Bet had set the wine on the end niche. She swayed her dress from side to side, lifting it slowly. “Come on, Daniel,” she said insistently. As he’d suspected, she wore nothing whatever beneath the clinging folds.
“Just savoring the moment, love,” Daniel lied. He pulled the inflation mechanism of the pad, then lifted off his cap and goggles.
He had quite a lot of questions about this location, but first things first. The questions could wait.
If he was right, they’d waited for a very long time already.
* * *
Adele rose from the data console and noticed the bustle of construction around her for the first time in several hours. The Cinnabar sailors used adhesive guns which spit glue with a high whine that Adele found more irritating than the bang of a hammer—when she was aware of it. She wasn’t aware of that or much of anything else when she was working.
Compiling the rosters had taken longer than she expected. The people in charge of the palace guard seemed to have entered only fragments of the data necessary to see that their personnel were fed and paid on time. By cross-checking Adele had become certain that about thirty percent of even what was in the various databases was wrong.
The fault was hers. She should have allowed for the guard officers being semiliterate incompetents. God knew they weren’t alone in that, on Kostroma or in the wider universe either.
“Looking pretty well, don’t you think?” somebody said behind her. Adele whirled.
Bosun’s Mate Woetjans’s smile became neutral when she saw Adele’s expression. “Coming along, at any rate,” the sailor said. “In my opinion.”
“It’s looking wonderful, Woetjans,” Adele said with real enthusiasm. She was embarrassed at her seeming harsh response to the petty officer’s friendly sally. “If there was one other part of my life that was looking as good, I’d be the Elector of Kostroma.”
Woetjans’s smile returned. “I guess a citizen of Cinnabar is better than any wog from around here, mistress,” she said, apparently oblivious of the library assistants who might be in earshot. “Even the chief wog. Mind, they’re fine as spacers. But I’m glad my crew’s a bright spot, yeah.”
Adele started to speak, then froze with her mouth open because she didn’t know which of her two objections to begin with. She closed her mouth again because she realized she’d be wrong to address either of them. “Yes,” she said instead. “A very bright spot.”
She leaned over the console and ejected the chip onto which she’d copied the data. It had taken hours of work, sifting and correlating files on distant machines whose software was quirky, ancient, and glacially slow. She could have sent Markos the first list she’d found, ignoring the fact that it covered only two of the palace’s seven entrances. She didn’t like Markos and the task was one that she didn’t dare consider very deeply. Even under these circumstances she couldn’t let herself do a bad job.
“Hafard!” Woetjans bellowed toward a high scaffold. “Polin! You two keep fucking around and you won’t like the duty roster after we lift planet, I promise you!”
She gave Adele a sheepish glance. “I better get back to keeping an eye on these lot, sir,” she said.
Adele nodded crisply. “I need to get to work also,” she said. “Vanness? I’ll be gone for about fifteen minutes. If there are any inquiries for me, I’ll answer them when I return.”
She strode from the library. She’d been offended when Woetjans referred to the Kostromans as wogs. If the petty officer were a pupil of hers at the Academy, she’d have torn a strip off her the first time it happened and dismissed her in ignominy on a repetition.
But Woetjans wasn’t a pupil. She was a naval bosun’s mate raised to different standards. Woetjans’s standards were wrong, of that Adele was sure; but nobody’d appointed Adele Mundy as Lord Corrector of the Universe, either.
She’d had colleagues at the Academy, even after she became deputy director of the Collections in all but name, who took it upon themselves to educate Adele on the ways in which her dress failed the test of fashion. She didn’t expect Woetjans would greet a lecture on demeaning language with any more patience—or reason for patience—than Adele had shown for that well-meant advice on her clothes.