Lt. Leary, Commanding (21 page)

Daniel stood and forced himself to stretch; at the moment his body wanted to curl into a ball and hug itself. "Right now I'm going to compare his notes with the patterns
I
see."

He keyed the BDC channel and said, "Lieutenant Mon, please take the conn while I go onto the hull for an hour or so. There's no need to come forward unless you prefer to."

"I'll come along, if I may," Adele said, rising to her feet. She seemed to be fully herself: cool and detached, with her normal pale complexion in place of the green undertone of a few minutes before. Apparently searching out data had been as bracing for her as a month in the country.

"A pleasure to have you," Daniel said truthfully, though he was a little surprised.

Of course Adele had a way of surprising him. He hadn't known about the life-cycle analyses of Stacey's ships, and if asked he would've agreed with Betts that quick in-and-outs would wear a hull at a higher rate than the normal practice.

What he did know—and what Adele probably knew also, though he was glad she hadn't broadcast the information to the crew—was that despite his picked crews, Uncle Stacey's commands had abnormally high rates of psychological casualties. Much as Daniel regretted the fact that he was going to lose spacers in the performance of their duty, the
Princess Cecile
was a warship and they—like him—were members of the RCN.

Daniel offered Adele his arm and walked to the suit closet just off the bridge. The riggers of the port watch had stripped and were going below to their bunks. From the look of their faces, few would be able to sleep. The starboard watch, still on the hull with Woetjans, might well be the lucky ones. As Daniel had noted in Adele and himself, falling into one's duties seemed to lessen the effect of rapid transitions into and out of the Matrix.

Delos Vaughn lay half-conscious on the floor of the wardroom across from the suit locker. Daniel paused; he hadn't wanted to take Vaughn aboard, but nonetheless the fellow was his responsibility. Timmins, the power room crewman Vaughn had hired to look after him aboard, lifted the passenger's shoulders with one arm and brought a tumbler of clear fluid to his lips with the other.

"Mr. Vaughn, are you—" Daniel began.

Vaughn drank reflexively. His eyes flashed open and he spewed the rest of the glassful across the room. Apparently Timmins' idea of a restorative was neat alcohol from the power room hydraulics.

"Good
God
, Lieutenant Leary," Vaughn said. He didn't sound angry, merely amazed. "Is that sensation normal?"

"I'm afraid it's going to be normal for this cruise, sir," Daniel said. He crossed his hands behind his back, a way to keep from fidgeting while he waited for something distasteful.

Instead of the expected shouts and threats—vain, of course, but unpleasant regardless—Vaughn managed a weak smile. "I see how the Cinnabar navy wins its battles, Lieutenant," he said. "Well, I asked to travel with you."

Using Timmins as a brace, Vaughn got to his feet. "And Lieutenant?" he said. "I win my battles too."

_A
dele sat primly in her place, taking her cue from Ellie Woetjans
who presided at the head of the table. The senior warrant officers had invited Lt. Leary, Mr. Vaughn, and the two midshipmen to dinner. Adele was tense because she wasn't good at rituals, and this one was both new to her and important. A gaffe here—and formal dinners were always minefields—risked hurting the feelings of her family by adoption.

Balsley, classed as a Mechanic II but in practice the wardroom servant, stood at the hatchway. In a loud voice that made his brushy little mustache wobble he announced, "The guests have arrived."

"Rise for the captain and our honored guests!" the bosun said, suiting her action to her words.

Adele scrambled to her feet. She was so careful not to overset the chair behind her that she bumped the table with her thighs. As the table was bolted to the deck neither it nor the place settings were affected an iota, but Adele knew she'd have bruises in the morning.

And not for the first time. She was perfectly comfortable in tight spaces. What she didn't like—and couldn't seem to learn—was
moving
in tight spaces.

Daniel appeared at the door, wearing his dress grays just as his hosts were. "Please be seated, sir," Woetjans said. When she spoke formally, her words came out as though so many cuts of a buzz saw.

"My fellow officers, thank you for your hospitality," Daniel said as he entered. He took the seat to Woetjans' right. He winked at Adele beside him.

Vaughn was behind him, wearing a suit of vivid chartreuse and carrying a bottle. "Mistress President," he said, offering the bottle to Woetjans. "I thank you as well. I hope you'll accept this small addition to the festivities."

It was brandy, a distillation from Pleasaunce and expensive even within the Alliance. Betts, peering past Adele's shoulder, said, "God
damn
! The
Marat
's wardroom got a case of that stuff at a souk on Rigoun. A shot of that'll put lead in your pencil, let me tell you!"

Adele saw Daniel frown slightly. "Then it'll make an excellent stirrup cup when we go on leave on Sexburga," he said. "In ten days, I expect, at the rate we've been shaping."

Woetjans nodded and handed the bottle to Hogg, who'd been drafted for the night along with Tovera and Timmins. She looked a trifle wistful, but she wasn't the person to question her captain's orders even when they were delicately phrased.

Adele knew perfectly well that alcohol impeded the physiology of mating, though no doubt a lot of the process was in the mind. It wasn't an area in which she could claim expertise, of course.

The midshipmen entered last, carefully groomed and as stiff as if they expected to be shot. They were both eighteen, just out of the Academy and on their first operational deployment. In a large vessel they would have had as many as a score of other midshipmen to provide fellowship and a degree of concealment. Instead they'd been placed in a small ship with a picked crew and a captain little more than their own age and already famous. Of course they were nervous!

Adele thought of her own entry into the Blythe Academy. Her smile was grim.

She'd been an outsider—of course; she'd been an outsider all her life and perfectly happy about it. Her skills even at age sixteen were beyond those not only of her fellow students but of her instructors and most of the staff of the Academic Collections. She couldn't imagine wanting to fit in with people whom she considered only a short intellectual step above lapdogs.

Dorst and Vesey couldn't tell themselves that. Besides, from what Adele had seen, they were far too nice to consider doing so. For that matter, if Adele had been trained by instructors as able as the Sissies were at their different jobs,
she
wouldn't have been so sure of her superiority.

"Be seated!" Woetjans said. Adele started to sit, then noticed everyone else was waiting till Daniel's trousers touched the cushion. She grimaced. She
would
learn how to do this, because it mattered to people who mattered to her.

It was strange, and remarkably pleasant, to be around so many people who mattered.

Glasses of water were already at the places. Hogg was filling squat, four-ounce tumblers from the punch bowl on the sideboard. It looked like lemonade, but Adele knew to be cautious even before Tovera, handing the punch around, whispered, "From the hydraulics."

"The Republic!" Woetjans said, rising. Adele rose with the others and sipped.

There was a choking sound from the end of the table. Dorst's face was very red. He saw the others staring at him and quickly downed another gulp of the punch from the glass he'd half-emptied at the toast.

Daniel nodded approvingly at the lad. Adele supposed that displaying bravado in the face of adversity was a virtue the RCN wanted to inculcate in its young officers. Certainly it was behavior that Daniel himself could be expected to approve.

Hogg was refilling glasses. Tovera set a pitcher of water on the table to Adele's right; the other diners politely pretended not to notice, the way they'd have done if she'd lost both arms and had to eat using her toes. Throughout most of her life Adele had never imagined she'd feel embarrassment at not being able to down the equivalent of eight or ten ounces of absolute alcohol in the course of an evening; but then, she'd never imagined that she'd be an RCN officer, either.

As Balsley took the first course, a tureen of soup, from an undercook at the doorway—hatchway, she had to remember to call it a hatchway—Vaughn said to Daniel across the table, "I've heard you're a naturalist, Lieutenant. Are you familiar with the zoology of my Strymon? I think you'll find it quite interesting. Our major predators are descended from flying species, while the herbivores are all semiaquatic."

Hogg and Tovera continued to dispense punch, which kept them busier in this company than Balsley and Timmins were serving the food. Adele tasted the soup and found it thick and rather good, albeit bland.

Apart from being overcooked and underseasoned to her taste, formed as it was in sophisticated circles, Adele had been surprised at how good RCN rations were. At the start of a cruise, a vessel's first lieutenant drew and inspected stores from a naval warehouse. The chief of ship and chief of rig—engineer and bosun—then had to give their approval to the lieutenant's assessment.

If the officers protested the quality of the offering, the agent could either provide replacements (which had to be approved in turn) or convene a Navy Office tribunal to decide the matter. Given that two of the tribunal members were by regulation former or serving space officers, very rarely did the warehouse personnel choose to argue the point.

The warehousemen were allowed five percent "shrinkage" for their profit. Any more than that, however, required the collusion of a vessel's senior officers. Given the number of ways a fatal accident could occur in space, even the most venal officers would think twice about starving the spacers who might be standing behind them at a steam line, or a hundred and fifty feet above them with a wrench.

"No, I haven't had the opportunity to study your biota, I'm afraid," Daniel said. From him the statement was no conventional excuse: Adele had first-hand experience of her friend's interest in the whims of nature on various planets. "Our sailing orders came so abruptly that my concerns were limited to the ship herself. I didn't have time to prepare for relaxation after we arrived on Strymon."

He paused to wash a mouthful of soup down with a hefty swig of punch, then turned to Adele and said, "We'll have loaded natural history files with the regional briefing data, won't we, Adele?"

Adele paused to remove with as much delicacy as possible something that hadn't responded well to chewing. A glance into her napkin suggested that it was a piece of plastic container that had been opened with a sharp knife.

"Yes," she said.
It couldn't very well have been poisonous, after all.
"Though I didn't request a natural history database for Strymon proper, and I'm afraid that the data in the regional overview may be skimpy. Because Terra is in the same files, that is."

Adele had loaded specialist political and economic data, but . . . She felt her face tighten with cold anger. It was directed at herself, of course, as her anger generally was; but Vaughn, who didn't know her the way Daniel did, flinched back in surprise.

"I should have gotten specialist files, Daniel," she said. "I know your interests. I apologize."

"Well, that needn't be a difficulty," Vaughn said. "I have quite an extensive library aboard. If you'd care to use it, Lieutenant, I'd be delighted to share. I'm something of a booster for my homeland, you see."

What Adele saw was that Vaughn had managed to bring most or all of his truckload of luggage aboard the
Princess Cecile
. A chip library needn't take up much volume, even with a reader, but Vaughn's wardrobe and personal rations hadn't been packed into one and a half cubic feet.

Presumably he'd bribed crewmen to slip his baggage aboard in the rain and conceal it. That couldn't be said to degrade naval discipline—Adele had learned quickly that all spacers were smugglers, as surely as all good librarians were obsessives—nor was the corvette's fighting efficiency degraded if some of her crew members shared their narrow bunks with cases of off-planet finery.

In the initial interview with Vaughn, Daniel had made the point that he'd decide the
Princess Cecile
's activities without regard for his passenger's wealth or influence. Vaughn had bowed to the captain's authority and achieved his end in a time-honored fashion that put money in the crew's pocket for leave on Sexburga.

Politics in action, as Adele's father might have said. Backdoor compromises, indirection; face-saving gestures. The social lubricants for which Adele Mundy had no taste or aptitude. Data in files were so much easier to deal with.

"I appreciate your offer, Mr. Vaughn," Daniel said, spooning the last of the soup into his mouth. "I would indeed like to borrow your library, then. We can copy it into the ship's database and return the chips immediately."

"I regret that my library is in a specialized Strymon format, Lieutenant," Vaughn said with a deprecatory lift of his hands. "We're an insular people, I'm afraid. But it shouldn't matter, since you're welcome to borrow my chip reader during the voyage as well."

Daniel glanced at Adele and raised an eyebrow. She started to say that, given the ship's communications suite and her own skill, there was no format in the human universe that she wouldn't venture to read. She caught herself an instant before the first syllable left her tongue.

"And when we reach Strymon, Daniel," Adele said blandly, "you'll be able to buy a suitable reader of your own, I'm sure."

Intellectual pride had always been her besetting sin; it had become a danger to her life and work since she accepted Mistress Sand's duties. Vaughn obviously had no idea of how completely open to Adele's perusal any documents he had would be. That ignorance was probably to the benefit of Adele's mission and to the officers and crew of the
Princess Cecile
.