He owed Mon the respect due a loyal and competent officer; but he owed a great deal to every soul who’d served on the Sissie with him. He wasn’t going to tell them to throw their lives away; and despite what he’d said to soothe Mon, the corvette’s troubles on the voyage home would convince anybody that he was a hard-luck officer. He wasn’t a man Daniel would willingly follow to the North, nor one to whom Daniel would pledge his honor to encourage others to follow.
There was a buzzing. Hogg, preparing to leave, reached into his breast pocket for the phone he carried while in Xenos. He listened for a moment, then said to Daniel, “We need to get back to the house, master. Now.”
They headed for the door together, the servant leading his master by virtue of starting a double step ahead. As they burst back into the sunlight, Hogg added in a low voice, “That was the major domo, sir. Mistress Mundy had some trouble. Bad trouble.”
* * *
The tramcar on which Adele and her entourage returned also carried fourteen home-bound office workers, filling it to the legal limit. Adele’s footmen—well, the footmen accompanying her and Tovera; the Merchants and Shippers Treasury paid their salaries, though they wore Mundy livery—would’ve barred the strangers if it had been left to them, but Adele’s parents had prided themselves on their concern for the lower orders. Adele, who’d spent most of her life in those lower orders and knew a great deal more about them than her parents had, nonetheless restrained her servants in their memory.
On the other hand, she hadn’t felt she needed to allow the car to be loaded above the legal limit. At this time of day there’d normally have been forty people per tram; as passenger number twenty boarded at the Pentacrest Circle, Adele’s footmen blocked the door and used their ivory batons on the knuckles of anybody trying to pry it open before the car started. Adele preferred to think of that as self-help in enforcing the law rather than a noble trampling on the rights of the people.
She smiled. Though she could live with the other characterization. She’d been trampled on often enough herself.
The car pulled into the siding at the head of her court, rocking slightly on the single overhead rail. No one waited to board on the eastbound platform; the office workers poised expectantly to spread out farther when Adele’s party disembarked. They knew how lucky they’d been to have so much room as they rode to their high-rise apartments in the eastern suburbs of Xenos.
As Adele followed her footmen onto the platform, a tram pulled into the westbound siding behind her. She sensed Tovera turning her head, holding her flat attaché case with both hands. A young naval officer in his 2nd Class uniform got off, a stranger to her. Probably someone coming to see Daniel, a friend or perhaps a messenger from the Navy Office.
The seven houses on the court were as quiet as usual on a summer evening. Half a dozen men wearing varied livery squatted on the doorstep of the end house on the left side, next to Chatsworth Minor. They rose, pocketing the dice and the money, when they saw Adele arriving home.
One of the group was her doorman; he walked quickly back to his post without looking sideways to acknowledge her presence. Unexpectedly two other men followed him.
“Mistress Mundy?” called the RCN officer behind her. She turned, then halted to let him join them. The footmen were unconcerned, but Tovera’s right hand was inside the attaché case she held in the crook of the other arm.
“Yes?” Adele said; not hostile but certainly not welcoming either. She didn’t like being accosted by strangers, especially strangers who knew her name. This lieutenant—she could see the rank tabs on his soft gray collar now—was clean-cut and obviously a gentleman before the Republic granted him a commission, but he was still a stranger.
“Your friend Captain Carnolets hopes you’ll be able to dine with him tonight at his house in Portsmouth,” the lieutenant said, stopping a polite six feet back. That put him just beyond arm’s length of Tovera, toward whom he glanced appraisingly. “He apologizes for the short notice, but he says he’s really quite anxious to renew your acquaintance.”