WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(143)

The aide's face was still. She shrugged. "Because you know what I am," she said, "but you don't really care. Any more than you care how tall I am or that I'm a woman. That's just information to you."

For no conscious reason, Adele thought of the people she'd killed here on Kostroma. She didn't know their names. She didn't know the name of a single one of them, and nothing she could do would bring them back.

She couldn't breathe life into dead clay.

"Yes, all right, Tovera," Adele said. "I don't know if I'll be able to pay you, and I'm not even sure you can travel back to Cinnabar with me"—though she suspected Woetjans would stow the servant aboard even if Daniel unaccountably refused to take her formally—"but welcome to service with the Mundys of Chatsworth."

Adele smiled like an icicle. "Sadly decayed though I'm afraid the house is."



Daniel moved his hand in front of his companion's faceshield and gestured toward the blue magnificence of Kostroma "rising" beyond the stern of the Princess Cecile. "Isn't it a wonderful view, Adele?" he said. "Though I guess you saw it before when you boarded the command node."

Adele's voice, tinged with a dry humor audible despite the compression of the radio intercom, replied, "I had other things on my mind at the time. And these helmets actually allow one to see out."

She touched her faceshield. She now wore an RCN rigging suit, as did Daniel and most of the forty crewmen working on the corvette's hull and masts. A few ratings still had Kostroman rigging suits, bulkier and more difficult to put on and take off than their Cinnabar equivalents. Even so there was no comparison between this equipment, meant for work in vacuum, and the lightweight transfer suits which were worn only minutes at a time.

Hogg and Domenico were working in separate ways to replace the lost Kostroman gear. Daniel suspected that meant the Princess Cecile would leave for Cinnabar with a complete double set of rigging suits. If nothing else they'd make useful material to trade with the complements of other ships in Harbor #3.

Daniel led Adele by the hand toward the repaired portion of the hull. He was familiar with the stiction-release of the magnetic soles each time his foot lifted, but his companion looked as though she'd blundered into a tar pool. Release—for one boot at a time—was automatic at a moderate level of upward pressure, but Daniel remembered how frustrating he'd found it the first time.

He was six years old, then, wearing a suit that must have been made for a midget as he walked the hull of an intrasystem transport with Uncle Stacey holding his hand. Now he was on his own starship, his own command, beneath the splendor of a distant world.

Of course it wouldn't be his command for very much longer. Well, perhaps some day. Fate had given Daniel Leary everything he'd hoped for as a boy: far planets and a starship command. Fate probably wouldn't take the planets away from him, and if he never again commanded, well . . .

He laughed. Adele turned within her rigid helmet to look at him.

"Just thinking that I should've been more careful about what I wished for," Daniel said musingly. "It's funny how things work out sometimes."

"Yes," Adele said. "It is."

Daniel again put a hand in front of Adele so that she'd see it, then pointed to the mast they were trudging past. Six riggers were raising and lowering it repeatedly to be sure it was properly installed. Lieutenant Mon, borrowed as an unassigned officer to help refit the Princess Cecile, was directing them.

"We replaced three of these as battle-damaged," Daniel explained. He and Adele were on a private channel, neither interfering with the work crews nor overheard by them. "If the parts' cost had been coming out of our own maintenance budget, there's probably only one I'd have bothered with changing. These spars came from transports caught in the Floating Harbor."

"They were prizes, then?" Adele said. "Do I have the term right?"

Daniel smiled faintly. "That's the word you mean," he said, "but in this case the ships themselves may not turn out to be prizes. The Kostroman vessels will probably be released to the original owners with a payment to the fleet that recaptured them. But after a victory like this everybody expects warship crews to bring their ships up to specification from what's lying around, so to speak."

He tapped the hull plating with a toe. "The frames here were fractured when the missile grazed us," he said. "A good thing I didn't know that or I'd have been afraid to reverse course under full power."

Adele turned and looked at him. She smiled.

"Yes, well," Daniel admitted in embarrassment. "I suppose I might have done pretty much the same thing but I'd have worried about it."