CHAPTER 4
Xenos on Cinnabar
The doorman bowed Adele into the lobby, where a cadaverous man in black—probably the club secretary rather than a lower functionary—waited behind a lectern. “I’m to meet Mistress Cleveland for lunch,” Adele said, using the name she had been given. “My name is Mundy.”
The secretary checked the display built into his lectern, then raised his eyes and smiled falsely. “Why yes, Mistress Mundy,” he said, tapping a call button. A boy—if he was older than sixteen, he was badly undernourished—came out of an alcove behind the secretary, buttoning his coat. “Daniel will take you back. The Gray Room, Daniel.”
Adele avoided blinking, though the boy’s name had been a surprise. “Daniel” wasn’t an uncommon name, of course; but that was looking at the matter logically.
The Oriel Club was old, but it wasn’t one that members would mention when they wanted to impress other people. It had been founded by residents of Oriel County to have a place to eat and sleep when they had business in the capital. The kitchen was said to be very good on mutton dishes; which made sense, as sheep were the first thing one thought of in the rare instances when someone mentioned Oriel County.
The boy swaggered ahead of her, past a reading room with leather-covered chairs, then through the grill room to the left-hand of the pair of private rooms in back. The three diners in the grill room were decently but not stylishly dressed. They glanced up from their meals—mutton curry in all cases—but Adele was no more interesting to look at than they were.
“The Gray Room!” the boy said, pulling the door open without announcing them to the occupant of the room. He was what you would expect from junior staff in a club whose secretary had to check his files to determine whether a guest was expected.
Bernis Sand sat across the table, facing the door. A decanter of amber liquid—whiskey, unless she had changed her habits since Adele last saw her—and two glasses were already on the table.
“Thank you, Daniel,” said Mistress Sand. “We’re not to be disturbed unless we call you.”
The boy closed the door. Sand smiled grimly and said, “Lock it, if you would, Mundy. Despite my clear direction, it’s quite possible that someone will bustle in with a carafe of water or a tablecloth.”
Adele snicked the lock and sat down. “I suppose shooting the first few intruders would be overreaction,” she said.
“This was my first husband’s club,” said Mistress Sand. She didn’t react to the joke. “I kept the membership after his death. There are times I like to be thought of as Mistress Cleveland, who owns land in Oriel County. Mistress Cleveland and her guests don’t attract attention.”
Sand was below middle height and solid; it would be accurate though uncharitable to describe her build as cylindrical. Her complexion had been ruddy when she introduced herself to Adele five years before. Now her skin had a gray undertone, and her cheeks sagged.
“I appreciate that,” said Adele, “though I wanted to talk with you in a private capacity. My friend Captain Leary plans to visit Corcyra, and I expect to accompany him.”
Sand had begun to pour whiskey into Adele’s glass unasked. The decanter ticked the rim of the glass hard, but neither broke. She set the decanter down, stared across the table at Adele, and drained the last ounce from her own glass.
“I don’t know how you heard about this, Mundy,” she said in a rasping voice. “But I’m glad you did. I usually don’t know how you learn things, of course.”
Not for the first time, Adele realized that people often gave her too much credit. Surely it wasn’t unusual for a husband worried about his wife’s problems to contact her associates in hope of finding a solution?
Aloud Adele said, “Explain the situation from your viewpoint, if you would.”
The way Mistress Sand answered that deliberately neutral request would tell more than the facts of the situation, for which Adele had many objective sources.
“My son Rikard returned from Corcyra two weeks ago,” Sand said, showing that she was here a mother, rather than a Cinnabar patriot or an intelligence director. “I hadn’t heard from him or of him for almost three years. I…well, it was reasonable to assume that he was dead.”
She had already refilled her glass; she drank half of the contents. Adele’s fingers were busy with her control wands, but she had no desire to try the splash of whiskey in her own glass anyway.
Given the resources Mistress Sand controlled, Rikard’s total disappearance did indeed imply that the boy was dead. The deaths of Adele’s own family were to her a series of events sealed in a block of crystal. She had no feelings about them: just generalized despair and anger.
Adele recognized that other people had different reactions; and perhaps mothers generally differed. Certainly she felt no empathy with any other aspect of motherhood.
“Rikard explained that he was now a follower of a religion formed on Corcyra, the Transformationists,” Sand said. “You can call it a cult if you like.”
She grimaced. Nothing Adele had observed of Mistress Sand suggested that the older woman had any religious belief. It must have been painful to learn that her son had embraced religion, and particularly that he’d joined some foreign cult.
“I don’t have an opinion on religious matters,” Adele said. It was a mild rebuke to anyone who knew her as well as Mistress Sand did. “In any case, the boy has returned unharmed?”
Given the way human beings behaved, Adele suspected that Rikard may have become a Transformationist for no other reason than that it would horrify his mother. Well, that was better than him becoming a traitor to Cinnabar, which might as easily have happened.
“Sorry, Mundy,” Sand muttered, taking another drink. “Yes, quite unharmed. Elements on Corcyra have declared the planet independent from its homeworld, Pantellaria, and the Pantellarians have sent a force to regain control. I suppose you know about all that?”
“I have the basics,” Adele said. “I’ll be learning more; and if you have data that I might not find elsewhere—”
That was extremely unlikely, but it was polite as well as potentially a means of saving time.
“—I’d appreciate seeing it.”
“Yes, of course,” said Mistress Sand. “I’ll have everything sent to you as soon as I leave.”
She reached for the decanter. “The Transformationists aren’t pacifistic,” she said. “They’re mostly foreigners like Rikard—though he says there’re both Corcyrans and Pantellarians in the, well, faith. They’re supporting the independence movement, but they’re concerned that whoever wins may decide the Transformationists would make a good scapegoat. They’re arming so that they don’t look like an easy target.”
“Transformationism sounds like an admirably pragmatic faith,” Adele said. “Whatever its philosophical tenets.”
“Which is some consolation to a mother,” Sand said with a brief smile. “Though not a great one.”
She set her glass down and said, “Rikard has located what he insists is a treasure buried by the first settlers of Corcyra. I didn’t go into the details, but he’s not a stupid young man, and he has some experience with sub-surface mapping. He held a position with an engineering firm here in Xenos.”
Sand grimaced again.
Adele raised her own glass for the first time and sipped what was indeed whiskey. She didn’t doubt that it was a good variety, though that was a taste she had never cultivated. She said deliberately, “I wouldn’t thank a friend who told me that I was drinking too much.”
Mistress Sand’s hand paused halfway to the decanter. She blinked as though she had just awakened to find herself on the Pentacrest, stark naked and singing “The Banner High,” the Alliance anthem. She pushed the decanter to the side of the table and said, “Mundy, I have occasionally been concerned that I would be told that you had shot yourself. I don’t believe that anyone will ever suggest that you’re drinking too much.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Adele, setting her glass down again.
“Look,” said Mistress Sand, sitting straighter than she had since Adele entered the room. “I wouldn’t have ordered you—well, with you, I mean asked—to get involved, but your involvement is the best news I’ve had since my son came home.”
She smiled wryly and added, “Since he explained why he’d come home, that is. I can give you as much official support as you want—and for Captain Leary, as well. If he’d care to take the Princess Cecile to the Ribbon Stars under RCN auspices, I can arrange that.”
“I will pass on your offer to Captain Leary,” Adele said. She felt no need to inform Mistress Sand of what Daniel was thinking. “Does the Republic have a position on the Corcyra situation?”
“Neither we nor the Alliance cares what happens to Corcyra,” Sand said. “Oh, there are functionaries on both sides, some of them wearing uniforms, who feel very strongly one way or another. But the position of the Senate and of Guarantor Porra as best we can determine—I can determine—is that all the parties involved on Corcyra can go to Hell in their own way, and the more quickly the better.”
Sand sighed, touched her glass, and pushed it firmly aside as she had the decanter. “Despite that,” she said, “there’s a very real possibility that we’ll shortly be at war over some silly business involving Corcyra, even though nobody wants it. No sane person wants that.”
Adele pursed her lips, looking for the correct phrasing. People in general did not use words as precisely as she did, and she needed to be understood this time.
“If I go to Corcyra as a private citizen,” she said, meeting the older woman’s eyes. “As I expect at the moment I will do. I cannot guarantee that the actions I take will be to the benefit of the Republic.”
Mistress Sand laughed. “Mundy,” she said, “I can’t guarantee that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, but I would bet on it with almost as much certainty as I would bet that whatever you do will be in Cinnabar’s best interests.”
She paused. She was fully herself again: Bernis Sand, whose mind controlled an intelligence apparatus which was more valuable to the safety of the Republic than any battleship in the RCN.
“I can justify all the help my organization provides you, Mundy,” she said forcefully. “But in my own mind, I am very clear that you are going to Corcyra as a favor to a colleague.”
Adele rose. “I’ll get back to preparations, then,” she said. “Captain Leary and I will need to talk to your son, probably this afternoon.”
“Yes, of course,” Sand said, rising also. “I’ll tell him to expect your call.”
And I’m not doing this for a colleague, Adele thought as she opened the door to the grill room. I’m doing it for a friend.
Bergen and Associates Shipyard, Cinnabar
Mon had an office on the top of what was now the Administration Building—it had been Hangar One when Daniel first visited the yard as a boy—but Daniel had asked to amble along the waterside with his manager while they talked. As expected, Mon was delighted to give his co-owner—Daniel had given Mon a ten percent share out of the fifty percent Daniel had inherited—a tour to show how well the yard was doing.
The “Associates” of the yard’s name was Uncle Stacey’s financial backer—Corder Leary, who had married Stacey’s sister and sired Deirdre and Daniel on her. Corder had little or nothing to do with his wife while Daniel was growing up, but he had made financial provision for his brother-in-law on Stacey’s retirement from the RCN at the rank of commander.
Deirdre handled all business between the yard and its silent partner. Daniel preferred not to deal with his father, and to the degree that Mon cared—Daniel wasn’t sure that Mon even knew the full ownership arrangements—he was probably pleased as well.
“We’re replacing all her thrusters,” Mon said, gesturing to the Ezwal, a small freighter in dry-dock. “Three or four might still pass, but the new owner plans to trade in the Nugget Cluster where his own crew’ll have to handle the refits. He wants to put the first major overhaul as far into the future as he can.”
Daniel nodded approvingly at the work. Six of the Ezwal’s eight thrusters were on a flatcar beside the dock, and the crane was winching up a seventh to join them.
Several of the dockworkers were missing limbs. Mon had continued Stacey Bergen’s practice of hiring former RCN spacers, particularly those who were no longer fit for interstellar service. As with Daniel’s decision to appoint Mon as manager, it was an act of kindness which had proven to be extremely good business.
“It’s always a pleasure to see how well things are going…,” Daniel said. He beamed at the bustle. The Bergen yard had gotten more than its share of Navy work during the war because employing injured veterans had protected it against the loss of workers to man the fleet. Things didn’t seem to have slowed down since the Treaty of Amiens, though. “But I came here primarily to pick your brains about a ship. I’d like to hire—or buy; perhaps purchase would be a better idea—a well-found freighter of a thousand tons or so. You know, a tramp that a crew of six could work but with cabin space for twenty.”
Mon looked at Daniel and rubbed his cheek. His black hair was receding, but he had begun wearing fluffy side-whiskers which merged with a magnificent moustache. Mon was much plumper than he had been as a lieutenant, but he looked truly happy—which had never been the case when he wore an RCN uniform.
“Well, I tell you, sir,” he said. “I’ve got three ships myself that’d fit, though only two of them’re on Cinnabar right this moment. I own them, I mean—bought them out of my share of the yard’s profits and fixed them up. You can have any of them for a florin—buy or rent, I don’t care. It’ll be a pleasure to turn her over to you.”
Daniel frowned. A nearby tramp tested its intake pump by running up to high flow and exhausting the reaction mass back into the pool; the roar gave him time to think.
“I appreciate the offer, Mon,” Daniel said as the flow whirred down to a trickle, “but that’s scarcely necessary. I realize that the price of shipping has gone up considerably since the treaty, but—well, from the yard alone, my income is very substantial thanks to your good management. Which ships are on Cinnabar now?”
Mon grimaced as he thought. “Well, one is the Golgotha Dancer,” he said. “She’s the one I’d recommend. Twelve hundred tons, two antenna rings, of course, but I just replaced her High Drives. Right now she’s in Portola—” on the East Coast “—loading a cargo of fusion bottles for Chateaubriand. But we can land them back on the dock in six hours, that’s no problem.”
“She’s just the sort of ship I have in mind,” said Daniel. He’d need to look over any offer before deciding, but he trusted Mon implicitly on the freighter’s soundness. “And the other?”
“She’s the Kiesche, right over here in the end berth,” Mon said. He gestured forward and set off down the track around the pool. “Twelve hundred tons, two antenna rings again but she turns like a cat. I’ve never seen a ship so handy. In civilian service, of course.”
Warships had large crews which made them handier than merchant ships even with the same rigging, and generally warships mounted more masts than civilian vessels also. A starship’s rigging was fully automated, but anyone who expected thousands of valves and pulleys to work perfectly in service was a fool.
Ships lifted and landed on pillars of plasma, and they passed through atmospheres which had their own corrosive possibilities. Without riggers on the hull, a ship would soon become mired in the Matrix and eons away from anywhere her captain wanted to be.
“What is her crew?” Daniel asked. What must be the Kiesche came in sight at the edge of the inlet channel to Lake Xenos. His first thought was disappointment—the freighter had a rusty, bedraggled look. But that again was a matter of crew size: much of a warship’s exterior maintenance was busy work to keep the crew occupied when the vessel wasn’t in the midst of a battle.
“I run her with ten,” Mon said. “Well, nine most of the time if I’m honest. You can sling hammocks for twenty easily enough.”
They were approaching from the bow, so the nose turret with its single plasma cannon was visible. Daniel nodded toward the gun and said in a neutral tone, “What does she mount?”
“A 50-millimeter high-intensity piece,” Mon said. “From an Alliance pirate chaser originally, I’d guess, but I took her off a freighter out of Trobriand that I was scrapping.”
He pursed his lips and looked at Daniel. “Look, sir—I know that’s a popgun, but this is a civilian ship and that’s all her frames’ll take in real use. You won’t find a freighter under five thousand tons which can handle as many as a dozen rounds from a four-inch gun without starting all her seams.”
Daniel laughed. “Much as I’d like you to be wrong, Mon,” he said, “I know that you’re not. And I’m trying to look inconspicuous on this business, so fitting destroyer armament would be a bad idea even if we could.”
Now that they were standing on the dock alongside, the Kiesche had a sharp, eager appearance. Sure, her hull was streaked with rust, but her rigging was taut and her antennas were straight with no signs of kinks which would keep the sections from nesting properly within one another.
“Say, there’s one more thing,” said Mon. “You remember the Milton—why sure you do! You captained her in her last fight, so sure you do! Well, she was scrapped right here when she got back to Cinnabar. I put her command console in the Kiesche when I was refitting her. A heavy cruiser’s console is really too big for a twelve hundred-ton freighter, but the price was right.”
Daniel had started down the catwalk to the ship’s own boarding ramp. He stopped, put his foot back on the quay, and turned. “You don’t bloody say!” he said. “You don’t bloody say!”
Mon, startled by Daniel’s vehemence, said, “Well, the console was first rate even if I hear that the ship was an abortion, 8-inch cannon on a cruiser hull.”
“You didn’t hear me say the Millie was an abortion!” Daniel said. “Why, she slugged it out with a battleship and it was the Millie who sailed home!”
He caught himself. Sailed home, yes; but under a jury rig and missing her hull aft of Frame 260. She was scrapped when she got home because that was the only option which made economic sense.
“Never mind, Mon,” Daniel said. “I’ll take the Kiesche.”
He cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Pardon if I sounded a bit heated. I’m, well… As you say, the Millie was my command. And—”
He beamed at the freighter.
“—a cruiser console may cramp the bridge somewhat, but it has full controls and display on the aft side. And that will be the perfect location for my communications officer!”