David Drake - RCN 01 - With the Lightnings

WITH THE

WITH THEWITH THE

WITH THE

LIGHTNINGS

LIGHTNINGSLIGHTNINGS

LIGHTNINGS

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.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57818-9

ISBN: 0-671-57886-3

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

DEDICATION

To A[rielle] Heather Wood

More widely known as The 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.

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. . . .

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 Kostro-man

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 nobil-ity 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 inter-est the

carven swags and volutes that decorated unpre-tentious 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 atmos-phere,

ships used their High Drive, a matter/anti-matter 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

detach-ing 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 appoint-ment 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

for any 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 because that 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

David Drake - RCN 01 - With the Lightnings

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: