The hardness left Vaughn’s expression, though now that Daniel had seen it once, he knew that it remained a part of the man himself. Delos Vaughn was more than a young foreigner living high in the fleshpots of Cinnabar—though he was probably that as well. Daniel would be the last man to suggest that a taste for liquor and amiable women precluded a man from taking a serious attitude toward his profession.
And what was the profession of Mr. Delos Vaughn?
Strymon had risen to prominence in the Sack, its region of space, following the thousand-year Hiatus from interstellar travel at the end of mankind’s first flush of colonization. Strymon had regained links with Earth itself more quickly than most worlds; but, as the intricacies of sailing through the Matrix were laboriously rediscovered, the Sack became a backwater.
Cinnabar expanded its sphere of influence and that influence hardened into something not so very different from an empire; Strymon tried to compete. Twice the competition was military; the RCN had crushed Strymon’s forces both times.
Distance from Cinnabar—two months of travel for a merchant ship and half that even for well-found naval vessels—preserved a degree of independence for Strymon, but by treaty her navy was now limited to light craft suitable for suppressing the endemic piracy of the three-star Selma Cluster nearby.
In halving the travel time between Strymon and Cinnabar, Uncle Stacey had done the Vaughns and their subjects a doubtful favor. Still, by forcing Strymon to realize Cinnabar’s hegemony, it no doubt prevented the weaker power from wasting its substance in a third hopeless war. Certainly Delos Vaughn seemed friendly enough to the man who’d brought the threat of an RCN punitive expedition weeks closer to his planet.
“If it’s not presumptuous of me, Commander,” Vaughn continued, “may I ask if this is the Daniel Leary of whom we’ve begun to hear so much?”
“Mr. Vaughn,” Uncle Stacey said, “may I present my nephew, Lieutenant Daniel Leary. He’s a credit to the Bergens, though he doesn’t bear our name.”
Vaughn’s handshake was firm, pausing just short of the pressure that would have meant he’d seriously tried to crush Daniel’s hand. Daniel’s eyes narrowed slightly. Vaughn was testing something more subtle than strength: he was determining whether Daniel was willing to try conclusions with a wealthy, well-connected foreign noble.
Daniel grinned faintly. When he was sixteen, he’d broken with his father in a shouting match that rattled the windows of the Leary townhouse. After that, neither Delos Vaughn nor Hell itself had any terrors for Daniel. He squeezed back till Vaughn released his hand.
“And I believe I heard you identify this officer as Ms. Mundy,” Vaughn went on, offering his hand demurely, fingertips only, to make it clear that he wasn’t going to attempt to bully the slightly built woman. “Allow me to say how pleased I am to see members of two of the noblest houses in the Republic standing together in the uniform of the Republic’s staunchest defense.”
There was no doubt from Vaughn’s phrasing that he knew Speaker Leary had pushed through the proscriptions which crushed the Three Circles Conspiracy and with it the Mundys of Chatsworth. That wasn’t knowledge to be expected of a foreigner.
“Delos, your schedule for this evening . . . ” said one of his aides, a dark-haired man older than Vaughn who’d been fidgeting in the background ever since the conversation started. “If we’re to inspect the . . . ?”
Delos Vaughn displayed the same imperturbable gloss as the throat of a plasma thruster fresh from the shipping crate. People like that seemed to make the folks around them worry double-time.
Now Vaughn shrugged easily. He gave Daniel and his companions a “you-know-how-it-is” grin and said, “Yes, Tredegar, I’m not forgetting that the caterer and the Gardens’ representative will be coming by for final approval tonight.”
Returning his attention to Daniel he went on, “I wonder, Lieutenant Leary, if you’d care to guide us through your command here. I wouldn’t have thought of imposing, but since you’re present . . . ?”
Daniel wouldn’t claim to be a politician, but Corder Leary’s son couldn’t help but have learned that no matter is simple when there are human beings on both sides of the equation. It was an awareness which had proved useful in his dealings with women, also.