Lt. Leary, Commanding (7 page)

"All right, Palovec, so much for the extrusions," the admiral said. It was his voice Daniel had heard through the outer door. "Now, tell me why you're recommending thruster nozzles from Kodiak Forges? Why is Kodiak even being permitted to tender?"

The hands slapped the papers down on the desktop of petrified wood. Another trophy of the admiral's active service?

"I believe they've sorted out their quality control problems, Admiral," the captain said with a bubbling good humor that didn't ring true in Daniel's ears. "I've made a personal inspection of their plant, you know. And the quote was very attractive, as you see."

The outer door opened without the formality of a knock. Daniel turned. A servant closed the door behind himself. He was far too senior to wear livery, but at his throat was a cravat in Anston's black-and-maroon colors.

"I'm here to collect the admiral, Klemsch," the servant said. His eyes flicked over Daniel the way light glances from a mud puddle. "Will you inform him, or shall I?"

Daniel's smile froze. He could take orders without hesitation or complaint; the RCN was no place for anyone who had a problem with hierarchies. But Daniel didn't expect ever to meet the
house servant
he considered his superior in any pecking order.

"Hold them for now, Palovec," the admiral said, shoving the papers across the figured stone surface. "I'll get back to you tomorrow."

"I'll inform the admiral that you're here, Whately," the clerk said. "This is the Navy Office, you'll recall, not Stamhead Square."

Captain Palovec rose and straightened his documents with a pensive expression. "I'll do what I can to convince them to hold the price, Admiral . . . " he said.

There might have been more to follow, but Admiral Anston stood and, with a hand on his elbow, ushered Palovec to the door. Anston was a short man with trim features even now, but either he'd gained twenty pounds since the last picture Daniel had seen of him or he wore a corset during formal appearances.

Daniel jumped to his feet, barely restraining himself from saluting. By tradition born of necessity, no salutes were offered within the Navy Office; otherwise nobody'd be able to walk down the hallway without stopping in the middle of each stride to exchange salutes.

And as heaven and his Academy tutors knew, saluting wasn't a skill Daniel could ever claim to have mastered.

"Come along, Admiral," Whately said as soon as Anston appeared. "Your wife sent me to fetch you. You're an hour late as it is."

Anston looked at Daniel, then to Klemsch with a raised eyebrow. Captain Palovec opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and strode out of the office, clicking the outer door behind him.

"This is Lieutenant Leary, Admiral," Klemsch said.

"Admiral, your wife has been waiting at the gallery," the servant said sharply.

"Then she'll damned well have to wait longer, won't she?" the admiral boomed. "Come on in here, lad. I can spare you a minute without all the statues melting off their stands!"

With the exception of the splendid desk, Anston's inner office was relentlessly utilitarian. The walls were off-white with no pictures or other decoration, and the furniture was as spartan as that of junior officers' quarters on a warship. Daniel sat because Anston directed him to a chair, but he perched on the edge of the cushion.

"Are you married, Leary?" the admiral asked.

"No sir!" Daniel said. Had there been a complaint about—

"Didn't think so!" Anston said, sitting in the similar chair across the deck. "But rumor has it you've met your share of women. Is that true?"

A number of possible answers to the question raced through Daniel's head. There
had
been complaints. Coming home as the Hero of Kostroma and with money in his pocket—well, Daniel had always been able to meet women looking for a good time, and with his present advantages it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

"Yes, sir, that's true," Daniel said. He'd never been any good at lying, and he wasn't going to start now with the Chief of the Navy Board.

Anston nodded again. "That's a good thing in a young man," he said in an approving tone. "That way you won't have to make a fool of yourself when you get to be my age. Now—what do you think about Kodiak thruster nozzles?"

Daniel felt as though he was being slapped on the back of the head with feather pillows. Every time he turned,
whap!
and another one hit him from behind.

"Sir, I don't have personal experience with Kodiak's products," he said, "but my uncle, that's Commander Bergen, has stopped using them in his shipyard. He says the internal polish is fine, but you have to magnaflux each one for weak spots or you can expect to have plasma leaking sideways before you've got ten hours of service. He says he rejected the whole shipment he received last quarter."

Anston banged his fist down. "Just what I told Palovec when I took them off the tender list last year!" he said. "I don't mind a purchasing officer making his five percent on a contract, but I will
not
have a man who lines his pockets by providing my people with shoddy goods! Klemsch, take a note of that."

"I have done so, Admiral," called the little man from the outer office. The servant, Whately, shifted from foot to foot in the doorway though he didn't choose to break in on Anston again.

"You're here about the corvette, the
Princess Cecile
," Anston said, grimacing at the vessel's name. No Cinnabar vessel would've been christened anything like "
Princess Cecile,
" but Anston was one of the old-fashioned officers who felt that renaming a ship changed her luck. "What do you think of her? Your assessment as an RCN officer!"

"Sir," said Daniel, "I'd match her against any vessel of her class, regardless of where she was built."

Like everything else he'd said since he entered the office, that was the simple truth. He didn't understand enough about the situation to guess what Anston wanted to hear; and when in doubt, the truth was always the best option.

Anston bellowed a laugh so loud that it trailed off into coughing. He slapped his desk again and said, "As all Cinnabar knows, lad, you matched her against a cruiser that was miles beyond her class. Oh, I know, you had luck to pull it off. I didn't make it to this office without knowing what luck was, I assure you. But you had balls enough to try, and that's the first requirement for a good officer."

"Admiral,
please
. . . " Whately said. He'd breezed in initially with the authority of Lady Anston. If that wasn't sufficient, he was likely to be ground to dust between her and the admiral.

"Yes, yes," Anston said, rising from his chair again. "I just wanted to meet Leary here. Leary, Klemsch will take care of you while I go pretend I see more in a line of bronze statues than so many bearings gone bad."

He walked Daniel into the outer office. Whately already had the door open and was hovering by it, a wraith of the self-important fellow who'd bustled in minutes before.

Daniel didn't understand what had just happened—
any
of the things that had just happened—but there didn't seem to be any advantage in commenting on the fact to Mr. Klemsch. He therefore said as the door closed behind Anston, "I'm requesting a twelve-hour draft of sixty ratings while I test the
Princess Cecile
before turning her over as ready for service."

The forty Sissies—former Aggies from the communications vessel
Aglaia
, aboard to handle the refit—were all experienced spacers. With them as a core, the corvette would be able to function even if the rest of the crew were ten-thumbed landsmen . . . which would very probably be the case.

Klemsch typed at a sheet of boron monocrystal marked with symbols. Daniel didn't recall seeing a physical keyboard like that in service anywhere within the RCN: the volume within a warship was too short to dedicate any of it to uses that could be accomplished by holograms. Klemsch's eccentricity would subtly disquiet any spacer who dealt with him, Daniel included.

But Daniel's passion for natural history disposed him to view the mechanisms at work within and among living entities. He recognized why the keyboard bothered him—and grinned broadly. It wasn't as though anything so minor as
that
was going to affect him in the present circumstances.

"The admiral has passed the
Princess Cecile
for service," Klemsch said as he typed. "You're to work her up in the course of your service cruise."

The printer whirred, extruding and clipping off a sheet of flimsy. Klemsch handed the document to Daniel.

"This appoints you captain of the
Princess Cecile
," the clerk said. His expression was perfectly deadpan, but it covered a sardonic grin as surely as flesh did his cheekbones. "You'll have to pardon the informality, but the stress of events prevents me from having it done with the proper seals and ribbons. You're to arrange for a full crew on long-term recruitment."

He cleared his throat. "Your orders give you authority to accept volunteers from any RCN vessel on Cinnabar, whether or not the volunteer's present commander acquiesces."

"Good God!" Daniel said; the phrase was getting to be a habit today, and this time he'd blurted it aloud.

He wasn't an unduly boastful man, but he'd brought the
Aglaia
's crew back from a disaster and filled their pockets with prize money. Spacers preferred to serve beneath lucky officers than able ones, though Daniel hoped the Aggies and everyone they talked to thought Lt. Leary was pretty damned able as well. If he was allowed to recruit under those terms, he'd get the pick of the RCN.

By God! He'd get back the crew that fought the
Princess Cecile
on Kostroma, barring those few spacers posted to vessels which had lifted during the corvette's refit!

"Ah," Daniel said. "I'm very grateful for these orders, Mr. Klemsch, very grateful. But can you tell me what the, ah, reason for them might be?"

The clerk looked up coldly. "Do I care to speculate as to Admiral Anston's motives, you mean, Lieutenant? No, I do not."

Daniel's heels clicked to a brace. "Good day, sir," he said. "Meeting you has been an unexpected pleasure."

He stepped out the door and began to whistle. What would Adele say about this?

_A
dele sat on a bench in the huge forecourt and took out her
personal data unit. The upper court with six banks of theater-style seating for a few hundred worshippers was to her right. Beyond it rose the gilded eighty-foot image of the Redeeming Spirit, framed rather than shielded by a conical roof supported by columns. Those structures on the very crown of the hill were the only portions of the complex really given over to religious uses; and that only rarely, when representatives of the Senate and the allied worlds gave formal thanks for the safety of the Republic.

Adele smiled, half in humor. In another way the whole Pentacrest was a religious edifice, dedicated to the faith that Cinnabar was meant to rule the human galaxy. Daniel certainly believed that, though he'd be embarrassed to say so in those blunt words.

And Adele Mundy? No, she didn't believe it and she didn't imagine she ever would. But not long ago she'd believed in nothing but the certainty she would die, and today she was convinced of the reality of human friendship as well. Perhaps someday Daniel would manage to convert her—by example; Daniel was no proselytizer—into a Cinnabar chauvinist as well.

Adele felt, as she always did when walking out of a library, that the sunlight was an intrusion. Still, she hadn't wanted to call up her messages within the Celsus; not after the meeting with Mistress Sand. Contact with intelligence personnel always made her feel both unclean and paranoid, uncomfortably aware of how easily she could be observed within the confines of a building.

Adele was an intelligence agent herself now. That made her feel more, not less, uncomfortable. Perhaps the paranoia would prove a survival trait, but she wasn't sure she wanted to live if she had to worry this way in order to do so.

Most of the messages she'd downloaded were of no consuming interest—RCN information, updating her status; or even less significant queries from people who wanted to sell her things. Adele had gained a great deal of attention from publication of the list of those entitled to a share in the proceeds of the
Princess Cecile
whenever the government of the Republic got around to paying. She found it quite amazing that so many people thought she wanted to buy real estate, an aircar, or companionship.

She permitted herself another smile. Companionship of the sort those folk offered had never interested her, even as a matter of scientific curiosity. Daniel was the naturalist, after all. Mind, Daniel's interest in companionship couldn't be called scientific, though the way he hooked and netted each night's quarry showed the same tactical acumen that had turned the tables on the Alliance at Kostroma.

A short block of information was encrypted. Adele entered the day's key; even with the wands, the hundred and twenty-eight characters took some time.

The message was from Tovera, Adele's servant insofar as that intelligent, highly trained sociopath could be said to serve anything except her own will. Tovera knew she wasn't fully human: that there were things which human beings felt that she would never feel. Her strategy for coping with her lack was to attach herself to a human who understood what she was, and who didn't care.

Every time Adele looked at Tovera, she thought of the boy she'd killed fifteen years before; and the others. How many more lives could Adele Mundy end with a four-ounce pressure of her trigger finger, before her eyes were just as empty as those of her servant?

The message was simple: Adele's bank had called regarding the drawing rights she had established against the award of prize money for the
Princess Cecile
. They would like her to meet with them at her earliest convenience, giving an address.

It wasn't the address of the office where Adele had set up the account, but that was only to be expected. It was on the north slope of Progress Hill, however; easier to walk to than to take a car.