With the Lightnings (21 page)

He stumbled as he entered. At some point the original floor had been replaced by a mosaic showing sea life battling in gaudy colors. The new floor had been laid directly over the old one, raising the level by more than an inch. The incongruity of Daniel's misstep made him giggle.

Candace was white-faced and furious. He wore his service pistol in a gilt-leather holster. With him in the anteroom were five servants. Two carried sporting shotguns, two had clubs—legs wrenched off a heavy table; and the last, a wizened little man, held a chef's knife with a blade as long as his forearm.

Daniel thought of the night the Three Circles Conspiracy broke; thought also of the plasma cannon in the APCs cruising the city. The door would burn like the white heart of a sun. . . .

"What in God's name do you think you're doing here?" Candace shouted. "I have half a mind to hold you for a patrol to pick up! I swear to God, if I weren't afraid of getting involved that's
just
what I'd do!"

Four of the servants were as frightened as their master. The little man with the knife was another matter entirely. If it came down to cases, Daniel would try to kick him in the crotch and pray for a better result than he expected.

"I need some help, Candace," Daniel said in a calm voice. "You know why. Some clothes, a gun, and the loan of your aircar. Then I'll be out of your life."

There was a doorway to either side of the anteroom. Directly in front of Daniel a hall led to the courtyard and, on the right, a staircase to the upper floors. One of the men with clubs carried a yellow glowlamp, the only light.

"Good God, man, are you insane?" Candace said. "Listen, the Candaces aren't political. Don't you understand what that means? This house has been in our family for four hundred years. I'm not going to throw it away by getting involved in matters that are no business of mine!"

Daniel looked at the Kostroman. He tried to imagine life as Benno Candace. He smiled.

"Can't you even pretend you're a man?" Daniel asked pleasantly. "No? Well, I suppose it'd be too much of a stretch."

He nodded toward the servants. "If one of you dogs will open the door," he said, "I'll be on my way. A Leary doesn't stay where he's not wanted."

The man with the knife grinned. Daniel grinned back. He doubted the fellow was as clever as Hogg, but there was an undoubted resemblance.

A servant handed his shotgun to a fellow. He stepped past Daniel and put his weight against the door.

"Look, Leary," Candace said, spreading his hands. "When this blows over we'll have a drink and laugh about tonight. But it may
not
blow over, don't you see? This isn't like a normal coup. This is—everything's different. Everything!"

The servant had opened the panel no wider than it was when Daniel entered. Daniel put his left palm flat against the embossed leather padding on the door's inner side and straightened his arm.

The door swung slowly, but it didn't stop until it banged against the stops on the outer jamb. "Good night, Lieutenant," Daniel said. "I wish you the fortune your sense of honor deserves."

He stepped into the street, deliberately pausing to dust his uniform with his hands. No point in letting Candace know which direction the fugitive had gone.

The fugitive didn't have the least idea where he ought to go. His apartment, he supposed. In the unlikely event there weren't Alliance soldiers there by now, he could grab some civilian clothes.

The door thumped shut behind him. Instantly, as though there'd been a switch in the doorjamb, light fanned across the street from a third-story window. In the present darkness it had the glare of a searchlight.

Daniel looked up. One of the shutter leaves had been thrown back. From this angle, nearly vertical, he saw only a wedge of pale pink ceiling.

Margrethe leaned over the windowsill with a bundle in her arms. The light from behind flowed through her russet hair. She pitched the bundle outward. She'd snatched the shutter closed again before Daniel caught her gift.

He'd braced himself but the bundle turned out to be cloth, bulk without weight. He carried it into the narrow gap between Candace's house and its neighbor to the right. He immediately understood what he was holding.

The jacket was dark, dark blue if the light had been better. The trousers were of the same material with a stripe down the seam that would be red. They were rolled around a peaked blue cap with a frontal of embossed brass.

He sighed. With this, there was just a chance that he could brazen his way into the palace where he hoped Woetjans's crew was hiding. So far as Daniel knew, their billet wasn't listed in any records.

Daniel Leary stripped off his Cinnabar uniform. Trousers first, he donned the service uniform of a naval lieutenant of the Commonwealth of Kostroma.

Well over a hundred people milled in the Grand Salon, which was being used as both coup headquarters and a holding cell for the dozen or so top prisoners taken thus far. Walter III—properly Walter Hajas again, Adele presumed—was present but his mistress wasn't. The Chancellor, barefoot in her fur-trimmed nightdress, babbled to a Zojira who ignored her as he spoke into his hand-held communicator.

Adele smiled faintly at the Chancellor's discomfort. She tried not to dislike people, merely their actions. The Chancellor's combination of graft, pompousness, and bullying came close to making her an exception.

The guards included both troops of the Zojira clan and Alliance soldiers whose battle dress looked as though drab paint had been dripped over the fabric. The Zojiras were possibly a cut above the armed thugs who'd burst into the library; these would be the personal bodyguard of the clan chief and new Elector, Leonidas Zojira.

She wondered whether there'd been a previous Elector of the name or if Zojira was Leonidas I. Given the direct involvement of Alliance forces in the coup, the question was probably meaningless. The real ruler of Kostroma would be the Alliance advisor, if not a planetary administrator appointed from Pleasaunce.

Adele was no expert on the military, but the Alliance troops looked very tough and competent. They wore body armor with bandoliers of weapons and munitions besides the submachine guns that were their primary armament. The Alliance planners had naturally chosen shock troops for the initial assault.

Markos's aide paused just inside the doorway, scanning the room for the figure she wanted. "Wait here, please, mistress," she said, as unfailingly polite as she was colorless. She left Adele with the two Zojiras and moved through the crowd with her usual swift grace.

One of the Zojiras let out his breath in a sigh of relief. Adele smiled again, still faintly.

Leonidas stood in the center of the great room, surrounded by aides who like him wore court dress in black and yellow. They looked like so many hornets, a Terran insect tough enough to stow away and become an unpleasant feature of almost as many worlds as had cockroaches.

In the group with the Zojira grandees were several Alliance officers. One of them wore battle dress like the troops on guard, but the khaki uniforms of the other two looked like a simpler version of what the naval members of the Alliance delegation wore to the Elector's dinner a few nights before.

None of those negotiators was in the Grand Salon tonight. Markos was here, however, standing like the axis around which the world moved. He smiled in black triumph.

A loud explosion sounded in the near distance. The palace shook. The Alliance officers in the central group all spoke into their communicators, while the Kostromans with them froze and looked apprehensive. One of the naval officers lowered her communicator and said something nonchalant to those around her. General conversation resumed.

Markos saw his aide approaching. They must have exchanged signals that not even Adele saw. The aide returned to Adele and said, "He'll see you now, mistress."

She looked at the Zojiras who'd come from the library with her and added, "You're dismissed. Report to whoever's in charge in the garden."

The Kostromans whirled and left the salon. They were moving so fast that the submachine gun one carried clanged into the doorpost.

Adele followed the aide to the center of the room. The crowd grew thicker as she went inward, but it wasn't a solid mass.

The assembly was formed of elements ranging from two people to a dozen, talking and gesturing among themselves. Individuals would break off and join other groups in an air of nervous dynamism.

It was like watching the interactions within a rookery of seabirds. The chaos was of overwhelming importance to the people making it, but from Adele's detached viewpoint it was merely empty noise.

Of course, it was noise that had ended her librarianship and might cost her life besides. Walter Hajas stood with a drawn face in a group of prisoners. The others kept their backs to him as though meeting the former Elector's eyes might contaminate them.

Markos moved a few steps away from the central group. The only potential eavesdroppers were a covey of second-rank Kostromans; Markos's aide moved them on with curt whispers and a tap from the muzzle of her submachine gun.

"Ms. Mundy," Markos said. "I wanted to thank you immediately in person. You'll be taken care of, don't worry."

"What does that mean?" Adele said.

"Well, we don't know yet, do we?" Markos said with vague humor. "Something commensurate with your deserts, however."

Despite his placid demeanor, the Alliance agent was as keyed up as anyone else in the room. It struck Adele that she and Markos's aide were perhaps the only calm people present—and the aide was a sociopath.

Markos looked around him and sniffed in scorn. "Listen to them," he said. "Every one of them claiming that what he did was crucial, that the coup couldn't have succeeded without him.
I
was the only one who was really necessary."

Adele wondered if the spy recognized the humor in what he'd just said.

He fixed Adele with his eyes. It was like looking into obsidian that has just cooled to black but still throbs with heat. "And after me, mistress," Markos said, "you are the one who mattered. Success couldn't have been so complete without you."

"No," Adele said, but she wasn't sure the word pulsing in her mind actually reached her tongue. Her mouth was dry, and for the first time this night she felt real fear.

There was commotion at the hallway door. A squad of Alliance troops entered the salon with three members of the Cinnabar embassy. The prisoners' wrists were tied behind their backs. Wire leashes around their necks connected them in single file.

Admiral Lasowski was in the lead. She limped, and blood from a bandaged shoulder wound soaked to the elbow of her pajamas. Her lip curled as she surveyed the crowd.

Adele waited, her eyes on the doorway. After nearly a minute she let her breath out again. There wasn't a fourth Cinnabar prisoner being dragged in with his seniors. Daniel Leary was still free.

If he was alive.

The troops brought their Cinnabar captives directly to the command group in the center. Anyone who pressed close for a look or simply didn't clear their path in time was prodded back with a gun butt or gun muzzle. Markos and his aide left Adele as abruptly as a page turns.

Adele thought about what she'd done, and why. Any one of a hundred people could have found the information she'd gathered for Markos. All she'd added to the process was speed and reliability. But because she couldn't lie to herself, she had to admit that speed and reliability might have been enormously important factors in a plan so complex and suddenly executed.

Why
had
she helped Markos? Adele didn't really believe Mistress Boileau had been in danger. Not only was the professor well connected with members of the power structure on Pleasaunce, her knowledge made her a national treasure. The Fifth Bureau knew that better than most.

Beyond question, Adele and her family had been ill-treated by the Republic of Cinnabar. She couldn't claim that she'd acted out of anger, though. The massacre of her family had stunned her, but she wasn't angry now and probably hadn't ever been angry. Hot emotions like love and hate weren't a major part of Adele Mundy's personality.

She had done what Markos demanded because that was the simplest choice. She did it to be finished, so that she could get back to the important work of cataloguing a library.

Adele Mundy had betrayed the Kostroman state that employed her and the Cinnabar state whose citizen she was because she was lazy. She hadn't wanted to be bothered by a man she loathed but who might have the power to harass her.

Markos stood facing the Cinnabar delegates. Alliance soldiers held either end of the leash binding the three together. The civilian member of the Navy Board spoke angrily about the law of nations, but Lasowski and the man from the finance office were coldly silent as they met Markos's eyes.

The room quieted. "Kneel down," Markos ordered pleasantly.

"I'll be damned first," Admiral Lasowski said. Her voice was thin with pain from her wound.

"Force them to kneel," Markos said to the soldier on one end.

The soldier frowned and looked toward the officer in battle dress. "Make them kneel," the officer said. He didn't sound comfortable. "Mr. Markos is in command."

The soldiers stepped back to tension the leash, then used their weight to drag the prisoners down. The Navy Board functionary cried out as he lost his footing and slipped headlong. The Alliance officers watched with obvious distaste.

"You see," Markos said, "it's possible that our Zojira friends here think that in the future they might be able to invite Cinnabar to return and nonetheless keep their ruling positions on Kostroma. That can't be permitted."

Leonidas Zojira shook his head nervously. He was a dapper little man with a mustache as sharp as paired stilettos. "I assure you that our treaty with the Alliance of Free Stars is sacrosanct, good sir. You need not—"

"As sacrosanct as your pledge of eternal alliance with Walter Hajas here, no doubt," Markos said with catlike amusement. "Well, never fear. You'll stay loyal to the Alliance."