Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

“Why are you telling Daniel and me the truth if you’re lying to others?” Adele said, pressing the point with a lack of tact that made Daniel smile. They were very different people, he and Adele, but they both had a capacity for directness that startled others. “Our social superiors, many would say.”

Vaughn smiled at her. His expression was perfectly open and natural—and false. Daniel was convinced of that, though he had no more evidence to go on than he did about the state of the universe before time began.

“Well, Officer Mundy,” he said. “I don’t believe you’re going to help my enemies, knowing that you would thereby help the Alliance. And if you’ll forgive a foreigner a bit of romance—I don’t care to lie to officers of the Cinnabar fleet. We on Strymon have had ample reason to respect you and the ships you crew.”

You know Adele’s been listening to your conversations, Daniel realized. You’re telling us a story that fits what we already know, but that doesn’t make it true.

“I see,” Adele said. “I wish your endeavors well, Mr. Vaughn.”

Albirus Islet with its wall of amber trees was coming up on the left. Tredegar had gone rigid again, except that he kept sucking his lower lip in and out over his teeth. He kept pressing the joystick but the trolling motor’s throttle was already full-open.

“Is Mistress Zane here to make arrangements for your return, then?” Adele asked. Daniel saw her fingers twitch and almost smiled: Adele desperately wanted to enter the data somewhere to make it real to her.

“Well, Thea is a friend,” Vaughn said. “I don’t think I should—”

There was a fresh hole in the sheets of hardened sap, a saucer-sized window from the interior of Albirus Islet that hadn’t been there when the party entered. It could’ve been casual vandalism, but that wasn’t the first explanation that went through Daniel’s mind.

“Watch out!” Daniel said, pointing to the opening. The boat was coming parallel to it. “There’s a—”

Only shadows showed through the amber curtain, but metal glinted on the other side of the hole. Vaughn was looking at Daniel in surprise; Adele groped in her left pocket for the pistol she’d been forced to leave behind. Tredegar, his face set and tears streaming down his cheeks, gripped the joystick as if it were his last hope of life.

There was no time for thought, only instinct. Daniel seized the aide’s throat with both hands, lifted him bodily from the seat, and threw him into the crystal water.

The boat pitched wildly, but craft in the Gardens were broad-beamed with the expectation that many passengers would be clumsy and no few of them drunk besides. Daniel stepped into the pilot’s seat, jerked the separate steering wheel to the left, and stamped on the foot throttle which controlled the main motor. The boat surged toward the islet, the bow lifting to a thirty-degree angle as the powerful waterjet torqued the vessel around its center of mass before accelerating it.

“Are you—” Vaughn said, grabbing Daniel around the shoulders. Adele threw herself over the Strymonian’s face. She wasn’t strong enough to break the grip of a well-built man, but suddenly being blindfolded made Vaughn jerk away.

The world exploded in heat and the flash of a sun going nova. What was left of the boat flew over on its back, flinging its three remaining passengers into the canal not far from Tredegar.

* * *

Air, fiercely hot and compressed by a thunderclap to the density of tons of sand, enveloped Adele. She thought she’d let go of Vaughn, but she couldn’t be sure. She felt nothing—not even the pull of gravity—until she slammed into the canal.

She rose spluttering. The canal’s knee-high water was clean and sweet; it must be filtered with the same care that the proprietors showed with every other aspect of the Gardens. Except that occasionally they failed to prevent assassins from bringing heavy weapons into their emasculated precincts. . . .

The weight of the motor held the boat’s stern down, so the remainder of the plastic hull stuck up in the air. The dashboard had survived but the lower portion of the bow had been converted into a stench of resin matrix. Only a few tatters of fiberglass reinforcement were still attached to the undamaged mid-hull.

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