Lt. Leary, Commanding (3 page)

"I'm honored to meet you, Commander," Vaughn said, speaking Universal with a better Xenos accent than Daniel—who'd been raised on the Learys' country estate of Bantry—could've managed. "You must have known my father. Your skilled explorations truly made the Sack a part of the greater universe for the first time since the Hiatus."

"President Leland Vaughn," Uncle Stacey said. He was standing without support, now, gaining strength from his memories; though Daniel and Adele kept close to either side in case of sudden weakness. "I sat at his right hand at the banquet on our arrival. Quite clear on the value of exploration for the trade that makes Strymon great. He's keeping well, I hope?"

"My late father, I'm afraid I should have said," Vaughn said with a deprecating rotation of his left hand. "My uncle, Callert Vaughn, succeeded him within a year of my arrival on Xenos, and now that Callert too has passed on, the presidency is in the hands of his daughter, Pleyna."

Momentarily Vaughn's tone became more sardonic than whimsical as he added, "Formally, that is. One assumes that a twelve-year-old is largely guided by her tutor, Friderik Nunes. I recall Nunes from when I last was on Strymon, fifteen years ago. He wasn't of much account . . . then, at any rate."

The hardness left Vaughn's expression, though now that Daniel had seen it once, he knew that it remained a part of the man himself. Delos Vaughn was more than a young foreigner living high in the fleshpots of Cinnabar—though he was probably that as well. Daniel would be the last man to suggest that a taste for liquor and amiable women precluded a man from taking a serious attitude toward his profession.

And what
was
the profession of Mr. Delos Vaughn?

Strymon had risen to prominence in the Sack, its region of space, following the thousand-year Hiatus from interstellar travel at the end of mankind's first flush of colonization. Strymon had regained links with Earth itself more quickly than most worlds; but, as the intricacies of sailing through the Matrix were laboriously rediscovered, the Sack became a backwater.

Cinnabar expanded its sphere of influence and that influence hardened into something not so very different from an empire; Strymon tried to compete. Twice the competition was military; the RCN had crushed Strymon's forces both times.

Distance from Cinnabar—two months of travel for a merchant ship and half that even for well-found naval vessels—preserved a degree of independence for Strymon, but by treaty her navy was now limited to light craft suitable for suppressing the endemic piracy of the three-star Selma Cluster nearby.

In halving the travel time between Strymon and Cinnabar, Uncle Stacey had done the Vaughns and their subjects a doubtful favor. Still, by forcing Strymon to realize Cinnabar's hegemony, it no doubt prevented the weaker power from wasting its substance in a third hopeless war. Certainly Delos Vaughn seemed friendly enough to the man who'd brought the threat of an RCN punitive expedition weeks closer to his planet.

"If it's not presumptuous of me, Commander," Vaughn continued, "may I ask if this is the Daniel Leary of whom we've begun to hear so much?"

"Mr. Vaughn," Uncle Stacey said, "may I present my nephew, Lieutenant Daniel Leary. He's a credit to the Bergens, though he doesn't bear our name."

Vaughn's handshake was firm, pausing just short of the pressure that would have meant he'd seriously tried to crush Daniel's hand. Daniel's eyes narrowed slightly. Vaughn was testing something more subtle than strength: he was determining whether Daniel was
willing
to try conclusions with a wealthy, well-connected foreign noble.

Daniel grinned faintly. When he was sixteen, he'd broken with his father in a shouting match that rattled the windows of the Leary townhouse. After that, neither Delos Vaughn nor Hell itself had any terrors for Daniel. He squeezed back till Vaughn released his hand.

"And I believe I heard you identify this officer as Ms. Mundy," Vaughn went on, offering his hand demurely, fingertips only, to make it clear that he wasn't going to attempt to bully the slightly built woman. "Allow me to say how pleased I am to see members of two of the noblest houses in the Republic standing together in the uniform of the Republic's staunchest defense."

There was no doubt from Vaughn's phrasing that he knew Speaker Leary had pushed through the proscriptions which crushed the Three Circles Conspiracy and with it the Mundys of Chatsworth. That wasn't knowledge to be expected of a foreigner.

"Delos, your schedule for this evening . . . " said one of his aides, a dark-haired man older than Vaughn who'd been fidgeting in the background ever since the conversation started. "If we're to inspect the . . . ?"

Delos Vaughn displayed the same imperturbable gloss as the throat of a plasma thruster fresh from the shipping crate. People like that seemed to make the folks around them worry double-time.

Now Vaughn shrugged easily. He gave Daniel and his companions a "you-know-how-it-is" grin and said, "Yes, Tredegar, I'm not forgetting that the caterer and the Gardens' representative will be coming by for final approval tonight."

Returning his attention to Daniel he went on, "I wonder, Lieutenant Leary, if you'd care to guide us through your command here. I wouldn't have thought of imposing, but since you're present . . . ?"

Daniel wouldn't claim to be a politician, but Corder Leary's son couldn't help but have learned that no matter is simple when there are human beings on both sides of the equation. It was an awareness which had proved useful in his dealings with women, also.

"Why, under other circumstances I'd be delighted to show you about the
Princess Cecile
," Daniel said with a smile of regret. "I'm afraid I have other commitments, however."

Uncle Stacey was trembling with fatigue; Adele, thank goodness, was easing him down into the wheelchair. The officers in Vaughn's own party didn't look pleased at the notion of being upstaged by a junior lieutenant. And as a matter of RCN regulation, not to mention fairness, the officer commanding the
Princess Cecile
was—

"Lieutenant Mon, the present captain, will be more than happy to do the job, though," Daniel continued, gesturing toward the corvette. "As for myself, I'm on half pay at the pleasure of the Navy Board for now."

Vaughn chuckled, then bowed to put a period to the discussion. "Perhaps I can hear about your adventures at some other time, Lieutenant," he said, allowing Captain Wenslow's slow movement to ease him toward the catwalk. "It'll have to be soon, though, I'm sure. The chiefs of your navy will never permit an officer of your demonstrated abilities to remain unemployed for long."

Adele started the wheelchair briskly toward the waiting jitney; it looked rather forlorn among its larger, flashier fellows. Daniel glanced over his shoulder as he took the wheelchair's handles himself a little farther down the apron. Vaughn was negotiating the catwalk with aplomb, but one of his aides and two Foreign Ministry officials had frozen at the edge of the dock like a trio of statues.

"The poor devil's an exile, I suppose," Uncle Stacey said as they neared the jitney. "Brought here as a hostage for his father's good behavior. Strymon isn't as bad the Selma Cluster next door to it—the Pirate Cluster, you know—but his life still wouldn't be worth a zinc florin if he tried to go home now."

"He seems a personable fellow," Daniel offered as he paused for Adele to open the door. He might have to hand his uncle into the vehicle; meeting the delegation had been as much of a strain on Stacey as the whole rest of the outing. "I wonder why he wanted to see the
Princess Cecile
, though?"

"Mr. Vaughn didn't strike me as a man who's often bored," Adele said without emphasis as she walked around to the other side where she could help if needed, "or one who gathers information without a good reason. Which is a good reason for me . . ."

Uncle Stacey lurched onto the bench seat without touching the arm Adele crooked for him to grip. Daniel began folding the wheelchair to set in the roof cargo rack.

" . . . to learn what I can about Mr. Vaughn, I think," Adele concluded.

_A
monorail car stopped within moments to carry Daniel and
his uncle in the direction of Xenos West, but Adele Mundy would have thirty minutes on the platform before a car arrived for her. City Center wasn't a popular destination for those leaving Harbor Three by public transportation. Laborers and ships' crewmen stayed either in barracks near the port or in tenements ranged on the city's outskirts. Senior officers, let alone dignitaries like Delos Vaughn's party, arrived and left the harbor in personally owned monorail cars if they even used the system rather than aircars.

The wait wasn't a hardship. As soon as her companions had departed on the rising whine of an electric motor, Adele drew out her personal data unit and started to learn what could be known about Delos Vaughn.

Until very recently the only parts of Adele's life she would've called happy were those she'd spent finding and organizing information . . . which to be sure was more time than she devoted to any other pursuit. The place Adele's body slept had never been of much concern to her, and since the Proscriptions she hadn't had a home outside her head.

A heavy starship lifted from the pool in the center of the harbor, shaking everything for miles around as its thousands of tons rose from a plume first of steam, then the flaring iridescence of hydrogen ions when the plasma motors no longer licked the water's surface. Adele was barely conscious of the event, adjusting her control wands in the precise patterns that guided her search.

The personal data unit was a featureless rectangle, four inches by ten inches, and half an inch thick. Its display was holographic, cued to the focus of the user's eyes. Though the unit had a virtual keyboard or could respond to voice commands, Adele preferred the speed and flexibility of the slim wands. She held them at the balance between the thumb and first two fingers of either hand. An expert in their use—and Adele was that if ever there was one—could access information almost as fast as her brain could frame the questions.

Delos Vaughn of Strymon, age twenty-nine Earth years; sole offspring of Leland Vaughn, former President of Strymon. Strymon presidency, a lifetime elective office with candidacy and franchise limited to members of the Shipowning class. Shipowning class: a group of originally thirty-seven, but now expanded to over a hundred, families; actually owning a starship is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for membership in the Shipowning class. . . .
 

Adele's little unit had a considerable storage capacity, but its real value on a developed world was to give her access to other databases. Here on Cinnabar she was linked—through the monorail control circuit—to the central records computer in the Navy Office, which she used as her base unit.

It had occurred to Adele as she set up the connection on her first day back on Cinnabar that she probably could've gotten authorization to use the system if she'd gone through some of the channels available to her. She'd decided it was simpler to circumvent the electronic barriers to what she was doing than it would've been to plow through bureaucratic inertia. Besides, it amused Adele to break rules when she'd spent all her previous life obeying them.

In the past month Adele had gained Daniel Leary for a friend and the whole Republic of Cinnabar Navy for home and family. Between them they gave her a remarkable feeling of security.

She grinned as she shifted back to another aspect of the problem she'd set herself.
Delos Vaughn, arrived on Cinnabar aboard the RCS
Tashkent
as a guest of the Republic. . . .
 

A car stopped in front of her with a clatter and squeal. She ignored it as she had the arrival of a party of laborers on the platform, shuffling heavy boots and talking about a ball game.

"Hey, Chief?" a laborer called.

Primary residence on Holroyd Square, Xenos, with secondary residences—
 

A different voice bellowed, "Lady, ain't this one yours?"

Adele's mind rose shatteringly from depths of pure knowledge where she preferred to live; it reformed in the present. An empty car stood in front of her. The lighted banner over the open door read ITY ENTER. Fifty yards down the rail, slowing as it approached the platform, was the Manine Village car that would haul home the laborers, crammed in as tightly as books in dead storage.

"Thank you," she called, stowing her data unit in its pocket with the ease of long habit and a precise mind. She stepped aboard the car just before the door closed; touched the destination plate over the Pentacrest—the map's clear cover was smeared almost illegible by the fingers of previous users, so Adele had to peer in doubt before she made her choice; and then sat back on one of the pair of facing benches as the car rocked into motion.

She was alone in a car in which twelve could sit and thirty ride in some degree of comfort. She might have taken out her data unit again, but she decided to experience the trip instead. She wasn't going to enjoy the ride, but there were things she could usefully learn about Xenos after her fifteen years of exile.

Besides, she was punishing herself for not noticing the car's arrival. She could've spent all afternoon there on the platform, lost in personal researches when she had business for others to accomplish. Adele had never been one to shirk her responsibilities, but the very degree of focus that made her effective sometimes got in the way of carrying out social obligations.

Not that this meeting was social except in the general sense of being part of Adele's involvement in human society.

The car swerved and squealed along the serpentine track serving a section of three docks. The
Aristotle
dominated the whole area, an outward-curving wall of steel as viewed from the car's grimy windows. Even if Adele craned her neck, she couldn't have seen the midpoint where the curve of the battleship's cylindrical hull reversed.

In some places the shipfitters had removed plates, giving glimpses of tubing, vast machinery, and once an open space the size of the Senate Chamber. It would be daunting to a civilian and was impressive even to Adele, who was beginning to look at the world with the eyes of a naval officer.