WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(116)

But if you believed that, you could just as easily believe that Fate was giving with one hand in order to snatch the gift back with the other. Best trust to courage, discipline, and good marksmanship.

The APC shuddered as Barnes plowed the hedgerow with his side panel, then settled. When the driver cut the fans to idle, his own sigh of relief was audible over the sounds of the restive vehicle.

"Let's go," Woetjans said quietly. "Remember, company manners."

The detachment stepped down from the compartment in two ranks. Adele wiped her palms on her trouser legs. She'd thought she was perfectly calm.

Adele led the way up the ramp with Hogg at her side; Woetjans was one of the pair bringing up the rear. The Cinnabar sailors couldn't march in step and Adele didn't know what a military pace was, but Daniel assured her that they'd look out of place if they moved like parade-ground troops while wearing commando uniforms.

Despite the hour, lights were on all over the palace. The only time that was likely to have been true in the past was when the Elector was giving a party.

Adele saw the Kostromans for the first time since she'd entered the palace grounds: a group of low-ranking clerks, looking haggard and frightened as they left the building. She knew from her signals intelligence that the Alliance command was determined to take over every aspect of Kostroman life as soon as possible, but Kostroman bureaucrats were still necessary to the process. Their new masters were working them within an inch of their lives.

Or a step beyond. One of the messages Adele had skimmed was an order for the execution of a clerk who'd upset a glass of wine over a stack of account books while eating supper at his desk. The official charge was "treason against the Alliance of Free Stars." As the member of the Alliance military government had explained in her covering memo, the real purpose was to encourage other clerks to be more careful.

They entered the rear porch, covered by the overhang of the second and third stories. There was another guardpost, this time manned by troops whose rigid armor and opaque faceshields made them look like statues with only a rough resemblance to humans. Plasma cannon threatened from behind two semicircles of sandbags. Between the gun nests stood another soldier with an electronic reader.

Adele handed over the routing card she'd taken from the helmet of the commando lieutenant, a programmable chip in a rectangular polymer matrix. It had carried the commandoes' orders in electronic form that could be read on the helmet visors of every member of the unit so that complex operations could be executed without communications errors.

The faceless guard inserted the card in his reader. Adele had reprogrammed it so that it showed only a destination—the Elector's Palace—and reserved all other information under the highest security level of Blue Chrome operations.

The guard looked at the projected data, then returned the card to Adele and stepped out of the way. "Proceed," he said.

Or was it, "she said"? The voice was an electronic synthesis, just as were all sensory inputs the guard received. What sort of person could willingly live and function in a prison so strait that it touched their skin at every point?

But then, there were people who probably thought work in a library was a sentence to Hell. The universe had room for all sorts; though God knew, present events proved that many people weren't willing to leave it at that.

Adele turned left with the sailors sauntering behind her. Strip lights glued to the ceilings brightened the main corridor. People, two or three in a clot, stood talking in hushed voices outside the offices. Inside were Kostromans at tables made from shelving laid over furniture and stacked with paperwork, some of it from moldy boxes that must have come up from storage in the basement.

Each room had an Alliance overseer who looked tired but very much in command. The Alliance must have moved in a civilian administration as large as or larger than the invasion's military component.

Adele glanced to left and right in cold appraisal at those she passed. Bureaucrats, even Alliance personnel, avoided her gaze as she passed to the back stairs. No civilian wanted to know why a squad of commandoes had been summoned here.

Because of the bright illumination she noticed the corridor's murals for the first time. They showed scenes of Kostroman life during centuries past. The backgrounds were so varied that they must be of specific different islands. Fishermen cast hand lines from a sailing vessel; a farm family picked citrus fruit; a starship lifted from the water as a crowd cheered.

The artist had been skillful, but grime and the band rubbed by shoulders of those passing in the hall had reduced them to a shadow of what they must have been. Adele thought of her library. Was it perhaps enough out of the way that the palace's new masters had spared it, or had the books been treated with the same brutal unconcern that had tossed antique furniture from the windows of reception rooms to clear them for office space?