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CHAPTER TWELVE

_Adele—Signals Officer Mundy—was busy for the first time since
the Princess Cecile entered the Matrix outbound from Cinnabar. Since the events on Kostroma, really. She'd studied the corvette's electronics on the voyage to Harbor Three, and during the past seventeen hellish days she'd been learning all she could about Strymon and the adjacent planetary systems.

That had been work at her own speed—which didn't mean it was done in a leisurely fashion by most people's standards, but there was no outside pressure involved. Now—

"Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one—" GR1751 was the Princess Cecile's pennant number, which her transponder sent automatically when interrogated "—you are cleared to land at Flood Harbor in numbers nine-five, I repeat nine-five, minutes. There will be no liftoffs or landings from Flood Harbor for half an hour either way of your slot, but be aware that there may be traffic from the Cove or Drylands. Hold to your filed descent. Condor out."

Adele had reconfigured the communications console to use wand control as its default. This wasn't ideal, as a computer capable of missile launches and astrogation had a much broader range of options than a civilian database. Adele preferred to layer command sets within her wands' existing software rather than use the virtual keyboard created for the console. It was still much faster, and for her there was less risk of an error.

Her hands moved, sending the core of the message from Condor Control—the station that handled starship traffic for all Sexburga—to Daniel's display in visual form. The course plot, the time parameters, and the two smaller harbors with their approach cones were instantly visible; if Daniel for some reason wanted the audio message as well, he had only to key an icon to get it.

That was the open part of Adele's duties. At the same time she'd entered the Condor database covertly and copied from it the complete records of landings and departures from the planet in the past thirty days. Her real concern—Daniel's real concern—was to see when and whether Commodore Pettin had arrived, but for safety's sake Adele had given her search broader parameters.

RCS Tampico, arrived four days previous. From . . . Adele's wands moved . . . Holtsmark, berthed at Slip Thirty-two, Flood Harbor. She accessed another file, this one internal RCN records held in the Princess Cecile's database. RCS Tampico, communications vessel, 1700 tons empty; defensive armament only.

"Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one," the controller on Sexburga said. "You're to put down in slip thirty. I'm transmitting a plot of Flood Harbor. Condor over."

The speaker was male, probably in his forties, and sounded alertly professional. He hissed his esses and more generally spoke with a soft lilt; Adele decided to class the peculiarities as a Sexburga accent until she learned otherwise.

A schematic appeared in gold light on the left side of Adele's display. It was offset from but identical to the harbor plan from the Princess Cecile's database. The local transmission also showed cigar-shaped vessels settled in roughly half the fifty-seven slips. Sexburga was clearly a major port, though most of the ships berthed here were of moderate size.

Adele framed the plan and retransmitted it to a suspense file serving the command console while Daniel set up his final approach. It was received, becoming a sidebar on the upper left corner of a screen almost completely filled by numerical data.

"Gee-Are one-seven-five-one acknowledges receipt of the Flood Harbor berthing plan," Adele said. "Gee-Are one-seven-five-one out."

Nothing went to the command console until it had been cleared through Adele's filters and then requested by the captain. The captain could set up categories for immediate update—this harbor schematic, for example—but even so the data didn't appear on Daniel's display until he called for it. The priorities were determined by a human being.

Adele returned her attention to the right half of her display, another RCN internal file: current deployment orders for RCN vessels. The Tampico was on a triangular run from Sexburga to the Cinnabar outpost at Fort Hill Station and finally to Langerhut, an allied system with a Resident Commissioner but almost no direct contact with Cinnabar. The Tampico carried dispatches, supplies, and personnel who were being transferred. The vessel wasn't connected with Commodore Pettin's squadron.

The Princess Cecile braked under one-gee acceleration. Even to the naked eye, the image of Sexburga swelled on the real-time display at the margin of Adele's screen. Speaking loudly to be heard over the whine of antimatter annihilation, Sun said to Betts, "Did you see that? Mr. Leary didn't quite kill our momentum with the last shift in the Matrix. He was so sure he'd drop us just short of the planet that he left us with a way on to save time. Ain't he a wonder?"

Betts nodded solemnly. He was clearing his display of the targeting fantasies that had preserved him in the Matrix, moving methodically through a checklist. "A wonder . . ." he breathed.

A wonder indeed. 

There were no other RCN vessels on Sexburga or in the PCT-3301 system of which Sexburga was the fourth planet. Adele moved to checking grouped arrivals.

Three ships had arrived in hailing range of Condor Control within minutes of one another a week ago, but they were freighters from three separate systems linked only by chance. Adele called up visuals from the Flood Harbor security cameras and proved beyond doubt that the ships weren't warships, let alone Commodore Pettin's squadron with disguised identities.

She thought a smile that eventually touched her lips. She was obviously being obsessive. In that, at least, she'd make a good spacer.

Adele had tapped into the automated stream of Sexburgan meteorological data as soon as the Princess Cecile emerged from the Matrix. The first and last twenty thousand feet of a voyage were statistically the most dangerous, because starships weren't streamlined for operations in an atmosphere.

The corvette's hull was a cylinder with rounded ends, a stable enough shape initially. The antennas and rigging on the exterior, however, created turbulence as well as twisting the vessel off-line when they caught gusts of wind. Even though ships in an atmosphere moved with the deliberation of belles making their entrances, they were fitted with sensor suites to make their own observations from space to be compared with whatever the planetary controller supplied.

Daniel let out his breath in a long sigh and flopped back in his seat. Almost at once he straightened and resumed keying commands, now with a look of eager attention. He caught Adele's glance and grinned at her through the haze of his new task. Moments before, as he'd been setting up the approach, he'd had the rapt focus of a cat watching potential prey.

Adele echoed the navigation display in a corner of her own screen, just to see what Daniel was working on now. It was a plan of the Princess Cecile's antennas and sails, which were being collapsed for storage. Daniel would be able to understand the process by a glance at the schematic, but to Adele it was merely bumps and lines.

She would have cut away, but a red arrow suddenly careted a point on the white outline. Daniel's voice said through her communications helmet, "See here? Port Three hasn't fully retracted. These three hollow triangles—"

It was hard to see details of the sail plan when it was shrunk down to a sidebar; Adele raised the schematic to three quarters of the display. She looked up to meet Daniel's eyes; he was grinning as he moved a light pen to mark the image she was importing to her console.

"—are the riggers working on it. They've shut off the hydraulics so they can crank the mast down manually. Now here—"

The caret jumped. Adele gave Daniel's explanation half her attention while she sorted the shipping log for vessels which had lifted from Cinnabar within thirty days of their arrival on Sexburga. No ship but the Princess Cecile herself would have made the voyage direct.

"—you see the dorsal mainsail we've been using for a rudder during our last leg of the Matrix," Daniel continued. "It kinked on its track, so these riggers and the topside officer—"

Who appeared to be a solid pink triangle close to the six hollow ones.

"—that's Woetjans on this watch, they just finished furling it by hand."

On the right of Adele's display, itself now a sidebar, a single name appeared: the Achilles, a private yacht of three hundred tons. It had landed on Sexburga six hours ahead of the Princess Cecile.

"The other problem's here on Ventral Five," Daniel continued, moving his pointer. "There's a jammed yard—see how she sticks out like a broken finger instead of lying along the mast. Woetjans has a rigger on that, using a wrench if he can and a cutting torch if the wrench doesn't work. We can't have that if we're going to land on our belly."

"Ah," said Adele, but she was frowning at the data on the right of her screen. The Achilles was fleet-footed indeed to have reached Sexburga only twenty-three days out from Cinnabar.

An attention signal whistled as the track lights pulsed green. "Hull reports the antennas are stowed and locked," a voice from the BDC reported. Dorst was speaking rather than Mon; the lieutenant was giving the midshipmen actual experience as officers, albeit in small ways.

"Acknowledged," said Daniel, captain of the Princess Cecile again instead of a friend explaining details of his expertise. He touched the command bar on the separate semaphore panel to his left, then keyed the intercom.

"Captain to ship!" Daniel announced, his voice in Adele's helmet preceding by a hair's breadth its analogue through the ceiling speakers. His fingers continued to type commands as he spoke. "The riggers are coming aboard. All hands prepare for entry into the atmosphere. Captain out."

Icons on the far left of Adele's display shifted. The whine of the High Drive ceased, and the braking thrust Adele's body perceived as gravity lessened for a heartbeat or so before the plasma thrusters roared to full life. Adele must have looked startled, because Sun glanced over at her and shouted, "We can't chance double thrust, mistress. The masts wouldn't take it, even brought in and locked."

Adele nodded understanding. She'd known that, of course. This wasn't the first time she'd landed in a starship, for heaven's sake, nor even the first time she'd done so as an officer on the bridge with full access to the details of what was going on.

But—her intellect had known what to expect. The lizard brain deep within Adele had known only that it had suddenly dropped into nothingness.

The riggers were coming through the airlock, unlatching their helmets and congratulating themselves with enthusiasm. Riggers even more than other spacers loved the void, but this had been a hard run. In the future the crew would brag to others about how Mr. Leary had brought the Princess Cecile from Cinnabar to Sexburga in seventeen days . . . but for the moment, they were glad to know they'd be walking on solid ground in an hour.

Daniel switched his display to the harbor plot. Adele, still watching her echo of the navigational console, saw pennant numbers blink into life beside each cylindrical hull. She smiled wryly. That was a much simpler route into the problem than those she'd taken.

"Commodore Pettin isn't on Sexburga now," Daniel said through her helmet. "Has the squadron already landed and lifted for Strymon?"

"We're the only RCN vessel to arrive from Cinnabar in the past thirty days, Daniel," Adele said. "Pettin had a ten days start and you've beaten him."

The upper atmosphere began to buffet the corvette. Over the windroar came a bang and a momentary fluttering rattle outside the hull. Woetjans snatched the handset from beside the suit locker and shouted into it.

Daniel focused on his screen, then looked unperturbedly through the hologram toward Adele again. "A furling clamp on the Starboard Three topsail gave way," he said. "Rule of thumb is you'll lose a sail on every leg of a cruise. If we'd made five or six intermediate landings as the squadron probably did, we'd have a much higher damage bill than this one."

He frowned. "Commodore Pettin had no reason to push the way we were doing," he continued in a careful tone. "I couldn't be more proud of the ship, the crew, and the—and my astrogation that brought us to Sexburga in a record run. But I do hope the commodore doesn't feel, ah, challenged. That would add complexity to a situation that's already less simple than it could be."

Woetjans and the riggers still wore their suits as they waited in the corridor. Delos Vaughn stood in the doorway of the wardroom, looking into the bridge past them. The hard voyage had worn him as badly as it had anybody else aboard the Princess Cecile; his face looked like a mummy's skull.

But he was smiling.

The echoes of the corvette's landing had stopped reverberating around the high cliffs of Flood Harbor, but when Daniel switched to a panoramic view he saw that a vast doughnut of steam still hung in the sky. The Harbormaster's office was a blockhouse built out from the natural rock wall at the base of the broad embayment. A vehicle pulled away from it and turned up the quay that would bring it to the Princess Cecile. That was greater efficiency than Daniel had expected on so distant a world.

He keyed the intercom and said, "Captain to crew. After the ship has been opened, spacers, there's a twenty-four hour liberty for everybody but the designated anchor watch. I'll remain aboard as officer of the watch."

He paused, then added, "Good work, Sissies. God grant this won't be the only record you and I will set! Captain out."

Daniel sighed and stretched his arms back, then forward to where they muddied portions of the display. The panorama provided a holographic image of what he would see were he standing on the Princess Cecile's spine and if the rigging weren't in the way. Like quite a lot of things—Daniel's fingers idly called up a file; women's faces, little mementos, cascaded across his display—the image was more attractive than the reality.

He grinned. Adele got up shakily from her console and said, "Daniel? I'd have thought you'd want to go ashore yourself."

"And so I do," he said, grinning even wider. "In fact I was just thinking that I'd always take the living, breathing reality over however pretty an image."

Daniel got up also. Riggers opened both doors of the forward dorsal airlock, letting in a gulp of air with touches of steam and ozone. Down the length of the ship clanks and squeals announced the undogging of hatches, both ordinary ports and the access panels used for major overhauls. Some of them would be closed again after the corvette had aired out, but for the moment everyone wanted the maximum ventilation.

The makeup of Sexburga's atmosphere differed by a few percentage points from Cinnabar's or Earth's. All that mattered just now was that it hadn't been lived in for seventeen days by over a hundred and twenty people, plus a wide variety of machinery and electronics. The corvette's filters scrubbed the carbon dioxide down to safe levels and removed actual toxins, while hydrolyzed reaction mass kept the oxygen constant; the stench was a permanent companion regardless.

After a time you no longer noticed the smell at a conscious level, but it still did damage to morale and efficiency. Like a mild toothache, the omnipresent discomfort of bad air robbed spacers of those top few points of intellect which could mean life or death in a dangerous environment. Flushing the ship's atmosphere was the first and most longed-for reward of landing after a long voyage.

"On the other hand," Daniel continued, quirking Adele his grin, "I'm going to be just as glad to be ashore come tomorrow, and I can relax better if I've already taken care of the ship's administrative business."

Feeling a little embarrassed, he added, "Besides, though it isn't exactly traditional for the captain to take the first shore-side watch, it's . . . traditional among the captains that I'd choose to serve under myself. So in a way I don't really have a choice, you see."

"I see," said Adele, with a smile that looked suspiciously like a smirk. "Well, I wasn't in a hurry to go ashore myself. I have a new series of databases to pry into, after all. I can do that best from my console here as soon as I've linked us to the local net."

The corridor was filling with spacers who'd changed into their shoregoing clothes. For Betts, Taley, and the midshipmen, that meant dress grays. The same was probably true of Pasternak, though Daniel didn't see him. The chief bunked in the office attached to the power room on A Level rather than in the warrant-officer accommodations here on C.

The lower-ranking crewmen and the officers who'd first shipped as common spacers wore liberty dress. These had started out as sets of utilities, but the owners had decorated them during off-duty periods in space.

Woetjans's liberty suit was the highest state of the art Daniel had seen. What with appliques, cutwork, embroidery, studs, and the ribbons fluttering from the seams, there wasn't a thread of the wave-pattern fatigues visible.

"Actually, Adele, you could do me a favor," Daniel said, feeling a touch of embarrassment. He should have broached this sooner. It was going to sound like he wanted to be shut of her company on the ground, which was far from the truth. "The midshipmen will be going ashore, as you know. Now, as you know, I'm not a moralist—"

"Actually, I believe you are a moralist, Daniel," Adele said. She grinned, reminding him that she must have been a child once upon a time. "But not in the fashion you mean, no."

On B Level, the accommodations deck, at least a dozen spacers were singing, "When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure . . ."

Daniel cleared his throat. "As I say . . ." he said. "Dorst and Vesey are young, though, and this is the first landfall of their first cruise. Normally the first lieutenant would shepherd them about, but Lieutenant Mon won't get farther than the first tavern beyond the docks."

He shrugged. "Not that I'm complaining," he added. "Mon does his job a hundred and twenty percent; it wouldn't be fair to deny him downtime he's so richly earned. But I was wondering . . . ?"

"You want me to chaperone the midshipmen?" Adele said carefully. She didn't seem hostile to the idea, though "cool" would be a fair description of her attitude. Well, "cool" would generally describe Adele's attitude.

"Not that, not controlling their behavior," Daniel said, trying to explain a concept that was more subtle than words could really express. His words, at any rate. "Dorst and Vesey are adults with the rights and responsibilities of officers of the RCN. And God knows, when I was their age . . ."

His voice trailed off. He wasn't much beyond their age now, not in years. Had his first commanding officer, Commander Gray, felt this way about him?

"Anyway . . ." Daniel continued, feeling his face warm as he looked at himself with the eyes of Midshipman Daniel Leary, age eighteen. "I don't want you to keep them on leashes, Adele, but I'm afraid that if they go off with any of the other senior warrant officers, they'll . . . well, the only question would be whether they spent their liberty in bars, brothels, or a gambling house."

A smile drove the self-conscious embarrassment from Daniel's face. Voicing the thought he said, "Of course, Sexburga's a major port. I'm sure there are a number of establishments providing all three entertainments under the same roof."

Sobering he went on, "And I don't care if my midshipmen do spend their liberty in one. I don't want to force them into that choice, though, as sending them off with Woetjans would guarantee. I can't order you to do this—"

Actually, he could: he was captain of the Princess Cecile, and if he ordered his crew to spend their whole liberty in church, regulations permitted him to do so. His chance of having anybody report aboard for the next leg of the cruise was a great deal more problematic, however.

"—but it would be a favor to me and to the RCN."

Adele nodded. "All right," she said. "I didn't have anything more exciting planned than sightseeing in what seems from the description in the Sailing Directions to be quite an interesting city. If Dorst and Vesey would care to join me, I'd be pleased to have their company."

She looked down at her rumpled utilities. "I suppose I should change? I see the others are."

"Dress grays are traditional for officers on liberty," Daniel said. "If you'd prefer civilian clothes, that's perfectly acceptable also. That is, on my ship it is."

"I sincerely hope I'll never travel on anybody else's ship, Daniel," Adele said with a faint smile. "Certainly not as a member of the RCN."

She stepped toward the suite she shared with him. "I'll put on my uniform. It's perfectly comfortable and I'm—"

Adele paused, looking back over her shoulder. "Actually, I'm rather proud to wear the uniform. Although I'm still surprised to feel that way."

Grinning broadly, Daniel keyed first the attention signal and then the PA system. "Midshipmen to the bridge," he ordered.

Hogg stepped onto the bridge, wearing his version of liberty dress—high boots, red beret, orange pantaloons, and a canary yellow shirt with flaring sleeves. He'd been waiting politely in the passage for his master and Adele to finish their conversation. "If you won't be requiring me, sir," he said, "I thought I'd go ashore and pick up a few things we'll need for the voyage."

"Certainly, Hogg," Daniel said. "I only hope that you don't pick up anything that you don't mean to."

Hogg drew himself up, which still left him a hand's breadth short of Daniel's own modest height. "Loose women," he said in a tone of injured innocence, "are not a problem of mine, young master."

He cleared his throat and added, "Though I'll be fair and say that I never noticed you to have problems finding them neither. Quite the contrary."

"We'll trust that they don't have anything on Sexburga that the sick-bay computer can't solve," Daniel said. "But of course you're free to go, Hogg. Have fun."

Daniel watched the vivid form of his servant disappear down the companionway. Hogg had grown grayer day by day during the long, brutal voyage. It wasn't so much a physical change as a lowering of the intense spirit that usually animated his pudgy form. He'd never flinched, let alone complained, but Daniel wasn't sure how much reserve there'd been remaining.

Perhaps very little—but Hogg had always rebounded swiftly.

Delos Vaughn came out of his berth, dressed in a flowing blend of blues and greens. His servant, Timmins, watched him head for the bridge. When he was sure of Vaughn's intention, Timmins ducked down the companionway. He was still wearing fatigues, having waited to change into liberty dress until he'd attended to the passenger.

Daniel's eyes narrowed slightly. To get that sort of service from a spacer after a voyage like the one just ended, Vaughn must be paying quite well. Which shouldn't have been a surprise, of course.

Vaughn paused at the bridge hatchway. "Lieutenant Leary?" he asked. "May I speak with you?"

"Yes, of course," Daniel said. "Welcome to the bridge, Mr. Vaughn."

It didn't bother Daniel, but he'd noticed that Vaughn always called him by his rank, lieutenant, rather than his position as captain of the Princess Cecile. If the choice was a political game, Daniel didn't understand it. But perhaps Vaughn was just ignorant, the niceties of shipboard usage having passed him by.

It didn't exactly bother Daniel.

"I have friends here on Sexburga, Lieutenant," Vaughn said as he stepped over the hatch coaming a trifle shakily. He spoke normally, but his cheeks had sunk noticeably in the past seventeen days. "I believe they're waiting for me on the dock now. I wonder if you might be able to join us for dinner tonight? I'd like to show my appreciation for the skill as well as the hospitality you demonstrated on this voyage."

Daniel reached over to Bett's console—his own keyboard was out of reach from where he stood—and brought up the panoramic view with quick keystrokes. He hoped he wasn't frowning at Vaughn, though he wouldn't pretend that he really cared that much.

"Your friends waiting for you, Mr. Vaughn?" he said, adjusting the display to expand the quay to which a team of riggers was extending the corvette's gangplank.

"Why yes, Lieutenant," Vaughn said. "I believe you met Mistress Zane at my party? Though of course you might not remember her with all the excitement that day."

"I remember her," Daniel said in a quiet voice. Indeed, that was Zane standing ramrod straight beside the open door of the ground car now waiting on the quay. Daniel had thought the vehicle was bringing harbor officials to handle the administrative details of the Princess Cecile's stay on Sexburga. "She must have made good time to arrive before we did."

Vaughn shrugged. "There's quite a lot going on, Lieutenant," he said. "As no doubt you realize."

Adele had come out of her cabin; Tovera straightened an everted pleat of her mistress's jacket with fingers as thin and white as if they were merely the bones. The midshipmen waited stiffly in the passage, their faces scrubbed and saucer hats in their hands. Vesey was squinching forward, apparently in an attempt to minimize the grease stain she'd somehow managed to get between her first and second jacket buttons.

"I appreciate your invitation, Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said, changing the subject back to one he felt comfortable with, "but I'm afraid tonight is impossible. I'll remain aboard the Princess Cecile until the liberty parties return tomorrow and Mr. Pasternak takes charge."

"I see," said Vaughn. A flash of anger suggested that at heart he didn't see any reason ever that his will should be thwarted, but the emotion was gone as quickly as it appeared. "Well, can we say tomorrow, then? I really feel a duty as a citizen of Strymon to thank you before a gathering of my compatriots. Quite a number of the chief residents here are natives of Strymon, you realize."

What Daniel realized was that Vaughn was making the invitation a matter of planet-to-planet protocol. Why he'd want to do that was puzzling, though a simple desire to get his own way would be a believable explanation; but Vaughn certainly had the power to make trouble for Daniel on the grounds of a political snub if the invitation was refused.

"I'd be pleased to attend you, yes, Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said. "With the proviso that I'll call on the Cinnabar Commissioner as soon as I go ashore; and whenever Commodore Pettin arrives, I'll be entirely at his disposal."

Daniel wasn't under any illusions about Vaughn's instinct to dominate, but it wasn't something that put the man outside the pale in the mind of an RCN officer. More important was the fact that the young nobleman controlled his impulses. Whatever Vaughn might have been at the core, his intellect made him a civilized man who operated within the norms he found around him; and it was intellect, after all, that divided men from beasts.

"Let's say tomorrow evening then, Lieutenant," Vaughn said with a smile, bowing as crisply as a punch notching a ticket. "The twelfth hour, as they calculate things here on Sexburga; and at the Captal da Lund's residence outside Spires. I will expect you."

He turned and strode to the companionway, nodding in friendly acknowledgment to the midshipmen. The interchange with Daniel had restored Vaughn's poise: he walked with none of the stiffness and doubtful balance that had hampered him when he entered the bridge.

Adele stepped to Daniel's side. In a low voice she commented, "The hormones that emotions release do wonderful things for a person's physical condition, don't they? I wonder if I've been wrong all my life in thinking people would be better off without emotion?"

Daniel looked at his friend sharply, not quite certain that she was joking. Deciding he didn't want to ask a question that might have the wrong answer, he said, "Yes, it seemed to me as well that more was going on than a party invitation. But I wonder why?"

He glanced sidelong at Adele and raised an eyebrow. She shrugged and said, "I truly don't know, Daniel. It's no affair connected with . . . me or mine, to the best of my knowledge."

In the glum pause that followed, Tovera turned her palm up. The slight movement called attention to her. Daniel started: it was like a magician's illusion. Poof! and Adele's servant stood where his mind hadn't registered anything a moment before.

"I wonder, mistress?" Tovera said. "Will I be going with you today?"

In place of the coveralls she'd worn during the voyage, she'd donned baggy gray slacks and a beige shirt that would have hung to her knees if it hadn't been belted at her waist. The loosely bloused fabric could conceal any number of weapons or other devices—and probably did.

"I don't believe I'll need you, no," Adele said, her words as careful as the taps of a gem-cutter. "You're welcome to come, but if you'd rather be off on your own . . . ?"

"Spires gets all sorts of people," Tovera said. She smiled; the expression belonged on a bird of prey. "Some of them may enjoy the same things I do."

She took a ring of dark hematite with a simple gold inlay from a purse hidden under the drape of her blouse, then slid it on her left little finger. "I'll see you tomorrow, then. At this hour?"

"Yes, that will be fine," Adele said. "If I need you sooner, I'll . . ."

She tapped the personal data unit that she used for communication. Tovera might have a mastoid implant for all Daniel knew, though a simple pager the size of a pea would be sufficient.

"Thank you, mistress," Tovera said as she walked away. Daniel shook his head in wonderment. It was like seeing the shadow of death thrown on the corridor bulkhead.

"And before you ask," Adele said in a bleak voice, "I don't have the faintest notion of what she means."

Daniel hadn't had the least intention of asking. He put his hand on Adele's shoulder and squeezed it, reassuring both of them that their truths remained.

Adele looked at the image Daniel had called up on the attack console. The gangplank was an internally braced structure that could unfold an entire twenty yards if necessary, though Daniel had brought the corvette much closer than that to the concrete slip. The Princess Cecile's crew, bright and fluttering in their liberty dress, crossed in loose formation. The crew from the anchor watch who'd just extended the gangplank watched their singing, laughing, fellows without expression.

Daniel sighed. Well, that was why he was aboard himself. A captain had to be willing to carry out unpleasant duties occasionally, if he expected his crew to obey when he ordered them to do things they'd rather not. Which, after all, covered most of the activities aboard a warship.

"That's Thea Zane, the woman who visited Vaughn on Cinnabar!" Adele said. She sat at the console, apparently oblivious of her surroundings, and began switching between screens without bothering to explain what she was doing. The view of the dock shrank to a corner of the display.

"Yes it is," Daniel said. Dorst and Vesey remained at the hatchway, teetering with nervous anticipation. He crooked his finger to bring them to him. "And I can't imagine how she reached Sexburga ahead of us, even if she left immediately after Vaughn's party."

"She came aboard the yacht Achilles," Adele said with satisfaction, leaning her head aside. "Twenty-three days out of Cinnabar."

Daniel stooped to bring his head into position to read the personnel manifest the yacht had filed with the Harbormaster. Fifty-three crew—a large complement for a 300-ton vessel, but she was carrying the sails of a much larger hull—and one passenger: Mistress Thea Zane.

"I see," he said, straightening. His smile had a degree of calculation in it. "I suppose we should be glad that they didn't have Uncle Stacey's logs, or our run from Cinnabar might not have been a record after all."

He straightened and gestured to Adele. She switched the console back to a full-sized image of the dock and stood, nodding to the midshipmen to show that she was aware of them. On the display Vaughn gripped arms with Mistress Zane, then got into the closed car with her help. Obviously, he wasn't fully recovered from the voyage.

Well, neither was Daniel, though he was getting there. He forced his face into a serious expression and said, "Dorst, Vesey, I have a favor to ask of you. I realize you have plans for your liberty—"

He was fairly confident that the midshipmen had no real plans, just concern sparked by the tall tales they were bound to have heard. They'd be afraid that they wouldn't measure up to what was expected of an RCN officer.

"—but I'm going to ask you to put them on hold for our first day here." Daniel cleared his throat. "Normally I'd escort Officer Mundy myself, but I have anchor watch for the next twenty-four hours. I don't want her to stumble around Spires alone, so I'd appreciate it if you'd accompany her. I won't make this an order, but—"

"Sir, we'd be happy—" Vesey said. Her tongue caught and she glanced at Dorst. "Ah, I'd be—"

"We'd be honored to join Officer Mundy!" Dorst said with relieved enthusiasm. "We'll keep her, ah . . ."

He wanted to say "safe," but he suddenly doubted that was the right word. Wisely, Daniel thought, he let his voice trail off.

Adele seemed to be on the verge of open laughter; which, if not a first, certainly wasn't something she had great experience with. Still working to keep his face straight, Daniel said, "This meets with your approval, Officer Mundy?"

You had to know what you were looking for to see the flat bulge in the side pocket of Adele's jacket. If the midshipmen had heard the stories about what Adele could and had done with her pistol, they probably classed them with the stories about the night Barnes serviced all thirty of the girls in a brothel on LaGrange, having reached the madam just as dawn broke.

"Yes it does," she said solemnly. "I'm afraid my taste in amusement is staid by any standards, but we can at least get the flavor of the city together. In future days you'll be free to indulge yourself."

"Oh, that'll be fine, ma'am," Dorst assured her. "To tell the truth, I was sort of looking forward to . . . I've never been out of the Cinnabar system, you know, and I'd like really to see some things besides—"

He broke off and pointedly didn't look at Vesey.

"We don't have to leave the Sissie to get drunk," Vesey said primly, her eyes fixed on the far bulkhead also. "Anyway, we're glad to join you, mistress."

"Then you'd best learn to call me Mundy," Adele said as she shepherded her charges toward the corridor. "I have the Sailing Directions—"

She tapped the pocket with her data unit.

"—and a map of Spires, so we should be all right if we stay together."

She nodded to Daniel as she followed the midshipmen down the companionway; a thin, stiff-looking woman in dress grays. He winked in reply. Yes, they'd be all right; no question about that.

The people telling about Barnes' exploit exaggerated: there'd only been fifteen women in the house, not thirty-one. And they exaggerated about Adele as well. She hadn't really killed a hundred Alliance soldiers on Kostroma with single shots to the head, snapping the rounds off every time a target offered.

But it probably wasn't as much of an exaggeration as the story about Barnes.

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Framed

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Contents

CHAPTER TWELVE

_Adele—Signals Officer Mundy—was busy for the first time since
the Princess Cecile entered the Matrix outbound from Cinnabar. Since the events on Kostroma, really. She'd studied the corvette's electronics on the voyage to Harbor Three, and during the past seventeen hellish days she'd been learning all she could about Strymon and the adjacent planetary systems.

That had been work at her own speed—which didn't mean it was done in a leisurely fashion by most people's standards, but there was no outside pressure involved. Now—

"Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one—" GR1751 was the Princess Cecile's pennant number, which her transponder sent automatically when interrogated "—you are cleared to land at Flood Harbor in numbers nine-five, I repeat nine-five, minutes. There will be no liftoffs or landings from Flood Harbor for half an hour either way of your slot, but be aware that there may be traffic from the Cove or Drylands. Hold to your filed descent. Condor out."

Adele had reconfigured the communications console to use wand control as its default. This wasn't ideal, as a computer capable of missile launches and astrogation had a much broader range of options than a civilian database. Adele preferred to layer command sets within her wands' existing software rather than use the virtual keyboard created for the console. It was still much faster, and for her there was less risk of an error.

Her hands moved, sending the core of the message from Condor Control—the station that handled starship traffic for all Sexburga—to Daniel's display in visual form. The course plot, the time parameters, and the two smaller harbors with their approach cones were instantly visible; if Daniel for some reason wanted the audio message as well, he had only to key an icon to get it.

That was the open part of Adele's duties. At the same time she'd entered the Condor database covertly and copied from it the complete records of landings and departures from the planet in the past thirty days. Her real concern—Daniel's real concern—was to see when and whether Commodore Pettin had arrived, but for safety's sake Adele had given her search broader parameters.

RCS Tampico, arrived four days previous. From . . . Adele's wands moved . . . Holtsmark, berthed at Slip Thirty-two, Flood Harbor. She accessed another file, this one internal RCN records held in the Princess Cecile's database. RCS Tampico, communications vessel, 1700 tons empty; defensive armament only.

"Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one," the controller on Sexburga said. "You're to put down in slip thirty. I'm transmitting a plot of Flood Harbor. Condor over."

The speaker was male, probably in his forties, and sounded alertly professional. He hissed his esses and more generally spoke with a soft lilt; Adele decided to class the peculiarities as a Sexburga accent until she learned otherwise.

A schematic appeared in gold light on the left side of Adele's display. It was offset from but identical to the harbor plan from the Princess Cecile's database. The local transmission also showed cigar-shaped vessels settled in roughly half the fifty-seven slips. Sexburga was clearly a major port, though most of the ships berthed here were of moderate size.

Adele framed the plan and retransmitted it to a suspense file serving the command console while Daniel set up his final approach. It was received, becoming a sidebar on the upper left corner of a screen almost completely filled by numerical data.

"Gee-Are one-seven-five-one acknowledges receipt of the Flood Harbor berthing plan," Adele said. "Gee-Are one-seven-five-one out."

Nothing went to the command console until it had been cleared through Adele's filters and then requested by the captain. The captain could set up categories for immediate update—this harbor schematic, for example—but even so the data didn't appear on Daniel's display until he called for it. The priorities were determined by a human being.

Adele returned her attention to the right half of her display, another RCN internal file: current deployment orders for RCN vessels. The Tampico was on a triangular run from Sexburga to the Cinnabar outpost at Fort Hill Station and finally to Langerhut, an allied system with a Resident Commissioner but almost no direct contact with Cinnabar. The Tampico carried dispatches, supplies, and personnel who were being transferred. The vessel wasn't connected with Commodore Pettin's squadron.

The Princess Cecile braked under one-gee acceleration. Even to the naked eye, the image of Sexburga swelled on the real-time display at the margin of Adele's screen. Speaking loudly to be heard over the whine of antimatter annihilation, Sun said to Betts, "Did you see that? Mr. Leary didn't quite kill our momentum with the last shift in the Matrix. He was so sure he'd drop us just short of the planet that he left us with a way on to save time. Ain't he a wonder?"

Betts nodded solemnly. He was clearing his display of the targeting fantasies that had preserved him in the Matrix, moving methodically through a checklist. "A wonder . . ." he breathed.

A wonder indeed. 

There were no other RCN vessels on Sexburga or in the PCT-3301 system of which Sexburga was the fourth planet. Adele moved to checking grouped arrivals.

Three ships had arrived in hailing range of Condor Control within minutes of one another a week ago, but they were freighters from three separate systems linked only by chance. Adele called up visuals from the Flood Harbor security cameras and proved beyond doubt that the ships weren't warships, let alone Commodore Pettin's squadron with disguised identities.

She thought a smile that eventually touched her lips. She was obviously being obsessive. In that, at least, she'd make a good spacer.

Adele had tapped into the automated stream of Sexburgan meteorological data as soon as the Princess Cecile emerged from the Matrix. The first and last twenty thousand feet of a voyage were statistically the most dangerous, because starships weren't streamlined for operations in an atmosphere.

The corvette's hull was a cylinder with rounded ends, a stable enough shape initially. The antennas and rigging on the exterior, however, created turbulence as well as twisting the vessel off-line when they caught gusts of wind. Even though ships in an atmosphere moved with the deliberation of belles making their entrances, they were fitted with sensor suites to make their own observations from space to be compared with whatever the planetary controller supplied.

Daniel let out his breath in a long sigh and flopped back in his seat. Almost at once he straightened and resumed keying commands, now with a look of eager attention. He caught Adele's glance and grinned at her through the haze of his new task. Moments before, as he'd been setting up the approach, he'd had the rapt focus of a cat watching potential prey.

Adele echoed the navigation display in a corner of her own screen, just to see what Daniel was working on now. It was a plan of the Princess Cecile's antennas and sails, which were being collapsed for storage. Daniel would be able to understand the process by a glance at the schematic, but to Adele it was merely bumps and lines.

She would have cut away, but a red arrow suddenly careted a point on the white outline. Daniel's voice said through her communications helmet, "See here? Port Three hasn't fully retracted. These three hollow triangles—"

It was hard to see details of the sail plan when it was shrunk down to a sidebar; Adele raised the schematic to three quarters of the display. She looked up to meet Daniel's eyes; he was grinning as he moved a light pen to mark the image she was importing to her console.

"—are the riggers working on it. They've shut off the hydraulics so they can crank the mast down manually. Now here—"

The caret jumped. Adele gave Daniel's explanation half her attention while she sorted the shipping log for vessels which had lifted from Cinnabar within thirty days of their arrival on Sexburga. No ship but the Princess Cecile herself would have made the voyage direct.

"—you see the dorsal mainsail we've been using for a rudder during our last leg of the Matrix," Daniel continued. "It kinked on its track, so these riggers and the topside officer—"

Who appeared to be a solid pink triangle close to the six hollow ones.

"—that's Woetjans on this watch, they just finished furling it by hand."

On the right of Adele's display, itself now a sidebar, a single name appeared: the Achilles, a private yacht of three hundred tons. It had landed on Sexburga six hours ahead of the Princess Cecile.

"The other problem's here on Ventral Five," Daniel continued, moving his pointer. "There's a jammed yard—see how she sticks out like a broken finger instead of lying along the mast. Woetjans has a rigger on that, using a wrench if he can and a cutting torch if the wrench doesn't work. We can't have that if we're going to land on our belly."

"Ah," said Adele, but she was frowning at the data on the right of her screen. The Achilles was fleet-footed indeed to have reached Sexburga only twenty-three days out from Cinnabar.

An attention signal whistled as the track lights pulsed green. "Hull reports the antennas are stowed and locked," a voice from the BDC reported. Dorst was speaking rather than Mon; the lieutenant was giving the midshipmen actual experience as officers, albeit in small ways.

"Acknowledged," said Daniel, captain of the Princess Cecile again instead of a friend explaining details of his expertise. He touched the command bar on the separate semaphore panel to his left, then keyed the intercom.

"Captain to ship!" Daniel announced, his voice in Adele's helmet preceding by a hair's breadth its analogue through the ceiling speakers. His fingers continued to type commands as he spoke. "The riggers are coming aboard. All hands prepare for entry into the atmosphere. Captain out."

Icons on the far left of Adele's display shifted. The whine of the High Drive ceased, and the braking thrust Adele's body perceived as gravity lessened for a heartbeat or so before the plasma thrusters roared to full life. Adele must have looked startled, because Sun glanced over at her and shouted, "We can't chance double thrust, mistress. The masts wouldn't take it, even brought in and locked."

Adele nodded understanding. She'd known that, of course. This wasn't the first time she'd landed in a starship, for heaven's sake, nor even the first time she'd done so as an officer on the bridge with full access to the details of what was going on.

But—her intellect had known what to expect. The lizard brain deep within Adele had known only that it had suddenly dropped into nothingness.

The riggers were coming through the airlock, unlatching their helmets and congratulating themselves with enthusiasm. Riggers even more than other spacers loved the void, but this had been a hard run. In the future the crew would brag to others about how Mr. Leary had brought the Princess Cecile from Cinnabar to Sexburga in seventeen days . . . but for the moment, they were glad to know they'd be walking on solid ground in an hour.

Daniel switched his display to the harbor plot. Adele, still watching her echo of the navigational console, saw pennant numbers blink into life beside each cylindrical hull. She smiled wryly. That was a much simpler route into the problem than those she'd taken.

"Commodore Pettin isn't on Sexburga now," Daniel said through her helmet. "Has the squadron already landed and lifted for Strymon?"

"We're the only RCN vessel to arrive from Cinnabar in the past thirty days, Daniel," Adele said. "Pettin had a ten days start and you've beaten him."

The upper atmosphere began to buffet the corvette. Over the windroar came a bang and a momentary fluttering rattle outside the hull. Woetjans snatched the handset from beside the suit locker and shouted into it.

Daniel focused on his screen, then looked unperturbedly through the hologram toward Adele again. "A furling clamp on the Starboard Three topsail gave way," he said. "Rule of thumb is you'll lose a sail on every leg of a cruise. If we'd made five or six intermediate landings as the squadron probably did, we'd have a much higher damage bill than this one."

He frowned. "Commodore Pettin had no reason to push the way we were doing," he continued in a careful tone. "I couldn't be more proud of the ship, the crew, and the—and my astrogation that brought us to Sexburga in a record run. But I do hope the commodore doesn't feel, ah, challenged. That would add complexity to a situation that's already less simple than it could be."

Woetjans and the riggers still wore their suits as they waited in the corridor. Delos Vaughn stood in the doorway of the wardroom, looking into the bridge past them. The hard voyage had worn him as badly as it had anybody else aboard the Princess Cecile; his face looked like a mummy's skull.

But he was smiling.

The echoes of the corvette's landing had stopped reverberating around the high cliffs of Flood Harbor, but when Daniel switched to a panoramic view he saw that a vast doughnut of steam still hung in the sky. The Harbormaster's office was a blockhouse built out from the natural rock wall at the base of the broad embayment. A vehicle pulled away from it and turned up the quay that would bring it to the Princess Cecile. That was greater efficiency than Daniel had expected on so distant a world.

He keyed the intercom and said, "Captain to crew. After the ship has been opened, spacers, there's a twenty-four hour liberty for everybody but the designated anchor watch. I'll remain aboard as officer of the watch."

He paused, then added, "Good work, Sissies. God grant this won't be the only record you and I will set! Captain out."

Daniel sighed and stretched his arms back, then forward to where they muddied portions of the display. The panorama provided a holographic image of what he would see were he standing on the Princess Cecile's spine and if the rigging weren't in the way. Like quite a lot of things—Daniel's fingers idly called up a file; women's faces, little mementos, cascaded across his display—the image was more attractive than the reality.

He grinned. Adele got up shakily from her console and said, "Daniel? I'd have thought you'd want to go ashore yourself."

"And so I do," he said, grinning even wider. "In fact I was just thinking that I'd always take the living, breathing reality over however pretty an image."

Daniel got up also. Riggers opened both doors of the forward dorsal airlock, letting in a gulp of air with touches of steam and ozone. Down the length of the ship clanks and squeals announced the undogging of hatches, both ordinary ports and the access panels used for major overhauls. Some of them would be closed again after the corvette had aired out, but for the moment everyone wanted the maximum ventilation.

The makeup of Sexburga's atmosphere differed by a few percentage points from Cinnabar's or Earth's. All that mattered just now was that it hadn't been lived in for seventeen days by over a hundred and twenty people, plus a wide variety of machinery and electronics. The corvette's filters scrubbed the carbon dioxide down to safe levels and removed actual toxins, while hydrolyzed reaction mass kept the oxygen constant; the stench was a permanent companion regardless.

After a time you no longer noticed the smell at a conscious level, but it still did damage to morale and efficiency. Like a mild toothache, the omnipresent discomfort of bad air robbed spacers of those top few points of intellect which could mean life or death in a dangerous environment. Flushing the ship's atmosphere was the first and most longed-for reward of landing after a long voyage.

"On the other hand," Daniel continued, quirking Adele his grin, "I'm going to be just as glad to be ashore come tomorrow, and I can relax better if I've already taken care of the ship's administrative business."

Feeling a little embarrassed, he added, "Besides, though it isn't exactly traditional for the captain to take the first shore-side watch, it's . . . traditional among the captains that I'd choose to serve under myself. So in a way I don't really have a choice, you see."

"I see," said Adele, with a smile that looked suspiciously like a smirk. "Well, I wasn't in a hurry to go ashore myself. I have a new series of databases to pry into, after all. I can do that best from my console here as soon as I've linked us to the local net."

The corridor was filling with spacers who'd changed into their shoregoing clothes. For Betts, Taley, and the midshipmen, that meant dress grays. The same was probably true of Pasternak, though Daniel didn't see him. The chief bunked in the office attached to the power room on A Level rather than in the warrant-officer accommodations here on C.

The lower-ranking crewmen and the officers who'd first shipped as common spacers wore liberty dress. These had started out as sets of utilities, but the owners had decorated them during off-duty periods in space.

Woetjans's liberty suit was the highest state of the art Daniel had seen. What with appliques, cutwork, embroidery, studs, and the ribbons fluttering from the seams, there wasn't a thread of the wave-pattern fatigues visible.

"Actually, Adele, you could do me a favor," Daniel said, feeling a touch of embarrassment. He should have broached this sooner. It was going to sound like he wanted to be shut of her company on the ground, which was far from the truth. "The midshipmen will be going ashore, as you know. Now, as you know, I'm not a moralist—"

"Actually, I believe you are a moralist, Daniel," Adele said. She grinned, reminding him that she must have been a child once upon a time. "But not in the fashion you mean, no."

On B Level, the accommodations deck, at least a dozen spacers were singing, "When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure . . ."

Daniel cleared his throat. "As I say . . ." he said. "Dorst and Vesey are young, though, and this is the first landfall of their first cruise. Normally the first lieutenant would shepherd them about, but Lieutenant Mon won't get farther than the first tavern beyond the docks."

He shrugged. "Not that I'm complaining," he added. "Mon does his job a hundred and twenty percent; it wouldn't be fair to deny him downtime he's so richly earned. But I was wondering . . . ?"

"You want me to chaperone the midshipmen?" Adele said carefully. She didn't seem hostile to the idea, though "cool" would be a fair description of her attitude. Well, "cool" would generally describe Adele's attitude.

"Not that, not controlling their behavior," Daniel said, trying to explain a concept that was more subtle than words could really express. His words, at any rate. "Dorst and Vesey are adults with the rights and responsibilities of officers of the RCN. And God knows, when I was their age . . ."

His voice trailed off. He wasn't much beyond their age now, not in years. Had his first commanding officer, Commander Gray, felt this way about him?

"Anyway . . ." Daniel continued, feeling his face warm as he looked at himself with the eyes of Midshipman Daniel Leary, age eighteen. "I don't want you to keep them on leashes, Adele, but I'm afraid that if they go off with any of the other senior warrant officers, they'll . . . well, the only question would be whether they spent their liberty in bars, brothels, or a gambling house."

A smile drove the self-conscious embarrassment from Daniel's face. Voicing the thought he said, "Of course, Sexburga's a major port. I'm sure there are a number of establishments providing all three entertainments under the same roof."

Sobering he went on, "And I don't care if my midshipmen do spend their liberty in one. I don't want to force them into that choice, though, as sending them off with Woetjans would guarantee. I can't order you to do this—"

Actually, he could: he was captain of the Princess Cecile, and if he ordered his crew to spend their whole liberty in church, regulations permitted him to do so. His chance of having anybody report aboard for the next leg of the cruise was a great deal more problematic, however.

"—but it would be a favor to me and to the RCN."

Adele nodded. "All right," she said. "I didn't have anything more exciting planned than sightseeing in what seems from the description in the Sailing Directions to be quite an interesting city. If Dorst and Vesey would care to join me, I'd be pleased to have their company."

She looked down at her rumpled utilities. "I suppose I should change? I see the others are."

"Dress grays are traditional for officers on liberty," Daniel said. "If you'd prefer civilian clothes, that's perfectly acceptable also. That is, on my ship it is."

"I sincerely hope I'll never travel on anybody else's ship, Daniel," Adele said with a faint smile. "Certainly not as a member of the RCN."

She stepped toward the suite she shared with him. "I'll put on my uniform. It's perfectly comfortable and I'm—"

Adele paused, looking back over her shoulder. "Actually, I'm rather proud to wear the uniform. Although I'm still surprised to feel that way."

Grinning broadly, Daniel keyed first the attention signal and then the PA system. "Midshipmen to the bridge," he ordered.

Hogg stepped onto the bridge, wearing his version of liberty dress—high boots, red beret, orange pantaloons, and a canary yellow shirt with flaring sleeves. He'd been waiting politely in the passage for his master and Adele to finish their conversation. "If you won't be requiring me, sir," he said, "I thought I'd go ashore and pick up a few things we'll need for the voyage."

"Certainly, Hogg," Daniel said. "I only hope that you don't pick up anything that you don't mean to."

Hogg drew himself up, which still left him a hand's breadth short of Daniel's own modest height. "Loose women," he said in a tone of injured innocence, "are not a problem of mine, young master."

He cleared his throat and added, "Though I'll be fair and say that I never noticed you to have problems finding them neither. Quite the contrary."

"We'll trust that they don't have anything on Sexburga that the sick-bay computer can't solve," Daniel said. "But of course you're free to go, Hogg. Have fun."

Daniel watched the vivid form of his servant disappear down the companionway. Hogg had grown grayer day by day during the long, brutal voyage. It wasn't so much a physical change as a lowering of the intense spirit that usually animated his pudgy form. He'd never flinched, let alone complained, but Daniel wasn't sure how much reserve there'd been remaining.

Perhaps very little—but Hogg had always rebounded swiftly.

Delos Vaughn came out of his berth, dressed in a flowing blend of blues and greens. His servant, Timmins, watched him head for the bridge. When he was sure of Vaughn's intention, Timmins ducked down the companionway. He was still wearing fatigues, having waited to change into liberty dress until he'd attended to the passenger.

Daniel's eyes narrowed slightly. To get that sort of service from a spacer after a voyage like the one just ended, Vaughn must be paying quite well. Which shouldn't have been a surprise, of course.

Vaughn paused at the bridge hatchway. "Lieutenant Leary?" he asked. "May I speak with you?"

"Yes, of course," Daniel said. "Welcome to the bridge, Mr. Vaughn."

It didn't bother Daniel, but he'd noticed that Vaughn always called him by his rank, lieutenant, rather than his position as captain of the Princess Cecile. If the choice was a political game, Daniel didn't understand it. But perhaps Vaughn was just ignorant, the niceties of shipboard usage having passed him by.

It didn't exactly bother Daniel.

"I have friends here on Sexburga, Lieutenant," Vaughn said as he stepped over the hatch coaming a trifle shakily. He spoke normally, but his cheeks had sunk noticeably in the past seventeen days. "I believe they're waiting for me on the dock now. I wonder if you might be able to join us for dinner tonight? I'd like to show my appreciation for the skill as well as the hospitality you demonstrated on this voyage."

Daniel reached over to Bett's console—his own keyboard was out of reach from where he stood—and brought up the panoramic view with quick keystrokes. He hoped he wasn't frowning at Vaughn, though he wouldn't pretend that he really cared that much.

"Your friends waiting for you, Mr. Vaughn?" he said, adjusting the display to expand the quay to which a team of riggers was extending the corvette's gangplank.

"Why yes, Lieutenant," Vaughn said. "I believe you met Mistress Zane at my party? Though of course you might not remember her with all the excitement that day."

"I remember her," Daniel said in a quiet voice. Indeed, that was Zane standing ramrod straight beside the open door of the ground car now waiting on the quay. Daniel had thought the vehicle was bringing harbor officials to handle the administrative details of the Princess Cecile's stay on Sexburga. "She must have made good time to arrive before we did."

Vaughn shrugged. "There's quite a lot going on, Lieutenant," he said. "As no doubt you realize."

Adele had come out of her cabin; Tovera straightened an everted pleat of her mistress's jacket with fingers as thin and white as if they were merely the bones. The midshipmen waited stiffly in the passage, their faces scrubbed and saucer hats in their hands. Vesey was squinching forward, apparently in an attempt to minimize the grease stain she'd somehow managed to get between her first and second jacket buttons.

"I appreciate your invitation, Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said, changing the subject back to one he felt comfortable with, "but I'm afraid tonight is impossible. I'll remain aboard the Princess Cecile until the liberty parties return tomorrow and Mr. Pasternak takes charge."

"I see," said Vaughn. A flash of anger suggested that at heart he didn't see any reason ever that his will should be thwarted, but the emotion was gone as quickly as it appeared. "Well, can we say tomorrow, then? I really feel a duty as a citizen of Strymon to thank you before a gathering of my compatriots. Quite a number of the chief residents here are natives of Strymon, you realize."

What Daniel realized was that Vaughn was making the invitation a matter of planet-to-planet protocol. Why he'd want to do that was puzzling, though a simple desire to get his own way would be a believable explanation; but Vaughn certainly had the power to make trouble for Daniel on the grounds of a political snub if the invitation was refused.

"I'd be pleased to attend you, yes, Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said. "With the proviso that I'll call on the Cinnabar Commissioner as soon as I go ashore; and whenever Commodore Pettin arrives, I'll be entirely at his disposal."

Daniel wasn't under any illusions about Vaughn's instinct to dominate, but it wasn't something that put the man outside the pale in the mind of an RCN officer. More important was the fact that the young nobleman controlled his impulses. Whatever Vaughn might have been at the core, his intellect made him a civilized man who operated within the norms he found around him; and it was intellect, after all, that divided men from beasts.

"Let's say tomorrow evening then, Lieutenant," Vaughn said with a smile, bowing as crisply as a punch notching a ticket. "The twelfth hour, as they calculate things here on Sexburga; and at the Captal da Lund's residence outside Spires. I will expect you."

He turned and strode to the companionway, nodding in friendly acknowledgment to the midshipmen. The interchange with Daniel had restored Vaughn's poise: he walked with none of the stiffness and doubtful balance that had hampered him when he entered the bridge.

Adele stepped to Daniel's side. In a low voice she commented, "The hormones that emotions release do wonderful things for a person's physical condition, don't they? I wonder if I've been wrong all my life in thinking people would be better off without emotion?"

Daniel looked at his friend sharply, not quite certain that she was joking. Deciding he didn't want to ask a question that might have the wrong answer, he said, "Yes, it seemed to me as well that more was going on than a party invitation. But I wonder why?"

He glanced sidelong at Adele and raised an eyebrow. She shrugged and said, "I truly don't know, Daniel. It's no affair connected with . . . me or mine, to the best of my knowledge."

In the glum pause that followed, Tovera turned her palm up. The slight movement called attention to her. Daniel started: it was like a magician's illusion. Poof! and Adele's servant stood where his mind hadn't registered anything a moment before.

"I wonder, mistress?" Tovera said. "Will I be going with you today?"

In place of the coveralls she'd worn during the voyage, she'd donned baggy gray slacks and a beige shirt that would have hung to her knees if it hadn't been belted at her waist. The loosely bloused fabric could conceal any number of weapons or other devices—and probably did.

"I don't believe I'll need you, no," Adele said, her words as careful as the taps of a gem-cutter. "You're welcome to come, but if you'd rather be off on your own . . . ?"

"Spires gets all sorts of people," Tovera said. She smiled; the expression belonged on a bird of prey. "Some of them may enjoy the same things I do."

She took a ring of dark hematite with a simple gold inlay from a purse hidden under the drape of her blouse, then slid it on her left little finger. "I'll see you tomorrow, then. At this hour?"

"Yes, that will be fine," Adele said. "If I need you sooner, I'll . . ."

She tapped the personal data unit that she used for communication. Tovera might have a mastoid implant for all Daniel knew, though a simple pager the size of a pea would be sufficient.

"Thank you, mistress," Tovera said as she walked away. Daniel shook his head in wonderment. It was like seeing the shadow of death thrown on the corridor bulkhead.

"And before you ask," Adele said in a bleak voice, "I don't have the faintest notion of what she means."

Daniel hadn't had the least intention of asking. He put his hand on Adele's shoulder and squeezed it, reassuring both of them that their truths remained.

Adele looked at the image Daniel had called up on the attack console. The gangplank was an internally braced structure that could unfold an entire twenty yards if necessary, though Daniel had brought the corvette much closer than that to the concrete slip. The Princess Cecile's crew, bright and fluttering in their liberty dress, crossed in loose formation. The crew from the anchor watch who'd just extended the gangplank watched their singing, laughing, fellows without expression.

Daniel sighed. Well, that was why he was aboard himself. A captain had to be willing to carry out unpleasant duties occasionally, if he expected his crew to obey when he ordered them to do things they'd rather not. Which, after all, covered most of the activities aboard a warship.

"That's Thea Zane, the woman who visited Vaughn on Cinnabar!" Adele said. She sat at the console, apparently oblivious of her surroundings, and began switching between screens without bothering to explain what she was doing. The view of the dock shrank to a corner of the display.

"Yes it is," Daniel said. Dorst and Vesey remained at the hatchway, teetering with nervous anticipation. He crooked his finger to bring them to him. "And I can't imagine how she reached Sexburga ahead of us, even if she left immediately after Vaughn's party."

"She came aboard the yacht Achilles," Adele said with satisfaction, leaning her head aside. "Twenty-three days out of Cinnabar."

Daniel stooped to bring his head into position to read the personnel manifest the yacht had filed with the Harbormaster. Fifty-three crew—a large complement for a 300-ton vessel, but she was carrying the sails of a much larger hull—and one passenger: Mistress Thea Zane.

"I see," he said, straightening. His smile had a degree of calculation in it. "I suppose we should be glad that they didn't have Uncle Stacey's logs, or our run from Cinnabar might not have been a record after all."

He straightened and gestured to Adele. She switched the console back to a full-sized image of the dock and stood, nodding to the midshipmen to show that she was aware of them. On the display Vaughn gripped arms with Mistress Zane, then got into the closed car with her help. Obviously, he wasn't fully recovered from the voyage.

Well, neither was Daniel, though he was getting there. He forced his face into a serious expression and said, "Dorst, Vesey, I have a favor to ask of you. I realize you have plans for your liberty—"

He was fairly confident that the midshipmen had no real plans, just concern sparked by the tall tales they were bound to have heard. They'd be afraid that they wouldn't measure up to what was expected of an RCN officer.

"—but I'm going to ask you to put them on hold for our first day here." Daniel cleared his throat. "Normally I'd escort Officer Mundy myself, but I have anchor watch for the next twenty-four hours. I don't want her to stumble around Spires alone, so I'd appreciate it if you'd accompany her. I won't make this an order, but—"

"Sir, we'd be happy—" Vesey said. Her tongue caught and she glanced at Dorst. "Ah, I'd be—"

"We'd be honored to join Officer Mundy!" Dorst said with relieved enthusiasm. "We'll keep her, ah . . ."

He wanted to say "safe," but he suddenly doubted that was the right word. Wisely, Daniel thought, he let his voice trail off.

Adele seemed to be on the verge of open laughter; which, if not a first, certainly wasn't something she had great experience with. Still working to keep his face straight, Daniel said, "This meets with your approval, Officer Mundy?"

You had to know what you were looking for to see the flat bulge in the side pocket of Adele's jacket. If the midshipmen had heard the stories about what Adele could and had done with her pistol, they probably classed them with the stories about the night Barnes serviced all thirty of the girls in a brothel on LaGrange, having reached the madam just as dawn broke.

"Yes it does," she said solemnly. "I'm afraid my taste in amusement is staid by any standards, but we can at least get the flavor of the city together. In future days you'll be free to indulge yourself."

"Oh, that'll be fine, ma'am," Dorst assured her. "To tell the truth, I was sort of looking forward to . . . I've never been out of the Cinnabar system, you know, and I'd like really to see some things besides—"

He broke off and pointedly didn't look at Vesey.

"We don't have to leave the Sissie to get drunk," Vesey said primly, her eyes fixed on the far bulkhead also. "Anyway, we're glad to join you, mistress."

"Then you'd best learn to call me Mundy," Adele said as she shepherded her charges toward the corridor. "I have the Sailing Directions—"

She tapped the pocket with her data unit.

"—and a map of Spires, so we should be all right if we stay together."

She nodded to Daniel as she followed the midshipmen down the companionway; a thin, stiff-looking woman in dress grays. He winked in reply. Yes, they'd be all right; no question about that.

The people telling about Barnes' exploit exaggerated: there'd only been fifteen women in the house, not thirty-one. And they exaggerated about Adele as well. She hadn't really killed a hundred Alliance soldiers on Kostroma with single shots to the head, snapping the rounds off every time a target offered.

But it probably wasn't as much of an exaggeration as the story about Barnes.

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Framed