“State your business with the Captal da Lund so that I can admit you,” the fellow said. “Please.”
Daniel frowned. There was no question of his having gotten the address wrong: this walled compound on a hill ten miles east of Spires was the only possible structure that matched Vaughn’s directions. Besides, from the dozen vehicles—two of them aircars—already in the courtyard, there was a party going on.
“He’s Lieutenant Daniel Leary, commanding the Princess Cecile!” Hogg said, sounding more disgusted than angry. “Delos Vaughn invited him, if you know who that is.”
“You’re expected, Lieutenant,” the attendant said, waving to the guard watching from the tower above the gate. The tower windows were beveled sharply so that the automatic impeller mounted there could fire down onto the access road. “Nothing personal. You see, the Captal’s got to be careful.”
He waved to the courtyard. “Park where you please. Ferde will take you to the third floor where the party is.”
Another attendant waved from the door of the narrow three-story building directly across the courtyard. He was dressed like the gate man, but his coat was azure blue instead of scarlet. Apparently it was a national style rather than livery.
Hogg engaged the motors. Over their whine he muttered, “They look like bloody clowns!”
“We’re guests in their master’s house, Hogg,” Daniel said. He cleared his throat. “And after all, their liquor should be perfectly good even if it comes in a funny-shaped bottle.”
Weeks in the Matrix had roughened Hogg’s personality beyond its normal degree of abrasiveness. Daniel understood his servant’s xenophobia, but it couldn’t be allowed to get out of hand.
Daniel didn’t share Hogg’s attitude. So far as he was concerned, foreigners were perfectly all right. Some of them were almost the equal of Cinnabar citizens.
The building’s top story was completely glazed; from there figures with drinks in their hands looked down. Most of them wore flashy Strymon costumes, though one was in garb cut like that of the attendants. His coat was black over a white cummerbund rather than of bright colors.
“Yeah, I’ll be better for a drink,” Hogg muttered as he pulled in at the end of a row of similar though more ornate vehicles. “And I guess you’ll be doing some drinking too, young master, because none of the women upstairs looked worth even my time.”
Before Daniel had managed the car door—it hinged at the back edge, not the front as he was used to—Delos Vaughn himself brushed past the attendant and called, “Lieutenant! Very pleased to see you. Come up and meet my friends and our host.”
Besides the residence, the compound held a power room—the blow-off roof on a squat, thick-walled structure pointed to a fusion bottle inside—and a utility building holding shops, a kitchen, and a laundry. The long, one-story building along the back wall was a barracks if Daniel had ever seen one. Fortress indeed!
Daniel let Vaughn take his arm because the other choice was to slap the fellow’s hand away. No point in coming at all if he was going to do that.
“I’d thought you were the host, actually, Vaughn,” he said as they entered the building. The walls were decorated with a mural of lush meadows, an incongruous contrast to Sexburga’s sere landscape. An open elevator waited across the tiled foyer.
“Well, I don’t have a suitable place of my own on Sexburga,” Vaughn said with a chuckle. The elevator door closed behind them without any command that Daniel noticed. “The Captal is an old friend of my father, you see. He was Lord Protector of the Berengian Stars until he decided to retire a few years ago. Mistress Zane contacted him, and he was glad to lend his premises.”
The Berengians were five—or occasionally seven—stars in loose confederation. The little Daniel knew of their political history reminded him of watching piglets squirming against a sow with two more offspring than teats.
The elevator started with a gentle hum. There weren’t any controls inside the circular cage. The curved mirror of the walls gave Daniel a view of himself looking uncomfortable in the white-and-gold of his 1st Class uniform.
“Retired?” Daniel said. “Not that I want to pry, but . . .”