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With the Lightnings

by David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57818-9

Cover art by David Mattingly

First paperback printing, July 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication No. 98-6745

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

BOY MEETS GIRL ...

Daniel closed the metal covers of the book, then looked directly at Adele. "I don't mean to intrude

in another citizen's business, mistress," he said, "but my manservant Hogg is very good at finding people

who can change things. If you'd like him to locate some carpenters . . . ?"

Adele snorted. The library budget, if there was one, wasn't under her control. "I appreciate the

offer," she said, "but I regret that I'm not in a position to take advantage of it. Unless your man could find

the carpenters' wages as well as the carpenters themselves."

Leary grinned, but there was a serious undertone in his voice as he said, "I really don't dare suggest

that, mistress. While I don't think Hogg would be caught, I'm afraid his methods would bring spiritual

discredit on a Leary of Bantry. What Hogg does on his own account is his own business, but if I set him

a task . . ."

The world had gone gray around Adele. "You said, 'a Leary of Bantry,' sir," she said. Her voice

too was without color. "You'd be related to Speaker Leary, then?"

Leary grimaced. "Oh, yes," he said. "Corder Leary is my father, though we'd both be willing to

deny it."

"I see," Adele said. Her voice came from another place, another time. She crossed her hands

behind her back. "Lieutenant Leary," she said, "I have a great deal of work to do. You're a Cinnabar

citizen and I will presume a gentleman. I therefore request that you cease to trouble me and my staff.

Daniel Leary reddened also. He made a stiff half-bow. "Good morning, mistress," he said. "No

doubt we'll meet again." He strode with a caged grace from the library.

Later, he sat on a bench in a garden. He'd walked until the adrenaline burned off and he needed to

sit. He hadn't been so angry since the afternoon he broke with his father.

He'd have to challenge her to a duel, of course. The insult had been too deliberate to ignore. . . .

WITH THE

LIGHTNINGS

DAVID DRAKE

DEDICATION

To A[rielle] Heather Wood

More widely known as The Heather Wood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'm afraid that I use machines and people very hard when I'm focused on a project. The

machines tend to break; the people, my friends, do not. Sincere thanks to Dan Breen; Jim

Baen and Toni Weisskopf; Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel; Sandra and John Miesel;

and my wife Jo.

A NOTE ON WEIGHT AND MEASURES

As most of my fiction is either set in the far past or the distant future, I regularly face the question of

whether to use weights and measures familiar to the reader or instead to reflect the differences that time

brings. In this particular case I've decided to use English and metric measurements rather than inventing

different but comparable systems.

In my opinion the weights and measures of thousands of years in the future will differ as strikingly

from those of today as the latter do from the talents and stades familiar to classical Greeks. Those future

systems may well vary among themselves as confusingly as the Euboic and Aeginetic standards did. But

while I hope a reader may learn something from this novel as well as being entertained, the state of the

world isn't going to be improved by me inventing phony measurement systems.

Me that 'ave followed my trade

In the place where the Lightnin's are made ...

—Kipling

Book One

Lieutenant Daniel Leary ambled through the streets of Kostroma City in the black-piped gray 2nd

Class uniform of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. He was on his way to the Elector's Palace, but there

was no hurry and really nothing more important for Daniel to do than to savor the fact that he'd realized

one of his childhood dreams: to walk a far world and see its wonders first hand.

His other dream, to command a starship himself, would come (if at all) in the far future; a future as

distant in Daniel's mind as childhood seemed from his present age of twenty-two Terran years.

For now, he had Kostroma and that was wonder enough. He whistled a snatch of a tune the band

had played at the supper club he'd visited the night before.

Daniel smiled, an expression so naturally warm that strangers on the street smiled back at him. The

Kostroman lady he'd met there was named Silena. The honor both of a Leary of Bantry and the RCN

required that Daniel offer his help when the lady's young escort drank himself into babbling incapacity.

Silena had been very appreciative; and after the first few minutes back at her lodgings, pique at her

original escort was no longer her primary focus.

Daniel was only a little above average height with a tendency toward fleshiness that showed itself

particularly in his florid face. His roundness and open expression caused strangers sometimes to dismiss

Daniel Leary as soft. That was a mistake.

A canal ran down the center of the broad street. During daylight it carried only small craft, water

taxis and light delivery vehicles, but at night barges loaded with construction materials edged between the

stone banks with loud arguments over right-of-way. The pavements to either side seethed with a mixture

of pedestrians and three-wheeled motorized jitneys, though like the canals they would fill with heavy

traffic after dark.

The Kostroman economy was booming on the profits of interstellar trade, and much of that wealth

was being invested here in the capital. Rich merchants built townhouses, and the older nobility added to

the palaces of their clans so as not to be outdone.

Folk at a lower social level—clerks in the trading houses, the spacers who crewed Kostroma's

trading fleet, and the laborers staffing the factories and fisheries that filled those starships, all had gained

in some degree. They wanted improved lodgings as well, and they were willing to pay for them.

Daniel walked along whistling, delighted with the pageant. People wore colorful clothing in

unfamiliar styles. Many of them chattered in local dialects: Kostroma was a watery planet from whose

islands had sprung a hundred distinct tongues during the long Hiatus in star travel. Even those speaking

Universal, now the common language of the planet as well as that of interstellar trade, did so in an accent

strange to Cinnabar ears.

Civilization hadn't vanished on Kostroma as it had on so many worlds colonized during the first

period of human star travel, but Kostroman society had fragmented without the lure of the stars to unify

it. The centuries since Kostroma returned to space hadn't fully healed the social fabric: the present

Elector, Walter III of the Hajas clan, had seized power in a coup only six months before.

Nobody doubted that Walter intended to retain Kostroma's traditional friendship with the Republic

of Cinnabar, but the new Elector needed money. At the present state of the war between Cinnabar and

the Alliance of Free Stars, Walter's hint that he might not renew the Reciprocity Agreement when it

came due in three months had been enough to bring a high-level delegation from Cinnabar.

Daniel sighed. A high-level delegation, with one junior lieutenant thrown in as a makeweight. Daniel

had almost certainly been sent because he was the son of the politically powerful Corder Leary, former

Speaker of the Cinnabar Senate. Daniel's—bad—relationship with his father was no secret in the RCN,

but the ins and outs of Cinnabar families wouldn't be common knowledge on Kostroma.

A man came out of a doorway, pushing himself onto the crowded pavement while calling final

instructions to someone within the building. Daniel would have avoided the fellow if there'd been room.

There wasn't, so he set his shoulder instead and it was the larger Kostroman who bounced back with a

surprised grunt.

No one took notice of what was merely a normal hazard of city life. Daniel walked on, eyeing with

interest the carven swags and volutes that decorated unpretentious four-story apartment buildings.

Kostromans didn't duel the way members of Cinnabar's wealthy families sometimes did. On the

other hand, feuds and assassinations were accepted features of Kostroman social life. Daniel supposed it

was whatever you were used to.

In Xenos, Cinnabar's capital, real magnates like Corder Leary moved through the streets with an

entourage of fifty or more clients, some of whom might be senators themselves. You stepped aside or

the liveried toughs leading the procession knocked you aside. The free citizens of the galaxy's proudest

republic accepted—indeed, expected—that their leaders would behave in such fashion. Who would

obey a man who lacked a strong sense of his own honor?

Birds fluted as they spun in tight curves from roof coping to roof coping overhead. They were avian

in the same sense as the scaly "birds" of Cinnabar, the winged amphibians of Sadastor, or the flyers of a

thousand other worlds that humans had visited and described. The details were for scientists to chart and

for quick-eyed amateurs like Daniel Leary to notice with delight.

During the final quarrel Daniel had said he'd take nothing from his father; but the Leary name had

brought Daniel to Kostroma. Well, the name was his by right, not his father's gift. Daniel didn't have a

shipboard appointment, and he really had no duties even as part of Admiral Dame Martina Lasowski's

delegation; but he'd reached the stars.

The Kostroman navy was small compared to the fleets of Cinnabar and the Alliance, and even so it

was larger than it was efficient. Kostroma's captains and sailors were of excellent quality, but the

merchant fleet took the greater—and the better—part of the personnel. Ratings in the Kostroman navy

were largely foreigners; officers were generally men who preferred the high life in Kostroma City to hard

voyaging; and the ships spent most of their time laid up with their ports sealed and their movable

equipment warehoused, floating in a dammed lagoon south of the capital called the Navy Pool.

A starship was landing in the Floating Harbor. Daniel turned to watch, sliding the naval goggles

down from his cap brim against the glare.

Starships took off and landed on water both because of the damage their plasma motors would do

to solid ground and because water was an ideal reaction mass to be converted to plasma. Once out of a

planet's atmosphere, ships used their High Drive, a matter/antimatter conversion process and far more

efficient, but to switch to High Drive too early was to court disaster.

At one time Kostroma Harbor had served all traffic, but for the past generation only surface vessels

used the city wharfs. The Floating Harbor built of hollow concrete pontoons accommodated the

starships a half-mile offshore.

The pontoons were joined in hexagons that damped the waves generated by takeoffs and landings,

isolating individual ships like larvae in the cells of a beehive. Seagoing lighters docked on the outer sides

of the floats to deliver and receive cargo.

The ship landing just now was a small one of three hundred tons or so; a yacht, or more probably a

government dispatch vessel. The masts folded along the hull indicated the plane on which Cassini

Radiation drove the ship through sponge space was very large compared to the vessel's displacement.

The hull shape and the way two of the four High Drive nozzles were mounted on outriggers

identified the ship as a product of the Pleasaunce system, the capital of the deceptively named Alliance

of Free Stars. That was perfectly proper since the vessel was unarmed. Kostroma was neutral, trading

with both parties to the conflict.

Kostroma's real value to combatants lay not with her navy but in her merchant fleet and extensive

trading network to regions of the human diaspora where neither Cinnabar nor the Alliance had significant

direct contact. Formally the Reciprocity Agreement granted Cinnabar only the right to land warships on

Kostroma instead of staying ten light-minutes out like those of other nations.

As a matter of unofficial policy, however, neutral Kostroman vessels carried cargoes to Cinnabar

but not to worlds of the Alliance. That was an advantage for which General Porra, Guarantor of the

Alliance, would have given his left nut.

The dispatch vessel touched down in a vast gout of steam; the roar of landing arrived several

seconds later as the cloud was already beginning to dissipate. Daniel raised his goggles and continued

walking. A graceful bridge humped over a major canal; from the top of the arch Daniel glimpsed the roof

of the Elector's Palace.

An Alliance dispatch vessel might mean Porra or his bureaucrats believed there was a realistic

chance of detaching Kostroma from Cinnabar. Alternatively, the Alliance could simply be trying to raise

the price Admiral Lasowski would finally agree to pay. Walter III would have invited an Alliance

delegation as a bargaining chip even if Porra hadn't planned to send one on his own account.

Well, that was only technically a concern for Lt. Daniel Leary. As a practical matter, he was a

tourist visiting a planet which provided a range of unfamiliar culture, architecture, and wildlife.

Whistling again, he strolled off the bridge and along the broad avenue leading toward the palace.

Adele Mundy stood in the doorway, fingering a lock of her short brown hair as she surveyed what

was only in name the Library of the Elector of Kostroma. Adele was an organized person; she would

organize even this. The difficulty was in knowing where to start.

The room was large and attractive in its way; ways, really, because whichever Elector had been

responsible for the decoration had been catholic in his taste. Time had darkened the wood paneling from

its original bleached pallor. The enormous stone hood of the fireplace was carved with a scene of hunting

in forests that looked nothing like Kostroman vegetation, and blue-figured tiles formed the hearth itself.

The knees supporting the coffered ceiling imitated gargoyles.

The last were a singularly inappropriate choice for the interior of a library. The notion of figures

gaping to gargle rainwater onto Adele's collections made her shudder.

The chamber had probably been intended as a drawing room for Electoral gatherings smaller and

more private than those in the enormous Grand Salon below on the second floor. There was quite a lot

of space in terms of cubic feet since the ceiling was thirty feet above, but there would have to be a great

deal of modification to make it usable for shelving books.

The modification was one of the problems Adele had been trying to surmount in the three weeks

since she had arrived in Kostroma City to take up her appointment as the Electoral Librarian. One of

many problems.

"Pardon, pardon!" a workman growled to Adele's back in a nasal Kostroman accent. She stepped

sideways into the room, feeling her abdominal muscles tense in anger.

The man hadn't been impolite, technically: Adele was standing in the doorway through which he

and his mate needed to carry a plank. But there was no hint in his tone that the off-planet librarian was

his superior or, for that matter, anything but a pain in the neck.

A six-foot board wasn't much of a load for two people to carry, but even that wasn't why Adele

became dizzy with frustration. That was a result of seeing the material, polished hardwood with a rich,

swirling grain. It was probably as pretty a piece of lumber as she'd ever seen in her life.

Elector Jonathan Ignatius, Walter III's immediate predecessor, was a member of the Delfi clan and

an enthusiastic hunter. Jonathan's absence on a six-month, multi-planet safari had permitted rivals in the

Hajas and Zojira clans to prepare the coup that unseated him the night of his return.

Walter by contrast wanted to be remembered as a patron of learning, possibly because he had no

more formal education than the Emperor Charlemagne. He'd decided to found an electoral library under

the carefully neutral direction of a Cinnabar scholar living in exile on the Alliance world of Bryce. He'd

assembled the contents of the library by the simple expedient of stripping books, papers, and electronic

storage media from Delfi households and those of their collateral clans.

The loot—Adele couldn't think of another word to describe it—was piled here in a variety of

boxes and crates. Most of them weren't marked, and she didn't trust the labels on those which had them.

The only order in the library was the view out the north windows, onto the formal gardens.

What Adele needed to start—what she had requested as many times and in as many ways as she

could imagine—was three thousand feet of rough shelving. What she was getting from the carpenters

Walter's chamberlain had assigned to the project was cabinetry of a standard that would grace a formal

dining room. At the present rate of progress, the job would be done sometime in the next century.

There was no doubt about the skill of the carpenters, these two journeymen and the master

cabinetmaker who never left her shop on the ground floor and never touched a tool with her own hands

that Adele had seen. They were simply the wrong people for the job. The twenty Kostroman library

assistants whom Adele was to train to the standards of Cinnabar or the central worlds of the Alliance—

these were with only a few exceptions the wrong people for any job.

Laughter boomed in the hallway. Adele sidled another step away from the door and put her straight

back against the wall. The band of tile at neck level felt cool and helped keep her calm. Bracey, one of

her assistants, entered with two other men whom Adele didn't recognize.

That didn't mean they weren't library assistants: the positions had been granted as political favors to

relatives who needed jobs. The only blessing was that most of them, lazy scuts with neither ability nor

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