Hogg and Tovera continued to dispense punch, which kept them busier in this company than Balsley and Timmins were serving the food. Adele tasted the soup and found it thick and rather good, albeit bland.
Apart from being overcooked and underseasoned to her taste, formed as it was in sophisticated circles, Adele had been surprised at how good RCN rations were. At the start of a cruise, a vessel’s first lieutenant drew and inspected stores from a naval warehouse. The chief of ship and chief of rig—engineer and bosun—then had to give their approval to the lieutenant’s assessment.
If the officers protested the quality of the offering, the agent could either provide replacements (which had to be approved in turn) or convene a Navy Office tribunal to decide the matter. Given that two of the tribunal members were by regulation former or serving space officers, very rarely did the warehouse personnel choose to argue the point.
The warehousemen were allowed five percent “shrinkage” for their profit. Any more than that, however, required the collusion of a vessel’s senior officers. Given the number of ways a fatal accident could occur in space, even the most venal officers would think twice about starving the spacers who might be standing behind them at a steam line, or a hundred and fifty feet above them with a wrench.
“No, I haven’t had the opportunity to study your biota, I’m afraid,” Daniel said. From him the statement was no conventional excuse: Adele had first-hand experience of her friend’s interest in the whims of nature on various planets. “Our sailing orders came so abruptly that my concerns were limited to the ship herself. I didn’t have time to prepare for relaxation after we arrived on Strymon.”
He paused to wash a mouthful of soup down with a hefty swig of punch, then turned to Adele and said, “We’ll have loaded natural history files with the regional briefing data, won’t we, Adele?”
Adele paused to remove with as much delicacy as possible something that hadn’t responded well to chewing. A glance into her napkin suggested that it was a piece of plastic container that had been opened with a sharp knife.
“Yes,” she said. It couldn’t very well have been poisonous, after all. “Though I didn’t request a natural history database for Strymon proper, and I’m afraid that the data in the regional overview may be skimpy. Because Terra is in the same files, that is.”
Adele had loaded specialist political and economic data, but . . . She felt her face tighten with cold anger. It was directed at herself, of course, as her anger generally was; but Vaughn, who didn’t know her the way Daniel did, flinched back in surprise.
“I should have gotten specialist files, Daniel,” she said. “I know your interests. I apologize.”
“Well, that needn’t be a difficulty,” Vaughn said. “I have quite an extensive library aboard. If you’d care to use it, Lieutenant, I’d be delighted to share. I’m something of a booster for my homeland, you see.”
What Adele saw was that Vaughn had managed to bring most or all of his truckload of luggage aboard the Princess Cecile. A chip library needn’t take up much volume, even with a reader, but Vaughn’s wardrobe and personal rations hadn’t been packed into one and a half cubic feet.
Presumably he’d bribed crewmen to slip his baggage aboard in the rain and conceal it. That couldn’t be said to degrade naval discipline—Adele had learned quickly that all spacers were smugglers, as surely as all good librarians were obsessives—nor was the corvette’s fighting efficiency degraded if some of her crew members shared their narrow bunks with cases of off-planet finery.
In the initial interview with Vaughn, Daniel had made the point that he’d decide the Princess Cecile’s activities without regard for his passenger’s wealth or influence. Vaughn had bowed to the captain’s authority and achieved his end in a time-honored fashion that put money in the crew’s pocket for leave on Sexburga.
Politics in action, as Adele’s father might have said. Backdoor compromises, indirection; face-saving gestures. The social lubricants for which Adele Mundy had no taste or aptitude. Data in files were so much easier to deal with.