Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “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.

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” Daniel said, momentarily surprised but concealing the fact beneath commonplaces. “I wouldn’t have had time to view them before, but now the cruise has started to settle down to a routine, so I can—”

  “A damned hard routine,” Taley said. She hadn’t eaten much of her soup, but she was matching Mon mug and mug with the punch. “Damned hard.”

  “Aye, that’s so,” said Pasternak without raising his eyes from the table. “But the fittings’re solid, just like Signals said—”

  He gave Adele a sidelong glance of acknowledgment.

  “—and by God, the crew’s solid too, most of them!”

  “I got a couple I don’t have on the hull when we’re making in-and-outs,” Woetjans said, star
ing into her mug with a bleak frown. “They’re going to scream and flail around the compartment if they’re inboard, but that’s better than …”

  She swallowed down the contents of her mug, then waggled the fingers of her free hand in the air.

  Adele had a bleak vision of a rigger drifting in a bubble universe that had nothing human in it but him—forever. She shivered. Death didn’t frighten her, but the thought of that eternal loneliness had a terror for even her gray soul.

  They were all looking at Daniel. Adele was suddenly aware of how pale the officers’ faces were, how deep-sunk their eyes. The spacers gathered here in the wardroom were among the most experienced in the RCN, but even they were being ground down by Daniel’s daily regimen of the Matrix punctuated by heart-freezingly brief returns to the normal universe.

  “It is a hard routine,” he said softly. “A very hard routine. When we reach Sexburga, I’ll give every person in the crew the opportunity to transfer to another vessel of the squadron. It’s no disgrace to be unable to withstand an environment that isn’t meant for humans.”

  “Aye, we know that, sir,” Pasternak said. His voice was steady, but his hands trembled until he laced them around his mug. “We’re spacers of the RCN. We’ll stick it.”

  “And there won’t be any of our people who go off to a clapped-out cruiser, sir,” Woetjans said, gripping her glass as if trying to strangle it. “They’ll stick with the Sissie. They’ll stick with the Sissie if it kills them!”

  Adele felt herself trembling. Without glancing toward her, Daniel covered her right hand with his left and said in a measured voice, “The purpose of practicing touch-and-goes is so that we and our friends won’t be the ones who’re killed, of course. That’s the only justification I would accept for the cost.”

  He lifted his tumbler to call attention to it. “A very dry atmosphere here in your wardroom, Mistress President,” he said. “All the punch appears to have evaporated from my glass!”

  The general laughter as Tovera filled the mug dissolved the mood of a moment before; but though Adele smiled at the humor and the skill with which Daniel used humor for a tool, there was a cold weight in her guts. She thought of the insertions of the next day and the nine days after that—if they lived so long.

  And unlike Daniel, she couldn’t convince herself that avoiding death was really that valuable a benefit.

  *

  Daniel watched a trio of strangers enter the bridge through the exterior bulkhead, talking in silent animation. They looked perfectly normal—an older man, a boy, and a woman Daniel wouldn’t have minded getting to know better—except that they had downy feathers instead of hair.

  “Five minutes to return to normal space,” said Lt. Mon from the BDC. His voice sounded shaky, but that could be a flaw in the communications system … or in Daniel’s ears. The voyage had been hard, very hard.

  “Acknowledged,” Daniel replied, then switched to intercom and said, “Captain to ship. We’re five minutes from entry to the Sexburga system, spacers. If God favors us and I’ve done my calculations correctly, there’ll be liberty for all but an anchor watch inside of twelve hours. Captain out.”

  He could hear faint cheering from other compartments. After seventeen days of discomfort punctuated by agony, nobody had much energy even for that.

  Adele stared transfixed at the three phantoms, looking horrified. The remaining bridge personnel kept their attention on their displays.

  “Ah, you see them too, Mundy?” Daniel said. The older male was making wide, oratorical sweeps of his right arm while his left remained cocked over his chest.

  It was all automatic from here on in unless there were an emergency. Betts was setting up missile launches. That had drawn Sun to simulate gunfire targets on his display. Daniel was all for training, but plotting for immediate attack on entry into a major Cinnabar naval base couldn’t be called realistic preparation. So far as Daniel was concerned, calming a friend who looked uncomfortable was at least as good a use for his time.

  Adele let her breath out slowly and looked at him. “You mean they’re real?” she said. “Daniel, I thought I was going mad!”

  “I don’t think they’re real—well, not part of the sidereal universe, at any rate,” he said. “But to be sure, I see them too.”

  “I knew three fish couldn’t really swim through the wall,” Adele said. “I’d forgotten what you’d said about phantoms.”

  She looked at the men on the battle consoles and said, “Sun, Betts? What do you see over there?”

  The gunner’s mate turned and smiled shyly at her. “I don’t see anything right now, mistress,” he said. “But I know what you mean, sure. They’ve been walking the corridors since the third day, I know.”

  Betts said nothing, utterly engrossed in plotting courses for his missiles. The muscles in Daniel’s jaw bunched, then relaxed. The missileer was reacting to the stress of the voyage in his own way. He was no more to be censured than Daniel and Adele were for seeing feather-haired strangers on the bridge.

  Adele shook her head in wonder. “But why do we see fish standing upright, Daniel?” she asked.

  “Ah!” said Daniel. Apparently the range of options was wider than merely seeing a phantom or not.

  “Uncle Stacey and his friends had no idea what caused the visions,” he said. “Stacey claimed to think they were random synapses firing in the watcher’s brain, but I don’t think he really believed that. You know as much as I do. Ah, I see people, more or less; not fish.”

  “Three minutes,” Mon said, verbalizing the countdown that Daniel’s screen showed as a sidebar.

  His main display was a navigational tank in three dimensions, the portion of the sidereal universe analogous to the Princess Cecile’s location in a wholly separate bubble of the cosmos. A bead of pure cyan drifted across the star map in tiny caracoles like a leaf blowing in the wind. If Daniel were to cut the charge of the sails now, the bead would be the corvette’s location; if the astrogational computer was correct.

  Abruptly, almost angrily—the voyage had been just as hard on the captain as it had on the rest of the complement—Daniel switched his display to the Princess Cecile’s sail plan. Instead of the icons that provided information in the most concentrated form, he rolled the controller up to give him a simulated real-time view of the corvette hanging in space, lighted by a sun like Cinnabar’s at a distance of 107 million miles.

  Color codings on the icons would have told Daniel that the port sails were all set at 37 degrees; that ventral and starboard courses were at 63 degrees; and that the mainsail on Dorsal Three was spread straight fore and aft to serve as a rudder.

  Daniel needed a reminder of the reality of the ship about him, the ship he commanded. This image provided it. He didn’t care about the precise details, though his trained eye could have called the settings to within a hair’s breadth if he’d been out on the hull.

  Which is where he wanted to be. Duty kept him aboard.

  “Every day we’ve been out of normal space …” he said, aloud but not really concerned whether anyone else on the bridge heard him. “It’s seemed that the hull was getting thinner. Subliming like a block of dry ice. I wasn’t sure there’d be anything left in another day.”

  “God help us!” Betts said, bent over his console; plotting solutions that were as imaginary as the holographic sails on Daniel’s display. His missiles were, like Daniel’s sails, the anchor that held his mind to—if not sanity, then to the memory of sanity.

  “One minute!” said Mon. Again Daniel failed to acknowledge. All that mattered was that the spacers aboard the Princess Cecile each find a way to create reality. Create: because such long immersion in the Matrix proved to every soul aboard that reality wasn’t an absolute, that it was no more than the whim of an individual mind for as long as the mind could stay sane.

  The time column on the sidebar was shrinking to zero. If Daniel switched back to the navigational display, he would find the cyan bead approaching the pinpo
int that was Sexburga. Toward ze—

  “Now!” a voice screamed; maybe Mon’s, maybe Daniel’s own as his left hand drained the sails’ charge and the Princess Cecile shuddered back into normal space, this time to stay.

  Nothing changed within the hull, but the light was richer, the fittings had palpable density instead of being gassy umbras, and the air filled Daniel’s lungs with the smells of weeks of being lived in. The stench was indescribably wonderful, like the rough texture of a log in the grasp of a man who had been drowning.

  The cheers were rough, bestial. The relief the spacers felt came from far below the conscious levels of their minds.

  His fingers moving by reflex, Daniel switched his display to a Plot Position Indicator. The icon that stood for the corvette was less than 150,000 miles out from the planet Sexburga, almost too close for a proper approach.

  “Power room, light the High Drive!” Daniel said to his console. His fingers moved on the semaphore controls, directing the riggers to unpin the antennas.

  Then through the intercom Daniel added, “Captain to ship. We’ve arrived, spacers. And by God, every one of you is going to have a drink on your captain when we’re on the ground!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Adele—Signals Officer Mundy—was busy for the first time since the Princess Cecile entered the Matrix outbound from Cinnabar. Since the events on Kostroma, really. She’d studied the corvette’s electronics on the voyage to Harbor Three, and during the past seventeen hellish days she’d been learning all she could about Strymon and the adjacent planetary systems.

  That had been work at her own speed—which didn’t mean it was done in a leisurely fashion by most people’s standards, but there was no outside pressure involved. Now—

  “Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one—” GR1751 was the Princess Cecile’s pennant number, which her transponder sent automatically when interrogated “—you are cleared to land at Flood Harbor in numbers nine-five, I repeat nine-five, minutes. There will be no liftoffs or landings from Flood Harbor for half an hour either way of your slot, but be aware that there may be traffic from the Cove or Drylands. Hold to your filed descent. Condor out.”