What Distant Deeps by David Drake Read Free Book Online Page B

line with his outstretched right arm; his lift arm was rigidly akimbo as though he were executing a ballet posture.
    “I don’t see what you mean by a paradox,” Broma said, scowling. He sounded as bored with the description as Daniel felt. “Isn’t a troll a bloody paradox enough? They’re not real, so they’re a paradox.”
    Platt fired; his right forearm lifted straight up with the recoil. The whack! of the hypersonic osmium pellet accelerating down the barrel made the others around Daniel jump. The birds overhead screamed, chattered, or croaked, depending on their species.
    Waldmiller snarled, “Hofmann, what’s your boy playing at, hey?”
    “Don’t call him my boy,” Hofmann muttered. He hunched over his mug of ale and didn’t meet the older landowner’s eyes. “He’s Bertie’s boy and she insisted on bringing him. I swear by all the gods, Leary—”
    He looked up in abject misery.
    “—I didn’t think he’d want to come. And when he said he did, I said maybe we ought all to stay home, but Bertie insisted because she’d heard Lady Mundy was going to be here. And now it looks like she was wrong about that, but here we are with Chuckie anyway!”
    Daniel didn’t bother to inform Hofmann that Adele had arrived—but with the rest of the Sissies instead of in the private aircar that he and his wife were apparently expecting. The Bantry tenants knew of Adele as the Squire’s friend. It hadn’t occurred to Daniel that Bertie Hofmann was from Xenos and would hope to scrape acquaintance with Mundy of Chatsworth.
    “I think it’d be just as well if your son put those pistols away for the time being, Hofmann,” he said. “There’s a lot of people here. And some of them have been drinking, of course.”
    Cory fired. They were shooting out to sea, presumably at bobbing flotsam. Spray fountained only twenty feet from the base of the sea wall; Cory had let his muzzle dip as he pulled the trigger.
    Platt hooted and called in a loud voice, “Why, you weren’t within a mile! Not a mile! What wets you navy men turn out to be!”
    The coils wrapping the barrel generated an electromagnetic flux which ionized the pellet’s aluminum driving band. The plasma hung in the air, a quivering paleness which faded as it stripped electrons from the atmosphere and returned to steady state.
    One of the effete servants was loading the pistols; the other held the case for him as a table. Platt had taken the gallon jug.
    “Oh, he won’t listen to me,” Hofmann mumbled. “I may as well save my breath.”
    Platt laid the jug on the crook of his elbow to lift it, then drank. He passed the liquor to the man on his right. There were about a dozen people in the group, none of them as old as twenty-five.
    Cazelet was one of them. Daniel supposed he and Cory had joined a youth whom they knew only as someone of their own age and class. The sons and daughters of a few Bantry tenants had drifted over also.
    “I think then that I’ll have a word,” said Daniel, starting forward. He thought sourly about how much more easily he could handle matters aboard the Princess Cecile, but he knew this sort of business could occur in a military environment as well.
    His Academy classmate Oudenarde had served as midshipman on a light cruiser whose captain allowed his pet Tertullian swamp monkey to wander freely on A Level. The animal’s career of rending, fouling and eating the possessions of the junior officers ended when it gobbled a package of aphrodisiacs which the Second Lieutenant had concealed among his socks.
    Apparently the pills worked better on swamp monkeys than Daniel had ever known them to do with humans. The beast had been shot on the captain’s screamed orders while it made a very respectable job of buggering him through the trousers of his Dress Whites.
    “I figure a wet like you hasn’t any business with a pretty bint,” said Platt, seizing the arm of the girl in a scarlet apron who’d been standing with Cory. She