What Distant Deeps (7 page)

“Ah, yes,” Daniel said. He was wearing his best set of Grays. Medal ribbons were proper but were not required with Grays, the second-class uniform; Daniel had chosen not to wear his.

In fact he’d gotten a Wreath for the Cinnabar Star which he’d been awarded after the Battle of Strymon while he was still a lieutenant. “We had a great deal of luck there, I must say.”

The Annunciator stood with the receiving clerk, beside the gate in the bar separating the assignment clerks from the ranks of benches. The printer beside him whirred out a length of flimsy. He pulled it off, glared at it, and said, “Number One-Seven-Two, come forward!”
 

A thin, almost cadaverous lieutenant scraped up from one of the back benches and strode toward the front. She was trying to look nonchalant, but she stepped a little too quickly. She was wearing her Whites; when she passed, Daniel saw that fabric of the elbows and trouser seat had been polished by long use.

Daniel felt uncomfortable discussing his career with former classmates. He had been lucky, very lucky; and particularly, he’d been lucky in gaining Adele’s friendship and support, which were matters he couldn’t discuss. Indeed, Adele’s intelligence duties—her spying—made Daniel even more uncomfortable than discussing his victories did.

“Well, I’m hoping for some luck myself,” Pennyroyal said. “Vondrian—you remember Vondrian, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Daniel said truthfully. Vondrian, who’d been a class ahead of him at the Academy, had private money. Instead of lording it over his less fortunate fellows, he’d been liked and respected by all who knew him. “He has a ship of his own, I understood?”

“That’s right, the Montrose in the Tattersall Flotilla—which Vondrian says is three destroyers on a good day but generally less,” Pennyroyal said. “Tattersall is an Associated World of the Republic but not a Friend, you see. It gives the RCN an observation base in the Forty Stars where every other world worth mentioning is part of the Alliance.”

“I dare say Vondrian’s breathing easier for the Peace of Rheims,” said Daniel, shaking his head. The trouble with a detached command like what Pennyroyal described was that if the enemy decided to get rid of you, you probably wouldn’t have enough warning even to run away.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Pennyroyal. “And I hope to be able to ask him personally soon, because he swears he’s requested me as his First Lieutenant. I don’t mind telling you, Leary, it’s going to be bloody short rations for me if I have to live on half pay for very long.”

“Vondrian’s as straight as a die,” Daniel said. It was the truth, but he added verve to the words to buck up Pennyroyal. “If he told you he was going to request you, you can take it to the bank that you’ll have your berth shortly.”

That wasn’t quite so true. Captains had a great deal of influence in the choice of officers serving under them, and Vondrian’s wealth gave him more influence than most. At a time like this, however, when any posting was worth fighting for, there was always the risk that an admiral’s nephew was going to be appointed into the place a lieutenant commander had requested for a friend.

Partly because Daniel was afraid his smile would slip if he looked directly at Pennyroyal, he focused on the bench ahead of him. Faintly visible in the wood was a pentacle about three inches across from flat to the point opposite. The illumination from the skylights thirty feet above was so diffuse that he first noticed the texture rather than the slight difference in color.

“Why, I’ll be!” Daniel said. He was glad to change the subject, but his enthusiasm was real. “Here, Pennyroyal—do you see the fungus growing through the wood? The gray pentacle?”

“I suppose I see the pentacle,” Pennyroyal said—agreed would be too strong a word. “If you say it’s a fungus, I’ll believe you.”

“You remember that some of these benches were supposed to have been made of paneling from the Alliance flagship captured in the Battle of Cloudscape?” Daniel said. Burbled, he supposed—but he’d always found the wonder of the universe more interesting than tensile strength or power-to-weight calculations. “Well, that must not be just a legend. This is a Pleasaunce species!”

He grinned in satisfaction at having dredged up another datum. “A male. They’re bisexual, and the females grow in circular patterns.”

“That’s your number, isn’t it, Leary?” said Pennyroyal.

For a moment Daniel tried to fit her words into a context of history or natural history, which between them were absorbing his attention. The bench in front of me is over three hundred years old!

“Four-forty-four?” Pennyroyal said.

Oh, dear gods!

“Yes, and I thank you sincerely,” Daniel said as he rose. The two officers between him and the aisle turned sideways to let him slip past. Their faces were stoical, but Daniel didn’t think he was imagining a touch of envy on the face of the overweight commander.

The receiving clerk looked up at Daniel. The sour disdain with which he greeted an expected new suppliant turned to fury when he saw the person approaching was an officer who’d been to see him only minutes before.

“If you’re looking for a luckier number, Captain—” the clerk sneered. When he realized that the chit Daniel was displaying face-out was the number that had been called a moment earlier, he swallowed the rest of whatever the comment would have been.

“This one seemed lucky enough to me,” Daniel said with a pleasant smile; he handed the chit to the Annunciator to drop back into the wire hopper. “Four-four-four, if you please.”

He was in too good a mood for a minor functionary to spoil it. Besides, he was pretty sure that just being cheerful would irritate the clerk as much as anything else he could do.
 

The twelve or fifteen personnel at desks on the clerical side of the Waiting Room bar were civilians. The only RCN officer in their chain of command was the Chief of the Navy Board. No one else in uniform, not even a full admiral, could give a valid order to an assignment clerk. That was a necessary feature of a job which would often lead to outbursts of fury from frustrated officers.

But facing anger and resentment day after day would have taken a toll on a saint, in the unlikely event that a saint applied for the job. The receiving clerk in particular had to be ruthless, but his duties had curdled necessity into cruelty.

“Yes, of course, Captain,” the clerk muttered. The Annunciator gave Daniel the flimsy printed with 444—Desk 7 and nodded to the usher, who lifted the gate.

Desk 7 was in the second row, identified by a rectangular sign on a short post; the letters were tarnished silver. The clerk was a woman in the process of passing middle age; her throat was wrinkled and her jowls were slipping, but her figure was still good.

She beamed at Daniel, an expression he had never expected to see on the face of an assignment clerk. “Do be seated, Captain,” she said, gesturing toward the straight chair across the desk from her. “May I say that I regard it an honor to meet you professionally?”

“I
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” said Daniel. He didn’t know where to go with his response. Here on this side of the bar, the noise of the hall was more noticeable than it had been among the hundreds of waiting officers whose whispers and shuffling were responsible for it. “I, ah, thank you.”

“There are a few formalities to take care of first,” she said, sorting through a file of hardcopy. “As the final commander of RCS Milton, you’re to initial this Finding of Loss and Disposal.”

Sliding a sheet of paper and a stylus across the desk, she added peevishly, “They haven’t attached the court-martial decision, though. There’s normally a copy of the court record.”
 

She raised her eyes to Daniel’s. “Not that there was anything to be concerned about in your conduct, of course,” she added hastily.

The document was a form whose blanks had been filled in by someone with casually beautiful handwriting. Daniel began to initial each paragraph that had holograph additions. He said, “A court martial is required for any captain who loses his ship, mistress. We—because it wouldn’t have been possible without an exceptional crew—were able to sail the Milton home. The surveyors declared her a constructive loss, but that was decided after I’d handed her over to the dockyard.”

Daniel returned the finding and stylus. Smiling to make a joke of what he was about to say, he added, “There wasn’t much doubt about their decision, I’m afraid; even without the end of hostilities, the Milton couldn’t have been economically repaired
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and there was a prejudice against her design, as well. But I, ah, regret her loss nonetheless.”

Sixty-three spacers had died when an Alliance missile vaporized the Milton’s stern. Daniel felt for every one of them; but he felt for the cruiser herself as well. A theologian might claim that ships don’t have souls, but Daniel was a spacer and knew things that no landsman would ever fathom.

The clerk replaced the form in her file folder, then handed Daniel another document. “Here is your new assignment, Captain,” she said. “Oh! I should have told you to keep the stylus, I’m afraid. You’re to sign the upper copy.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel dryly, retrieving the instrument which was only six inches from his hand. He scanned the document, smiling with satisfaction—and, truth to tell, with relief.

The past generation had been one of constant war or looming war between Cinnabar and the Alliance. The Peace of Rheims appeared to be a different animal from the brief truces of the last twenty years, if only because both empires were on the verge of social and economic collapse.

Peace had put the RCN in a state of flux like nothing before in Daniel’s lifetime. It had been possible that someone very senior in the RCN or even the Senate was going to trump the cards that Captain Daniel Leary and his friends could play.

“Captain,” the clerk said earnestly, “I realize that being assigned to a chartered vessel may appear to be a slight after your command of a heavy cruiser. I assure you that it is not: the Cinnabar Commissioner died suddenly on Zenobia. It’s necessary to rush a replacement there, but the world is in the Alliance sphere. We can’t send a warship without giving offense, which might have the most serious implications for the recent treaty.”

“Mistress
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” Daniel said, looking up from his orders. He was faintly puzzled. “I understood that the needs of the service were paramount from the moment I enlisted. I’ve never objected to a lawful order.”

There had been times when Daniel Leary’s superiors might have complained regarding the speed and manner in which he executed his orders—but he wasn’t going to say that to a civilian.

“Oh!” said the clerk, touching her fingertips to her lower lip. “Oh, of course not, Captain! But surely the needs of the service include the proper treatment of officers who have done so much for the Republic. Why, the peace treaty might not have been signed without your victory at Cacique!”

Daniel blinked. He supposed he ought to be pleased that the clerical staff was treating him as an individual rather than a cog to be put in whatever bin a computer decided.

In fact he found he preferred to be a cog. If the clerks treated Captain Leary as a person, then he had to think of them as people. It took much less energy to view clerks as minor irritations to the life of an RCN officer, much like the gnats that rose from the marshes at Bantry to clog the eyes, noses, and food of everyone who had to be outdoors in early spring.

But after all, it might be just this clerk at Desk 7. Perhaps he could go on being callously dismissive of all the faceless others here in Navy House and beyond.

Daniel smiled broadly; the clerk seemed to glow in reaction. That was fair even though she probably misunderstood his expression: she’d led him to the train of thought, after all. Anyway, it made the world a better place than it would have been after another sneering exchange like his with the receiving clerk.

The woman was forty years past the age that Daniel’s smile would’ve meant what she apparently understood from it, though.

Aloud he said, “Well, since I’m to have my pick of spacers to crew her, I’ll see if we can’t get Commissioner—”

He glanced at the document he’d just signed.

“—Pavel Brown and his family to Zenobia before the vacancy causes problems for distressed Cinnabar spacers in the Qaboosh Region.”

Simply being in the Qaboosh Region would be distressing enough for an RCN officer; the place could be used as the illustration of the term “backwater.” Though peace meant that there weren’t any postings which were likely to be a springboard to higher rank.

The clerk took the signed copy of the orders. As Daniel stood she said, “Using a chartered yacht means money in the pocket of some well-placed civilian, but we mustn’t complain about reality. I only hope that this Princess Cecile is well found.”

Daniel grinned again. “The ship is as tight and nimble as any vessel in the RCN, mistress,” he said. “And the charter fee won’t be going to a civilian—because I own her myself.”

He had to remind himself not to begin whistling as he strode toward the door to the street.

Harbor Three, near Xenos on Cinnabar

“Ma’am?” said Benthelow. He was a Power Room tech who’d been on guard duty when Adele boarded the Princess Cecile an hour before. He probably still was, but he’d left his sub-machine gun back in the boarding hold with his fellow guard before he came up to the bridge. “There’s a guy here that, well, I thought you might talk to him.”

Adele was alone on the bridge. Tovera had gone off on her own business; Adele made a point of not knowing what her servant did in her free time. She sat at the Communications console, going over the software she had just installed.

Every time Adele landed on Cinnabar, Mistress Sand’s organization provided her with updates for the codes she might encounter. The top Alliance military codes were still effectively closed to her if they were applied properly, but the computing power necessary to guide a starship through the Matrix could by brute force gut almost any commercial code like a hooked fish.