Read Lt. Leary, Commanding for Free Online

Republic long survive!"
    Adele wondered whether they'd been set the same proposition or if chance had merely doubled an oratorical commonplace. She wasn't curious enough to listen for more; and anyway, time was short. Briskly she climbed the broad treads. They were hewn from hard sandstone, but nonetheless the feet of a millennium of passersby had polished them.
    How would the Pentacrest look to a visitor from Rodalpa, say, or an even more rural world like Kerrace? Would he be impressed, or would it seem the mad chaos of an overturned ants' nest?
    To Adele, sophisticated and dispassionate but not even now a stranger, the Pentacrest was the most amazing sight of her personal experience. It made her—unwillingly and amused by her own sentimental weakness—proud to be a citizen of Cinnabar.
    The stairs mounted the face of Progress Hill steeply. Every generation or so, some politician moved to put in an elevator. The proposal was always defeated on the twin grounds of tradition and fear of defacing the Pentacrest. Retainers carried members of most wealthy families, and citizens in more moderate circumstances could hire a chair and two husky laborers to bear it.
    Adele's mouth quirked a wry smile. The Mundys had courted the popular vote by walking on their own feet so long as health permitted them to. Her father would have said he supported the people as a matter of principle; and no doubt he did. But in the end principle boiled down to personal power, as surely for Lucius Mundy as it did for Corder Leary; and it was the Mundys whose associates—not Lucius himself, of that Adele was certain—took Alliance money to further their plans.
    The open staircase ended in a terrace eighty feet above the Vale. Several of the city government offices were located here, their facades set back enough that they couldn't be seen from below. An archway enclosing more stairs zigzagged across the face of the hill, leading to the nave of the church and the wings flanking the main courtyard.
    Adele stepped into the tunnel, ignoring the beggars around the entrance. Church ushers—guards—prevented mendicants from climbing farther into the complex, so they clustered here on the lower parterre. Adele knew what it was to be poor, but she wasn't wealthy now; and the sympathy for the poor that the political members of her family had shown as a matter of policy had died with them during the Proscriptions.
    Electroluminescent strips along the axis of the tunnel's roof cast a cool glow over the interior. Mosaics made from glass chips, sometimes with foil backing, lined the walls. The images portrayed the settlement of Cinnabar in the third wave of human expansion.
    The first colonists built with slabs of stabilized dirt extruded by vast machines carried in the bellies of four starships. In the artist's rendering, bladed tractors crawled across a forested landscape, leaving behind them fields green with human crops.
    But the tractors and the furnaces forming construction material wore out. Later buildings were of wood, stone, and concrete, because Cinnabar's industry was incapable of repairing the equipment which had come from Earth. Cattle imported for meat and milk drew the plows.
    Because the colony was less than a generation old when the Population Wars began, Cinnabar wasn't dragged into the fighting as a participant. The complete collapse of interstellar transport threw the planet onto her own weak resources, but she escaped the rain of redirected asteroids which wreaked cataclysmic destruction on the more developed worlds—Earth herself foremost among the victims.
    There were perhaps more humans alive in the universe today than there had been at the start of the Population Wars, but the most populous single planet had only a fraction of the numbers which had caused the Earth government to pursue a policy of forcing its excess on daughter worlds because sending out further organized colonies would have been too expensive.
    The population of the few