Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

“—and a map of Spires, so we should be all right if we stay together.”

She nodded to Daniel as she followed the midshipmen down the companionway; a thin, stiff-looking woman in dress grays. He winked in reply. Yes, they’d be all right; no question about that.

The people telling about Barnes’ exploit exaggerated: there’d only been fifteen women in the house, not thirty-one. And they exaggerated about Adele as well. She hadn’t really killed a hundred Alliance soldiers on Kostroma with single shots to the head, snapping the rounds off every time a target offered.

But it probably wasn’t as much of an exaggeration as the story about Barnes.

Chapter Thirteen

Nine funicular railways climbed from Flood Harbor to the city of Spires on beyond the cliffs. Three were for personnel, leaving at fifteen-minute intervals according to the scarred metal plate in the shelter where Adele stood with the midshipmen. The others were much larger, with cogged rails to give positive traction to heavy loads. They hauled cargo to and from the freighters berthed in slips formed from golden limestone quarried from the cliffs themselves.

“How does the harbor flood?” Dorst said, looking back at the rounded hulls of starships which showed over the slips like so many oxen in their stalls. “It looks to me that the locks keep the water level pretty constant whatever the tide’s doing.”

“Captain Ludifica Flood refounded the colony from Earth after the Hiatus,” Adele said, restraining the urge to bring out her personal data unit and show the boy the reference. “The harbor’s named after her.”

The funicular lines carried two cars in balance, going up and down simultaneously on a single set of tracks with a double-tracked shunt in the middle where they passed. The lower set of pulleys squealed loudly as the cars above reached midpoint.

Adele eyed them without pleasure. The cables were no thicker than her thumb, which seemed modest when they had to support forty-odd passengers and the vehicle against a thousand-foot fall. Deliberately she said, “I wonder, Dorst; are these—”

She gestured.

“—going to be thick enough to hold us?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am!” Dorst said, forgetting he was supposed to treat her as a peer. “This is beryllium monocrystal felted in an elastomer—single-strand, you see, not woven, to limit the stress. You could haul the Princess Cecile to the top if your motor was up to it.”

“The strands are continuously tested for current path, Mundy,” Vesey said. “The operator, well, the system itself I suppose, knows if there’s any breakage. It’d shut down long before there was danger.”

They both reacted to Adele with a sort of frightened deference. It wasn’t her rank: though they were classed as petty officers for the time being, Dorst and Vesey were in line for commissions which would make them the titular superiors of any warrant officer, let alone a specialist like Adele who knew virtually nothing about the running of a starship.

Her question, crafted to emphasize that ignorance, must have relaxed them somewhat, though. Vesey, her eyes on the approaching car, added, “How long have you known Captain Leary, Mundy, if you don’t mind . . . ?”

Good God, they thought she was Daniel’s mistress.

“I met Mr. Leary on Kostroma, where I was working for the Elector,” Adele said calmly, suppressing the urge to shout, “You idiots!” in anger at the obtuseness of people. “And Woetjans and most of the rest of the present crew, as a matter of fact. Our families had had dealings in our youth—”

That was an honest if incomplete way of describing the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Proscriptions that followed it.

“—but we didn’t know of one another’s existence until a few hours before the Alliance invasion.”

She was tempted to add that they were doing Daniel a disservice in believing he was the sort of man whose penis made all his decisions. She didn’t say that because it wasn’t her place to; and in fairness to the midshipmen, Daniel’s off-duty behavior could lead one to that conclusion.

The pulleys divided the waiting area. There was a mounting platform on either side of the tracks, though Adele could see that the descending car had a single bay. She and the midshipmen had walked to the right side because a dozen or so Sexburgan traders were already waiting on the left.

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