“Two minutes to go,” Daniel said. “I believe I should be punctual even though the Astrogator hasn’t directly informed me of the assembly. Although—”
He smiled broadly as Adele fell in beside him on their way from the bridge. Tovera waited at the hatch with Adele’s gunbelt; Hogg had gone to join the squad of marksmen.
“—I don’t imagine that he believes that I won’t hear whatever he says that pertains to the RCN.”
“There’s been nothing to suggest an attack,” Adele said. “But there’s been no reason at all given for the assembly, just the order decreeing it. I’m truly sorry, Daniel. I’ve listened to conversations between Kelburney and his closest associates, and there was no hint of this till it happened. The only person whose opinion matters in an autocracy is the autocrat.”
“Speaking as the captain of a warship, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Daniel said, stretching with the care that his uniform’s strait limits required. He grinned.
Adele walked down the companionway behind Daniel and with Tovera following her. He glanced back and said, “Adele, if you would, please arrange that the Astrogator doesn’t speak until I have.”
“Yes, I took care of that,” Adele said in the dry tone she used when someone told her to do something obvious. When a Cinnabar aristocrat attends a gathering of barbarians, of course he takes precedence.
She shook her head in self-amusement. She’d thought of herself as an egalitarian when she worked in the Academic Collections on Blythe. There, of course, she’d been surrounded by other well-born intellectuals.
A boarding party with submachine guns and grenades filled Corridor B in both directions from the entryway. Woetjans and Barnes headed the sections.
“You show ’em, sir!” a spacer called.
Woetjans snarled vainly for silence, but the whole party was cheering as Daniel and his companions walked into the sunlight. And perhaps that wasn’t such a bad accompaniment after all.
The corvette and the captured freighter were at a corner of the port distant from other vessels. The plain before the Princess Cecile’s main hatch had filled with pirates and the vehicles that had brought them to the assembly. There were several thousand of them, a staggering number in comparison to the empty purple wasteland Adele had seen a few hours before.
She sat on the deck, her back against the jamb of the main hatch, and brought her data unit live. At the top of the display Adele put a panorama of the crowd, but her own concerns were with matters that might not take place openly.
Tovera was across the hatchway, scanning the thousands of faces on the ground below. She too had specialized concerns.
Kelburney had parked his armored car at the bottom of the ramp. He stood with his back to the vehicle, behind a line of his bodyguards. On seeing Daniel appear, he started his oration.
The noise of the crowd, most of it drunk or still drinking, completely covered Kelburney’s unaided voice. A technician with a desperate expression stuck his head out the rear hatch of the vehicle.
Daniel raised his hands in greeting. “Siblings of the Selma Cluster,” his voice boomed. “I greet you in the name of Cinnabar and the RCN. Astrogator Kelburney, I’m particularly glad to see you.”
He beckoned Kelburney forward with his left hand. “Come, join me and address your people from the deck of a Cinnabar warship.”
It struck Adele that if the Astrogator hadn’t been so determined to avoid informing Daniel of his plans, Daniel wouldn’t have chosen to embarrass him in this fashion. The fact that only Kelburney and a few of his closest aides knew what was happening now made the insult bearable but all the deeper.
Kelburney’s face went white, then red. Finally he rocked forward in a gust of laughter. Pushing through the line of his startled bodyguards, he strode up the ramp and took his place beside Daniel.
“I wished for a while that you were one of my captains, Leary,” he said in a low voice. “Now I’m glad you’re not, because I see I’d have to shoot you and your tech officer there—”
He nodded toward Adele.
“—before the month was out.”