Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

He grinned. Adele got up shakily from her console and said, “Daniel? I’d have thought you’d want to go ashore yourself.”

“And so I do,” he said, grinning even wider. “In fact I was just thinking that I’d always take the living, breathing reality over however pretty an image.”

Daniel got up also. Riggers opened both doors of the forward dorsal airlock, letting in a gulp of air with touches of steam and ozone. Down the length of the ship clanks and squeals announced the undogging of hatches, both ordinary ports and the access panels used for major overhauls. Some of them would be closed again after the corvette had aired out, but for the moment everyone wanted the maximum ventilation.

The makeup of Sexburga’s atmosphere differed by a few percentage points from Cinnabar’s or Earth’s. All that mattered just now was that it hadn’t been lived in for seventeen days by over a hundred and twenty people, plus a wide variety of machinery and electronics. The corvette’s filters scrubbed the carbon dioxide down to safe levels and removed actual toxins, while hydrolyzed reaction mass kept the oxygen constant; the stench was a permanent companion regardless.

After a time you no longer noticed the smell at a conscious level, but it still did damage to morale and efficiency. Like a mild toothache, the omnipresent discomfort of bad air robbed spacers of those top few points of intellect which could mean life or death in a dangerous environment. Flushing the ship’s atmosphere was the first and most longed-for reward of landing after a long voyage.

“On the other hand,” Daniel continued, quirking Adele his grin, “I’m going to be just as glad to be ashore come tomorrow, and I can relax better if I’ve already taken care of the ship’s administrative business.”

Feeling a little embarrassed, he added, “Besides, though it isn’t exactly traditional for the captain to take the first shore-side watch, it’s . . . traditional among the captains that I’d choose to serve under myself. So in a way I don’t really have a choice, you see.”

“I see,” said Adele, with a smile that looked suspiciously like a smirk. “Well, I wasn’t in a hurry to go ashore myself. I have a new series of databases to pry into, after all. I can do that best from my console here as soon as I’ve linked us to the local net.”

The corridor was filling with spacers who’d changed into their shoregoing clothes. For Betts, Taley, and the midshipmen, that meant dress grays. The same was probably true of Pasternak, though Daniel didn’t see him. The chief bunked in the office attached to the power room on A Level rather than in the warrant-officer accommodations here on C.

The lower-ranking crewmen and the officers who’d first shipped as common spacers wore liberty dress. These had started out as sets of utilities, but the owners had decorated them during off-duty periods in space.

Woetjans’s liberty suit was the highest state of the art Daniel had seen. What with appliques, cutwork, embroidery, studs, and the ribbons fluttering from the seams, there wasn’t a thread of the wave-pattern fatigues visible.

“Actually, Adele, you could do me a favor,” Daniel said, feeling a touch of embarrassment. He should have broached this sooner. It was going to sound like he wanted to be shut of her company on the ground, which was far from the truth. “The midshipmen will be going ashore, as you know. Now, as you know, I’m not a moralist—”

“Actually, I believe you are a moralist, Daniel,” Adele said. She grinned, reminding him that she must have been a child once upon a time. “But not in the fashion you mean, no.”

On B Level, the accommodations deck, at least a dozen spacers were singing, “When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure . . .”

Daniel cleared his throat. “As I say . . .” he said. “Dorst and Vesey are young, though, and this is the first landfall of their first cruise. Normally the first lieutenant would shepherd them about, but Lieutenant Mon won’t get farther than the first tavern beyond the docks.”

He shrugged. “Not that I’m complaining,” he added. “Mon does his job a hundred and twenty percent; it wouldn’t be fair to deny him downtime he’s so richly earned. But I was wondering . . . ?”

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