“Listen up!” the bosun said, sweeping her fierce glare over the ten spacers of the escort detail. “We’re here for show, period. Keep your guns switched off till you’re told, and remember—nobody shoots till Officer Mundy shoots! Do you all hear?”
“And what’s going to be left to shoot at when she’s done?” Bemish said to general laughter.
Daniel grinned also, but he saw that Adele’s expression had tightened. The change was minuscule, something that only a friend would have noticed.
“Let’s go!” he said, louder than he’d intended. The main hatch cycled open.
Hogg got up from where he’d been waiting beside the berm. He was wearing a broadly conical straw hat, obviously local though not a garment Daniel had noticed the day before.
“Tovera said you were coming out to find the Astrogator,” Hogg said as the heavily armed spacers approached him. “She sent me to guide you in.”
He looked at Adele with an unfathomable expression. “You got a good one there, mistress,” he said. “Though I guess I could teach her a few things in open country.”
In Adele’s ear Daniel said, “I gather from Hogg’s comment that Tovera has listening devices aboard the ship?”
Adele shrugged. “That’s what I assume also,” she said. “Tovera likes to gather data even more than I like to arrange it. Both activities are beneficial so long as we serve an executive who isn’t incapacitated by the mass of information.”
Daniel’s grin was delayed by a moment, but when it came it melted all the concern out of his mind. The RCN’s way was to use the tools at hand to achieve victory, and he couldn’t complain about the past usefulness of Adele’s odd servant. “Yes, I’d agree with that,” he said.
In a loud voice he said, “Now, let’s go find Astrogator Kelburney so we can get on to the real business of the RCN.”
He looked around the escort. “Which is not,” he continued, “despite what you might have assumed from watching your captain, a matter of screwing as many different locals as possible on liberty.”
The bellowing laughter from every throat but Adele’s broke the tension. Daniel grinned at his crew. There were good officers who were too proud to make a joke at their own expense, but that wasn’t Daniel’s style. He kept his pride for other things than his sense of self-importance.
Perhaps because of the laughter, Woetjans permitted Daniel to walk at the head of the party alongside Hogg instead of being surrounded by hefty crewmen like glassware wrapped for shipping. When he saw that the scene on the occupied side of the berm was one of repletion, not riot, Daniel beckoned Adele up beside him also.
“See the fun we missed by staying cooped up in the Sissie all day?” he murmured in her ear.
“Yes,” Adele agreed with the dry amusement he’d learned to expect from her. “I dare say I regret the loss even more than you do.”
Dalbriggans in various stages of undress sprawled in the doorways of buildings and on crushed-rock pavements which connected them more like the passages of a maze than a street grid. Some held bottles, some twined with or stacked upon one another, and not a few lay crumpled like the dead of a battle.
Other citizens were upright, more of them sitting than standing; the few who walked did so with the awkward deliberation of the aged. Some distance into the forest several voices sang in good harmony about the “Bouncing Boys of Lyme.” They sounded cheerful, though their tempo was slower than normal for that standard of spaceports across the human universe.
Servants—well, slaves, to give a thing its right name—puttered about ministering to fallen citizens. The slaves were easily identified by not carrying weapons and the fact they were moving at all. Even so, most of them looked the worse for wear following the debauch.
“Hogg?” Daniel said. “Is it safe for the, ah, citizens to party like this when they have so many slaves?”
“They ain’t in quite such bad shape as they look, master,” Hogg said as he stepped over a Dalbriggan with a beatific smile, no trousers, and her fist around a broad-bladed knife. “I mean, they are, but I’ve knowed this sort. They can get up if they have to.”