CHAPTER 15

"Do have a bite of this breast, Captain Leary," said Estrella, the strawberry blonde on Daniel's left, offering him a tidbit of chicken between her thumb and index finger. She giggled and with her other hand plucked the deep-scooped neck of her blouse momentarily below her nipples. "Wouldn't you like that?"

"I think Dannie prefers dark meat," said Margolla, the brunette on his other side as she leaned against his arm. Her top covered her from chin to wrists, but the fabric was translucent even in dim light and so thin he felt not only her warmth but her heartbeat. "Do you like dark meat, Dannie?"

"At the moment . . . ," said Daniel with a catch in his throat. "I think I'll have some more of this excellent wine."

He emptied his glass and looked around for a waiter. Two servants converged on him, each carrying a ewer. They jostled for a moment, then one poked the other in the ribs with his free hand.

"Boys!" Daniel snapped. He pointed his finger at the servant who'd jabbed the other and said, "Stand back!" When the servant obeyed, bowing and scraping with his free hand, Daniel offered his glass to the other fellow to fill.

Daniel saw Adele reach into her jacket pocket when he raised his voice. She alone of the forty-odd diners appeared to have noticed anything. She sat at the end of the table on Enrique Pansuela's right; he'd been lecturing her about the curio cabinets covering the walls to the mezzanine walkway.

"Oh, you're so masterful," Estrella murmured, absently swallowing the bit of chicken she'd been holding. "I wish we had men like you in Lusa City, don't you, Margolla?"

The women were young, pretty, and obviously willing—all the traits Daniel looked for in his off-duty socializing; but they were also forward enough to make him a trifle uncomfortable in a setting whose rules weren't necessarily as clear as they seemed. He'd done enough snaring in his youth on Bantry to worry that the open path before him might end in a demand for marriage or huge damages to a suddenly-aggrieved father.

Come to think, he wasn't even sure the girls were daughters rather than wives with God knew what sort of complications. The way Flora was crawling over Count Klimov at the far end of the table showed that was a possibility.

The hall filled the second and third stories of a whole wing; even with scores of guests and seemingly twice that number of servants, it was a hollow cavern. Now that night had fallen, chandeliers hanging from coffers between the darkened skylights were the only illumination.

The curio cabinets along the walls weren't separately lighted, but as a result the few items that reflected the glow from above stood out like stars on a moonless night. Daniel was in a reverie that was part wine, part the warm pressure of the girls to either side, and part concern about that pressure. It took him almost a minute to understand the image he'd seen gleaming on a shelf behind him when he separated the squabbling waiters.

He set his refilled glass down untasted. "Excuse me, my dears," he said, sliding his chair back so quickly that the girls might well have toppled sideways together had he not kept a guiding hand on the nearer shoulder of each.

Daniel stepped to the cabinet; as before only Adele paid any attention to him, though in this case there was the excuse that the others probably thought he'd risen to go to the jakes. He took the object out of its niche beside a goblet of tarred earthenware, seemingly ancient, and a sheet of native copper covered mostly with black sulfate corrosion. It was a military belt buckle. That was common enough, but judging from its weight and lack of tarnish this one was made of platinum.

A golden eagle stood out in high relief from an incised shield whose lower portion was crosshatched to indicate a separate color. Daniel turned and found that Adele and their host were already coming around the long table toward them. He was surprised, but he knew Adele well enough that he shouldn't have been.

Pansuela getting up did create some interest; half the diners began craning their necks to see what was happening. Count Klimov was too far into his wine to care, but the Klimovna was looking. Daniel caught her eye and hooked a finger toward her. She shook off the hand of the local gallant—from his features very possibly Margolla's brother—and got up to join Enrique and Adele before they reached Daniel.

"Master Pansuela," Daniel said, holding out the belt buckle, "this appears to me to be a representation in metal of the Novy Sverdlovsk flag. I was wondering how it came to be here?"

"May I?" said Valentina; the form of her words was polite, but she snatched the buckle from Daniel with the ravenous enthusiasm of a predatory fish taking chum. "Yes!"

She turned, folding the buckle in her palm. "Georgi! Come here! The Captain has found the buckle from John Tsetzes' regalia!"

"What?" said Pansuela. He reached for the buckle, but Valentina obviously wasn't in a mood for anybody else to touch it at the moment. He shrugged. "I'm afraid I don't have any idea, Leary. One of my uncles catalogued this, but that was . . ."

He waved a hand, indicating a past lost in the mists of time.

"And anyway," he added, "we all thought he was likely to start chirping with the birds, you see. Not quite right in the head."

"John Tsetzes left Novy Sverdlovsk sixty-one standard years ago," Adele said. Her voice was calm but she wore a tense expression—possibly because she couldn't use her personal data unit unless she sat down and set it on her lap. At the moment sitting on the floor meant she'd be stepped on. "The chances are that were he to have arrived here, it would've been within six months of that time. Is that helpful?"

"Who knows?" Pansuela said. "I suppose you could check the guest book. You noble patrons haven't signed the book yourselves yet, have you? Or did you? I forget things sometimes."

"Where would the guest book be, if you please?" said Adele more sharply than perhaps she intended. One didn't want to get between Adele and information, though. "I'd like to look at it now."

The Count and Flora Pansuela struggled through what was by now a gathering crowd. Given the limited amount of light, it was rather like being in a forest after sunset. Hogg stood nearby—he'd been against the wall behind Daniel's chair during dinner. Daniel didn't see Tovera, but then one generally didn't see Tovera. He had no doubt Adele's pale reptile was wherever she felt she could best safeguard her mistress.

"Georgi, you see?" Valentina said, holding the buckle toward her husband in her cupped hands. She turned to Daniel and said, "Tsetzes always appeared in public in a white uniform with appointments of platinum picked out with gold: the braid, the buttons, and this buckle of course. He even had a pistol of platinum, they say."

"And the Earth Diamond," the Count said. He caressed the buckle with his fingertips but didn't try to take it from his wife's hands. To his host he went on, "Master Pansuela, have you perhaps in this potpourri—"

A sweep of his left arm indicated the egg-crate shelving which held the curio collection on this side of the room.

"—a diamond the size of a child's head, etched with the continents of Old Earth? Because if you do, my wife and I can offer you. . . ."

Pansuela shrugged. "I really don't know," he said. "I've never seen such a thing. But the last person to take an interest in the cabinet was Uncle Manuel, as I said."

"Did your uncle leave a written catalogue?" Adele said. She and the Klimovna sounded like a pair of hounds on a very fresh scent. "Or perhaps electronic files? Either would do."

"I suppose he must have," Pansuela agreed, wrinkling his brow. "He had a study off the mezzanine." He nodded toward the railed walk midway to the hall's coffered ceiling. "I'll show it to you, but you'd know better than I what sort of thing you're looking for."

He turned to the Klimovs. "And you're welcome to search the collection itself if you like," he went on. "But a diamond so large, I'd expect to have heard about it. Though perhaps not."

"You will not be looking at dusty shelves tonight, Georgi," said Flora Pansuela, pressing her ample form so firmly into the Count that he shuffled sideways to avoid being knocked over. "We have other business."

"Not tonight, Lady Pansuela," said the priest who'd been glowering from the moment Daniel first saw him. "You and I will spend tonight in our devotions."

"No, Rosario, not tonight," said Flora with an unmistakable edge in her voice. "Perhaps next week—"

"No!" said the priest. He tried to force his way between Klimov and Lady Pansuela, but he was so short that the wide brim of the hat he wore even at dinner brushed the Count's chin. "I will not permit you to risk your immortal soul by putting off your devotions!"

"Rosario!" said Flora. "You are my chaplain, not my jailer. If you forget that once more, I'll have the boys put you out the door—and if I do, you'll not be allowed back, I warn you!"

"Father Rosario," Enrique Pansuela said, putting a hand on the priest's shoulder. "Come upstairs with me and Lady Mundy to find Uncle Manuel's papers. Afterwards you and I can have a nightcap and get some sleep. It won't seem so important in the morning, I'm sure."

"Faugh, you complaisant lump!" the priest shouted. He glared at the Klimovna, adding, "And you're no better!"

"Rosario, these are our guests!" Pansuela said. The priest shoved his way out of the assemblage and tramped toward the doorway at the end of the hall.

Daniel let his breath out slowly. He'd been in enough situations of the sort himself to realize that you couldn't be sure just where they were going to go in the next few seconds.

Enrique Pansuela turned to Adele with a sad smile. "Lady Mundy," he said, "have you had your fill of dinner? Because I can show you Uncle Manuel's study whenever you like."

"I've eaten all I need to, Master Pansuela," she said. "I'd like to see the records as soon as is convenient."

Daniel felt friendly warmth against his left arm. "And you, Dannie?" a voice murmured. "Would you like to go somewhere too?"

"I would indeed," Daniel agreed. As he settled his arm around Margolla's waist, it struck him that he and Adele both in their different ways were finding Tegeli an unexpectedly pleasant landfall.

The guest book lay open on the folding table servants had brought into the room at Adele's direction. Uncle Manuel's desk of boldly-carved wood was here also, but his study—and for how many generations would it be known by that name?—had become a place to dump whatever the Pansuelas decided they didn't need but weren't ready to discard.

Boxes and odd lots—a set of curtains, rotted halfway to the rod on which they were rolled; a holographic entertainment deck, certainly ancient and probably non-functional—stood along one side of the hallway, the overburden removed to get down to the layers of Uncle Manuel's occupancy. Stolid servants waited just outside the door to execute Adele's next direction.

She smiled faintly as she twisted off the top of a canister which rattled hopefully. This is really more a task for an archeologist than a librarian, she thought, but she wasn't about to complain. Not only was this a job well within her capacity, it gave her a familiar warm feeling to unearth information that almost no one else could have dragged from the tangles where it hid.

The canister contained commercially-loaded holochips. According to the legends printed on their sides they were cookbooks. The chips were of a non-standard variety. Adele could probably manage to read them with her data unit, but she didn't bother. Even if they were something other than they claimed to be—a collection of pornography, for example—they weren't going to bring her closer to John Tsetzes.

She closed the can and set it in the box of discards beside her. It was full enough, so she called, "Boy!" and went on to the next item.

This was a diary, handwritten by a woman with a penchant for purple ink, though she'd used a number other colors. Adele skimmed the contents: an empty chronicle of an empty life, very like most other lives. It was from twenty or so years ago, far too recent for the period she was researching, so she set it into the empty box with which a servant had replaced the one he'd carried into the hall.

Adele caught movement from the corner of her eye. These servants didn't need to be geniuses to understand "Stay out of the room until I call you," which she'd already had to repeat twice since her initial briefing. "I told you—" she said, looking up in irritation.

Enrique Pansuela had come back. He'd watched her for half an hour initially, then given the servants directions to do whatever Lady Mundy said and to her relief gone off to his own occupations. "Oh," Adele said. "I'm sorry, Pansuela, I thought . . ."

She let her voice trail off. "I thought you were a servant," was the honest truth, but it probably wouldn't be politic to say. She sneezed instead, a natural consequence of the work she'd been doing, and well timed for a change.

"Don't bother getting up," her host said with a little gesture. Adele blinked, amazed that he'd thought she was going to. She'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours, so it wouldn't be a quick process. "I just came over to see how you've been getting on."

He cleared his throat. "I haven't been able to get to sleep, you see."

Adele nodded, understanding more than she'd been told. Pansuela had been under the influence of something when he greeted them this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, by now—but he apparently hadn't taken any more of his drug of choice since the Princess Cecile's arrival. She supposed she should praise her host for fighting his addiction instead of sneering within herself at somebody weak enough to become addicted in the first place . . . but so long as she kept it within her, not even Pansuela himself had a right to complain about her attitude.

"Yes, well," she said aloud. She decided to get up after all; now that she was back in the world outside her own head, she realized that she really ought to move. "I've found John Tsetzes in the guest book, that was easy enough."

She gestured to the leather-bound volume on the table she'd had brought in. Finding the page hadn't been as easy as she implied—well, it wouldn't have been easy for somebody else. The ink and the pages—which were some sort of leather, perhaps fish bladder—had turned an identical sepia tone in the sixty-one standard years since they'd been created. She'd scanned the sheets into her data unit, sharpened the contrast, and then let the processor do the sorting, managing the job in a reasonable hour or so.

In place of the original muted lighting, a battery-powered lantern which Hogg had found for her flooded the room with hard illumination. He said it came off the bow of a fishing vessel where it'd been used as a night lure. Pansuela winced, though whether from the glare or the disorder it threw into high relief Adele couldn't judge.

"He signed using the name Ion Porphyrogenitus, commanding the yacht Nicator," she explained, "but the timing was right and he gave his homeworld as Novy Sverdlovsk. Since then I've been looking for your uncle's catalogue of the collection, hoping that there'll be some reference to provenance as well—at least for the accessions within his own lifetime. Your Uncle Manuel would've been an adult sixty-one years ago, wouldn't he?"

Pansuela rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. "What?" he said. "Yes, I suppose so. In his thirties, I believe."

He scanned the room; it was emptier than it'd probably been in a generation but it was a jumble by any reasonable standards. Pansuela swivelled—he still stood in the doorway—and looked down the hall in both directions and returned his attention to Adele.

"I wonder," he said unexpectedly, "what might have happened if I'd grown up differently. If I'd gone off-planet, I mean. I almost did, when I was eighteen. A Kostroman merchantman landed. They'd been damaged in a fight with pirates and needed repair. They'd lost some crew as well. The captain stayed with us while they were fitting new antennas. He offered to take me as a trainee officer."

Adele looked at Pansuela and tried to imagine him as a spacer, as a starship officer. She shook her head unconsciously. He had the intelligence and probably the education, but with the best will in the world she couldn't pretend he had a backbone. Though perhaps the drugs had leached it out of him. . . . 

Pansuela gave her a bitter smile. "Do you ever wonder how things might have been different in your life, mistress?" he said.

How much did he know about her? And of course the answer was, "Nothing whatever."

"No, I do not," Adele said, bending backwards to loosen muscles that'd tightened during the past several hours of her hunching forward. "There was one major . . . crux point, I suppose you could call it, in my life. Occasionally I wonder what it would've been like had that developed otherwise—"

Had the Mundys and all their close associates not been slaughtered in the Proscriptions which she'd escaped by being off Cinnabar at the time.

"—but I find it's like trying to look through a brick wall. It's a completely pointless exercise, so I don't do it."

Adele cleared her throat and glanced down at the pile she'd been working through. She said, "Well, I'd better get back—"

Somebody shouted in mad fury, his voice echoing down the hallway like the roar of a balked predator. Metal hammered on wood.

"What on—" Pansuela said.

A heavy electromotive pistol cracked. The slug hit metal with a bell note and the splintering of wood.

"That's from the guest wing!" Pansuela said. His mouth dropped open. The servants in the hallway had exchanged brief glances and vanished in the opposite direction from the shooting.

Adele stepped to the doorway. Her left hand was in her pocket.

Daniel had eaten well, drunk very well, and thereafter exercised with an enthusiasm appropriate to a fit young man who took pride in good workmanship. Even so the first shouting brought him to his feet out of a dreamless sleep. He didn't know what was going on or even where he was, but he knew something was wrong and that made it the business of Lieutenant Daniel Leary.

God in heaven, it was dark! They'd had a candle lantern that burned with a pinkish flame. The girl, whatever her name was—Margolla?—thought it was romantic and Daniel was happy with whatever a girl thought was romantic. It'd burned out, though, and the course of the evening he'd kicked heaven knew where the trousers he'd laid neatly over the bunk's footboard when he took them off.

He groped on the floor, still disoriented—it was dark as six feet up a hog's bum!—and grabbed a handful of the silky synthetic fabric as the girl said, "Dannie, what's happening?" and somebody started banging on a door just down the hallway.

The girl—her name was Margolla—switched on a bedlamp. She was leaning toward him. Her breasts were firm, full, and shapely—enticing under most circumstances but right now of less interest to Daniel than the fact that Bloody hell, I've got my trousers on backwards!

"Daniel, where are you going?" Margolla said on a rising note. Daniel jerked the door open.

Electric sconces at either corner illuminated the hall with wan sufficiency. Father Rosario stood at the door of the next suite down. His wide hat had fallen off and lay like a soup dish on the floor beside him. As Daniel stepped into the hallway, the priest put the muzzle of his gleaming pistol against the lock-plate and fired.

The brilliant white flash of oxidizing aluminum lit the hallway. The pellet hit the lock a clanging hammerblow that blew it out of the panel. The doorpanel swung inward.

"Hey!" Daniel shouted, waving his arms as he started forward. He didn't have strong feelings about Count Klimov as a person, but the Count was a Sissie, a member with Daniel of a family bound tighter than mere genetics could do. "Drop it!"

Father Rosario turned, bringing up the pistol. Daniel, ten feet away, saw the tiny black hole of the muzzle and threw himself sideways.

The first slug missed, blasting a divot from the wainscoting before it ricocheted off the concrete core with a spiteful howl. Recoil lifted the barrel so the priest's next two shots smacked into the ceiling.

Daniel'd squinted as he rolled, but the flashes still left vivid afterimages quivering across his retinas. He saw Count Klimov, a gangling ghost of a man, lunge out of his room and sprint down the hall in the other direction.

Father Rosario turned, aiming through the doorway again. He was blinking, blinded by his own shots, but he caught motion from the corner of his eye and blasted twice more down the corridor just as the Count disappeared around the corner. The priest started after him, waving the pistol and screaming.

Bloody hell, it sounded like a whole stadium of people screaming, including Margolla bawling, "Dannie, don't do it!" Daniel launched himself in a flying tackle that would've smashed the priest to the floor hard enough to jar his teeth loose, let alone his gun—except that Flora Pansuela, darker and more rounded than the Count but just as naked, ran into the hallway just at the wrong moment. Daniel crashed into her, knocking Flora into the doorjamb and slewing himself into the opposite wall. For all her softness, the lady was a solid weight.

Daniel rose to his feet again like a sprinter launching himself from the blocks. He'd never lost forward motion, just channeled it at the cost of some bruises. He'd feel them in the morning but they didn't slow him tonight.

Rosario stumbled on the hem of his long robe, triggering another shot into the floor. It caromed into the ceiling, then back to punch a hole in the door of the thankfully unoccupied room at the end of the hallway.

The priest stopped at the corner and pointed his weapon down the intersecting hall. Daniel caught him around the shoulders and crushed him against the opposite wall. He thought he heard bones crack, and he bloody well hoped he heard bones crack. The pistol bounced away harmlessly.

Father Rosario crumpled to the floor. Daniel fell on top of him, breathing through his mouth and suddenly queasy from the adrenaline he hadn't burned out of his system. He glanced down the hall through blobs of purple and orange flickering across his retinas. Count Klimov had tripped on a pile of boxes and was crawling on all fours toward the lighted doorway where Enrique Pansuela stood with a shocked expression.

Adele, her face still as marble, lifted the muzzle of the pistol on which she'd been taking up trigger-pressure. She breathed out, then slipped the weapon away in her pocket.

Daniel managed to rise to his hands and knees. He patted the priest on the back. "You may not be ready to thank me now, Rosario old boy," he said through dry lips. "But I just saved your worthless life!"