With the Lightnings (23 page)

The light around the bend of the stairs was so faint that Adele was conscious of it only when it vanished. She stopped on the step above the landing. "Woetjans," she said, "this is Adele Mundy. I'm alone."

She folded her hands in front of her. Nobody had bothered to search her, but neither had she found herself tonight in a place that she thought the pistol in her left pocket could improve.

"Good God, it's Adele!" cried Daniel Leary. She couldn't have been more surprised to hear Markos, whom she'd left behind her in the Grand Salon. "Hogg, we've got to take her with us. They'll figure out sooner or later that she's really a Cinnabar citizen."

Daniel stepped onto the landing. "Show a light, man!" he demanded. He groped for Adele, caught her hand, and shook it enthusiastically.

The tiny glow returned. Hogg stood behind his master, looking as grimly displeased as could be implied by a complete lack of expression.

"I came to warn the sailors," Adele said. Warn them to do what? she wondered. She couldn't have gotten Woetjans and the others out of the palace, nor could she have hidden them in her tiny room if they did get clear. But she'd felt she had to do something after watching the executions in the Grand Salon.

"Sir, I think it might be best if the Ms. Mundy went her own way," Hogg said, looking off at an angle as if he were surveying the stairwell in preparation to bid on repainting it. "And I think we all—"

"Nonsense!" said Daniel, the good humor gone from his tone. This was an odd place to hold a discussion, but quite obviously the three of them weren't going to go anywhere until the discussion had been held. "We're not going to abandon a Cinnabar citizen in a bloody shambles like this! That wouldn't be honorable."

"Lieutenant," Adele said. Daniel's explicit confidence in her as a fellow citizen was a knife to her heart. "I think Hogg is correct. I'll be all right, but upstairs they just murdered the rest of your delegation. That may have been a one-time warning through terror, but you can't take the risk."

She turned and started up the stairs.

"Nonsense!" Daniel said and caught her right wrist. He didn't squeeze, but she could as well have pulled free from handcuffs as she could the lieutenant's grip. "We're all together now. Hogg, you're leading."

"Sir—" Hogg pleaded.

"I think what your servant means but doesn't care to say," Adele said with cool dispassion, "is that the Three Circles Conspiracy proved Cinnabar citizens, even members of the best families, were quite willing to turn their friends over to butchers to save their own necks. He has logic on his side. If you'll release me, Lieutenant Leary, I'll return to my own affairs."

"A moment please, Adele," Daniel said. He didn't loose her hand completely, but he reduced the contact to minimal pressure from his thumb and forefinger.

"Hogg," he said, "Ms. Mundy is a friend of mine; I won't stand for any suggestion that she might behave dishonorably. On the other hand I can appreciate your concern for your own safety in conditions so involved. I therefore release you to do as you please. Adele and I will find our own way without burdening you further."

"Don't be a fool!" Adele said. She snatched her hand away but she didn't take a step upward.

"And I might add, Hogg," Daniel added as though he hadn't heard her, "that it was the Alliance paymaster who provided the evidence on the Three Circles Conspiracy, not its citizen members!"

"What it pleases me to do, sir," Hogg said with gravel-voiced dignity, "is to go on serving the young master the best way I know how, just as I've been doing the past twenty-two years. For all that the little fellow acts the right stiff-necked prick now and again."

The ground shuddered violently; dust and fragments chipped from the brick walls danced in the stairwell. Several seconds later arrived the airborne shockwave, a sound as prolonged as distant thunder.

"For
God's
sake!" Adele said. "Let's get out of here before they blow the palace down around our ears!"

"After you, Hogg," Daniel said, bowing his servant forward. "After all, you know where we're going."

Hogg gave Adele a sheepish smile and tapped his forehead in salute as he squeezed past. Adele followed as Daniel waved her ahead on the narrow stairs. She heard him humming behind her, secure in his hopes for the future and his confidence in his friends.

Adele thought of the information she had provided to Markos. She'd rather anything than that she'd given in to the Alliance spy.

And she'd rather that she lay dead in the Grand Salon beside Admiral Lasowski than that she be here and alive beside a man who trusted her implicitly.

The woman screaming as they passed the door to the basement made it easier for Daniel to recompose his face in appropriately stern lines. He
supposed
the sound came from a woman. If he'd heard it on Bantry he'd have assumed an animal was being slaughtered, but in Kostroma City tonight the smart money would bet that the victim was human.

Hogg paused at the stairhead to don a black and gold beret. He opened the door with a flourish and swaggered into the corridor ahead of Adele and Daniel.

The regular palace lighting seemed bright after Daniel's plunge into the vaults below. Adele Mundy was as coldly aloof as she'd seemed when Daniel first met her in the library. She gave no sign of being perturbed by this disruption of her normal scholarly routine.

Corder Leary, ever the aristocrat, would have said, "Blood will tell." Watching the librarian made his son feel proud to be a citizen of Cinnabar; the same thing, perhaps, but in a more generalized form.

The corridor was much as Daniel had seen it before, but three Zojira officials were trying to halt the destruction. One of them, a man in full court dress, was arguing with the drunk who'd been shooting out window panes one at a time.

The official kept patting at the flap-covered pistol holster he wore for show. His companions, who wore only shoulder cockades to proclaim their Zojira affiliations, watched their fellow's gestures with obvious apprehension.

Daniel thought they were right to be worried. The drunk was perfectly capable of blowing the first man's head off and killing the other two as well if he had any ammunition left.

The woman of the trio stared at Daniel, who'd just appeared from a doorway she didn't know existed. "What are you doing?" she demanded. Daniel suspected her real purpose was to distance herself from the colleague who appeared to be provoking a gunfight.

Daniel stared at her coldly. If he spoke—

"We're carrying out our orders," Adele said in a cold voice. She made the statement in Universal with an upper-class Alliance accent, obvious to anybody who noticed dialectical differences. "I suggest you do the same, or you'll have reason to regret it."

Hogg spat a few inches from the questioner's foot and sauntered on. The three Zojiras grouped a little closer together, saying nothing. The drunk started shooting at the ceiling decorations.

The new rulers were trying to bring order to the crowd in the big anteroom. Two Alliance civilians bellowed into bullhorns. Neither would have been much good alone; in combination they merely raised the volume of cacophony. Commandoes in battle dress watched the scene with expressions like those of visitors to the zoo.

The commandoes were on guard at the ramped exit to the gardens, but they weren't attempting to control traffic in either direction. Their helmets contained full communications suites; in open air they could even use the planetary comsats directly. If the Alliance planners wanted them to stop a Hajas counterattack they'd be ready, but they watched Daniel and his companions pass without concern or even interest.

If their superiors wanted every Kostroman in the anteroom killed, the commandoes might be ready for that as well. Daniel thought about what Adele had said: Admiral Lasowski murdered with the other two members of the delegation. Even with half the Zojira force made up of thugs, that seemed incredible.

Somebody would pay for it. With a little luck, Daniel Leary would collect the first installment.

Half the garden's considerable expanse was partitioned off by woven-wire fencing on temporary poles. Hundreds of Kostromans inside sat or stood disconsolately among the plantings. A few were crying.

The makeshift prison would have been easy enough to break out of: twenty people running together at a section of fence would flatten it. Zojira guards stationed around the perimeter would probably open fire if that happened; the commando watching from the open cupola hatch of her armored personnel carrier certainly would. The Zojiras standing between the plasma cannon's muzzle and the escapees who were the intended target wouldn't slow the commando in the least.

Hogg walked past the APC and through a group of Zojira officials carrying clipboards with lists of names. They were talking among themselves and glancing from their lists to the faces on the other side of the wire.

The cage was being used as a general impoundment rather than serving only captives from the palace itself. Trucks and jitneys pulled in from the street and wound around the construction equipment parked in the drive. They were delivering more prisoners: men and women in their nightclothes, children wailing in terror that their elders were too frightened to dispel.

Daniel wondered if it had been like this on Cinnabar during the proscriptions. He'd been kept in Bantry with his mother.

The most exciting thing that had happened to Daniel Leary during the period was seeing a migratory roc that rested on a high outcrop during the night. Hogg had carried Daniel near the cliff base. An hour after dawn the great flyer had spread its forty-meters vans and launched itself into the swelling updraft. The roc's scaly underbelly was almost close enough for a boy to touch when lift mastered gravity and the huge creature mounted skyward again on the next stage of its ten-thousand-mile flight.

Daniel wondered what Adele Mundy remembered about the proscriptions. She'd have heard about them much later, of course.

Banks of floodlights glared across the garden, throwing hard shadows and dazzling reflections that were more confusing than more muted illumination could have achieved. The mobile fusion powerplant that drove the lighting must have come from the Alliance transport.

The cage blocked one arm of the circle from street to street, so the vehicles carrying prisoners had to leave the same way they arrived. The remaining driveway into the gardens was a snarling traffic jam. Normally the route would have been tight but possible, but the construction equipment along the drive made movement a matter of skill and patience—both of which were in short supply.

Hogg walked to the back of a one-ton van marked Gedrosian and Daughters. A Kostroman thug with a Zojira beret and his hands in his pockets stood nearby. He sauntered away whistling when he saw Hogg; neither man spoke.

The van's concertina rear door appeared to be padlocked, but Hogg slid it a few inches to the side by simple pressure. Daniel realized that the hasp was sawn through so that the door could be opened from inside or out.

"Some local friends of mine found this for me," Hogg muttered. "It won't be reported missing for the next two days."

The back of the van was full of Cinnabar ratings. "Sir!" said the figure nearest the narrow gap. "Bosun's Mate Ellie Woetjans reporting for orders!"

The relief in Woetjans's voice was as obvious as a cement block. Damned if she didn't throw a salute despite the cramped quarters. Daniel almost returned it. There were times reflex could get you killed. . . .

"Stand easy, Woetjans," Daniel said. He felt surprisingly calm. He was too busy to be scared, he supposed. "Now, what equipment do you have?"

"Not a fucking thing but ourselves, sir," Woetjans said. The ratings behind her were a restive mass of people trying not to breathe so that they could hear their superiors' low-voiced exchange. "No food, no weapons. Well, hammers and pipes, you know."

Daniel hoped it looked as though he and his two companions were having a conversation a little away from the angry traffic in the drive. They had to plan, and the worst thing they could do was to look furtive. Everyone suspected everyone else tonight, and Daniel's disguise wouldn't stand scrutiny.

"I'd been figuring we could lay up in a warehouse somewhere for a few days till things got sorted out, sir," Hogg said. "That was when I heard about the business. But I didn't know the Alliance was in it so deep. Those bastards're real soldiers, and I don't guess they're planning to leave any time soon."

"Right on both points," Daniel said. With no equipment or safe hiding place, his detachment had very few options. Their best chance would be to seize a starship tonight before the Alliance forces consolidated their hold on Kostroma.

There was almost certainly an Alliance squadron no more than a few hours out from the planet, though. The chance of the escapees being able to lift before the warships arrived was even slighter than the chances of twenty-odd unarmed Cinnabar citizens reaching the Floating Harbor alive, let alone capturing a ship there.

"Thing is, sir," Hogg said in great embarrassment, "I've got friends like I say, but it isn't like we're family or something. Maybe if it was you alone we could hole up for a good while, but if it's a whole army . . ."

"It's certainly the entire naval detachment I command," Daniel said more sharply than he'd intended. Hogg had worded the statement so carefully that it didn't have to be read as a suggestion that Lieutenant Leary abandon the ratings to save his own neck. "First we'll need clothing. Then—"

"I can get the password into the navy warehouses," Adele said. "I'll have to return to the library. My personal data unit got in the way while I was sorting books, so I took it out of its pocket and left it there."

"By God!" Daniel said. He could suddenly imagine a path to the future that didn't end in a flare of plasma or Zojiras laughing as they used swimming Cinnabars for target practice. "With Kostroman naval uniforms we just might pull this off! And there'll be food stores. If we can hide for the next few weeks till normal traffic in the port resumes, there's a damned good chance!"