WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(16)

Commander Stacey Bergen was an astrogator whose reputation inspired deserved awe in others, his nephew included. But with a quiet and never-spoken assurance very different from the pride that also was a part of his character, Daniel Leary felt he was as able an astrogator as anyone he'd ever met except his Uncle Stacey.

Lt. Weisshampl got to her feet with a slow grace that belied the amount she'd had to drink. She was a tall woman with the features of someone more petite. Her parents had some status but no money; an aunt, however, had married wealth and provided Weisshampl with the support an officer needed beyond RCN pay.

She raised her glass. "Fellow officers," she said, "I give you Command. May she come to all of us, and may we prove worthy of her!"

"By God, yes!" Cassanos said and gulped his wine. Daniel blinked, for the midshipman's words were those he'd caught before they reached his own lips.

Lt. Mon drank with a face like a raincloud. He lowered his empty glass and gripped it in both hands as if to strangle it and himself as well.

"Would the master like me to bring in the brandy?" Hogg murmured in Daniel's ear.

"Brandy?" Daniel repeated. The unexpected word dragged him from a fantasy in which Admiral Daniel Leary stood on the steps of the Senate House to receive the acclaim of an adoring nation.

"I thought it'd go well now, sir," Hogg said with a satisfied grin. He wore clean clothes, a loose green shirt over blue trousers with a red cummerbund to tie the ensemble together. Shaving had been neglected in his care to prepare the dinner. Hogg looked like a cheerful pirate at the moment, which was pretty much the reality as well.

"It'll go very well indeed, Hogg," Daniel said. "Bring on the brandy!"

He leaned back in his chair, a heavy thing of plush and dark wood borrowed from the landlord. He was at peace with the world.

Some time in the distant past a librarian having a bad day had said something that Daniel must have misinterpreted. Who could be angry about such things when life was a wonderful thing, shadowed only by the absence of command?

Command would come, as surely as good fellowship and good wine and the stars themselves had come to Daniel Leary!



The Grand Salon where the Elector held formal dinners rose the full height of the palace's second and third stories, with a rebated clerestory above that. The ceiling was a single enormous fresco, but the light wasn't good enough for Adele Mundy to see more than a hint of bare limbs and flowing drapery.

She'd have liked a better view, but since she hadn't bothered to visit the salon in daylight she didn't suppose that her interest could be as great as all that. Primarily she was feeling the utter boredom of the gathering.

"Now . . ." said the man to her left, a provisions merchant from Kostroma City and the only person seated below Adele at the fourth and lowest table of the dinner. "This is egg salad, of course—"

He wiggled a dab of vaguely peach-colored matter on his fork; Adele wasn't sure that "of course" would have been a phrase she used in the identification.

"—but what kind of egg, I ask you? Not hen as you might think, but domesticated Kostroman Diamondtail!"

"Pardon me, mistress," said the member of the Alliance delegation on Adele's right. He was a husky, dark-haired fellow in his forties who'd said his name was Markos. He spoke Academy-grade Universal with a rasping undertone of the Pleasaunce slums. "I believe I've been seated higher than my proper precedence should have allowed. Please accept my apology and change places with me."

"I'm sure—" Adele began, then caught herself. "Ah."

Even if Markos were a junior clerk as he'd claimed, he should have been higher as a simple matter of diplomatic checkers. At the head table Admiral Lasowski sat to the Elector's right while the Alliance chief of mission was on the left of Walter's mistress, looking sour. Not only had the Cinnabar envoy been given precedence, an admiral's dress uniform with six full rows of medals and a gorget of honor at the throat completely upstaged the robes of the Alliance civilian.

The order at the two middle tables was reversed. A grandnephew of Guarantor Porra, a peacock in full plumage, sat at the top while the Cinnabar civil head was two places below him; likewise the two naval captains at table three, an Alliance delegate sitting above Le Golif of the Aglaia—not properly a member of the Cinnabar mission, but present in Lt. Leary's place.

It was proper that at table four the mid-ranking functionary from the Cinnabar Navy Office restore balance by being seated higher than Markos; but no member of the delegations for whom the banquet was arranged should have been so low. The notion that Markos should really have been below the Electoral Librarian was ludicrous, a piece of gallantry which Adele knew her looks didn't justify and nothing else could justify.