I’d like to note for those who’re interested that the orders in Chapter Nine are a close paraphrase of those which sent the frigate USS Congress to Hawaii in 1845. Here as elsewhere, I prefer to borrow from reality rather than invent it.
David Drake
When the skies are black above them,
and the decks ablaze beneath,
And the top-men clear the raffle with
their clasp-knives in their teeth.
—Rudyard Kipling
Chapter One
Lieutenant Daniel Leary rolled his uncle’s wheelchair to the end of the catwalk and paused, gazing back at the corvette Princess Cecile nestled in the center of the graving dock. He turned the wheelchair. “Now that you’ve inspected her, Uncle Stacey,” he said, “wouldn’t you agree there’s no finer ship in the RCN?”
The battleship Aristotle in the next bay lowered over them: seventy thousand tons empty, with a crew of two thousand and missile magazines sufficient for a day-long engagement. The eight-inch plasma cannon of the Aristotle’s defensive battery could not only divert incoming projectiles but also devour ships the corvette’s size in rainbow cascades of stripped nuclei.
Daniel was as oblivious of the battleship as he was of the wisps of cirrus cloud in the high heavens. For him, the twelve-hundred ton Princess Cecile was the only ship in Harbor Three. He’d commanded her, after all. Commanded her and fought her and—by the grace of God and the best crew ever to come a captain’s way—destroyed an Alliance cruiser of many times the corvette’s strength.
“Didn’t we, Adele?” Daniel said, forgetting how little of his previous thoughts had made it to his lips. He grinned over his shoulder at the severe-looking woman of thirty-one who’d joined him and Uncle Stacey on their excursion.
Adele Mundy smiled in response—it was hard not to smile when Daniel was full of happy enthusiasm, as he was at most times—but her expression gave no sign that she knew what he was talking about. Like Daniel she wore a 2nd Class RCN dress uniform, gray with black piping. Her collars bore the crossed lightning bolts of a signals officer, a senior warrant rank with pay and allowances equal to those of a bosun.
Adele’s handheld data unit slipped into a fitted pocket on her right thigh. That modification to her uniform was absolutely nonstandard and the sort of thing that would send an inspecting officer ballistic if it were noticed.
Daniel didn’t even bother to wince any more. Adele without her data unit would be like Adele without hands, personally miserable and of no value to the RCN. Whereas with the unit—and with the little pistol, also nonstandard, nestled in a side pocket—neither Daniel nor Cinnabar ever had a better bulwark.
Adele Mundy was an RCN officer by grace of the Republic’s warrant. By training and inclination she was an archival librarian, a task she’d performed with skill amounting to genius before circumstances required her to accept other duties. By birth, she was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful houses in the Republic before the Three Circles Conspiracy had forfeited the money and cost the head of every adult Mundy but one.
Adele had been at school off Cinnabar when the cycle of treason and proscriptions played itself out in blood. Distance had preserved her life; not her fortune, but she wasn’t the sort to whom money meant much one way or the other.
For that matter, Daniel sometimes suspected that life didn’t mean much to Adele either; but duty did, and craftsmanship. Daniel didn’t try to remake his friends.
“She’s a trim craft,” Uncle Stacey said, assessing the corvette with a mind no less sharp for being confined to a wheelchair-bound body. Commander Stacey Bergen, the finest astrogator of his day, had opened or resurveyed half the routes in the Sailing Directions for Ships of the Republic. “I’ve never seen a Kostroman-built ship that wasn’t as pretty as anything of her class, though some of them use lighter scantlings than I’d have chosen for anything coming out of my yard.”
The old man cocked his head over his shoulder to catch his nephew’s eye with the implied question.
“The frames and hull plating are at RCN specifications, Uncle Stacey,” Daniel said quickly. “The only problem we’ve had in the conversion was that all the astrogational equipment is calibrated in Kostroman AUs instead of Sol standard like us and the Alliance. Granted of course that the Sissie’s a fighting corvette, not a dedicated survey ship built to accept stresses that’d turn a battleship inside out.”