Lt. Leary, Commanding (2 page)

Raising the goggles, the old man looked up at his nephew again. "Are they going to give you command again after she's commissioned, lad?" he asked.

Daniel shrugged. Civilians assumed the answer was obvious: of course the Hero of Kostroma would be returned to command. An RCN officer, however, knew there was much more to the question.

"I don't know," he said. "I performed well, but there're many skilled officers senior to me."

He smiled at a sudden thought. "Lieutenant Mon among them."

It was a grim joke, of course, because Mon would
never
have a command of his own. He didn't have the interest of a senior officer nor the sort of family money that would allow him to cut a figure socially and call attention to his undoubted abilities.

Worst of all, Mon had bad luck: he'd always been at the wrong place when there were prizes or honors to be won nearby. And there he differed from Daniel Leary, who'd been sent to Kostroma with no interest and no money, but whose good fortune had handsomely made up for those lacks.

"Short of Admiral Anston," Adele said dryly, "there's no better-known officer in the RCN today. You won't be the wonder of Cinnabar forever, but I think you still have some of your nine days left."

Daniel grinned, but he said, "That's not an unmixed blessing, you know, Adele. There'll be some who think I've carried myself a little higher since my return than an officer so junior ought to do. And they may be right."

Uncle Stacey nodded, his lips pursed. "You're young, Daniel, you're young, and they'll understand that. But still . . ."

"You carried yourself here with the same well-justified confidence that you showed on Kostroma," Adele said, raising her voice slightly. Her words had the precision of the teeth of a saw cutting timber to the proper fit. "The reason we're not in an Alliance prison—or dead—is that you never let any of us doubt that you were going to get us free. I have far too much respect for the organization of which I'm now an officer—"

She touched a fingertip to the rank flash on her collar with a thin smile.

"—to doubt that those in charge can also see the merit of a more extroverted personality than mine when the task involves leading others into battle."

A plume of steam expanded from a berth halfway across the port. The ground trembled for several seconds before the roar of a ship lifting off reached Daniel's party through the air. He slipped his goggles down to protect his eyes—the optics blocked UV completely and filtered white light to a safe intensity—and looked toward the event.

In truth, Daniel was glad to have an excuse not to respond. He was comfortable with the praise of his peers and generally amused by the compliments of civilians who hadn't the least notion of what they were talking about. Adele's words were disconcerting, though. He couldn't equate her cold analysis with the confused bumbling he remembered going through; to ultimate success, agreed, but that was due less to Daniel's own efforts than to luck and the expert assistance which Adele and so many others provided.

The ship lifted high enough that its plasma motors no longer licked a shroud of steam from the pool on which the vessel had floated. The plume of ions flaring from the thrusters was a rainbow beauty over which a long steel cigar continued to lift. She was an Archaeologist-class heavy cruiser, an old ship with a greater length-to-beam ratio than more modern vessels of the type. If Daniel had wanted to, his goggles would have let him read the pennant number to identify her.

The plasma motors stripped atoms and voided them as ions to provide thrust. Any reaction mass would do, but water was ideal as well as being available generally on human-habitable worlds. Permanent harbor facilities were usually on seas or lakes which absorbed the plasma roaring from the thrusters at stellar heat and made refueling a matter of extending a hose.

When the vessel was well above the surface of the planet, she would switch to her High Drive, which used matter-antimatter conversion to provide sufficient inertial velocity to enter the Matrix. The High Drive was efficient but not perfect. If exhausted into an atmosphere, atoms of antimatter would flare and eat away the vessel itself.

The trio let the throb of the cruiser's liftoff drop back from its plateau before any of them tried to talk over it. Harbor Three was a huge installation with frequent movements, but the sound of a heavy ship taking off or landing made it impossible to speak in a normal voice anywhere within the perimeter.

Uncle Stacey took out his hundred-florin touchpiece—part of an issue struck twenty-two years before to mark the birth of Speaker Leary's son Daniel. He spun it so that the internal diffraction grating caught the light.

"People talk about how pretty Cinnabar coins are," he said as they watched the cruiser rise. "There's nothing as lovely as a well-tuned plasma motor, nothing. Unless maybe it's the way the universe shines on you as you drop into the Matrix."

"That reminds me," Adele said with a faint smile. "I need to talk to my banker again. It's time to make another draft on my prize account."

Uncle Stacey snorted. "Bankers!" he said. "The worst risk one of that lot faces is that the wine he orders with dinner won't be properly chilled."

He twisted his head one way, then the other to look back at Adele; she politely stepped out to the side and nodded to him.

"My brother-in-law interests himself in banking," Stacey said. "That's Daniel's father, you know. Though the lad's turned out an honor to his Bergen blood,
I
say."

His tone wasn't usually so sharp. Daniel would have been surprised, but he knew that Uncle Stacey was in Xenos to render on behalf of Bergen and Associates, Shipfitters his quarterly accounts to the company's financial backer . . . who was Corder Leary.

Speaker Leary's financial interests were widespread. The only thing unusual about his share in Bergen and Associates was that the involvement was direct instead of being filtered through one or more holding companies. Daniel knew his father wasn't a cruel man, but he was extremely punctilious about power relationships, especially when kinship was involved. You always knew where you stood with Corder Leary; or, more precisely, where at his feet you were to kneel.

An open four-wheeled jitney was leaving the
Aristotle
, probably to pick up Daniel and his party. Aircars weren't permitted within Harbor Three for safety reasons: the risk of starships maneuvering in close proximity was great enough without adding aircraft to the mix. Heavy machinery and laborers at shift changes used the slow-moving overhead rail system circling the whole installation; branches led off the central line and snaked through sectors of six to ten bays, with shunts where carloads could wait until required.

The jitneys carried light cargo and small groups of people along the roadway beneath the rails. One had dropped Daniel and his party here at Dock 37, then whined off to make a delivery to the
Aristotle
in Dock 36 before returning. The driver claimed he was carrying urgent medical supplies in the hampers, but Daniel strongly suspected that liquor was arriving in trade for some item of the battleship's furnishings.

That was the way of the world, and Lt. Daniel Leary had no desire to complain. The
Princess Cecile
's fire control system had been converted to RCN standard by means of similar off-book transactions.

A pair of limousines and a van with the pennon of the Harbor Administrator's office pulled up in front of Dock 37. Brass of some sort, obviously, but civilian brass by the look of the vehicles. Perhaps a Treasury delegation, checking on the way the Navy Office spent its appropriations? Though they wouldn't run to limousines, surely.

"Let's get you safely aboard the tram to home, Uncle Stacey," Daniel said. "As shorthanded as the RCN is with the number of ships going into service, there's a risk that some bosun'll snatch you up for a rigger and you'll be off-planet before you can catch your breath."

Uncle Stacey couldn't walk thirty feet unaided any more, though he seemed more resigned to his weakness than Daniel himself was. Some of Daniel's earliest memories were of being carried in his uncle's arms along the yards of a ship being refitted, hopping from spar to spar over what seemed like chasms—and probably were six feet or more. It had been a good upbringing for a boy who was to enter the RCN, not that anybody had imagined that at the time.

Daniel pushed the wheelchair down the concrete apron, glad to be off the catwalk which crossed the open dock to the corvette's main hatch. It was a steel grating and not much wider than the chair, though that didn't concern either Daniel or his uncle.

What had concerned Daniel was Adele. His signals officer—his friend—had many skills beyond those to be expected from one trained as a librarian, but a sense of balance was noticeably
not
one of those.

"Leary!" called one of the new arrivals. "By God, that's Daniel Leary, isn't it?"

Daniel turned, rotating the wheelchair to the side with one hand. That gave Uncle Stacey a clear view also instead of him trying to look over his shoulder in desperate isolation.

Mixed groups of civilians and senior officers in 1st Class uniforms were getting out of the limousines, but the speaker was the lieutenant in charge of the detachment of ratings from the van. He was of middling height with a florid face and a few extra pounds—like Daniel himself. Daniel found him half-recognizable but not really familiar.

"Tom Ireland, Leary," the fellow called, striding down the apron with his hand out to clasp Daniel's. "Two years ahead of you at the Academy, but in South Battalion while you were in North."

Good God, Ireland claiming his acquaintance! To the junior cadets upperclassmen at the Academy were generally aloof strangers, sometimes slavering monsters. Ireland had been in the former category, a vague presence to Cadet Daniel Leary; and Daniel Leary would have been less than the paving stones of the Quad to Ireland. Suddenly they'd become fellow schoolmates. . . .

"I heard about your little affair on Kostroma," Ireland said, seizing Daniel's hand and pumping it. Behind him the passengers from the limousines were drifting toward them with the sort of meaningful aimlessness of goats grazing across a field. "Well handled, I'll tell the world! Though you had a bit of luck come your way, it seems to me. Not so?"

"Very definitely so," Daniel said, feeling his lips form a smile hard enough to cut glass. "Permit me to introduce you to a great part of that luck, my signals officer, Mistress Mundy."

Ireland blinked with mild confusion; his little mustache twitched. If he'd noticed Adele at all it was as a signalman; a specialist, a
technician
, a category necessary for the proper functioning of the RCN but which operated on a different plane from commissioned officers like himself and Daniel.

"That's Mundy of Chatsworth, of course," Daniel added. "Death masks in the front hall from ancestors back to before the Hiatus, isn't that right, Adele?"

He was surprised at the anger which he hoped he covered with his bantering tone. Ireland had never harmed him at the Academy, and if he wanted to scrape acquaintance now with the Hero of Kostroma, well, that wasn't a terrible crime. Though flattery
had
begun to pall on Daniel from its constant repetition.

It was the comment about luck that had tripped a switch in Daniel's mind. Luck there'd been in plenty, and Daniel Leary would be the first to say that; but when the words came from a stranger who hadn't seen men die to make that luck a reality . . .

"
Those
Mundys?" Ireland said. The name would be familiar, though unless he were more politically attuned than the RCN encouraged its junior officers to be, he wouldn't remember the names and details of the Three Circles Conspiracy. "Ah, I see!"

Which of course he didn't; he just saw that he'd misjudged the status of Lt. Leary's companion.

Ireland started to extend his hand to Adele. Before the gesture was more than a hint, she crossed her arms behind her back and gave him an icily polite nod of greeting. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ireland," she said. "You're a tour guide for the Harbor Administrator, I gather?"

"I, ah . . . " Ireland said. He looked over his shoulder. The mixture of dress uniforms and still-more-splendid civilian garb had almost reached him. "Yes, I'm in charge of the escort for some officials from the Foreign Ministry and their liaison with the Navy Office. I, ah . . . they, that is, are showing the son of the President of Strymon around."

The dignitaries were on them. Ireland opened his mouth again, perhaps to introduce Daniel to the rank of dress uniforms, but the squat, jowly captain in front said, "Well, by my hope of a flag! Commander Bergen, isn't it? Mr. Vaughn, let me introduce you to the man who mapped a route to Strymon that cut three weeks sailing off the previous time!"

Uncle Stacey squeezed the arms of his chair. Daniel—and Adele to the other side, as smoothly as if they'd rehearsed the maneuver—each slid a forearm under the old man's hands and lifted him to his feet as soon as he'd transferred his grip.

"Young Wenslow, isn't it?" Stacey said with close to the old fullness in his voice. "You served under me on the
Queensland
."

"Senior midshipman and fourth lieutenant after Broker got his own command on Tuttel's World," agreed Wenslow—no longer young, and as Daniel knew, secretary of the RCN's planning council. He drew forward the slim young man at his side. "Delos Vaughn, allow me to introduce you to Commander Stacey Bergen. Commander Bergen has forgotten more about astrogation than anyone else in the RCN ever knew!"

Vaughn extended his right hand and shook Uncle Stacey's, showing a care for the old man's frailty that Daniel approved with a minuscule nod. Vaughn wore a severely tailored suit, but the cloth from which it was cut formed a series of chevrons which changed from red to gold alternately depending on the angle of the light. He was as hard to focus on as the flare of a plasma exhaust.

Apart from that he had a handsome, thirty-year-old face and an engaging smile. Three of the other civilians wore clothes of similar style and flamboyant materials; the rest, like the naval officers, were Cinnabar nationals.