Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

Daniel froze. “Sir,” he said in a voice he hadn’t meant to use, “the officers and crew under my command are the equal of any in the RCN. Sir.”

Pettin grimaced. “No doubt they are,” he snapped. “Now get the hell back to your own ship. After you’ve had two weeks freezing your feet on Tanais, I’ll see if your deportment has improved to the point that I won’t feel required to mention it on your next fitness report. Dismissed!”

Daniel stood, saluted, and walked out of the cabin as quickly as he could without running. He reclosed the hatch behind him; he’d had no orders on the subject, and it certainly made him feel better to know that there was a steel panel between his back and the commodore.

He threw a smile toward the startled lieutenant at the console. Daniel regretted being sent to Tanais for the crew’s sake, but to be perfectly honest the recreation available there was about what most of them would have chosen on Strymon proper.

Adele might miss the lack of museums to tour, but Daniel was pretty sure that her real work was expected to begin after she reached the Strymon system. She’d be very busy, and the heart of a naval base was at least as suitable a site from which to send out electronic tendrils as the capital would be.

As for Daniel himself, even two weeks on Tanais would be a vacation compared to the run from Cinnabar to Sexburga. He could take it easily.

And it was a great improvement over the career-ending efficiency report that Pettin had probably planned to issue at the time the squadron lifted from Sexburga.

Chapter Twenty-two

Adele echoed the right half of Daniel’s display—a schematic of the Strymon system rather than the astrogation data on the left portion—as a sidebar on her own screen. Frankly, the icons on ghostly orbital tracks didn’t mean a great deal more to her than the abstruse mathematics of Matrix navigation, but she knew Daniel would want to walk her through the display when he had a moment.

Her communications board was as silent as a snake waiting for prey. Within the Matrix, there was nothing to hear but static; so the experts said. Though sometimes the static formed patterns that almost mimicked communication.

Once Adele imagined that she heard her sister calling, “Adele . . .” After that she no longer listened to her equipment until the Princess Cecile reentered normal space.

“Going to put her right in the slip when we exit, sir?” Betts called from the attack console. His display was a mass of overlying curves in many colors.

Adele checked for curiosity’s sake and found that the missileer had set up twelve separate attacks for each of his pair of launchers. The first factor in each equation was blank. The actual courses would be determined when the Princess Cecile exited the Matrix and thus had a location in the sidereal universe.

“No, we’re going to be very discreet and not offend our hosts,” Daniel said. He leaned back in his chair, watching his display but obviously not called on to act at the moment. “They deal with pirates who enter normal space adjacent to their target and use plasma cannon to strip the sails. A ship exiting near Tanais the way a pirate would is likely to be hailed by eight-inch cannon instead of a microwave dish.”

There was general laughter on the bridge. The corvette was noisy with preparations for its return to sidereal space, but the spacers were talking normally instead of using the helmet intercom. Adele found communication systems interesting, though she felt a mild surprise whenever she remembered that she was no longer merely an observer.

“Eight minutes to exit,” rumbled the PA system in Lt. Mon’s voice.

“Adele?” called Daniel. “Are you—yes, of course you are. Do you want a rundown of the Tanais control area?”

“Yes, Daniel,” Adele said, careful to speak loudly so that she’d be heard. She was vaguely curious about the place they’d be spending the next two weeks, but not nearly as interested as Daniel was in informing her. The layout of the Strymonian naval base was a matter of record. What Adele had been sent to the system to learn was of a subtle and immaterial nature, not concrete and tunnels.

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