WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(7)

Though the fountain was twenty feet high and therefore imposing, Daniel didn't find it in any way attractive. He felt much the same way about the palace itself.

Well, unlike the other three members of the delegation, Daniel didn't even live there. Admiral Martina Lasowski and her senior aides doubtless had more serious concerns than the fact they were housed in a three-story pile of beige brick with pillared arches in the center and windows of many different styles on the wings.

Daniel frowned as he walked over the final narrow pedestrian bridge. Because Daniel was a supernumerary, the admiral had permitted him to find his own accommodation—a harborside apartment. Being billeted in the palace at government expense would have saved money, but at a cost to the freedom of his personal life.

Still, the money would have been nice. Daniel's spending had exceeded his combined income—naval pay and a small annuity settled on him at his mother's death—ever since he broke with his father. He'd gotten considerable credit simply because he was a Leary of Bantry, but even that had stretched close to the breaking point.

If not beyond it. Maybe his sister would see her way clear to a loan.

Daniel no longer told himself that he'd cut back his expenditures in the near future. That hadn't happened in six years, so it wasn't probable now. It cost a good deal to keep up the show required of an officer worthy of promotion, and besides, he'd gotten a taste for high life in his early years.

The palace entrance was a rank of eight archways, with six more in the row immediately behind the first and four final arches giving onto three broad steps to the tall doors. The pillared court stretched sixty-five feet back from the plaza, and the amount of greenish stone in the columns was staggering.

Daniel's mother had raised him at Bantry, the country estate claimed—in legend, at any rate—by the Leary family when the first colony ship arrived on Cinnabar. His sister Deirdre was the elder by two years. She, Corder Leary's pride and presumptive heir, spent most of her time in the family townhouse in Xenos under the care of nurses and other hirelings.

Deirdre had emerged from the capital milieu of vice, pomp, and riot as a sober, pragmatic woman who drank as a duty, ate to fuel her body, and had no vices rumored even by political enemies. Daniel, the product of mother love and rural sport, was . . . less of a paragon.

Well, Deirdre's virtues weren't those of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. The RCN was a place for hot courage, quick initiative, and the willingness to follow a fixed course when orders required it. Daniel thought he might someday be an RCN officer whom others spoke of, if he survived.

And if he ever got a command. Talent could help an officer to a command, and luck was useful in the RCN as well as all the rest of life. But the best way to a command was through interest: the help of wealthy and politically powerful citizens. People like Speaker Leary, who would have preferred to see his son in Hell rather than in the navy.

Which was why Daniel had joined, of course. One of the reasons. He'd been drawn also by his uncle Stacey Bergen's tales of far worlds. Those were some of Daniel's warmest and earliest memories.

The vast entrance alcove was lighted only by the sun shining onto the plaza in front of it. That should have been sufficient now at midmorning, but Daniel's eyes took a moment to readapt from full day to these shadowed stones. In bad weather the hawkers, idlers, and thieves thronging the plaza came here for protection. Their trash remained to eddy disconsolately among the pillars.

The great wooden doors into the palace were open. A squad of guards whose berets were quartered in the Hajas colors, silver and violet, stood nearby. Their weapons, slung or leaning against the wall, were mostly submachine guns which accelerated pellets to high velocity by electromagnetic pulses. One guard had an impeller that threw slugs of greater weight and penetration.

A line of scars, filled with plastic but visible because of their lighter hue, crossed the right-hand doorpanel at waist height. Somebody'd raked the doorway with an automatic impeller, probably on the night Walter Hajas became Elector. Maybe one of the present guards had been at the grips of the big weapon then. . . .

Daniel climbed the steps to the entrance, feeling fire in his shins each time he raised his leg. Kostroma City was as flat as the lagoon from which it'd been reclaimed, but the many arched bridges between Daniel's apartment and the palace had taken their toll.

Hogg, Daniel's manservant, had offered to drive him in a three-wheeled jitney of the type that was universal in the city. Daniel had walked instead as the best way to see the city. In hindsight, he thought that perhaps he could've seen enough of Kostroma from the jitney's back seat.

A Cinnabar naval officer was expected to have servants. A wealthy lieutenant, the sort of fellow Daniel would have been had not he and his father disowned one another, might have a dozen servants in port and several even on shipboard during war service (though all but one of the latter would be ratings paid from the officer's pocket for additional services).