Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

He leaned to touch his helmet to Adele’s. “Look at Port Two,” he said, pointing forward toward the second mast on the corvette’s port side. “If that leak doesn’t slow by tomorrow, we’ll have to do something about it. The main joint is new, and the seal may have been pinched when it was being replaced.”

Adele turned to follow the line of Daniel’s fingers, taking her helmet out of contact with his. Riggers’ suits weren’t normally fitted with radios. An accidental transmission in the Matrix could have incalculable—literally—effects on a ship’s velocity and location in regard to the sidereal universe.

The riggers didn’t adjust the sails: hydraulics controlled from the bridge did that. But the pumps, the joints, the parrels—even the gossamer fabric—were machines and worked the way good machines do: most of the time.

The riggers patched and stretched and replaced. If an antenna was beyond quick repair they signaled the problem through the hull, using a hydromechanical semaphore with a keyboard for unusually complex problems. The captain and navigation computer could then choose another solution to the astrogation task.

It wasn’t a handicap for a trained crew to operate by semaphore and hand signals even while the ship was in normal space. Riggers as experienced as those of the Princess Cecile’s present crew could put a ship through her paces with no direction at all. Stiction, leaks, breakage—all were as obvious to the crewmen as they were to Woetjans or Daniel, and they could do the repairs in their sleep.

The riggers didn’t need to talk. Daniel needed to be on the hull to talk to Adele without risk of being overheard. For this too the lack of a radio was an advantage, so long as both parties remembered they had to keep their helmets touching to hear one another.

Which Adele now did, a moment late, clanking her head back against Daniel’s. He winced, more at the thought than from the shock itself. Riggers’ gear had to be able to take a hammering, but the very violence of the environment meant spacers learned to be as gentle as a nurse handling infants.

“Sorry, Daniel,” she said contritely. Adele had the saving grace of knowing she was clumsy on shipboard. The dispatch vessel Aglaia from which most of the Princess Cecile’s crew were drawn had often carried high-ranking civilians. Some of them insisted on coming out on the hull but because of pride refused to wear a safety line like the one which joined Adele to Daniel. Woetjans told of leaping between masts to snag a treasury official who was on his way toward Canopus if she hadn’t caught him.

“Adele, I’d asked an acquaintance in Foreign Affairs about Delos Vaughn,” Daniel said, holding his friend tight so that she wouldn’t absentmindedly pull away. “I was told that for reasons of state Vaughn would never be allowed to leave Cinnabar. Ah, I don’t want to be privy to any matters that aren’t my business to know, but if there’s anything you can in good conscience tell me . . . ?”

Adele turned to face him, then caught herself and brought her helmet back in contact temple to temple. “My information was much the same as yours, Daniel,” she said. “Though I should emphasize that I wasn’t specifically told anything about Vaughn.”

There was a pause; Daniel knew his friend well enough to visualize her frowning as she chose words with her usual precision. “The thing is,” she said, her voice robbed of all overtones by the method of transmission, “I would have expected that I would be told, especially if Vaughn were to be travelling on the same vessel as me. Even though his affairs have no direct connection with mine or those of the RCN.”

Daniel didn’t know what other duties Adele had to the Republic, but he knew there had to be a connection well above that of the Personnel Bureau in the Navy Office. Her skills made her a marvelous addition to the Princess Cecile’s crew, but there was no way in Hell that a faceless clerk would have approved a signals warrant for someone with Adele’s deficiencies on paper.

Daniel had been prepared to use what influence he had. The “Hero of Kostroma” business didn’t gain him much ground in the RCN directly, but there were admirals’ wives to whom he might seem a romantic figure. All the more so, because young Leary was trying to get his ladyfriend aboard his ship despite a hard-hearted bureaucracy.

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