John Ringo - With the Lightnings

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With the Lightnings

by David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57818-9

Cover art by David Mattingly

First paperback printing, July 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication No. 98-6745

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

BOY MEETS GIRL ...

Daniel closed the metal covers of the book, then looked directly at Adele. "I don't mean to intrude

in another citizen's business, mistress," he said, "but my manservant Hogg is very good at finding people

who can change things. If you'd like him to locate some carpenters . . . ?"

Adele snorted. The library budget, if there was one, wasn't under her control. "I appreciate the

offer," she said, "but I regret that I'm not in a position to take advantage of it. Unless your man could find

the carpenters' wages as well as the carpenters themselves."

Leary grinned, but there was a serious undertone in his voice as he said, "I really don't dare suggest

that, mistress. While I don't think Hogg would be caught, I'm afraid his methods would bring spiritual

discredit on a Leary of Bantry. What Hogg does on his own account is his own business, but if I set him

a task . . ."

The world had gone gray around Adele. "You said, 'a Leary of Bantry,' sir," she said. Her voice

too was without color. "You'd be related to Speaker Leary, then?"

Leary grimaced. "Oh, yes," he said. "Corder Leary is my father, though we'd both be willing to

deny it."

"I see," Adele said. Her voice came from another place, another time. She crossed her hands

behind her back. "Lieutenant Leary," she said, "I have a great deal of work to do. You're a Cinnabar

citizen and I will presume a gentleman. I therefore request that you cease to trouble me and my staff.

Daniel Leary reddened also. He made a stiff half-bow. "Good morning, mistress," he said. "No

doubt we'll meet again." He strode with a caged grace from the library.

Later, he sat on a bench in a garden. He'd walked until the adrenaline burned off and he needed to

sit. He hadn't been so angry since the afternoon he broke with his father.

He'd have to challenge her to a duel, of course. The insult had been too deliberate to ignore. . . .

WITH THE

LIGHTNINGS

DAVID DRAKE

DEDICATION

To A[rielle] Heather Wood

More widely known asThe Heather Wood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'm afraid that I use machines and people very hard when I'm focused on a project. The

machines tend to break; the people, my friends, do not. Sincere thanks to Dan Breen; Jim

Baen and Toni Weisskopf; Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel; Sandra and John Miesel;

and my wife Jo.

A NOTE ON WEIGHT AND MEASURES

As most of my fiction is either set in the far past or the distant future, I regularly face the question of

whether to use weights and measures familiar to the reader or instead to reflect the differences that time

brings. In this particular case I've decided to use English and metric measurements rather than inventing

different but comparable systems.

In my opinion the weights and measures of thousands of years in the future will differ as strikingly

from those of today as the latter do from the talents and stades familiar to classical Greeks. Those future

systems may well vary among themselves as confusingly as the Euboic and Aeginetic standards did. But

while I hope a reader may learn something from this novel as well as being entertained, the state of the

world isn't going to be improved by me inventing phony measurement systems.

Me that 'ave followed my trade

In the place where the Lightnin's are made ...

—Kipling

Book One

Lieutenant Daniel Leary ambled through the streets of Kostroma City in the black-piped gray 2nd

Class uniform of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. He was on his way to the Elector's Palace, but there

was no hurry and really nothing more important for Daniel to do than to savor the fact that he'd realized

one of his childhood dreams: to walk a far world and see its wonders first hand.

His other dream, to command a starship himself, would come (if at all) in the far future; a future as

distant in Daniel's mind as childhood seemed from his present age of twenty-two Terran years.

For now, he had Kostroma and that was wonder enough. He whistled a snatch of a tune the band

had played at the supper club he'd visited the night before.

Daniel smiled, an expression so naturally warm that strangers on the street smiled back at him. The

Kostroman lady he'd met there was named Silena. The honor both of a Leary of Bantry and the RCN

required that Daniel offer his help when the lady's young escort drank himself into babbling incapacity.

Silena had been very appreciative; and after the first few minutes back at her lodgings, pique at her

original escort was no longer her primary focus.

Daniel was only a little above average height with a tendency toward fleshiness that showed itself

particularly in his florid face. His roundness and open expression caused strangers sometimes to dismiss

Daniel Leary as soft. That was a mistake.

A canal ran down the center of the broad street. During daylight it carried only small craft, water

taxis and light delivery vehicles, but at night barges loaded with construction materials edged between the

stone banks with loud arguments over right-of-way. The pavements to either side seethed with a mixture

of pedestrians and three-wheeled motorized jitneys, though like the canals they would fill with heavy

traffic after dark.

The Kostroman economy was booming on the profits of interstellar trade, and much of that wealth

was being invested here in the capital. Rich merchants built townhouses, and the older nobility added to

the palaces of their clans so as not to be outdone.

Folk at a lower social level—clerks in the trading houses, the spacers who crewed Kostroma's

trading fleet, and the laborers staffing the factories and fisheries that filled those starships, all had gained

in some degree. They wanted improved lodgings as well, and they were willing to pay for them.

Daniel walked along whistling, delighted with the pageant. People wore colorful clothing in

unfamiliar styles. Many of them chattered in local dialects: Kostroma was a watery planet from whose

islands had sprung a hundred distinct tongues during the long Hiatus in star travel. Even those speaking

Universal, now the common language of the planet as well as that of interstellar trade, did so in an accent

strange to Cinnabar ears.

Civilization hadn't vanished on Kostroma as it had on so many worlds colonized during the first

period of human star travel, but Kostroman society had fragmented without the lure of the stars to unify

it. The centuries since Kostroma returned to space hadn't fully healed the social fabric: the present

Elector, Walter III of the Hajas clan, had seized power in a coup only six months before.

Nobody doubted that Walter intended to retain Kostroma's traditional friendship with the Republic

of Cinnabar, but the new Elector needed money. At the present state of the war between Cinnabar and

the Alliance of Free Stars, Walter's hint that he might not renew the Reciprocity Agreement when it

came due in three months had been enough to bring a high-level delegation from Cinnabar.

Daniel sighed. A high-level delegation, with one junior lieutenant thrown in as a makeweight. Daniel

had almost certainly been sent because he was the son of the politically powerful Corder Leary, former

Speaker of the Cinnabar Senate. Daniel's—bad—relationship with his father was no secret in the RCN,

but the ins and outs of Cinnabar families wouldn't be common knowledge on Kostroma.

A man came out of a doorway, pushing himself onto the crowded pavement while calling final

instructions to someone within the building. Daniel would have avoided the fellow if there'd been room.

There wasn't, so he set his shoulder instead and it was the larger Kostroman who bounced back with a

surprised grunt.

No one took notice of what was merely a normal hazard of city life. Daniel walked on, eyeing with

interest the carven swags and volutes that decorated unpretentious four-story apartment buildings.

Kostromans didn't duel the way members of Cinnabar's wealthy families sometimes did. On the

other hand, feuds and assassinations were accepted features of Kostroman social life. Daniel supposed it

was whatever you were used to.

In Xenos, Cinnabar's capital, real magnates like Corder Leary moved through the streets with an

entourage of fifty or more clients, some of whom might be senators themselves. You stepped aside or

the liveried toughs leading the procession knocked you aside. The free citizens of the galaxy's proudest

republic accepted—indeed, expected—that their leaders would behave in such fashion. Who would

obey a man who lacked a strong sense of his own honor?

Birds fluted as they spun in tight curves from roof coping to roof coping overhead. They were avian

in the same sense as the scaly "birds" of Cinnabar, the winged amphibians of Sadastor, or the flyers of a

thousand other worlds that humans had visited and described. The details were for scientists to chart and

for quick-eyed amateurs like Daniel Leary to notice with delight.

During the final quarrel Daniel had said he'd take nothing from his father; but the Leary name had

brought Daniel to Kostroma. Well, the name was his by right, not his father's gift. Daniel didn't have a

shipboard appointment, and he really had no duties even as part of Admiral Dame Martina Lasowski's

delegation; but he'd reached the stars.

The Kostroman navy was small compared to the fleets of Cinnabar and the Alliance, and even so it

was larger than it was efficient. Kostroma's captains and sailors were of excellent quality, but the

merchant fleet took the greater—and the better—part of the personnel. Ratings in the Kostroman navy

were largely foreigners; officers were generally men who preferred the high life in Kostroma City to hard

voyaging; and the ships spent most of their time laid up with their ports sealed and their movable

equipment warehoused, floating in a dammed lagoon south of the capital called the Navy Pool.

A starship was landing in the Floating Harbor. Daniel turned to watch, sliding the naval goggles

down from his cap brim against the glare.

Starships took off and landed on water both because of the damage their plasma motors would do

to solid ground and because water was an ideal reaction mass to be converted to plasma. Once out of a

planet's atmosphere, ships used their High Drive, a matter/antimatter conversion process and far more

efficient, but to switch to High Drive too early was to court disaster.

At one time Kostroma Harbor had served all traffic, but for the past generation only surface vessels

used the city wharfs. The Floating Harbor built of hollow concrete pontoons accommodated the

starships a half-mile offshore.

The pontoons were joined in hexagons that damped the waves generated by takeoffs and landings,

isolating individual ships like larvae in the cells of a beehive. Seagoing lighters docked on the outer sides

of the floats to deliver and receive cargo.

The ship landing just now was a small one of three hundred tons or so; a yacht, or more probably a

government dispatch vessel. The masts folded along the hull indicated the plane on which Cassini

Radiation drove the ship through sponge space was very large compared to the vessel's displacement.

The hull shape and the way two of the four High Drive nozzles were mounted on outriggers

identified the ship as a product of the Pleasaunce system, the capital of the deceptively named Alliance

of Free Stars. That was perfectly proper since the vessel was unarmed. Kostroma was neutral, trading

with both parties to the conflict.

Kostroma's real value to combatants lay not with her navy but in her merchant fleet and extensive

trading network to regions of the human diaspora where neither Cinnabar nor the Alliance had significant

direct contact. Formally the Reciprocity Agreement granted Cinnabar only the right to land warships on

Kostroma instead of staying ten light-minutes out like those of other nations.

As a matter of unofficial policy, however, neutral Kostroman vessels carried cargoes to Cinnabar

but not to worlds of the Alliance. That was an advantage for which General Porra, Guarantor of the

Alliance, would have given his left nut.

The dispatch vessel touched down in a vast gout of steam; the roar of landing arrived several

seconds later as the cloud was already beginning to dissipate. Daniel raised his goggles and continued

walking. A graceful bridge humped over a major canal; from the top of the arch Daniel glimpsed the roof

of the Elector's Palace.

An Alliance dispatch vessel might mean Porra or his bureaucrats believed there was a realistic

chance of detaching Kostroma from Cinnabar. Alternatively, the Alliance could simply be trying to raise

the price Admiral Lasowski would finally agree to pay. Walter III would have invited an Alliance

delegation as a bargaining chip even if Porra hadn't planned to send one on his own account.

Well, that was only technically a concern for Lt. Daniel Leary. As a practical matter, he was a

tourist visiting a planet which provided a range of unfamiliar culture, architecture, and wildlife.

Whistling again, he strolled off the bridge and along the broad avenue leading toward the palace.

Adele Mundy stood in the doorway, fingering a lock of her short brown hair as she surveyed what

was only in name the Library of the Elector of Kostroma. Adele was an organized person; she would

organize even this. The difficulty was in knowing where to start.

The room was large and attractive in its way; ways, really, because whichever Elector had been

responsible for the decoration had been catholic in his taste. Time had darkened the wood paneling from

its original bleached pallor. The enormous stone hood of the fireplace was carved with a scene of hunting

in forests that looked nothing like Kostroman vegetation, and blue-figured tiles formed the hearth itself.

The knees supporting the coffered ceiling imitated gargoyles.

The last were a singularly inappropriate choice for the interior of a library. The notion of figures

gaping to gargle rainwater onto Adele's collections made her shudder.

The chamber had probably been intended as a drawing room for Electoral gatherings smaller and

more private than those in the enormous Grand Salon below on the second floor. There was quite a lot

of space in terms of cubic feet since the ceiling was thirty feet above, but there would have to be a great

deal of modification to make it usable for shelving books.

The modification was one of the problems Adele had been trying to surmount in the three weeks

since she had arrived in Kostroma City to take up her appointment as the Electoral Librarian. One of

many problems.

"Pardon, pardon!" a workman growled to Adele's back in a nasal Kostroman accent. She stepped

sideways into the room, feeling her abdominal muscles tense in anger.

The man hadn't been impolite, technically: Adele was standing in the doorway through which he

and his mate needed to carry a plank. But there was no hint in his tone that the off-planet librarian was

his superior or, for that matter, anything but a pain in the neck.

A six-foot board wasn't much of a load for two people to carry, but even that wasn't why Adele

became dizzy with frustration. That was a result of seeing the material, polished hardwood with a rich,

swirling grain. It was probably as pretty a piece of lumber as she'd ever seen in her life.

Elector Jonathan Ignatius, Walter III's immediate predecessor, was a member of the Delfi clan and

an enthusiastic hunter. Jonathan's absence on a six-month, multi-planet safari had permitted rivals in the

Hajas and Zojira clans to prepare the coup that unseated him the night of his return.

Walter by contrast wanted to be remembered as a patron of learning, possibly because he had no

more formal education than the Emperor Charlemagne. He'd decided to found an electoral library under

the carefully neutral direction of a Cinnabar scholar living in exile on the Alliance world of Bryce. He'd

assembled the contents of the library by the simple expedient of stripping books, papers, and electronic

storage media from Delfi households and those of their collateral clans.

The loot—Adele couldn't think of another word to describe it—was piled here in a variety of

boxes and crates. Most of them weren't marked, and she didn't trust the labels on those which had them.

The only order in the library was the view out the north windows, onto the formal gardens.

What Adele needed to start—what she had requested as many times and in as many ways as she

could imagine—was three thousand feet of rough shelving. What she was getting from the carpenters

Walter's chamberlain had assigned to the project was cabinetry of a standard that would grace a formal

dining room. At the present rate of progress, the job would be done sometime in the next century.

There was no doubt about the skill of the carpenters, these two journeymen and the master

cabinetmaker who never left her shop on the ground floor and never touched a tool with her own hands

that Adele had seen. They were simply the wrong people for the job. The twenty Kostroman library

assistants whom Adele was to train to the standards of Cinnabar or the central worlds of the Alliance—

these were with only a few exceptions the wrong people forany job.

Laughter boomed in the hallway. Adele sidled another step away from the door and put her straight

back against the wall. The band of tile at neck level felt cool and helped keep her calm. Bracey, one of

her assistants, entered with two other men whom Adele didn't recognize.

That didn't mean they weren't library assistants: the positions had been granted as political favors to

relatives who needed jobs. The only blessing was that most of them, lazy scuts with neither ability nor

interest in library work, didn't bother to show up. Those who did pilfered and damaged materials

through careless disregard.

Bracey, a Zojira collateral, was one of those who often came to the library. Unfortunately.

The trio entered the room, passing a bottle among them. From the smell of their breath as they

strode past Adele she was surprised they were still able to move, let alone climb the lovely helical

staircase to the third floor.

Three other assistants were in the library. Two were fondling one another in a corner. Their lives

were at risk if in passion they managed to dislodge the boxes stacked to either side. The third assistant

was Vanness, who was actually trying to organize a crate of what were probably logbooks. Alone of her

"assistants," Vanness had the interest that was a necessary precondition to becoming useful. The

Kostroman wasn't any real help now, but Adele could cure his ignorance if she just got some room to

work in.

"Hey, save me seconds!" Bracey called to the couple in the corner. Adele's presence hadn't

concerned them, but now they sprang apart.

One of Bracey's companions tugged his arm, nodding toward Adele behind them. Bracey waved

the bottle to her and said, "Hey, chiefie! Want a drink?"

Bracey burped loudly; his companions lapsed into giggles. Adele looked through the Kostroman as

if he didn't exist, then walked to the data console she'd spent most of the past two weeks getting in order

becausethat was within her capacity to achieve without the help of anyone else . . . and she didn't have

the help of anyone else.

The console was of high-quality Cinnabar manufacture and so new that it was still crated in the

vestibule of the palace when Walter's supporters took stock after the coup. It came loaded with a

broad-ranging database which could, now that Adele had completed her labors, access information from

any of the computers in the government network; better and faster than the computers could reach their

own data, in most cases.

Adele rested her forehead against the console's smooth coolness and wondered whether starving

on Bryce would have been a better idea than accepting the Kostroman offer. But it had seemed so

wonderful at the time. She'd even told Mistress Boileau, "It's too good to be true!"

Adele smiled. At least in hindsight she could credit herself with a flawlessly accurate analysis.

Adele was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of Cinnabar's most politically powerful families while she

was growing up, though the Mundys' populist tendencies meant they were generally on the outs with

their fellow magnates. Adele hadn't been interested in politics. When she was sixteen she'd left Xenos for

the Bryce Academy. Her choice was made as much to avoid the alarms and street protests escalating

into riots as for the opportunity to study the premier collections of the human galaxy under Mistress

Boileau.

That was fifteen terrestrial years ago. Three days after Adele Mundy reached Bryce, the Speaker

of the Cinnabar Senate announced that he'd uncovered an Alliance plot to overthrow the government of

Cinnabar through native agents—primarily members of the Mundy family. The Senate proscribed the

traitors. Their property was confiscated by the state or turned over to those who informed against them,

and those proscribed were hunted down under emergency regulations that were a license to kill.

Adele had a bank account on Bryce, but it was intended to provide her first quarter's allowance

rather than an inheritance. Mistress Boileau herself replaced the support which had vanished with the

Mundys of Chatsworth. Her charity was partly from kindness, because the old scholar's heart was as

gentle as a lamb's on any subject outside her specialty: the collection and organization of knowledge.

But beyond kindness Mistress Boileau realized Adele was a student with abilities exceeding those

of anyone else she had trained in her long career. They worked on terms of increasing equality, Adele's

quickness balanced by the breadth of information within Mistress Boileau's crystalline mind. Nothing was

said, but both of them expected Adele to take Mistress Boileau's place when the older woman died at

her post—retirement was as unlikely a possibility as the immediate end of the universe.

Maybe without the war . . .

Cinnabar and the Alliance had fought three wars in the past century. This fourth outbreak had less

to do with the so-called Three Circles Conspiracy than it did with the same trade, pride, and paranoia

which had led to the earlier conflicts. Those were politicians' reasons and fools' reasons; nothing that

touched a scholar like Adele Mundy.

But the decree that came out of the Alliance capital on Pleasaunce touched her, for all that it was

framed by politicians and fools. The Academic Collections on Bryce were a national resource. Access

to them by citizens of the Republic of Cinnabar was to be strictly controlled.

Mistress Boileau suggested a way out of the crisis. She had friends on Pleasaunce. They couldn't

exempt Adele from the ruling, but they could make Adele an Alliance citizen as soon as she renounced

Cinnabar nationality.

A moment earlier Adele would have described herself as a citizen of learning and the galaxy, not of

any national boundary that tried to limit mankind. Cinnabar was a memory of the riots she saw in person

and the slaughter she missed by hours.

But she was a Mundy of Chatsworth, and she would bedamned before any politician on

Pleasaunce made her say otherwise.

Then the Elector of Kostroma asked Mistress Boileau, Director of the Academic Collections on

Bryce, to recommend someone to run his new library. The request had seemed a godsend at the time.

Now . . .

Bracey cried in alarm. Adele raised her head.

Bracey sprang backward, bumping into the boxed remains of several electronic data units that

might antedate the palace. One of his companion drunks vomited. Most of the yellowish gout cascaded

onto a gunnysack filled with loose paper of some kind, but splatters landed on Bracey's boots.

"Bracey," Adele said, her voice a handclap, "get out, and take your fellows with you. And stay out!"

"Aw, don't knot your panties, chiefie," the assistant said. His boots were red suede; he tentatively

rubbed the toe of one against a pasteboard carton, smearing but not removing the splash of vomit. "I'll

get one of the maids to—"

"Get out, by God!" Adele said.

Bracey's face clouded. The friend who still stood had been watching Adele and had seen more

than a short, slim female in nondescript clothing. As Bracey opened his mouth to snarl a curse, the friend

tugged his arm and muttered.

Bracey shook himself free, then dragged the sick man up by the collar. "Come on, Kirkwall," he

said. "If you've ruined these boots, I'll flay another pair from your backside, damned if I won't!"

Two men supporting the third, the Kostromans shuffled out of the library. Adele remained by the

data console, following them with her eyes. When she looked around the room again, the other

assistants and the two carpenters were staring at her. All of them turned their heads instantly.

"I'll take care of this, mistress," Vanness said as he trotted toward the mess of vomit. He waved the

bag which had held the logbooks, to use as a wiping rag.

The bag itself might identify where the contents had come from—

But Adele caught her objection unvoiced. There was nothing she'd gain from speaking that would

justify the seeming rebuke of a man who was trying to do his job.

"Yes, very well," she said instead. She turned her hawk glance onto the carpenters. They'd

resumed measuring their plank against the brackets they'd yesterday fastened to the paneling and the

frames mortised into the brick fabric of the wall.

"You two!" Adele Mundy ordered. "Come along with me to see your mistress, and bring that silly

piece of veneer stock with you. I need proper shelvingnow , and I don't mean enough for a medicine

chest!"

She was a Mundy of Chatsworth. She might very well fail, but she wasn't going to quit. With her

face hard, she set off for the cabinet shop in the arches supporting the causeway to the palace gardens.

"I believe there's only one more matter to be considered at this time, sirs and madame," said the

Secretary to the Navy Board. She was a woman at the latter end of middle age, utterly colorless in tone

and appearance. Her name was Klemsch, but two of the five board members couldn't have called her

anything beyond "Mistress Secretary" without thinking longer than they were accustomed to do.

With absolute rectitude and self-effacement Klemsch had served Admiral Anston for over thirty

years. Because of that she was herself one of the most powerful individuals in the Republic of Cinnabar.

"Oh, for God's sake, Anston," Guiliani grumbled. "Does it have to be today? I have an

engagement."

"It shouldn't take long," Admiral Anston said, politely but without any hint that his mind might be

changed. He nodded to Klemsch. "Invite Mistress Sand to join us, please."

"I knew I should have stayed in bed today," the Third Member muttered, scowling at the table's

onyx surface.

Three of the junior board members were senators; Guiliani was not, but the present Speaker was

her first cousin. She and La Foche had naval rank themselves, but Admiral Anston was the only serving

officer. He had earned both his rank and his considerable private fortune waging war successfully against

Cinnabar's enemies.

No Chairman of the Navy Board could be described as apolitical, but it was accepted by all who

knew Anston that his whole loyalty was to the RCN itself. At this time of present crisis, even the most

rabid party politician preferred the office to be in Anston's hands rather than those of someone more

malleable but less competent.

Mistress Sand entered the conference room without an obvious summons. She was a bulky

woman, well if unobtrusively dressed. "Harry," she said, nodding. "Gene, Tom, it's good to see you.

Bate, my husband was just asking after you. Will we see you next week at the Music Society meeting?"

"We're planning to attend," the Third Member replied. "At least if my granddaughter's marriage

negotiations wrap up in time."

All the political members of the board knew Mistress Sand socially; none of them wanted to have

professional contact with the genial, cultured woman.

"I told my fellows that this wouldn't take long, Bernis," Admiral Anston said. "Why don't you lay

out just the heads of the business rather than going into detail as you did with me?"

Sand nodded pleasantly and opened her ivory snuffbox. She placed a pinch in the hollow formed

by her thumb and the back of her hand, then snorted it into her left nostril.

There was a chair open for her at Anston's right. She remained standing.

"The Alliance is planning some devilment on Kostroma," Sand said. Admiral Anston wore a slight

smile; the four junior board members were frowningly silent. "I'm afraid that the risks are such that we

need to take action ourselves."

"There's already trouble with the new Elector, isn't there?" the Fourth Member said. "Time we took

the place over ourselves and cut the subsidy budget,I say."

"The reasons we decided Kostroma was more valuable as a friend than as a possession," Anston

said, "appear to me to remain valid. But we can't permit the Alliance to capture Kostroma, and the

Kostromans are unlikely to halt a really serious Alliance invasion. Their fleet is laid up and their satellite

defense system hasn't been upgraded in a generation."

"Walter Hajas isn't going to like us interfering," Guiliani said in a gloomy tone. Her family had

invested heavily in the Kostroma trade, so the probable disruption had personal as well as national

importance to her. "Let alone us basing a fleet on Kostroma. A few ships refitting at a time, sure, but the

harbor's already near capacity with the merchant trade. If we reduce that, a lot of people lose money

and the new Elector gets unpopular fast."

She shook her head in dismay. "As do we."

"We don't have a battle fleet to send!" the Second Member said. He looked up at Anston in

sudden concern. "Do we, Josh? I understood we were too stretched for proper patrolling against

privateers."

Three ships in which the Second Member was a partner had been taken by Alliance raiders in the

past year. That was partly bad luck and partly a result of the member spreading his investments over

nearly a hundred vessels . . . but it was also true that closer patrolling of systems known to outfit

privateers might have helped.

As little as the political members liked what they were hearing, none of them had questioned the

seriousness of the threat. Mistress Sand wouldn't have come before the full board this way if she'd

thought the matter could be handled through normal channels.

"I don't foresee the need of a fleet if we act promptly," Mistress Sand said. "Or for a permanent

presence. We can fulfill our requirements with an improvement to Kostroma's satellite defense system

and perhaps some experts to maintain and control it. The personnel wouldn't have to wear Cinnabar

uniforms."

She rotated the snuffbox between her thumb and forefinger. It was cone-shaped and the carvings

on its surface had been worn to tawny shadows.

"We were planning to upgrade the defenses of Pelleas Base," Anston said to his fellow members.

"The new constellation is already being loaded on transports. While I'm not comfortable in my mind

about Pelleas, the Kostroma situation appears to be more immediately critical."

The political members nodded. Guiliani muttered, "You could buy a battleship for what one of

those damned satellite constellations cost, but I suppose we'll find the money somewhere. I'll have a

word with my cousin."

"We'll need an escort," said the Fourth Member. "All it'd take is for illiterate pirates from Rouilly to

grab that load!"

"I think we can scare up a few destroyers for a cargo of such importance," Anston said without

cracking a smile. "And it occurred to me that guardships get too little out-of-system time to be at peak

performance if they should be needed. TheRene Descartes isn't as fast as a newer battleship, but she

can keep up with a transport."

"Walter Hajas can be made to understand that the squadron's presence is temporary," Ms. Sand

said. "Merely a training exercise."

"A guardship?" the Third Member said. "What are we leaving unguarded, then?"

"Admiral Koffe's heavy cruiser squadron arrived at Harbor Three yesterday for refit," Anston said,

skirting the nub of the question. "That can wait while . . . Admiral Ingreit, I think I'd recommend . . .

returns from Kostroma with theRene Descartes ."

"Christ," the Third Member muttered. "Well, if you're sure, Anston."

"None of us can be sure of anything except our ultimate demise, Harry," Mistress Sand said,

smiling as she returned the snuffbox to a pocket in the front of her silk jumper. "But I think we can

reasonably expect a good result—"

Her words lost the overtone of good humor, though a stranger wouldn't have thought the stocky

woman sounded worried as she concluded, "—so long as the squadron arrives at Kostroma in time. I'm

afraid there may be very little time."

There was a fountain in the plaza fronting the Elector's palace: a fish-tailed Triton sat on a shell and

blew water vertically from a conch. The stream splashed onto the shell and finally drained into the

passing canal.

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

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WiththeLightningsbyDavidDrakeThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1998byDavidDrakeAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPub...

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John Ringo - With the Lightnings

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