Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

The Princess Cecile’s hull was a rough cylinder two hundred and thirty feet long and fifty-five feet wide, with bluntly rounded ends. Here in the graving dock she was clamped bow and stern by collars like the chucks of a gigantic lathe. They could rotate her into any attitude, so that the antennas that lined her hull in four rows of six each could be extended and canted throughout their range of motion.

Two twin four-inch plasma cannon provided the corvette’s defensive armament in turrets offset toward the starboard bow and sternwards to port. Their bolts of charged particles could deflect incoming missiles by vaporizing portions of the projectile and converting that mass into slewing thrust. Offensively, a practiced crew in the Princess Cecile could launch her twenty missiles in pairs at one minute intervals. The crew which Daniel had brought from Kostroma was trained very well in that and every other aspect of war.

As a boy, Daniel had listened to Uncle Stacey and the naval friends who came to chat with him in the shipyard he ran after retirement. They’d talked of shifts in the Matrix, of sheared antennas, torqued hulls; of days at a time spent in the glare of Casimir radiation, picking a course where none was known before.

It was those tales, told by master astrogators to other masters of the art, that had led Daniel to join the RCN at age sixteen after the flaming row he’d had with his father, Corder. The Learys weren’t a naval family: they were politicians, movers and shakers of the Republic, and never a one of them had risen higher than Corder Leary, Speaker Leary, himself.

Daniel laughed, surprising Adele and his uncle both. Grinning apologetically at their surprise he explained, “I was just thinking that six years on, there’s no decision I’m more glad of than that I joined the RCN, but it could be that my reasons for making that decision had more to do with spiting my father than they did with making a name for myself.”

“I’ve never noticed that the reasons people do things have much connection with how well or badly matters turn out,” Adele said. “For example, I’m confident that my parents entered the Three Circles Conspiracy with the full intention of saving the Republic from men who couldn’t be trusted with power.”

She smiled. Adele gave the impression of being dispassionate about everything except knowledge, and then only knowledge in the form of marks on paper or electronic potentials. That wasn’t true—the passion was there, Daniel knew, as surely as it was in his own explosive outbursts—but Adele’s analysis would always be as cold and clean as the blade of a scalpel.

That was true even at times like this one, when Adele was analyzing the factors that led to the severed heads of every member of her family, including her ten-year-old sister, being displayed from Speaker’s Rock.

“Your Lieutenant Mon’s a good man,” Stacey said. “Who did the yard assign for a supervisor? Archbolt, I suppose? Or did they give you Berol?”

“Yes, Archbolt,” said Daniel, watching members of the Princess Cecile’s crew—the Sissies—clambering over the antennas with tool belts.

Harbor Three had a regular dockyard staff, but the strain of fitting out the fleet in anticipation of full-scale war with the Alliance had overstrained their capacity. There would have been jobs for three times the number of workmen, and there were no trained personnel to hire into the new slots.

One way around the problem was to use a vessel’s own crewmen to perform all but the specialist yard work. Normally crews were paid off when their ship docked in its home port; now, a third of the Princess Cecile’s crew was at work refitting the vessel under the command of a ship’s officer who also was kept on full pay.

Daniel, as the corvette’s captain, would normally have been that officer. He’d passed the posting down to his first lieutenant, Lt. Mon, who would otherwise have been trying to support his family on half pay and no other resources. Mon had been a prisoner during the capture of the Princess Cecile; therefore he had no share of the prize money which the Navy Office would eventually adjudge for the ship.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *