“I appreciate your offer, Mr. Vaughn,” Daniel said, spooning the last of the soup into his mouth. “I would indeed like to borrow your library, then. We can copy it into the ship’s database and return the chips immediately.”
“I regret that my library is in a specialized Strymon format, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said with a deprecatory lift of his hands. “We’re an insular people, I’m afraid. But it shouldn’t matter, since you’re welcome to borrow my chip reader during the voyage as well.”
Daniel glanced at Adele and raised an eyebrow. She started to say that, given the ship’s communications suite and her own skill, there was no format in the human universe that she wouldn’t venture to read. She caught herself an instant before the first syllable left her tongue.
“And when we reach Strymon, Daniel,” Adele said blandly, “you’ll be able to buy a suitable reader of your own, I’m sure.”
Intellectual pride had always been her besetting sin; it had become a danger to her life and work since she accepted Mistress Sand’s duties. Vaughn obviously had no idea of how completely open to Adele’s perusal any documents he had would be. That ignorance was probably to the benefit of Adele’s mission and to the officers and crew of the Princess Cecile.
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Daniel said, momentarily surprised but concealing the fact beneath commonplaces. “I wouldn’t have had time to view them before, but now the cruise has started to settle down to a routine, so I can—”
“A damned hard routine,” Taley said. She hadn’t eaten much of her soup, but she was matching Mon mug and mug with the punch. “Damned hard.”
“Aye, that’s so,” said Pasternak without raising his eyes from the table. “But the fittings’re solid, just like Signals said—”
He gave Adele a sidelong glance of acknowledgment.
“—and by God, the crew’s solid too, most of them!”
“I got a couple I don’t have on the hull when we’re making in-and-outs,” Woetjans said, staring into her mug with a bleak frown. “They’re going to scream and flail around the compartment if they’re inboard, but that’s better than . . .”
She swallowed down the contents of her mug, then waggled the fingers of her free hand in the air.
Adele had a bleak vision of a rigger drifting in a bubble universe that had nothing human in it but him—forever. She shivered. Death didn’t frighten her, but the thought of that eternal loneliness had a terror for even her gray soul.
They were all looking at Daniel. Adele was suddenly aware of how pale the officers’ faces were, how deep-sunk their eyes. The spacers gathered here in the wardroom were among the most experienced in the RCN, but even they were being ground down by Daniel’s daily regimen of the Matrix punctuated by heart-freezingly brief returns to the normal universe.
“It is a hard routine,” he said softly. “A very hard routine. When we reach Sexburga, I’ll give every person in the crew the opportunity to transfer to another vessel of the squadron. It’s no disgrace to be unable to withstand an environment that isn’t meant for humans.”
“Aye, we know that, sir,” Pasternak said. His voice was steady, but his hands trembled until he laced them around his mug. “We’re spacers of the RCN. We’ll stick it.”
“And there won’t be any of our people who go off to a clapped-out cruiser, sir,” Woetjans said, gripping her glass as if trying to strangle it. “They’ll stick with the Sissie. They’ll stick with the Sissie if it kills them!”
Adele felt herself trembling. Without glancing toward her, Daniel covered her right hand with his left and said in a measured voice, “The purpose of practicing touch-and-goes is so that we and our friends won’t be the ones who’re killed, of course. That’s the only justification I would accept for the cost.”
He lifted his tumbler to call attention to it. “A very dry atmosphere here in your wardroom, Mistress President,” he said. “All the punch appears to have evaporated from my glass!”
The general laughter as Tovera filled the mug dissolved the mood of a moment before; but though Adele smiled at the humor and the skill with which Daniel used humor for a tool, there was a cold weight in her guts. She thought of the insertions of the next day and the nine days after that—if they lived so long.