The car swerved and squealed along the serpentine track serving a section of three docks. The Aristotle dominated the whole area, an outward-curving wall of steel as viewed from the car’s grimy windows. Even if Adele craned her neck, she couldn’t have seen the midpoint where the curve of the battleship’s cylindrical hull reversed.
In some places the shipfitters had removed plates, giving glimpses of tubing, vast machinery, and once an open space the size of the Senate Chamber. It would be daunting to a civilian and was impressive even to Adele, who was beginning to look at the world with the eyes of a naval officer.
A warship was a community. The Aristotle was a town of some size, with a complex street system and rituals shared only with similar towns. Its population would be standoffish with strangers, even strangers who wore the same uniform.
But the same was true of the Princess Cecile despite the corvette’s lesser volume and crew. People went to and from their bunks and their duty stations in a certain way, the same way every time, because there was no physical room for individualism and in a crisis there would be no time for confusion.
Crises were common on a warship. Action against enemy forces was rare, but the universe was a constant opponent before which Alliance fleets paled to insignificance. Naval architects crammed as much heavy, powerful equipment as they could into each hull. The machinery was dangerous even when it worked properly, and when it malfunctioned—which it did as regularly as any other human contrivance—those in the cramped spaces nearby had to react precisely if they and their fellows were to survive.
Adele smiled, remembering the times during the voyage from Kostroma when a spacer had slung her down a passageway in zero gee or even wrapped her in flexible netting to keep her safe—and out of the way. If Adele put her mind to it, she could probably learn the various calls and responses expected of an RCN spacer. She doubted that she’d ever be able to transfer that intellectual knowledge into motor skills, however.
Nor did she need to, so long as she was part of an experienced crew who’d take care of her. One spacer, come to the RCN from a farm on North Cape, had remarked that she was clumsy as a hog on ice as he snatched Adele away from the mechanism of a rotating gun turret.
Adele knew she amused her fellow crewmen, but they didn’t laugh at her. They’d all seen the way she danced through the maze of a communications screen; and the ones who’d seen her shoot told the others about that, too. No, they didn’t laugh at Officer Mundy.
The car bumped and chattered over joints in the track. The vehicle had been steamed with disinfectant in the recent past—the odor clung to the benches’ dimpled surfaces—but it was still scratched and grimy.
Adele had never thought about public transportation in her youth. The Mundys had private cars to be hooked onto rails, for Mistress Adele and the servants who accompanied her to the Library of Celsus or wherever else her studies took her. Less wealthy nobles summoned public cars. Their servants and retainers then emptied ordinary citizens out of the vehicle so that the master could ride surrounded only by those who owed him allegiance.
Displaced passengers could wait for another car to arrive, irritated but not particularly angry. The citizens of Cinnabar expected their leaders to be proud folk. However else would they be able to properly represent the Republic to the folk of lesser worlds?
Adele’s car jolted sideways onto a shunt serving a rank of modern apartment blocks with brick facings and swags molded to look like carved limestone. On Kostroma carving had still been done by hand.
Three housewives got on, carrying rolled shopping baskets and wearing hats with long, soft brims. One of them touched the destination plate as they continued a conversation begun on the platform. The car accelerated slowly up the shunt, paused for a gap in the line of vehicles now using the rail, then groaned as the drive motors exerted maximum effort to get back into traffic.