use.

It was very unusual for people of the status of Vaughn's guests to carry weapons themselves: they had servants for their protection. Adele's parents, however, had believed in an ideal of equality—which meant that a Mundy should be able to do anything a servant could, only better.

Besides that, the Mundys' progressive political views meant they might at any time be challenged to a duel—
if
the affronted party thought he or she might survive the encounter. In her youth Adele had spent almost as many hours on a virtual target range as she had with a data unit, and her skill with a pistol was comparable to what she could achieve with her wands.

She took the small electromagnetic pistol from her side pocket and set it inside a locker, which she closed with her thumb over the plate. In theory, at least, only her thumb could release the latch. She hoped the lockers were as secure as the management claimed, because that gun had been a friend to her in difficult times.

Adele returned to Daniel and the servants. She glanced at Tovera's attache case and raised an eyebrow, a gesture that only someone with a great deal of knowledge of what Tovera was could interpret.

Tovera smiled blandly and walked through the detector without incident. Hogg sauntered after her, his hands in his pockets. His whistling was a discordant echo of his master's.

"That's odd," Daniel murmured to Adele, indicating that they'd been thinking along the same lines.

"Isn't it?" she said, taking his offered arm and stepping though the screen beside him. Ahead of them Hogg and Tovera stood back to back, their hands at their sides, taking in their human and material surroundings with perfectly feigned nonchalance.

When she'd first accepted Tovera's allegiance, Adele had wondered how she was going to get along with Hogg. In fact the two . . . "servants" was the wrong word; they were retainers in the full sense of the term—the two retainers showed mutual respect and a spirit of emulation which didn't spread to direct competition. Open rivalry between them would have been unpleasant and very brief: Tovera had been born missing a conscience, and Hogg was ruthless the way only a countryman can be.

On the other side of the detector arch, the Gardens opened out into a broad park with benches and, beyond the grass, a canal. A dozen awning-covered boats, ranging from a four-seater to a barge that would hold at least forty, were drawn up along the canal bank. Scores of guests stood in loose groupings; the servants formed a semicircle at a distance around their betters.

A man in silver-slashed magenta stepped from the largest group and waved. "Lieutenant Leary!" he called. Adele recognized the voice as Vaughn's; the facial makeup repeated the motifs of his garments and had completely concealed his identity so far as Adele was concerned. "Come over here and let me introduce you to a friend from Strymon before we get under weigh."

Why is he so interested in Daniel?
 

"I wonder why he's so interested in me?" Daniel murmured under his breath. He straightened his shoulders and added, "Well, perhaps we'll learn," as he sauntered with Adele toward their host.

Vaughn clasped Daniel's hand warmly. "Honored to have such an exceptional member of the RCN with us here, Leary," he said. "Given the way your career's started, I expect some day to be telling my grandchildren, `Yes, darlings, I knew Admiral Leary when he was merely a dashing young lieutenant.' "

"I didn't know you even had children, Delos," said a spare woman of forty-odd, well dressed in a fashion much flashier than Cinnabar tastes. What she wore was obviously a business suit, but instead of a muted progression from black through silver gray—like Adele's—it was scarlet with gold accents up the right side.

Vaughn laughed. The aide behind him, the Tredegar whom Adele remembered meeting in the group visiting the
Princess Cecile
, scowled as though the sound had tripped a switch in his face muscles.

"No, Thea," Vaughn said, "the Vaughn bloodline is far too valuable to Strymon for me to waste it where it wouldn't be appreciated, don't you think? And I've been away from Strymon for what sometimes seems rather a long while."

He turned to Daniel, completely ignoring Adele. His attitude didn't disturb her; it was to be expected from one of Vaughn's status to one of her own. What was interesting was the fact that according to the same logic, Vaughn should be ignoring Daniel as well.

"Lieutenant Daniel Leary, the Hero of Kostroma," he said, "allow me to introduce Mistress Thea Zane. Mistress Zane was one of my father's dearest friends and has acted as a friend to me on Strymon during my absence."

"When someone's a long way away, Delos," Tredegar remarked harshly, "it's difficult to be sure that they
are
really friends and not secretly plotting to trap you!"

"I'm sorry that being out of touch with home for so long has so warped your perceptions, Tredegar," Zane said with a condescending smile. "In any case, I'm not at a distance any more, am I?"

Vaughn laughed easily and put a hand on the shoulder of both his partisans. "Come, let's board the boats, shall we? After all, there's no point in renting the whole Gardens if we're going to spend the afternoon on the entrance canal. Especially when the food—and the drink, Lieutenant, I know you navy men—is inside."

His eye caught that of a man wearing the uniform of the Land Forces of the Republic. "Colonel?" he said. "Would you and your lady care to join me in the lead boat? Tredegar will be driving. He made the arrangements, so he knows where things are placed."

"Yes, we'll stop at Rakoscy Island for refreshments," Tredegar said, walking toward the smallest of the craft with a gesture to bring those closest with him. "Then we can spread ourselves as taste determines."

In a louder voice directed at the entire gathering he added, "There's a barge for the servants. I thought the rest of us could choose our own seating."

Daniel looked at Adele. He gestured with a twist of his lips toward a craft with gilded seats for ten. The ends of a three-seat bench were being claimed by a pair of blond women who might have been twins and were certainly equally stunning. Adele smiled faintly and followed Daniel, shifting her line slightly to block a young Cinnabar aristocrat who'd been aiming for the same place as Daniel was—the one between the blondes.

Even if this outing taught them nothing about Vaughn's plans, Daniel should have no reason to protest the expenditure of time.

Smiling at the girls in turn, Daniel said, "Are both you ladies from around here?"

"Oh no," said Shawna, the one on his left. "I'm from Welter Heights."

The boat moved away from the canal side, rocking in the wake of the three craft ahead of them. Each vessel was piloted by a member of Vaughn's retinue rather than a servant or a professional from the Gardens' staff. The woman at the controls of this one was in her twenties and not at all bad looking. Under other circumstances Daniel might have chosen a seat in the bow beside her.

"And I'm from Welter Heights too," said Elinor, trying—with some success—to give the words a sultry air.

Welter Heights was the district of Xenos where Daniel was now renting an apartment. He'd meant, "Are you from off-planet?" but in fairness to the girls, he hadn't said that. Mind, if he had, they might have asked him what a planet was.

"You must have been a lot of places since you're a navy man, isn't that so, Danny?" Elinor said, shifting slightly and bringing her knee in contact with Daniel's. She lifted her hands to frame her hair, which swirled into a peak like a pale blond meringue.

The canal curved slowly between walls of stone covered with a Terran variety of moss. Daniel doubted that many of the Gardens' visitors recognized that the entranceway was a display in its own right, but he at least appreciated the attention to hidden detail.

"Why, I've seen some of the universe, yes," Daniel said with a broad smile to imply an exaggeration he would've choked before putting into words. In fact his two months on Kostroma were the only time he'd spent on a planet besides Cinnabar.

The boat's powerful electric drive set up a hum in the fabric of the hull, easily distinguished from the slap of wakes from the preceding craft. The tiny trolling motor on the transom must be intended to move them between the islets, named for the planets whose transplanted vegetation adorned them.

"Then tell me the truth," Elinor said. Her friend leaned toward Daniel from the other side, putting the fingertips of her left hand on his shoulder as if for balance. "Do the girls on Pleasaunce really wear their hair this way?"

Daniel blinked. "I can truthfully say," he said truthfully, "that I never saw a woman on Pleasaunce—" the capital of the Alliance of Free Stars, and a planet Daniel could only have visited as a prisoner during the past five years of open war between Cinnabar and the Alliance "—who was anywhere near as beautiful as you—"

He put his left hand over the fingers on his shoulder. Shawna responded by massaging his trapezius.

"—or Shawna."

Well, after all, he hadn't chosen this seat because he expected brilliant conversation during the trip. Adele, placed beside Mistress Zane on a bench forward, seemed to be having that. She caught Daniel's eye past Zane and gave him a sardonic grin—almost as if she could hear the girls.

The boat slowed, then turned sharply to enter the Gardens proper. Around the edge of the islet to the right grew amber trees from Albirus. Sap dripping from their horizontal branches down to the surface of the water had hardened into a curtain of translucent gold. There was a small dock and a passage through the wall, but the trees were planted to form a reentrant that screened the islet's interior even from that direction. An orgy there would have been only shadows and laughter to those elsewhere in the Gardens.

Daniel laughed, exchanging pats and flattery with Shawna and Elinor. Conditioned reflex and his tongue muscles were sufficient for the task, letting his eyes and brain get on with cataloguing the minihabitats which the boat crawled past on the thrust of the trolling motor.

He didn't recognize all the originals, though usually one plant or another was so distinctive that he could identify the source planet by that alone. The scarlet rippers from Swetna surprised him until he noticed that each leaf had a small cut at the base. The motive spines must have been removed, explaining how a plant which slashed animals' throats for fertilizer could be grown in a pleasure garden. The flowers' heavenly perfume floated over the water, stopping the girls in mid-sentence. Their faces took on a rapt, almost feral, look that was honest in a fashion no previous expression of theirs had been.

In the lead, Vaughn's boat nosed up a ramp which was long enough to berth the whole miniature fleet. Rakoscy Islet was equipped for large parties. There were no grasses on it, but short-stemmed plants whose leaves were the size of five-florin pieces covered the ground with soft resilience. In the center of the islet were refrigerated containers on serving tables. Bowers of larger, soft-bodied shrubbery around the circumference sheltered couches and eating tables.

Vaughn shook hands with the colonel who'd accompanied him in the boat, then walked over to where Daniel's vessel grounded softly. The aide at the controls lowered a gangplank, though that seemed scarcely necessary for a craft with less than six inches of freeboard.

"Lieutenant Leary," he called, "would you and Mistress Zane care to join me for a glass of wine before we adjourn to individual explorations? I'll pledge my honor as a Shipowner of Strymon that your lovely companions will be waiting for you when we finish."

He turned his smile toward Elinor and Shawna. Shawna made a face as though she'd bitten something sour and said, "He doesn't have to give me orders, Danny. I'd wait for you anyway."

"And me too!" said Elinor, rising on her tiptoes to kiss Daniel's cheek.

Daniel patted both girls on the shoulder and stepped past them. The aristocrat who'd lost out in the race for seating moved in; Shawna ostentatiously turned her back and began talking to Elinor in her normal affected voice.

Daniel pretended to ignore the byplay. He doubted that the girls were professionals, or at least fully professional. No question that they took whatever orders Vaughn chose to give them, however. Perhaps they just wanted to stay on the A-list for his parties.

Tredegar had turned when Vaughn spoke to Daniel. He came over with quick steps and said, "Delos, perhaps you should—"