WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(50)
Adele started to speak, then froze with her mouth open because she didn't know which of her two objections to begin with. She closed her mouth again because she realized she'd be wrong to address either of them. "Yes," she said instead. "A very bright spot."
She leaned over the console and ejected the chip onto which she'd copied the data. It had taken hours of work, sifting and correlating files on distant machines whose software was quirky, ancient, and glacially slow. She could have sent Markos the first list she'd found, ignoring the fact that it covered only two of the palace's seven entrances. She didn't like Markos and the task was one that she didn't dare consider very deeply. Even under these circumstances she couldn't let herself do a bad job.
"Hafard!" Woetjans bellowed toward a high scaffold. "Polin! You two keep fucking around and you won't like the duty roster after we lift planet, I promise you!"
She gave Adele a sheepish glance. "I better get back to keeping an eye on these lot, sir," she said.
Adele nodded crisply. "I need to get to work also," she said. "Vanness? I'll be gone for about fifteen minutes. If there are any inquiries for me, I'll answer them when I return."
She strode from the library. She'd been offended when Woetjans referred to the Kostromans as wogs. If the petty officer were a pupil of hers at the Academy, she'd have torn a strip off her the first time it happened and dismissed her in ignominy on a repetition.
But Woetjans wasn't a pupil. She was a naval bosun's mate raised to different standards. Woetjans's standards were wrong, of that Adele was sure; but nobody'd appointed Adele Mundy as Lord Corrector of the Universe, either.
She'd had colleagues at the Academy, even after she became deputy director of the Collections in all but name, who took it upon themselves to educate Adele on the ways in which her dress failed the test of fashion. She didn't expect Woetjans would greet a lecture on demeaning language with any more patience—or reason for patience—than Adele had shown for that well-meant advice on her clothes.
Adele started down the spiral stairs at a brisk pace. She slowed when she reached a pair of clerks descending in leisure as they talked. Kostromans were a cheerfully voluble people, who made broad arm gestures in conversation. Adele wasn't in so great a hurry that she needed to make a point of getting around these two.
She'd almost objected to Woetjans calling her a Cinnabar citizen. On reflection, Woetjans's assumption was probably true. The Edict of Reconciliation had restored citizenship rights to survivors of those proscribed, and Adele had never been listed by name anyway. As an adult member of the Mundys of Chatsworth she would have been fair game, but no one could honestly claim Adele had any involvement in general politics let alone with the Three Circles Conspiracy.
She went around the clerks at the bottom of the stairs and picked her way through the loungers and passersby in the main entryway. Kostroman tempers were as noisily enthusiastic as their expressions of undying friendship. Neither could be expected to last. Very different from Cinnabar, where emotions were weapons as unyielding as steel.
She'd heard the Kostromans described as flighty, mercurial. True enough, she supposed. Until humans became saints, though, the alternative was cold, murderous ruthlessness of the sort that had wiped the Mundys from the face of Cinnabar.
Woetjans said the Kostromans were good spacers. In that at least they and the folk of Cinnabar had matters in common.
Adele entered the garden. The sunlight was a subconscious surprise. The ranks of shelves, now filling with roughly sorted books, reduced light from the library windows to a fraction of what was needed. To install the new lighting the sailors had run an additional line from the power room in the palace subbasement. Woetjans had explained that though the fusion plant had sufficient capacity, the building's wiring would fry like bacon.
Citizen of the Republic of Cinnabar . . .
A starship was landing in the harbor. Quite a large one. A transport, she supposed. Daniel Leary would be able to identify the vessel by class and perhaps by name.
A nurse pushed a stroller down the path. Two more children were tied to her waist by leashes; the older of them was no more than four. They tugged in opposite directions, shouting to call the nurse's attention to individual birds or flowers. A male minder with a metal-shod baton and swirling mustaches swaggered behind the group, puffing out his chest and bowing to every woman he passed.
Adele had never returned to Cinnabar. At first her presence would merely have added another name to the roster of victims. After the Edict of Reconciliation was passed, disgust kept her away.
Besides, it was bad enough to be poor in a foreign land. She had no intention of starving before the eyes of those who would have called her a friend in the days before the Proscriptions. The Senate had confirmed a cousin on her mother's side as owner of Chatsworth, she'd heard.