The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "It went well, Uncle Stacey," he muttered under his breath. By God it had! All Cinnabar had turned out to cheer the Republic's greatest explorer off on his final voyage.

  Maryam Bergen had left on the arm of Bergen and Associates' shop foreman, an old shipmate of her husband's and, not coincidentally, her brother. A mere workman couldn't be part of the official mourning, of course, but the foreman and most of the other yard employees had been given places just outside the fence where they had an unrivaled view.

  "Here you go, master," Hogg muttered, offering Daniel a silver half-pint flask. He'd already unscrewed the jigger measure that covered the stopper. He eyed the dispersing crowd, wearing an expression of the same satisfaction that Daniel felt.

  "What is it?" Daniel said as he plucked out the cork.

  "It's wet and you need it," Hogg said. "Just drink."

  Not precisely what a gentleman's gentleman would have said, but Daniel was a country gentleman which was a very different thing from the citified version. He took a swig of what might have been cherry brandy and certainly was strong enough to fuel an engine.

  The actors playing Stacey's ancestors had joined the clowns behind the crematorium. They'd handed the deathmasks to footmen from the families which'd provided them and were removing their costumes; attendants folded the chairs on which they'd been sitting.

  The man who'd impersonated Stacey was talking to the undertaker. He was the contractor as well as the principal performer, for the undertaker handed him a purse. He weighed it in his hand and bowed.

  Adele stood alone just beyond the ranks of chairs. When she caught Daniel's eye she nodded, turned, and walked away. Tovera, who must've been watching from the other side of the fence during the ceremony, trailed her mistress closely.

  Daniel smiled in appreciation. Adele wouldn't intrude, but she hadn't wanted to leave without saying goodbye.

  "Lieutenant Leary?" said a voice at his elbow. Daniel turned abruptly and found the principal actor beside him. "My name is Shackleford, Enzio Shackleford. I trust our performance was to your taste?"

  It was disconcerting to see the fellow still in uniform but without the mask and wig, for his wild white hair was utterly unlike anything a spacer would wear. In a cramped, weightless vessel, such strands would've drifted in all directions.

  Daniel swallowed the swig of brandy that'd been in his mouth when the man startled him. Part of it went down the wrong pipe; he sprayed it onto the sleeve of his Dress Whites that he got over his mouth and nose in time.

  Hogg muttered and snatched the kerchief from Daniel's cuff to mop at the liquor. It would've made better sense to sneeze on the actor's utility uniform. . . .

  Shackleford pretended his attention was fastened on matters of supernal interest on the horizon. "A most gratifying house, if I may say so, Lieutenant. A turn-out that would've done honor to the most respected admiral or statesman. I was pleased to be in charge of the performance."

  "Your pardon, Master Shackleford," Daniel managed through spasms; the strong brandy burned like spattering thermite on the soft inner tissues of his nose. "Yes, yes, you did splendidly."

  "I like to think that the Enzio Shackleford Company gives value far above our small additional increment of cost compared to just any self-styled thespians," Shackleford said with an airy gesture of his hand to indicate they both were true aristocrats. "Allow me to provide you with my card, sir."

  He did so with a flourish that suggested he performed card tricks when nothing more lucrative offered itself.

  "You may have occasion at any moment to require similar services," Shackleford continued. "How well it has been said, 'We know not the day and hour of our passing.' In your moment of grief, sir, do not fail to call on the first name in posthumous impersonations—the Enzio Shackleford Company!"

  Daniel frowned, trying to imagine who else might die for whom he'd be responsible. Adele, perhaps? Though she was at no obvious risk unless catastrophe struck the Princess Cecile, in which case the vessel's commander was unlikely to be in a position to arrange the funeral.

  Thought of the Princess Cecile lowered a gray curtain over Daniel's mind; he took a long, deliberate drink from the flask, drawing its contents far down. He'd been tense throughout the day, afraid that some mistake would turn the proceedings into a farce. He'd felt no sadness, though; this had been a celebration of Stacey's life and—as it turned out—a triumph. The flesh, frail even in life, was now ash; but the name of Commander Stacey Bergen was on the lips of everyone in Xenos.

  Uncle Stacey's glorious send-off was past, and now present reality was intruding on the euphoria of the afternoon. Daniel had Admiral Anston's word that the Admiralty would find him a command; that counted for more than a signed and sealed commission from anybody else. The thought of the Sissie being gutted and turned into an intra-system tramp, though—that was troubling.

  Gutted—or simply bought by a breaker's yard for her masts, electronics and drives. Though the boom in trade that came with peace should give all spaceworthy hulls enough value to spare the Sissie that final indignity for a few years further.

  Daniel took another drink. When he lowered the flask empty, he saw Lieutenant Mon coming toward him against the grain of the departing crowd.

  In general terms he was glad to see Mon, who'd been as satisfactory a first lieutenant as Daniel could imagine serving under him: competent, careful, and brave—though that went almost without saying in an RCN officer. No few of those who wore the uniform were pig stupid, but cowards were as rare as saints. Besides those professional virtues, Mon was loyal to Daniel beyond what could be expected of a human being.

  On the other hand, if Mon was coming to moan about having to feed his large family on half-pay when the Sissie went out of commission, well—Daniel would sympathize, but at another time. For now his grief was for the corvette herself.

  "Sir!" Mon said, clasping Daniel's hand. "Thank God you're on Cinnabar. I had nightmares of you being off on an embassy to Kostroma or the Devil only knew where!"

  Mon's dress uniform fit poorly—he'd lost weight since he last wore it, which might have been five or more years in the past—and he hadn't taken time to update his medal ribbons. Daniel let a smile of satisfaction touch his lips: the citations Mon had won in the brief time he'd served under Lieutenant Leary would have made the cabbage patch on his tunic much more impressive.

  Quite apart from the fit of his uniform, Mon looked dreadful. At the end of the brutal run to Sexburga, seventeen days in the Matrix without a break, everybody aboard the Princess Cecile looked like they'd been dragged through a drainpipe . . . and even then, Mon had been in better shape than Daniel saw him now.

  "I'm here, right enough," Daniel said with a note of deliberate caution, "but as you can imagine, Mon, I have a good deal on my plate right at the moment. Perhaps later . . . ?"

  "Sir," Mon said. His face screwed up in despair and frustration. "Daniel, for God's sake. I need help and I don't know where else to turn!"

  "Ah," said Daniel, nodding in understanding. "Well, I hope I always have a few florins for an old shipmate."

  He reached for the wallet that'd be attached to the equipment belt of the 2nd Class uniform he usually wore on the ground. His Whites used a cummerbund rather than a belt and had no provision for carrying money or anything else of practical value.

  "Hogg?" he said, trying to hide his irritation in forgetting the situation. "Do you have ten—that is, twenty florins you can let me have until I'm back in my rooms?"

  "Sir, it's not money . . . ," Mon said. He straightened and looked around, suddenly a man again and an RCN officer. "Look, can we go somewhere and talk? This is . . ."

  He shrugged; Daniel nodded agreement. Standing in the open among attendants sweeping up the debris of a funeral simply wasn't the way to discuss anything except the weather.

  "Right," Daniel said. "The last time I looked there were bars just down the street. We'll find a booth and see how I can help you."

  He
gave Mon his arm and they started up the avenue, by now almost empty of mourners. Though there was no lack of bars this close to Harbor Three, they weren't the sort of places that an officer usually entered wearing his dress uniform.

  Still, if Daniel kept his intake to only a few drinks—or anyway, a moderate amount—then he shouldn't have to replace his Whites because they were dirty; or they were bloody; or they'd been torn completely off his back in a brawl that'd started the Lord knew how. And if he did have to replace his uniform, well, an officer of the RCN was always ready to make sacrifices for his fellows.

  CHAPTER 3

  Buelow's, only three doors down from the Stanislas Chapel, catered to warrant officers looking for a place to have a drink rather than common spacers intending to get falling-down drunk as quickly and cheaply as possible. Daniel eased himself into a booth, realizing as he did so that it was the first time since dawn that he'd taken the weight off his feet.

  The three-dimensional photographs on the walls were of landscapes rather than sexual acrobatics. Daniel couldn't identify any of the scenes, but the three-legged creature clinging to the face of a basalt cliff certainly wasn't native to Cinnabar. The dark, pitted wood of the bar came from off-planet also; Daniel noted with interest that its vascular tissue seemed to curl in helixes around the bole, rising and sinking through the slab's planed surface like sections of a dolphin's track.

  Hogg seated himself beside the cash register where he would unobtrusively take care of the charges; a woman in uniform, an engineer by her collar flashes, was drinking a boilermaker at the end of the bar. Other than them and the tapster who walked over to the booth, Daniel and Mon had the tavern to themselves.

  Daniel glanced at the tapster and said, "So, Mon? I believe yours is whiskey and water?"

  "No, no, Leary," Mon said, shaking his head violently. "Thanks, I mean, but I've sworn off for, for the time. I'll have—"

  He looked at the solid, balding bartender and grimaced. "A shandy, I suppose," he said. "Yes, a shandy."

  "And for me as well, sir," Daniel said brightly, wondering if Mon had gone out of his mind. Aloud he continued, "Well, Mon. What d'ye need to see me about?"

  Mon set his hands firmly on the table with his palms down and the fingers spread, stared at them as he organized his thoughts, and then lifted his weary eyes to Daniel. "Look sir, it's like this," he said. "While the Sissie was rebuilding on Tanais, we got a message through the High Commissioner to the Strymon system that we were to bring her home to Harbor One for disposal. I guess you'd heard that?"

  "Yes," Daniel said, "I had."

  He didn't add that he'd heard it from Adele less than two hours ago. Strictly speaking nobody'd been required to tell him, since he'd turned over command of the Princess Cecile to his first lieutenant while she was in dock.

  The fact that he hadn't heard a whisper about the sale out of service of the corvette he'd captured and commanded in actions that thrilled all Cinnabar, let alone the RCN, had to have been conscious concealment rather than mere oversight. Anston, or more likely the captain heading the Board of Materiel, must have thought that the famous Lieutenant Leary could raise enough of a public outcry to reverse the Board's reasoned decision.

  And so he could've done; but he wouldn't have. The needs of the service came first with Daniel Leary, as they should do with every officer of the RCN.

  "Well, you can imagine I wasn't happy about that," Mon said, stating the facts baldly as though the situation had no emotional weight for Daniel. "But then a couple nobles from Novy Sverdlovsk arrived with a letter of introduction from the High Commissioner. Count Klimov and wife Valentina, their names were, and they wanted passage to Cinnabar."

  He shrugged. "No problem there, of course," he went on. "We weren't on a fighting cruise, and you'd drafted forty crewmen to the Strymon dispatch vessel you sailed home on. It was just a matter of the passengers providing a share of rations to the officer's mess—and I don't mind telling you, captain, that I've never had better rations anywhere in my life, on shipboard or land. They've got more money than God, the Klimovs do."

  The tapster returned with the shandies, thumping them down on the table. "Thank you, sir!" Daniel said, but the fellow turned with only a grunt and walked back behind the bar.

  Daniel eyed the muddy brown fluid in his glass, a mixture of draft beer and ginger ale or whatever else the bar kept for a mixer. The tapster looked as though he were disgusted to've served something so debased. Daniel didn't blame him.

  "Well, it turned out that the Count and his wife were coming to Cinnabar to hire a ship so they could tour the Galactic North," Mon said, raising his glass. "Rather than use a Novy Sverdlovsk crew and vessel, they wanted the best. Besides, they knew Cinnabar'd opened the shortest routes to the North. Your Uncle Stacey had."

  He drank, made a sour face, and set the shandy down again. He started to speak but paused to wipe his lips with the back of his left hand.

  "Touring the North?" Daniel said, pursing his lips in concentration as he stared at his glass. "You mean, visiting the Commonwealth of God? I suppose people from Novy Sverdlovsk might find it interesting, though I recall one of Stacey's old shipmates saying he'd seen pig sties he thought were prettier than Radiance, and the rest of the Commonwealth wasn't up to that standard."

  "I don't think they care much about the capital," Mon said, rolling his palms upward. "The Count says he wants to do some hunting, and his wife studies people that never got back into space after the Hiatus. The relict societies, she calls them. You know, wogs with bones through their noses who'll cut out your heart and eat it because the Great God Goo tells them to. It's her life, I guess."

  "Scholars, then," Daniel said. "I don't think the Commonwealth controls a tenth of the worlds that'd been settled in the North before the Hiatus, and 'control' is stretching it to describe the government anyway. The planets pretty much run their own business, and the Commonwealth fleet supports itself by extortion when it isn't straight piracy."

  By a combination of treaty and threat the ships of Cinnabar and her allies were exempt from the abuses, at least in cases where there might be survivors to bring back word of what had happened. But all vessels trading into the Galactic North went armed, even though guns and missiles reduced their cargo capacity.

  "Yeah, well, it's still a damned fool way to waste time and money," Mon said. "But they've got money, the Lord knows they have. And that's the rub, Leary. When they learned the Sissie'd be going on the block, they decided to buy her themselves for their tour. And they want me to captain her, at a lieutenant commander's salary!"

  "Why Mon, that's wonderful news!" Daniel said, rising in his seat to reach over the table and grasp Mon's shoulder. "And they couldn't have a better man and ship for the job! Why, good God, man, you had me thinking there was something wrong!"

  If the Klimovs could afford to crew the corvette, she was an ideal choice for a long voyage into a region which was unexplored where it wasn't actively hostile. The Princess Cecile was a fast, handy vessel. Though light for a warship in a major fleet, she was far more powerful than the pirates and Commonwealth naval units (where there was a difference) she'd meet in the North.

  Mon would have to resign his commission, but under the circumstances the Admiralty would grant him a waiver so that he could rejoin at some future date at the same rank. All he'd lose was seniority on a day-for-day basis—and his half-pay, just under a quarter of what the Klimovs were offering for his services.

  As for the Sissie—well, she wouldn't be a warship any longer, but she wouldn't be a scow running bulk supplies to asteroid miners either. Good news for the ship, good news for her acting captain—and good news for Daniel Leary, two recent weights off his back!

  "There is something wrong!" Mon said miserably. "Sir, what am I going to do for a crew? With the peace treaty signed, all the trading houses will be hiring spacers. I'll have nothing but drunks and gutter-sweepings—for a voyage to the North, and not to the major ports either."
<
br />   While Daniel thought over what Mon had just said, he sipped his shandy. Good grief! it was dreadful. He supposed he'd drunk worse . . . well, realistically, he knew he'd drunk worse; but he certainly hadn't been sober while he was doing it.

  "Well Mon . . . ," he said, resisting the urge to swab his mouth and tongue with something clean or at any rate different. "I should think based on what the Klimovs offered you, they'd pay something better than going wages for seasoned spacers. In fact, I'd expect most of the Sissie's current crew would sign on with you. She was always a happy ship—and lucky in her officers, if I may say so."

  A middle-aged man came in with a younger woman, moderately attractive but respectably dressed—a second wife, perhaps, but not a whore. "Hey Bert," the man said to the barman as they headed for the end booth. "The usual for me and Mamie."

  "Coming up, Lon," the tapster said as he set a pair of glasses on the bar.

  "Luck!" Mon said bitterly into his empty glass. "That's the problem. On the voyage home we had a dozen breakdowns. Mostly the damned High Drive—Pasternak finally figured out that the gauges they'd replaced in Tanais were off, so we were feeding eight percent more antimatter to the motors than he thought. We had half the motors go out, eaten through by the excess. Plus two of the masts carried away in the Matrix. We didn't lose a rigger, but we would've if Woetjans hadn't grabbed him without a safety line and then caught a shroud with her free hand."

  Woetjans, the bosun, and Pasternak, the engineer—Chief of Rig and Chief of Ship respectively—were both officers who did credit to the RCN. Woetjans in particular, a big raw-boned woman, was worth a squad of almost anybody else when she entered a brawl with a length of high-pressure tubing.

  "Well, that's the sort of thing that happens with a major rebuild," Daniel said reasonably. "That's what shakedown cruises are for, after all. Are the Klimovs upset?"