“This is Lieutenant Leary, Admiral,” Klemsch said.
“Admiral, your wife has been waiting at the gallery,” the servant said sharply.
“Then she’ll damned well have to wait longer, won’t she?” the admiral boomed. “Come on in here, lad. I can spare you a minute without all the statues melting off their stands!”
With the exception of the splendid desk, Anston’s inner office was relentlessly utilitarian. The walls were off-white with no pictures or other decoration, and the furniture was as spartan as that of junior officers’ quarters on a warship. Daniel sat because Anston directed him to a chair, but he perched on the edge of the cushion.
“Are you married, Leary?” the admiral asked.
“No sir!” Daniel said. Had there been a complaint about—
“Didn’t think so!” Anston said, sitting in the similar chair across the deck. “But rumor has it you’ve met your share of women. Is that true?”
A number of possible answers to the question raced through Daniel’s head. There had been complaints. Coming home as the Hero of Kostroma and with money in his pocket—well, Daniel had always been able to meet women looking for a good time, and with his present advantages it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
“Yes, sir, that’s true,” Daniel said. He’d never been any good at lying, and he wasn’t going to start now with the Chief of the Navy Board.
Anston nodded again. “That’s a good thing in a young man,” he said in an approving tone. “That way you won’t have to make a fool of yourself when you get to be my age. Now—what do you think about Kodiak thruster nozzles?”
Daniel felt as though he was being slapped on the back of the head with feather pillows. Every time he turned, whap! and another one hit him from behind.
“Sir, I don’t have personal experience with Kodiak’s products,” he said, “but my uncle, that’s Commander Bergen, has stopped using them in his shipyard. He says the internal polish is fine, but you have to magnaflux each one for weak spots or you can expect to have plasma leaking sideways before you’ve got ten hours of service. He says he rejected the whole shipment he received last quarter.”
Anston banged his fist down. “Just what I told Palovec when I took them off the tender list last year!” he said. “I don’t mind a purchasing officer making his five percent on a contract, but I will not have a man who lines his pockets by providing my people with shoddy goods! Klemsch, take a note of that.”
“I have done so, Admiral,” called the little man from the outer office. The servant, Whately, shifted from foot to foot in the doorway though he didn’t choose to break in on Anston again.
“You’re here about the corvette, the Princess Cecile,” Anston said, grimacing at the vessel’s name. No Cinnabar vessel would’ve been christened anything like “Princess Cecile,” but Anston was one of the old-fashioned officers who felt that renaming a ship changed her luck. “What do you think of her? Your assessment as an RCN officer!”
“Sir,” said Daniel, “I’d match her against any vessel of her class, regardless of where she was built.”
Like everything else he’d said since he entered the office, that was the simple truth. He didn’t understand enough about the situation to guess what Anston wanted to hear; and when in doubt, the truth was always the best option.
Anston bellowed a laugh so loud that it trailed off into coughing. He slapped his desk again and said, “As all Cinnabar knows, lad, you matched her against a cruiser that was miles beyond her class. Oh, I know, you had luck to pull it off. I didn’t make it to this office without knowing what luck was, I assure you. But you had balls enough to try, and that’s the first requirement for a good officer.”
“Admiral, please . . . ” Whately said. He’d breezed in initially with the authority of Lady Anston. If that wasn’t sufficient, he was likely to be ground to dust between her and the admiral.
“Yes, yes,” Anston said, rising from his chair again. “I just wanted to meet Leary here. Leary, Klemsch will take care of you while I go pretend I see more in a line of bronze statues than so many bearings gone bad.”