There was another pause. The Goldenfels’ signals compartment was separate from the bridge. The hatch had remained closed while the inspectors boarded above Todos Santos, so Adele had only her imagination and the speaker’s tone from which to picture her opposite number: a little angry, a little worried; frowning because now he must relay uncertainty to a superior officer who expects merely assurance that they have the correct target for their missiles.
“Citizen Mundy, hold one,” the voice said. “Do not break contact or it’ll be the worse for you! Over.”
There was a longer pause. Adele took a deep breath and became aware that she was the center of attention. Concerned spacers had enforced a ten-foot circle about her by shoving people back with their weapons; they glanced at her. The nervously angry Klimovs glared at her from the other side of the spacers. Puzzled natives watched her and the Sissies do unintelligible things. And Daniel Leary, holding the data unit more steadily than any terrified slave could’ve managed, smiled engagingly through the hologram at her.
“I think they’re trying to learn what the Earth Diamond is,” Adele said. Her first syllables were croaks, because her throat was very dry. “It’ll take them longer than it did me, but a vessel like that—”
A spy ship.
“—will have a data bank with enough of a description to make them believe me. Then—”
“Citizen Mundy,” a different voice said through Adele’s commo helmet. “We will be setting down after the next orbit. We’ll invite the owners and officers of your ship aboard ours for a banquet. See to it that you come with them. Goldenfels out.”
Adele cleared her throat. She smiled at Daniel, knowing that her expression was wan compared to his.
“Then,” she concluded, “we’ll figure something else out.”
“I think I already have,” said Daniel, who’d smiled even more broadly when he heard the final orders from the Goldenfels.
CHAPTER 19
There was seating for twenty at the Goldenfels’ banquet table. The compartment was austere—it was ordinarily the petty officers’ mess, the lieutenant to Adele’s left had informed her—but the attendants were uniformed and she didn’t recall ever seeing a better wine list, even in the old days when her parents were entertaining the rich and powerful of Cinnabar.
“How did you come to your present position, Mistress?” the lieutenant asked politely. His fingers played with his wine glass but his eyes were on her with the intensity of a bird of prey. His name was Greiner, the Goldenfels’ Signals Officer. His was the voice she’d talked to four hours earlier.
Adele snorted. “Necessity,” she said. “My father was in shipping and lost everything to Cinnabar privateers. What do you think? Did you suppose I like working for unlettered boobs from Novy Sverdlovsk? Though the woman isn’t so bad, for a farmer.”
She glanced past Greiner toward the head of the table, pretending to be concerned that she might be overheard but too resentful to keep a close bridle on her tongue after the second glass of wine. Adele was playing a part, but it was an easy one: any one of a score of the pupils she’d studied with at the Academic Collections would do for a model. Given the way the recent war had gone—the reference to Cinnabar privateers was perfectly believable—she suspected that several of them were trading on their education to stave off poverty instead of living as cultured dilettantes as they’d expected.
The same thing had happened to Adele, of course; but a little earlier, and the result of the Three Circles Conspiracy rather than war. The worst trouble she’d had in being the librarian to the Elector of Kostroma wasn’t the pay or even the conditions; it was quite simply that nobody really cared about the things an educated person knew and did. Her presence had been only a bauble for the Elector to dangle in front of other vulgarians.
Oh, yes; Adele Mundy understood the feelings of a resentful savant working for wealthy Philistines. . . .
“And yet it appears most of your yacht’s crew come from Cinnabar,” Greiner said. “Don’t you find that very difficult, given your background?”
“If it were my yacht,” Adele said with a trace of asperity that wasn’t feigned, “then you’d have a right to be puzzled. As it is, I find the situation less difficult than starvation—which was the only choice on offer.”