That was the way of the world, and Lt. Daniel Leary had no desire to complain. The Princess Cecile’s fire control system had been converted to RCN standard by means of similar off-book transactions.
A pair of limousines and a van with the pennon of the Harbor Administrator’s office pulled up in front of Dock 37. Brass of some sort, obviously, but civilian brass by the look of the vehicles. Perhaps a Treasury delegation, checking on the way the Navy Office spent its appropriations? Though they wouldn’t run to limousines, surely.
“Let’s get you safely aboard the tram to home, Uncle Stacey,” Daniel said. “As shorthanded as the RCN is with the number of ships going into service, there’s a risk that some bosun’ll snatch you up for a rigger and you’ll be off-planet before you can catch your breath.”
Uncle Stacey couldn’t walk thirty feet unaided any more, though he seemed more resigned to his weakness than Daniel himself was. Some of Daniel’s earliest memories were of being carried in his uncle’s arms along the yards of a ship being refitted, hopping from spar to spar over what seemed like chasms—and probably were six feet or more. It had been a good upbringing for a boy who was to enter the RCN, not that anybody had imagined that at the time.
Daniel pushed the wheelchair down the concrete apron, glad to be off the catwalk which crossed the open dock to the corvette’s main hatch. It was a steel grating and not much wider than the chair, though that didn’t concern either Daniel or his uncle.
What had concerned Daniel was Adele. His signals officer—his friend—had many skills beyond those to be expected from one trained as a librarian, but a sense of balance was noticeably not one of those.
“Leary!” called one of the new arrivals. “By God, that’s Daniel Leary, isn’t it?”
Daniel turned, rotating the wheelchair to the side with one hand. That gave Uncle Stacey a clear view also instead of him trying to look over his shoulder in desperate isolation.
Mixed groups of civilians and senior officers in 1st Class uniforms were getting out of the limousines, but the speaker was the lieutenant in charge of the detachment of ratings from the van. He was of middling height with a florid face and a few extra pounds—like Daniel himself. Daniel found him half-recognizable but not really familiar.
“Tom Ireland, Leary,” the fellow called, striding down the apron with his hand out to clasp Daniel’s. “Two years ahead of you at the Academy, but in South Battalion while you were in North.”
Good God, Ireland claiming his acquaintance! To the junior cadets upperclassmen at the Academy were generally aloof strangers, sometimes slavering monsters. Ireland had been in the former category, a vague presence to Cadet Daniel Leary; and Daniel Leary would have been less than the paving stones of the Quad to Ireland. Suddenly they’d become fellow schoolmates. . . .
“I heard about your little affair on Kostroma,” Ireland said, seizing Daniel’s hand and pumping it. Behind him the passengers from the limousines were drifting toward them with the sort of meaningful aimlessness of goats grazing across a field. “Well handled, I’ll tell the world! Though you had a bit of luck come your way, it seems to me. Not so?”
“Very definitely so,” Daniel said, feeling his lips form a smile hard enough to cut glass. “Permit me to introduce you to a great part of that luck, my signals officer, Mistress Mundy.”
Ireland blinked with mild confusion; his little mustache twitched. If he’d noticed Adele at all it was as a signalman; a specialist, a technician, a category necessary for the proper functioning of the RCN but which operated on a different plane from commissioned officers like himself and Daniel.
“That’s Mundy of Chatsworth, of course,” Daniel added. “Death masks in the front hall from ancestors back to before the Hiatus, isn’t that right, Adele?”
He was surprised at the anger which he hoped he covered with his bantering tone. Ireland had never harmed him at the Academy, and if he wanted to scrape acquaintance now with the Hero of Kostroma, well, that wasn’t a terrible crime. Though flattery had begun to pall on Daniel from its constant repetition.