The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 1


Bantry Estate, Cinnabar

Daniel Leary, otherwise Captain Daniel Oliver Leary, Republic of Cinnabar Navy—but here merely “Master Daniel” or “Squire”—stood poised in the bow of the skiff with his arms at his sides. The throwing stick was in his right hand with the line nocked in the cleft and the lure dangling. Hogg knelt in the stern, holding the tiller/throttle of the tiny motor that edged the boat toward the floating weed.

The lure was a streamlined tube about the size of a plump man’s middle finger. Its batteries powered the caged contra-rotating props, but control signals came down the line from the handset now resting on the planks in front of Hogg.

When the lure hit the water, it would circle until it picked up the pattern of electrical impulses given off by the nerves of the species it was set for, then home on that source. It was set now for floorfish; two or three sprats would fillet into an excellent dinner for Daniel and Miranda, his fiancée, who was waiting in the manor.

Daniel tensed to make the cast. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, boy,” Hogg said. “Another ten feet, and don’t tell me your arm’s strong enough to cast into the center from here.”

The skiff continued to creep toward the weed. Hogg spoke quietly so as not to disturb the prey, but his voice was as harsh as a rough-cut file. Here off the coast of the Bantry estate their releationship was the same as it had been twenty years earlier when the old poacher took it on himself to teach the young master how to fish and to hunt, and how to be a man.

Teaching Daniel to be a man wasn’t part of a plan, but Hogg was a man himself and made assumptions. If he’d been asked, he would have said that Corder Leary wanted a son who would stand up for himself, who would carry out his duties, and who would take responsibility for his own actions.

Overhead, a trio of Barranca birds sailed southward, following the cold current which had bent toward shore during the volcanic eruption hundreds of miles out in the Western Ocean. The birds were so high that even Daniel’s sharp eyes couldn’t distinguish the two separate pairs of wings on each. The occasional low-frequency grunts of the birds communicating were barely audible, even to ears trained to recognize them.

Looking back on his childhood, Daniel suspected that his father had been too busy chasing money and power to spare any thoughts for the boy who lived with his mother on the Bantry Estate. Still, Speaker Leary wouldn’t have minded what Daniel was learning, any more than he would have cared about the weather over Bantry while he was comfortable in the Leary townhouse in the capital, Xenos.

Hogg switched off the motor. It was inaudible even while it was running, but Daniel had felt the vibration through the thin soles of his moccasins. The skiff drifted forward on momentum. Daniel swung his right arm up in parallel with the keel. At the height of its arc, his fingers released the line which he’d clamped to the throwing stick till that moment. The lure sailed off in a flat curve that plopped it into the center of the large patch of weed.

“A nice cast,” said Hogg softly. “You haven’t forgotten everything I taught you, I guess.”

“I haven’t forgotten not to draw to an inside straight, either,” Daniel said. He remained upright for a better view, though standing in the small boat would have been dangerous despite the skiff’s broad bottom if the water hadn’t been still and Daniel’s own balance perfect. The skills he’d gained as a boy on Bantry had been sharpened since he’d entered the Naval Academy and begun running along the spars of starships.

Instead of circling as expected, the lure vanished instantly. “It looks like it just sank,” Daniel said, squinting. He had a pair of multi-function RCN goggles on his forehead, but they wouldn’t help him look through the water. “Do you suppose the motor failed?”

“The motor’s running fine and the props are free,” Hogg said testily, looking at the readout on his control unit. “It’s just got a bite.

“Unless—” Hogg’s delay was too short to have allowed Daniel to speak even if he’d intended to. “—that bloody weed has caught it. It’s the deep-sea weed with thicker hair. But the lure seems okay.…”

He and Daniel were in the channel between Borden’s Cay and the mainland, but recent nor’westers had brought considerable oceanic debris through the inlets, including unfamiliar fish parboiled by the volcano. This patch of weed looked from any distance like the normal inshore variety; but as Hogg had said, it was the open-water species whose clumps were tied together by tendrils sturdy enough to withstand serious storms.

“Want to haul back the lure and try near the creek mouth?” Daniel said, frowning.

He was closer to the weed. He could have noticed before Hogg did that it was slightly darker than it should have been, but Hogg had spent most of his sixty years learning the tricks and whims of nature on the Bantry Estate. Missing something that Hogg also had missed wasn’t a good reason to kick himself.


“It’s still running true,” Hogg said, “so don’t get in front of yourself. Maybe we’re just having fisherman’s luck.”

Hogg had been concentrating on the holographic read-out hovering above the control unit; his fierceness suggested he was planning to take a bite out of the display. A brief smile turned his unshaven face into something remarkably ugly.

Daniel smiled also. Like Hogg, he was used to having luck when he was fishing. Most of it was bad.

The channel wasn’t much over a quarter mile wide here. Similar vegetation grew on both the cay and the mainland; but the trees on the mainland shore were taller, and they were much taller further inland where storms less often drove salt water over the roots.

Birds shrieked and clucked, but they remained hidden in the foliage. Insect-eaters wouldn’t be out in numbers until nightfall, but Daniel was surprised not to see the fish-eaters which were usually snatching meals from the surface of the water or gorging on carrion on the mud. A skiff with two fishermen wasn’t reason to frighten them under cover.

“We’ve got one,” Hogg said, adjusting both thumb controls of the handset. “We bloody have got one.”

The lure was multi-function. When it was attached, the controller sent impulses into the nervous system of the fish. You couldn’t actually control the behavior even of a fish, but a disruption equivalent to an unscratchable itch would eventually bring the prey thrashing to the surface as it tried to rid itself of the irritation.

Daniel set the throwing stick down on the floorboards. He touched the trident with hooked barbs of spring steel, then thought again. The pole was only six feet long. That was as much as they wanted to carry in so small a boat, but it wasn’t enough to reach the center of the weed from where they now floated.

“I’ll go in,” he said. He didn’t want to foul the lure’s prop in heavy weed. Hogg grunted agreement, still concentrating on the controller.

Sitting down, Daniel pulled off his moccasins. He probably ought to take off his baggy trousers also, but sometimes small crustaceans clung to floating weed, and he didn’t want to transfer them to his wedding tackle. As he started to his feet again, the skiff rocked violently.

“Bloody hell and damnation!” Hogg said, looking up from the display but not dropping the controller.

Daniel’s first thought was that there had been another sub-sea earthquake, a tremor like those which the volcano had spawned in recent months. The weed lifted in a great swell. Instead of subsiding, it hung in streamers on the dark, twitching mass which floated on the surface of the water.

“On my sainted mother’s soul,” Hogg said in a tone of reverence. “We’ve got an adult. What’s it doing here?”

Daniel had heard enough stories growing up on Bantry—some of them from Hogg himself—to know that if Hogg’s mother had been a saint, it was only by comparison with Hogg’s father. That aside, there was no doubt that they’d caught an adult floorfish.

If caught was the right word.

“The volcano must have brought it up,” Daniel said. Adult floorfish meandered across the bottom at three thousand feet or deeper, though their eggs hatched in marshes and the sprats spent their first two years in coastal waters. “It’s sixty feet long if it’s an inch.”

“And the flesh is no good for anything but feeding pigs,” Hogg said with a tone of regret. “Even if we could land it.”

He adjusted his controller again.

The floorfish continued to quiver, so Daniel didn’t rise from his knees. There wasn’t any real risk. When Hogg released the lure, the fish—it was really a blanket with a mouth at one end and a body filled by the gut which processed ooze that the mouth sucked in—would sink back to the bottom.

Daniel grinned. The worst danger that the floorfish posed was that if it didn’t find its way back out to sea soon, the warmth and higher oxygen content of the surface waters would probably kill it. In that case, its many tons of rotting flesh and partially digested ooze would make a considerable uninhabitable until the process was complete. Fortunately, nobody except hunters and sport fishermen spent much time in this swampy portion of Bantry.

The fish continued to wobble like a huge jelly while Hogg stabbed at his controller. “It won’t release!” he snarled. “I don’t know if something’s corroded or the probes are just too deep in that thick hide.”

He stuck his hand into a baggy pocket and brought out a folding knife with a knuckleduster hilt; the blade snicked open. “I say we cut the line and chalk it up to experience.”

“Do you have another lure?” Daniel said.

Hogg shrugged. “Back to the Manor,” he said. “We’ve got three sprats now in the cold chest. That’s enough for dinner; and if it’s not, well, me and Em—”

That would be the Widow Brice.

“—can find something else. She’s not big on fish anyhow.”

That was all true, but…

“I’ll fetch the lure,” Daniel said, swinging his right foot into the water carefully. “I was figuring to go in with the trident anyway.”

He eased over the side by stages, gripping the gunwale with both hands and lowering himself carefully to reduce the splash. The water was noticeably warm; more sign of the volcanic disruption, he supposed.

Hogg had leaned to his left instinctively to balance Daniel’s weight. “I can’t turn off the current or the fish’ll go right back to the bottom,” he said. “That means it’s going to keep on shivering like that.”

“Right,” said Daniel, breast-stroking away from the skiff with his head out of water. “Well, if it swallows me, you can cut me out with that knife of yours.”

The weed wasn’t as thick as it looked from even a short distance away. The tendrils which bound palm-sized clumps into mats the size of a soccer pitch parted as easily as gauze between Daniel’s hands. He wouldn’t want to swim miles through the weed, but he thought he could if he had to. Twenty yards was no problem.

The line of optical fiber was invisible except that when the sun caught it at the right angle, it became a slash of light from the water to the lure on the black/brown skin. Daniel was probably brushing it as he swam/paddled toward the floorfish, but its touch went unnoticed in the weed.

The floorfish had a fringe of fins all along its side. They extended about the length of Daniel’s forearm and were stiffened with cartilage, not spines. They appeared to undulate gently, but there was enough power behind the continuous motion to push at Daniel like a strong current when he was close enough to touch the fish.

Daniel paused, then dived and came up like a sprat trying to escape a predator. His out-stretched hand gripped the lure, and his weight pulled it free as he slid down the slimy side of the floorfish.

“Master!” Hogg shouted. “Back away! Keep the bloody lure on your bare skin and in the water between you, okay? Don’t bloody argue!”

“Between” wasn’t a direction, but Hogg must mean the floorfish if he wanted Daniel to back away. The older man’s voice wasn’t panicked, but there was more stress in it than Daniel remembered since the night Hogg had readied the Bantry tenants against trouble that might sweep in from the darkness. He’d handed the seven-year-old Daniel Leary a shotgun and told him to aim for heads because face-shields weren’t as tough as the body-armor which the attackers might be wearing.

No one came to Bantry that night. In the morning, Daniel and the others learned that Speaker Leary had drowned the Three Circles Conspiracy in blood, wiping out the leaders of the Popular Party and their families—save for a few of the proscribed who happened to be off planet at the time the crisis broke.

One of those survivors was Adele Mundy, 16-year-old daughter of Lucius Mundy, the leader of the Popular Party. She had just left to study in the Academic Collections on Blythe. At the time, Adele’s name wouldn’t have meant anything to Daniel, or for that matter to Corder Leary. The girl was a scholar and wholly apolitical.

Daniel, a newly made lieutenant, had met Adele, then Electoral Librarian on Kostroma, five years ago. That meeting had changed their lives. Both of them were better off by orders of magnitude than they would have been without the other’s support.

The floorfish submerged like a mass of sludge slipping into the channel. Suction tugged at Daniel, but because the fish’s body shaped itself to the water, it was much less of a problem than what a sinking ship of similar size would have caused. The fish left behind an effluvium of ancient mud, cloying and slightly sulfurous.

Something lifted briefly above the undulating weed, then slipped back. Daniel knew what Hogg had seen from the height of the boat.

He knew why Hogg was worried, too.

Daniel splashed, hoping that he was moving toward the boat as Hogg had ordered. It wasn’t a very effective way to proceed, but he wasn’t about to stretch his legs out behind him to backstroke properly. That would put his bare, kicking feet very close to the head of the wolf eel, and the predator’s jaws were armed with six-inch fangs.

Wolf eels attached their sucker tails to floorfish. They didn’t harm or even affect the huge scavenger, but when the giant maw rooted up some lesser muck-dweller, the eel snatched it for a meal.


This was an extremely large floorfish, even for an adult, and the eel was a similarly impressive member of its species. Because its jaws and belly expanded, it could easily ingest prey the size of an average-sized man.

“I got the lure set to female eel,” Hogg said in a hoarse whisper. “If it figures you’re a female, it likely won’t try to eat you. Just keep coming back. I don’t want to foul the prop in the weed, but I will if I have to.”

“I don’t especially want to be buggered by an eel either,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a real concern—like other fish, the eels sprayed milt onto the eggs the female had just extruded into the sea—but it made Hogg chuckle, which is what Daniel had intended.

Hogg would rather die than let anything harm the Young Master. Daniel didn’t want him to leap into the eel’s jaws as the best way of saving his charge.

Daniel continued to splash. He didn’t look around. He couldn’t see anything through the agitated water. Perhaps Hogg could see more.

They were using the lure’s field to override the bioelectrical field of Daniel’s own body. Hogg was, at least; it wouldn’t have occurred to Daniel to do that. He’d certainly think of it should the situation arise again.

“Now, hold the lure in your left hand and hook your right over the gunnel,” Hogg said, speaking from just above Daniel’s head. He was again as calm as he had been years before while teaching his young charge to squeeze rather than jerk his trigger. “When you’re ready, you’ll swing up and I’ll haul you aboard. No problem at all for a strong young lad like you, right?”

“No problem,” Daniel whispered. His attendance at temple was sporadic at best, but he really would try to improve in the future.

Daniel’s hair brushed the skiff’s hull. He fumbled with his right hand, bicycling his legs to keep him up until he could grip a thwart. He took a deep breath and another, consciously trying to slow his heart rate.

He had only had one glimpse of the eel. It had seemed huge. Even allowing for the exaggeration of fear, it was probably ten feet long. Its slender body trailed behind a head the size of a bushel basket.

Hogg gripped Daniel’s left arm, just above the elbow. He wasn’t putting any pressure on the contact yet.

“On three,” Daniel said. “One, two, thr—”

Water exploded as Daniel rolled up and over the gunwale. The eel must have come after him because Hogg shouted and Daniel heard the crunch as Hogg’s right arm drove the trident through the bones of the creature’s skull.

Daniel rolled into the belly of the skiff. Hogg had gotten out of his way, though Daniel wasn’t sure how. He wasn’t even sure he still had both legs, and his hands were locked together in mutual reassurance.

Bloody Hell, that was a bad one!

The skiff was rocking violently. Hogg shoved them backward and released the shaft of the harpoon. The little motor was backing with all the power it had available, ignoring the risk of weed clogging its intake.

Daniel raised his head to look over the gunnel. The shaft flailed back and forth, sometimes under the surface, as the fatally injured eel curvetted. The body behind the soot-colored head was so nearly transparent that Daniel could make out the bones of the skeleton.

His guess of ten feet long had been conservative. This eel was probably big enough to have swallowed the skiff itself along with the two men.

“I wonder what the record for a wolf eel is?” Daniel said. “Taken by hand, I mean.”

“You want this one as a trophy,” Hogg said hoarsely, “then you’re going to have to come back by yourself and get it. Me, I’m heading for home; and when I get there, I’m going to get very drunk.”

“Yes,” said Daniel. “I think that’s a good plan for both of us.”

Xenos on Cinnabar

Lady Adele Mundy—she had been released from the RCN when her ship was paid off, so she could not properly use her naval rank of Signals Officer—stood before one of the chest-high reading tables in the Long Room of the Navy House Archives. Her Personal Data Unit sat to the left on the table; to the right was the small stack of ships’ logs which she was copying; and in the center was a flat conversion device eight inches deep by ten inches across.

The converter was a specialist item and would have cost a great deal to buy, even if she could have found one for sale. This one had been given her as an adjunct to her work for her other employer, Mistress Bernis Sand—the head of Cinnabar’s intelligence service, or at least one branch of it.

Adele didn’t think she was flattering herself to believe that she was in her way Mistress Sand’s most effective agent. She was fairly certain that the intelligence arms of the Alliance of Free Stars, the Republic’s greatest rival and frequent enemy, would have agreed with that assessment.

She put another log in the converter. This was a chip recording, but the format was unique in Adele’s experience and may not have been common some seven hundred years ago when, according to the label, the officers of a freighter out of Palafox created it.

The converter whined for a moment, then projected the first entries through the data unit’s holographic display for Adele to view while the remainder of the contents was stored. She wasn’t trying to absorb all the data on the logs at this moment, but neither was she merely a copyist. She had repeatedly found cases where the labels slapped on quickly by disinterested clerks were seriously in error.

Adele smiled faintly. The clerks probably thought that items which hadn’t been incorporated into the general database were of no value. It was true that the logs were valueless except to someone who was very skilled and very obsessive. Even the skilled, obsessive Adele Mundy was unlikely to find any data that she would use during the however many further years of her life.

On the other hand, she had nothing better to do, and she liked gathering data. There was probably nothing she liked more.

Tovera, Adele’s servant, stood at the desk to Adele’s left, nearer the entrance. Besides the clerk, a naval rating, they had been the only people present in the Long Room, but an RCN midshipman wearing her 2nd Class uniform—her Grays—had entered and was talking to the clerk.

Tovera moved slightly, facing the doorway. She lifted the lid of the attaché case on her desk, just enough to reach inside.

Adele was by now too familiar with Tovera’s ways to be surprised; she didn’t even smile. Tovera wasn’t precisely paranoid, but she saw no reason why an unfamiliar midshipman might not intend to kill her mistress; therefore she prepared against the possibility.

After all, Tovera had nothing better to do either, and she had never cared about the reasons why she was told to kill someone. She had been trained by the Fifth Bureau, the intelligence service which reported directly to Guarantor Porra, the autocrat of the Alliance. Tovera had changed her allegiance from the Alliance to Adele Mundy personally, but she continued to follow her training.

Tovera did most things by rote. She was a sociopath and far too intelligent to make social decisions for herself. She would have been executed long since if she had done that, because she generally saw the simplest way out of a problem as being to kill the person making the problem.

So long as Tovera did as Adele directed, she would remain within socially acceptable norms. Thus far obeying Adele had given Tovera ample opportunity to kill people, which she liked to do as much as she could be said to like anything.

“Well, Midshipman,” the clerk said, raising his voice enough to be heard where Adele stood, thirty feet away. “I guess despite your exalted rank, you’re going to have to check the catalogue just like lesser mortals. And for that you’ll have to go back up to the lobby, because the terminal down here’s on the blink.”

“The catalogue only lists the logs of the Princess Cecile while the corvette was on the RCN list,” the midshipman said. “I know that she sailed a number of times in private commission, and I’ve heard that copies of those logs were deposited with Navy House also.”

In theory, the midshipman ranked a naval rating. In practice, she was probably on half pay since so many ships had been laid up after the Treaty of Amiens, and nothing was of lower importance to the RCN bureaucracy than a midshipman on the beach.

The clerk shrugged. “Could be, honey,” he said. “You’re welcome to look to your little heart’s content.”

“Excuse me, mistress?” Adele called. She had personal experience with poverty, since the Mundy wealth had escheated to the Republic when her parents were executed; besides which, she disliked people who didn’t do their jobs. “If you’ll come back here, I may be able to help you.”

As she had expected, her helpfulness irritated the clerk. He gave Adele a black look and returned to his desk display. He was watching a sporting event, though Adele—who had checked it out of habit—couldn’t imagine why a score of men (they were all men) were shoving a stone quoit up and down a grass field.

This basement area of the archives was more a storage room than a library in proper form. Floor-to-ceiling cages of woven-wire fencing marched down both sides of the room. Inside each were file cabinets, but boxes of additional material were stacked on the floors of many cages, particularly those nearer the entrance.


People using the archives could switch on direct lighting to supplement the glow strips in the arched concrete ceiling, but not all the lights worked. Specifically, the cage beside the desk where Adele was working didn’t have working internal lights. The unsorted boxes within were lumps in shadow.

The midshipman strode past the clerk’s desk without looking back. She was petite and dark-haired, and she was obviously angry.

“It’s ridiculous that an RCN officer has to depend on the courtesy of a private scholar to find something in RCN archives!” she said, probably hoping that her voice would carry to where the clerk sat. “Still, if you know where the logs might be stored, mistress, that’s the main thing. I’d be very grateful.”

Her nametag read Hale. She had probably bought her Grays used, because they had more wear than someone only a few years out of the Academy was likely to have given them.

“I think you’ll find them in there,” Adele said in a neutral voice, pointing. “In the second box down on the left-hand stack, the metal one. Tovera, help her with your handlight.”

Tovera opened the wire gate and gestured the midshipman into the cage. They could be padlocked, but most of them were not.

Hale followed Tovera’s narrow beam of light, lifted off the covering box, and took out the clear container within the one indicated.

“Perfect!” Hale said after a glance. “They’re on RCN standard chips, and it looks like they’re all of them here. And in order!”

Adele smiled faintly. A stranger like Hale probably wouldn’t have recognized the expression if she had even noticed it.

Hale came out and Tovera closed the cage behind her.

“I suppose you’re wondering about these,” Hale said as she set the chips on a table across the aisle from Adele. She didn’t appear to have noticed Tovera. Adele’s servant excelled in being unobtrusive in any normal social setting. “You see, I was in the Academy with two midshipmen who were assigned to Captain Leary, only he wasn’t a captain then. You know—the famous one?”

Tovera didn’t snicker. Adele nodded expressionlessly. She did indeed know Captain Leary.

“Well, I knew them,” Hale said. She took an ordinary chip reader out of its belt pouch and set it on her table. “One was pretty sharp, I’ll grant, but the other always struck me as being as thick as two short planks. But they’ve both been promoted to lieutenant with no interest behind them.”

She shrugged. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands since the peace,” she said, “so I thought maybe if I studied the logbooks I could figure out how they did it. Besides being lucky to serve under Captain Leary, I mean.”

“You’d be talking about Blantyre and Cory, I presume,” Adele said. Hale’s age made the identification certain, but she still had to resist her desire to check Naval Academy class lists. “I’ll remind you that Blantyre’s luck led to her being killed two years ago.”

“You knew Blantyre, then?” Hale said in surprise. “I didn’t realize.…”

Adele nodded again. She was wearing a plain civilian business suit in dark blue. The light here wasn’t good enough for anyone but a couturier to realize that the outfit was of top quality. Hale had assumed that she was a private scholar, and Adele hadn’t bothered to correct her. Actually, she supposed she was a private scholar at the moment.

“Blantyre struck me as the best kind of RCN officer,” Adele said. “Competent in astrogation and other technical subjects, and a fighting officer above all else. But as I said, killed in battle.”

“Everybody dies, mistress,” Hale said. “Very few die with a record equal to Blantyre’s.”

She eyed Adele more carefully, but she clearly didn’t see anything more than she had at first glance. Tovera wasn’t the only one who remained unobtrusive under most circumstances.

“Blantyre and I were friends,” Hale said. “I’m not the sort to go put a bouquet on her grave—”

On her cenotaph, Adele corrected silently. Blantyre’s body had been vaporized off Cacique, along with those of fifty-odd of her shipmates.

“—but I figure if I can use her record to learn how to be a better RCN officer, that’s a better memorial anyway. And—”

Hale straightened slightly, as though she were coming to attention for a reviewing officer.

“—you’re right about her. When you beat Blantyre on the Battle Board, you knew you’d done something. But more often than not, she beat me.”

Adele smiled very faintly at the pride in the midshipman’s voice; albeit probably justifiable pride. She wouldn’t have thought anyone could read the expression, but apparently Hale did because she flushed slightly.

“Please excuse my discourtesy,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Lucinda Hale.”

Adele shook her hand with a carefully gauged polite pressure. “I am Lady Mundy,” she said, using her civilian rank rather than the one Hale might have noticed in the logs of Daniel’s RCN commissions. “I’m pleased to have met you, Mistress Hale.”

Her personal data unit flashed a silent signal. Adele glanced at it, reading the oral message which had been converted to text, as she preferred it. “Yes, all right,” she replied. “I should be there within the hour.”

Tovera was efficiently replacing the set of logs in the file drawer from which they had come. She didn’t know anything about the summons, but she knew that her mistress wouldn’t leave the archive until she had at least restored it to the condition in which she had found it.

Hale looked as though she might be going to speak further, but in the end she merely nodded. She slipped into her reader the first of the logs of the private yacht Princess Cecile, owned and commanded by Captain Daniel Leary. Adele was glad. She didn’t want to insult the young woman, but she didn’t have time for conversation.

As Adele left the long room, she started to put her personal data unit away in the thigh pocket tailored into her trousers. Unexpectedly, the clerk snarled, “You know, it’s traditional to leave a little something for the attendant, but I suppose you’re too high and mighty to worry about that.”

Adele stopped and looked at him, then sat on one of the three chairs in the anteroom. They were standard RCN designs of pressed steel and steel mesh, identical to those of any warship save that these were not bolted to the deck. She brought up the data unit.

“Your name is Dozois?” said Adele. She wasn’t in quite as much of a hurry as she had thought. “Yes, Tech Five Dozois.”

The data unit’s holographic screen was a blur to anyone save the user herself. Adele had a control wand in either hand; she found them the quickest and most accurate form of entry and access. She often used her data unit as a remote control device for other units. She was doing so now with the clerk’s terminal, though he wasn’t aware of the fact yet.

“What do you care what my name is?” the clerk said. He got to his feet. “Hey! Whatta you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving,” Adele said, standing up again and putting the data unit away. She was almost to the stairwell before Tovera turned and followed her.

“I thought he might try to stop us,” said Tovera regretfully. “Well, maybe he’ll be there the next time we visit.”

“I doubt it,” Adele said as her boots scuffed briskly up the concrete steps to the outside entrance. “He just sent a message to his immediate superior, copying the Chief of the Navy Board, detailing his failures of performance and adding that he keeps a bottle of gin in his desk.”

“I didn’t see the gin,” Tovera said. She was in front again so that she could step into the street ahead of her mistress.

“Nor did I,” said Adele, “but I smelled it on his breath when he was shouting at me.”

She gestured toward the tram stop in front of Navy House. “We’re going to the Shippers’ and Merchants’ Treasury to meet Deirdre Leary. I don’t know the intended purpose of the meeting.”

A tram pulled up at the stop, swaying slightly on its overhead monorail as it disgorged men and women in their best RCN uniforms. Those who had enough rank to have afforded a set wore their Whites, often too tight for them now. They would be uncomfortable waiting in the hall for an assignment clerk to call their name…or most likely, not to call their name.

Adele and her servant got on when the car had emptied. Tovera punched the address of the bank into the routing computer.

Deirdre Leary was Daniel’s older sister and Adele’s banker. She was also the representative of Corder Leary and the Leary family interests to both Daniel and Adele. Daniel had broken violently with his father at age 16. As for Adele, if she ever came face to face with the man who had ordered her family’s slaughter, she would shoot him dead.

Adele could imagine many reasons for Deirdre to request a meeting at short notice—no notice, in fact. None of the possibilities were good.