WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(136)

Daniel smiled faintly. He could imagine what Admiral Ingreit would say when he heard the message. On the other hand, he could imagine what Speaker Corder Leary might have said in similar circumstances. In that, at least, father and son were more alike than different.

Daniel switched to the channel dedicated to communication between the Princess Cecile and Adele's detachment. He'd better inform the command node promptly, or Admiral Ingreit was going to find his squadron in range of a hostile and demonstrably lethal defensive constellation.





BOOK FOUR


Twenty people sat at consoles around the walls of the outer room. Adele would have called them clerks if this had been a civilian setting. She didn't know what they were on a battleship.

"Come in, please," said the man seated at the desk of the small inner office. "And close the hatch behind you if you would."

Adele obeyed. She didn't like the feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she didn't think the problem was her return to gravity after six days weightless in the command node. Strictly speaking the Rene Descartes was under one-gee acceleration, not real gravity, but the only difference Adele could tell was that the battleship had changed course twice in the hours since she'd come aboard.

"We've completed integrating the defense array your ships brought with the Alliance mines already in place," she said. "I'd like to return to the ground, now. I was told to see you about transportation."

The man seated on the other side of the desk was tall, very fit, and about thirty years old. He wore an officer's uniform, but there were no rank insignia on his collar or sleeves.

The man chuckled. "Yes," he said, "we'll talk about transportation in a moment." He stood and reached across the desk to offer his hand. "My name's Elphinstone. Please sit down, Ms. Mundy."

The walls of the office had large flat-plate displays that gave the impression of windows, though the scenes were different. A starscape spread behind the desk as if the room were open to vacuum. Adele found the effect disconcerting, which was very likely Elphinstone's intention.

His handshake was firm; a little too firm. Elphinstone was playing a variation of the childish game of trying to crush the other party's hand with his own. He was demonstrating how much stronger he was than the small woman, and by implication how completely the situation was under his control.

Adele imagined Elphinstone's eyes bulging to either side of the bullethole. She shook her head in violent self-disgust. The sailors had tried, but it was impossible to clean the control node well enough to get rid of the smell of rotting blood.

Elphinstone wasn't smiling now. He coughed, then gestured to the single chair in front of the desk and repeated, "Please sit down, mistress."

His composure returned as he settled into his own more comfortable chair. "It's quite an honor to meet you," he said. "You're the reason for our easy victory here on Kostroma, you know."

Adele looked at the wall showing Kostroma City from an apparent thousand feet in the air. Most of the fires were out by now. The Alliance forces on the ground had been willing to surrender when they realized they were trapped beneath a hostile fleet and automatic defensive array.

The Kostromans themselves had felt otherwise when they saw that Alliance personnel were suddenly at their mercy. Assassination was a staple of local culture; mercy toward one's enemies was not. From the reports Adele listened to in the control node, it seemed that folk wearing Zojira colors had been the quickest to turn on their former allies. They may have hoped their neighbors would forget what they'd been doing a few weeks before.

"I was part of a group," Adele said. "A group I'm very proud to have been a member of. And I've helped put the defensive array in shape, so now I'd like to be returned to the ground."

The technicians from the Cinnabar squadron were skilled, but they didn't know the Alliance system in detail and they didn't have Adele's ability to chart paths through the unfamiliar. She and the four programmers from Willoughby—volunteers, now that they'd been freed—remained in charge of the Alliance command node until the systems were fully merged: integrated to the standards of Adele Mundy.

"You're far too modest," Elphinstone said with a chuckle that made Adele think of a stream of oil. "Fortunately, you have friends to advertise your merits, so to speak. Otherwise—"

There was no change in his voice, but his hard, brown eyes glittered.

"—there'd be some problems with your background."

"My understanding," Adele said in a voice that was perfectly distinct and as flat as if synthesized, "was that an Edict of Reconciliation was passed nine years ago to reintegrate survivors of the Three Circles Conspiracy into Cinnabar society."