Adele ate her starch—which hadn’t begun as potatoes, though she didn’t know what the source was—in precise forkfuls, using it to sop sauce from the pork. She was nervous, but she’d spent many years poor to the point of starvation. Emotion might rob her of her appetite, but nothing took away her ability to eat.
After a minute, neither more nor less, Adele rose, folded her napkin beside her plate, and walked out the hatch at her end of the compartment. Mr. Pasternak was coming the other way, guided by a discreet steward. The engineer’s eyes brushed over Adele without focusing: whether or not Pasternak recognized the vintages, he’d certainly shown his appreciation of the Goldenfels’ wine.
The nearest rest room—the head, as she’d learned to call it in the RCN—was just outside the banquet hall, but Lieutenant Greiner gestured to her from the hatch of the companionway down the corridor instead. She followed him upward. The whisper of their boot-soles on the steel treads set up pulses in the armored tube that rushed back and forth like heavy surf.
Greiner motioned her up alongside him; the Goldenfels was a much bigger ship than the Princess Cecile, and even her companionways were on a larger scale. “I was surprised when you signaled us as soon as we fell into orbit here, mistress,” Greiner said under the cover of the echoes. “Not every rich man’s secretary would know how to use a starship’s communications gear even if it were left unattended.”
“I told you,” Adele said. “The Klimovs pay me as their secretary, but my father trained me as an assistant engineer—his assistant. He shipped as engineer on a privateer before his share of a convoy of fullerenes let him buy his first vessel.”
Greiner looked at her in the green light of the glowstrips forming long circles up the companionway, but he said nothing till he opened the hatch marked A Level and led her out. At the end of the corridor to the left—directly above the banquet room—was the bridge. Its hatch was open, but a spacer with a sub-machine gun stood guard there.
Greiner stopped instead at an unmarked compartment on the left of the corridor, opening the hatch with an electronic key. “Go in, mistress,” he said.
There were three consoles, one of them occupied. The man on duty looked up as Adele entered.
“I have some questions to ask the lady, Bandeng,” Greiner said as he closed the hatch. “I’m not sure how she’s going to react, so I’d like you to be prepared.”
The duty man gave Greiner a flat stare, then looked at Adele. He ostentatiously reached into a drawer of his console and withdrew a service pistol which he pointed toward the corner past her head. If Adele had been armed—she wasn’t; the contingent from the Princess Cecile knew they’d be searched before they were allowed to board the Alliance vessel—she could’ve shot Bandeng through the eye before he realized a gun isn’t a magic wand that you wave to make people do what you want.
“So, Mistress Mundy . . . ,” Greiner said. “How is it that you knew you were speaking to the Goldenfels? We identified ourselves as the Belle Ideal.”
“You did after you reached orbit,” Adele said with a justified sneer. “When I pinged you half an astronomical unit out, a few minutes after you returned to sidereal space, your transponder was still saying you were the Goldenfels. When you changed the identification, I knew you’d be willing to help me get the Earth Diamond.”
Greiner’s expression was becoming locked into frustrated surprise. “You queried our IFF when we were that far out?” he said. “How did you locate us so quickly?”
Adele shrugged, a gesture that was becoming as habitual in this conversation as the Alliance officer’s amazement. “The yacht still has its naval sensors,” she said. “I suppose they wouldn’t always have picked up your arrival while we were on the ground, but they did this time.”
That was a lie: the Sissie hadn’t been aware of the new arrival until the Goldenfels announced herself—falsely. But it was a perfectly believable lie, one which fit all the facts at Greiner’s disposal.