Lt. Leary, Commanding Read Online Free PDF Page B

furniture did.
    Still, they'd existed. Even on public transit Adele would never have been faced with anything like this, because the Mundy retainers escorting her would have cleared the Tanisards out with the same ruthless unconcern as they'd have ousted dogs who'd somehow gotten into the car.
    Tanisards block the path of a Mundy? Not till the sky falls!
    The sky had fallen on the Mundys; fallen within days of when Adele boarded the packet that carried her to Blythe to continue her education in the Academic Collections there. Blythe was a core world of the Alliance of Free Stars, but what did that matter to Adele? She was a librarian, a member of that higher aristocracy of knowledge which cared nothing for mere politics.
    As it turned out, politics had mattered a great deal.
    The Speaker's Rock was a granite outcrop whose naturally level top had been improved by the first settlers; it stood at the west end of Pentacrest Vale. Adele edged out of the ruck around the transport terminus and eyed the Rock critically. Fifteen years ago the heads of her father, her mother, and her ten-year-old sister, Agatha, had hung from it in mesh bags to be viewed by all those who chose to do so.
    There were many other heads as well, most of whom had as little to do with a conspiracy as Agatha did. Adele herself would have been there, save for the whim of sailing schedules. Political realities don't care whether their victims feel superior to them.
    Because she'd found herself looking at the Rock with new eyes, Adele paused to survey the whole setting for what was in a way the first time. Even before she reached age ten, she'd spent more of her waking hours on the Pentacrest than she had in the Mundy townhouse; but she'd never looked at it the way a stranger would, taking in its magnificence instead of simply accepting it the way fishes do the sea through which they swim.
    The buildings on the five hills framing the Vale shone with marble, polished granite, and bronze. The only exception was the Old Senate House which had burned three centuries before during the Succession Riots. The shell of concrete with brick accents remained as a relic of Xenos—and Cinnabar—before the Hiatus.
    The present Senate House embraced and towered above the original. The business of a planet had been conducted in the older building; the new one served an empire. As Adele watched, builders were working on an additional fourth floor in place of the Senate Roof Garden.
    Before the Succession Riots, the palaces of wealthy families had covered the slopes of Dobbins Hill and a part of the Divan, on the south and southeast margins of the Vale. Most of those structures, that of the Mundys included, had burned with the Senate House. Rebuilding had taken place at a safer distance from the Vale, where political protest generally took form.
    Now, even the palaces surviving from the time of the Riots had been converted to government use. The entire Pentacrest was given over to structures which either carried out the work of the Republic or vaunted the Republic's power.
    Adele made her way through the crowd, around the statues and other monuments studding the Vale like tucks in upholstery. A juggler performed with burning torches while an animal resembling a bipedal armadillo paced a circle about him, holding up a hat for donations. A woman with the flying hair of a Maenad shouted the truths of her revelation—amusingly to Adele, from the shade of a stele commemorating Admiral Duclon. Duclon, a hero of the First Alliance War, was reputedly the most profane man ever to wear an RCN uniform.
    The Church of the Redeeming Spirit stood on Progress Hill. Students filled both bays of the domed portico sheltering the foot of the stairs serving it, declaiming under the eyes of their rival rhetoric professors. As Adele passed between the groups, the girl to her left trilled, " . . . nor could the Republic long survive!" while the boy to the left boomed hoarsely, " . . . nor can the