Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

They settled into place, thirty yards behind one car, thirty yards ahead of another. Adele tried to guess where the women came from. Not Cinnabar, certainly. They were speaking a language that was neither a Cinnabar dialect nor Universal, and their fluidly attractive costume wasn’t native to Cinnabar either.

Xenos had become a microcosm of the whole Cinnabar empire. Adele could access a rental list from the apartment building where the women boarded. She could then match the frequency of names with those of various worlds protected by the Republic, giving her a high probability of identifying the women’s planet of origin.

Or of course she could ask them; and watch their faces freeze, and wait for one of them to answer in a voice either dead with fear or shrill, trying with anger to cover that fear—She’s in uniform. Why does she want to know? What does it mean? But they would answer.

Adele smiled faintly; at life, at herself. They wouldn’t believe it was merely curiosity, useless information being gathered by a person to whom nothing had use except information.

Half a mile from the apartments the car pulled into another shunt. The ground floors of the nearby buildings were given over to expensive shops, while the windows of the floor above were stenciled with business logos.

The housewives got off and were replaced by a score of officeworkers dressed in styles as stratified as those of the RCN. The one senior clerk wore a jacket with wide fur cuffs, showing that she didn’t need to use her hands. The clothes of her underlings grew brighter with each step down in status; the trio of messenger boys chattered together like warblers in yellow and green and azure tawdriness.

The car staggered into motion again, sluggish with its load though not quite full. Close to the city center the cars ran slower than in the suburbs, so they bounced back onto the main line directly despite the traffic.

A woman sat next to Adele, talking with animation to the companion on her other side. The man standing in front of them joined in the conversation, his calf brushing Adele’s knees as the vehicle swayed.

When Adele was last on Cinnabar, she couldn’t have imagined being a part of this scene. Literally: she wouldn’t have had the data to visualize being jostled and crowded on a public conveyance. How matters had changed. . . .

Not necessarily for the worse. She’d learned many things through disgrace and poverty that she never would have known in the ordinary course of things. She smiled. And she’d gained a family and a friend more trustworthy than those at the apex of power—people like her own parents and Corder Leary—would ever know.

The car groaned to a halt again. They’d reached the district ringing the Pentacrest, where the lesser nobility owned houses and rented ground-floor space to expensive shops. A group—a gang—of servants pushed their way into the car. Several of them held the doors open as their fellows chivied those already aboard out onto the platform.

Their garments were gray and bright green in horizontal stripes. That would make them Tanisards, a minor house which hadn’t had a member in the Senate until the last century. All of them were in the full livery of underlings. Senior servants like the majordomo and his/her section heads would wear business suits with only collar flashes to announce their affiliation.

Adele squirmed to look out the window at her back. More servants waited to board, but no member of the house was present: these servants were clearing the car for their personal whim.

A husky youth—they were all young, not surprisingly—stood squarely in front of Adele with two of his fellows at his elbows. He grinned in an attempt to look threatening, but there was a degree of caution in his expression. Adele was alone, but the RCN was a very large organization.

Adele remained seated with her left hand in her pocket. “If you touch me, scum,” she said in a clear voice, “your master will answer for your presumption on the field of honor!”

“What?” said the Tanisard. He’d expected something when the woman didn’t scuttle away from his advance but not that particular threat, delivered with such absolute conviction in an upper-class accent.

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