Daniel bent to pick the weapon up, clicking the safety on and handed it back. He’d burn a new asshole in whoever’d issued a gun to Hilbride without sufficiently explaining about the safety, but that was for the morning.
Now he said pleasantly, “Keep it switched off till you have a reason to shoot, spacer. And Norton—you might make sure he understands that. I don’t want one of you to accidentally blow me in half when I come back from my little walk.”
“God help me, sir!” Norton said, her face red and sweating. “Sir, it was my fault, but it won’t happen again!”
Daniel nodded, acknowledging the apology without suggesting that the business was closed. “I can’t sleep, so I’m going to walk for a few hours,” he said. “I have my recall plate—”
He tapped his breast pocket, then his pistol holster.
“—and in case I’m attacked by a ravenous bark mite, I have this.”
“Isn’t Mr. Hogg going with you, sir?” Hilbride asked doubtfully. He held the sub-machine gun with the care worthy of a poisonous snake which had already bitten once.
“Mr. Hogg is playing poker with the Count,” Daniel said, smiling engagingly. He was breaking his own rules; he knew it and the guards knew it. But there was nobody present who’d stand up to the captain the way Hogg or Woetjans certainly would. “They’re also drinking a bottle of what the Count calls Calvados and Hogg says is smooth applejack.”
Everybody chuckled. Daniel touched his fingers to his brow in a friendly salute, then strode down the boarding bridge into the night. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but he slid his light-amplifying goggles over his eyes. Starlight brought the whorled wonder of the Tree into sharp relief. Oracle or not, it was a remarkable plant and a unique habitat—not least for the humans burrowing into its fabric like so many adoring beetles.
Grinning, Daniel began to whistle “Cruising Round Pleasaunce” and stopped in a moment’s confusion. Margarida seemed a shy girl, even in the note she’d written. A song like that wasn’t for the ears of a decent child like her.
He grinned still broader. Perhaps in the morning he’d teach it to her. . . .
Daniel kept his eyes on the Tree as he walked along its vast curve. He switched his goggles from light enhancement—which did a better job of showing the ground—to thermal imaging in order to pick up the higher body temperature of animal life.
He’d allowed himself plenty of leeway before local midnight, so occasionally he paused to examine some creature crawling on the bark. None of them were bigger than his little fingernail. According to the database all native species were wingless and multi-legged, but when he cued the goggles to caret movement he caught a few swoops from branch to branch, even after he’d filtered out fluttering leaves. Imported species, he supposed; like the humans on New Delphi.
He walked on more briskly. The wind among the gnarled branches formed a chorus as thin and cold as the stars singing.
Machines could have measured the distance for Daniel, but he chose instead to pace it—a countryman’s skill he’d learned, like so much else, from Hogg while he was growing up on Bantry. 2,912 feet would be just around the curve of the tree from the Princess Cecile. That was fortunate, because Daniel knew that the guards in the main hatch were watching him if only because they had nothing better to do.
Margarida was an adult and anyway Lieutenant Daniel Leary wasn’t her keeper, but though it wasn’t his business to protect her honor, he would as a gentleman keep the bargain she’d offered: nobody would learn about the affair through Daniel’s action or inadvertence. Instead of destroying the note, he’d hand it back so that she could be certain of its destruction.
This should be. . . . Daniel glanced over his shoulder as though looking up at the Tree’s overhanging mass, a thing he’d done several times since he left the ship. The Princess Cecile was out of direct sight, as he’d expected. In a niche at the juncture of two separate trunks of the Tree was an arched doorway. In daylight it would’ve been invisible, but thermal imaging showed the panel to be minusculely warmer than the mass of living wood into which it was set.