Hogg seated himself beside the cash register where he would unobtrusively take care of the charges; a woman in uniform, an engineer by her collar flashes, was drinking a boilermaker at the end of the bar. Other than them and the tapster who walked over to the booth, Daniel and Mon had the tavern to themselves.
Daniel glanced at the tapster and said, “So, Mon? I believe yours is whiskey and water?”
“No, no, Leary,” Mon said, shaking his head violently. “Thanks, I mean, but I’ve sworn off for, for the time. I’ll have—”
He looked at the solid, balding bartender and grimaced. “A shandy, I suppose,” he said. “Yes, a shandy.”
“And for me as well, sir,” Daniel said brightly, wondering if Mon had gone out of his mind. Aloud he continued, “Well, Mon. What d’ye need to see me about?”
Mon set his hands firmly on the table with his palms down and the fingers spread, stared at them as he organized his thoughts, and then lifted his weary eyes to Daniel. “Look sir, it’s like this,” he said. “While the Sissie was rebuilding on Tanais, we got a message through the High Commissioner to the Strymon system that we were to bring her home to Harbor One for disposal. I guess you’d heard that?”
“Yes,” Daniel said, “I had.”
He didn’t add that he’d heard it from Adele less than two hours ago. Strictly speaking nobody’d been required to tell him, since he’d turned over command of the Princess Cecile to his first lieutenant while she was in dock.
The fact that he hadn’t heard a whisper about the sale out of service of the corvette he’d captured and commanded in actions that thrilled all Cinnabar, let alone the RCN, had to have been conscious concealment rather than mere oversight. Anston, or more likely the captain heading the Board of Materiel, must have thought that the famous Lieutenant Leary could raise enough of a public outcry to reverse the Board’s reasoned decision.
And so he could’ve done; but he wouldn’t have. The needs of the service came first with Daniel Leary, as they should do with every officer of the RCN.
“Well, you can imagine I wasn’t happy about that,” Mon said, stating the facts baldly as though the situation had no emotional weight for Daniel. “But then a couple nobles from Novy Sverdlovsk arrived with a letter of introduction from the High Commissioner. Count Klimov and wife Valentina, their names were, and they wanted passage to Cinnabar.”
He shrugged. “No problem there, of course,” he went on. “We weren’t on a fighting cruise, and you’d drafted forty crewmen to the Strymon dispatch vessel you sailed home on. It was just a matter of the passengers providing a share of rations to the officer’s mess—and I don’t mind telling you, captain, that I’ve never had better rations anywhere in my life, on shipboard or land. They’ve got more money than God, the Klimovs do.”
The tapster returned with the shandies, thumping them down on the table. “Thank you, sir!” Daniel said, but the fellow turned with only a grunt and walked back behind the bar.
Daniel eyed the muddy brown fluid in his glass, a mixture of draft beer and ginger ale or whatever else the bar kept for a mixer. The tapster looked as though he were disgusted to’ve served something so debased. Daniel didn’t blame him.
“Well, it turned out that the Count and his wife were coming to Cinnabar to hire a ship so they could tour the Galactic North,” Mon said, raising his glass. “Rather than use a Novy Sverdlovsk crew and vessel, they wanted the best. Besides, they knew Cinnabar’d opened the shortest routes to the North. Your Uncle Stacey had.”
He drank, made a sour face, and set the shandy down again. He started to speak but paused to wipe his lips with the back of his left hand.
“Touring the North?” Daniel said, pursing his lips in concentration as he stared at his glass. “You mean, visiting the Commonwealth of God? I suppose people from Novy Sverdlovsk might find it interesting, though I recall one of Stacey’s old shipmates saying he’d seen pig sties he thought were prettier than Radiance, and the rest of the Commonwealth wasn’t up to that standard.”