WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(67)

That wasn't really true. Still, they'd have a chance that could be measured in percents instead of tenths of a percent.

"There'll be weapons in store, I'd guess," Hogg said. "Can we . . . ?"

"No," Daniel said. "Much as I'd like to, I can't imagine any circumstances in which the armory wouldn't have extra guards tonight; and probably Alliance guards. Guns will have to wait."

Hogg shrugged, "My friends put a few little somethings in the cab," he said. "Nothing I want to go fight the Alliance army with, but guess we'll make do."

"I'll check which buildings have what you need." Adele said. She seemed detached rather than nonchalant. Though their lives depended on this, Adele had been more animated when she was searching for an answer to Daniel's zoological question. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

She turned. Hogg stepped back and sideways so that he blocked her path without seeming to. "Maybe I should go along to protect the lady, sir," he said.

"Mr. Hogg," said Daniel. "This is a command decision. Do you understand?"

Hogg grimaced, nodded, and gave Adele another minuscule salute as he stepped aside.

"If I hadn't forgotten my handheld, I could examine the warehouse contents now," Adele said. She half smiled. "There's something else I should do in the library before I leave, though, so I suppose it's just as well."

She walked toward the palace entrance. "I'll see you as soon as I can," she called over her shoulder. Straight-backed and unhurried, she made her way through the nervous crowd as steadily as a drill enters wood.

"Goddam if I don't think I'm going to start praying as a habit," Hogg muttered. He wiped his forehead with his beret.

Daniel sighed. He doubted Hogg was worried about what might happen to Adele, but it wasn't necessary to pursue the question.



Vanness's body had been removed from the library. Judging from the smears on the tile flooring, they'd dragged it onto the loggia overlooking the gardens. Adele grimaced at the thought of her late assistant being tossed over the railing and loaded onto a truck to be disposed of in the harbor with the rest of the city's garbage. Adele hadn't wanted to look at the corpse again, though.

Her mild pleasure at not seeing Vanness was more than counterbalanced by finding Bracey and his two drinking companions in the library with a pair of women. They had bottles, but the men's main present concern seemed to be to coax one of the women into sex with all three of them. She wasn't quite drunk enough, and the other woman seemed to be more competition for the men than an alternative target.

All five displayed Zojira colors in some fashion or other. One of the men had a pistol thrust under his black and yellow sash. Bracey carried a slung submachine gun, but the ammo tube that should have been parallel to the barrel was missing.

Adele swept the group with expressionless eyes as she entered; no point in pretending they weren't present. No point in speaking to the scum either. She found her personal data unit on the console where she'd left it. After sliding it into the pocket where she should have left it to begin with, she squatted to open the main console's sideplate.

"Hey!" said Bracey in surprise. He got up from the stacked boxes on which he sat, tumbling the one on top onto the floor beside him. "What the hell do you think you're doing, bitch?"

People were dying tonight; Adele shouldn't let herself worry about a carton of what seemed to be service manuals for machinery that had been rust for a hundred years. Even so . . .

She turned and looked at Bracey with the cold loathing of a human for a slug. "Because of the unsettled conditions at the moment, Bracey," she said, "I'm not going to order you out of here. But neither will I have you interfering with the way I carry out my duties. Shut up and mind your own business."

She turned back to the console's internal architecture. When she'd emplaced the decryption module Markos gave her, she'd deliberately reversed its polarity as a minor act of rebellion. She was quite confident that neither Markos nor any Kostroman technician he brought to check the installation would figure out why it didn't work.

In the event, Markos hadn't asked for information from the Aglaia which would have told him twenty members of her crew were billeted in the palace. Now Adele wanted that decryption capacity herself: what would work on Cinnabar naval communications would work equally well on their Alliance equivalents.

"What do you mean, your duties?" Bracey said. He stepped toward Adele. His fellows looked puzzled; the drunken woman began to croon a lullaby. "I'm the Electoral Librarian, now. You're nothing, bitch! You're dirt!"

Adele seated herself at the console and used the wands to bring up the operating system. She needed to enable the module now that it was properly in place, and she also wanted to conceal its existence from anyone examining the software.