Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

Good God, I am jealous! Adele realized in shock. Not of Daniel’s body, of course; but the outrage on this red-haired trollop’s face at a hint of intimacy between her and Daniel had lit an unexpected fuse in Adele’s mind as well.

“Actually, Daniel,” Adele said, uncertain whether or not he could hear over the bustle, “it’s not nonsense. The admiral is quite correct about what happened on Kostroma.”

The buffet was for ordinary guests; Admiral Torgis and those about him would have a sit-down dinner. The servants were now handing the expanded entourage into chairs, trying to judge status and fearful of their master’s anger if they mistook his preferences.

Daniel went into the chair at Lady Torgis’s right hand. After a moment’s hesitation, the stick-thin, gray-haired female majordomo put Adele herself on the admiral’s right and Mr. Cherry, of course, beside her. The Strymonian businessman looked as amazed as Mon had at the preference.

There were service stairs or at least a dumbwaiter, because three servants hustled in through the side door bearing place settings. The china was blue-and-gold with the RCN insignia, but instead of metal the flatware was made of plastic or—

“Scaleware from the Cassiterides, Admiral?” Daniel said in unfeigned enthusiasm. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a set so fine.”

Adele had her personal data unit half out of its pocket before she caught herself. Cosmographical directory, initial sort Cassiterides, sub-sort scaleware . . .

Not her job, not necessary, and very much not the right time to call attention to herself. Daniel was bonding with the former admiral. In a thoroughly innocent fashion, of course; simply by being his own engaging self.

“You’re not likely to see a better set ever, Leary,” the admiral said. “I haven’t and I’ve got a few years on you. A few decades, by God! But I wasn’t more than your age when a grateful prince from Cassis gave them to me for saving his son and heir from the Alliance privateer who’d captured his ship. In the knickers of time, if you catch my drift. The privateersman was as queer as old Jaunty Teillor who commanded the Home Squadron when I was a boy.”

Torgis, his wife, and Daniel all bellowed with laughter. Mistress Lully looked puzzled, and the member of the admiral’s staff hovering in the background winced with psychic pain.

A servant set Adele’s place; she picked up the outermost spoon and examined it more closely. The material weighed amazingly little. She’d thought the color was gray, but in fact there was a lambent fire—gold to green to a black that was total absence of hue—at the core of the piece. It was so clear that she could read the whorls of her finger pads through it.

“Cassis III is a sea world, Adele,” Daniel said, leaning toward her over the table as the fingers of his right hand caressed Ms. Lully’s bare shoulders. “The top of the food chain is the saberfish that grows to forty feet long. During the Hiatus only princely houses were permitted to have flatware made from saberfish scales, and even now very few sets of the real thing ever leave the planet.”

“Right, right,” Torgis said, bobbing his head with the animation of a man who believes he’s met his soul mate. “They fob off muck made from the gill-rakers of filter-feeding worms on foreigners! This is the real thing. You can tell by the axial pinctatus, see?”

He held a fork up to the light, apparently trying to display the internal color that Adele had already noticed. Other guests peered at their host’s waving utensil instead of looking at their own.

The expressions of Daniel and Admiral Torgis suddenly shifted. The humor was gone, replaced by an eager intentness. Around them the party continued to swirl.

Daniel’s hand lay on Ms. Lully’s back, but he had become still. A servant offered Torgis an urn of consomme she’d plucked from the serving table; another servant held the ladle ready to fill his bowl. The admiral ignored them.

Adele felt the rumble, though she wouldn’t have noticed it for another minute or more had not the spacers’ attitude shown her there was something to notice. Almost simultaneously the voice of Woetjans, the duty officer tonight, said through a roar of static in Adele’s ear, “Bridge to Signals. The Winckelmann’s on her way down with two destroyers waiting in orbit to follow. Warn the captain that Pettin’s arrived, mistress. Bridge out.”