Daniel was reasonably certain that he was the only person present who realized the webs hadn’t been woven by a native Cinnabar species—nor Terran spiders, for that matter—but rather by the winged snails of Florissant. The flicker of movement in the shadows beneath the opposite row of benches was a Quatie Hopper, thumb-sized and warm-blooded, patrolling for dropped crumbs on the tiles with fans of hair-fine filaments sprouting from its forelegs. The faint but rhythmic thumm, barely audible over the susurrus of shoes and voices, was an amphibian common to all three of the Halapa Stars . . . and the Navy Office.
Over the centuries the RCN had touched most human-inhabited worlds; the natives of those worlds in many cases had touched the RCN as well. Daniel smiled: You could write a history of Cinnabar expansion based on the natural history of the Navy Office.
A wooden railing, darkened by age and polished by the thighs of centuries of petitioners, separated the waiting area from the administrative section of seven civilians. A junior lieutenant who must be nearly forty spoke urgently to the receiving clerk; the latter continued to type on her keyboard. If she heard the lieutenant’s pleas, she gave no sign of it.
The chief clerk, wearing a dull green coat and an expression of cold superiority, oversaw proceedings from a desk at the back of the section with his fingers tented before him. His desktop was a sheet of black opal with neither paper nor a data console to mar its polished perfection. A small printer perched on the outer edge, as if contemplating suicide in remorse at intruding on so august a personage.
The staff was civilian to underscore the fact it was outside the authority of even the highest-ranking RCN officer. Several of those waiting for appointments were full captains; occasionally there might even be an admiral in the hall. The decisions about who passed and when they passed the bar to the offices within would be made without regard for how those waiting felt about it.
A printer hummed on a desk; the clerk there rose and handed the slip of hard copy to the annunciator at the podium.
“Number seventy-three!” the annunciator bawled.
Daniel’s ivroid chit bore number 219. There wasn’t any precedence, of course. It was just a matter of when the underclerk responsible for temporary staffing would come to Daniel’s request: sixty additional personnel for twelve hours, so that he could lift the Princess Cecile and wring her out before turning her over to the Director of Forces as ready for assignment.
The overaged lieutenant arguing with—arguing at—the receiving clerk glanced down at his chit in delighted surmise. He started forward, then paused. Another lieutenant, a trim female in a uniform as crisp as that on a tailor’s dummy, was already striding through the gate after handing her chit to the usher.
The older man looked again at his own bit of ivroid, then hurled it to clack on the floor. Others in the waiting room ostentatiously looked toward the walls, toward the ceiling. Daniel watched a pair of snails swathe a beetle in a shimmering arabesque of death. He alone looking at something rather than away from an embarrassment.
The officers gathered here weren’t afraid of what they would be told. They were afraid that they wouldn’t be told anything, that they would sit on these hard benches today and tomorrow and for all the future till they finally surrendered to despair, and that the RCN would never call them.
“Number fourteen!” called the annunciator. “Number one-hundred-and-fifty-five!”
Daniel wouldn’t be ignored, not this time, though he might spend the rest of today and longer cooling his heels. Spacers were in short supply: there simply weren’t enough trained personnel to serve both the merchant fleet and the RCN on a war footing. A temporary draft could be borrowed from the ships in port, however, to test a badly needed corvette.
When he’d handed over the Princess Cecile, Daniel would return to this waiting room to request his own assignment. That might mean a very long wait indeed. Enlisted personnel were hard to find, but there were more qualified officers than there were slots for them even in the expanded fleet.