Woetjans, the bosun, and Pasternak, the engineer—Chief of Rig and Chief of Ship respectively—were both officers who did credit to the RCN. Woetjans in particular, a big raw-boned woman, was worth a squad of almost anybody else when she entered a brawl with a length of high-pressure tubing.
“Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens with a major rebuild,” Daniel said reasonably. “That’s what shakedown cruises are for, after all. Are the Klimovs upset?”
“Them?” Mon said scornfully. “Good God, Leary, they’re used to Sverdlovsk ships. They’d be happy enough if the hull didn’t split open and all the antennas fall off!”
He shook his head, miserable again. “No, no, it’s the crew,” he said. “They think I’m a hard-luck officer. I heard Barnes say that opening his suit in a vacuum’d be quicker than going to the back of beyond with the Sissie now, and the other riggers on his watch agreed. And word’ll get around the docks, of course. Hell and damnation, it already has!”
“Ah,” said Daniel, understanding completely but unable to think of a useful remark to make. “Ah.”
It was quite unfair, of course, but spacers were a superstitious lot. There were ships—well-found according to any assayer—which had reputations as killers; and there were captains who, whatever their technical qualifications, were known as Jonahs. No spacer shipped with either, not if there was a choice; and now, with the merchant fleets hiring, all spacers who could stand more or less upright had a choice.
“God damn all spacers to Hell!” Mon said. “God damn life to Hell!”
He turned on his bench and said, “I’ll take a whiskey and water. A double, dammit, and keep the bottle out!”
He looked at Daniel and said in a despairing voice, “I know, I don’t need my wife to tell me that I put down maybe more than’s good for me. But liquor never affected me on duty, you know that sir?”
“I never had a complaint about you, Mon,” Daniel said still-faced. He could use a drink himself, but it didn’t seem that ordering one was going to make the situation better.
“I thought with everything going wrong, you know . . . ,” Mon said, squeezing his face with his spread hands. “That, you know, if I went on the wagon, that the trouble would let up. That God’d take his thumb off me, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know,” said Daniel. Spacers are superstitious by nature; they’re too close to random death on every working day to be otherwise. That was no less true of acting captains than it was of the riggers under their command.
“And the next watch the Port One antenna carried away and took the spars and sails from Two and Three besides,” Mon concluded bitterly.
The tapster came with his drink, setting it down on the table and watching Mon sidelong as he walked back behind the bar. Hogg was watching also. Daniel wasn’t concerned, but Mon was obviously closer to the edge than Daniel would’ve wanted on the bridge during action.
“Daniel,” Mon said, holding the drink in both hands but not raising it. “Sir. The men will listen to you, you know they will. Will you come to the mustering-out parade tomorrow and talk to them? Sir, I’ve got five brats now, my wife delivered while I was on Tanais. I can’t make it on half-pay, I can’t, and if I have to take a crew of fag-ends to the Galactic North, well—”
He smiled with a wry sort of humor. “Well, then, I’d say Barnes’d be right. I’d do better to open my suit in a vacuum.”
“I . . . will consider our options tonight, Mon,” Daniel said, rising deliberately so that it wouldn’t look as though he were fleeing his old shipmate; which was what he was doing, near enough. “And I’ll be at the mustering-out parade, I promise you. That’s ten hundred hours?”
“Aye, ten hundred,” Mon said, rising also with a radiant smile and gripping Daniel’s hand. “Thank God. Thank you, sir. If I can just keep a stiffening of trained men we’ll be all right, I swear we will!”
Daniel nodded without amplifying his earlier statement. He needed to be at the pay parade to thank the crew which had followed him to Hell, not once but several times; and who’d brought the Princess Cecile and her commander back as well. But as for what he was going to say to them—