“Then send him bloody in!” a voice growled from inside. The rating swung the door open and nodded to Daniel.
In the center of the room was a long table topped with colored marble. The frames of the chairs along either side were carved and gilded with green satin upholstery. The high ceiling had gilt decorations, and the walls were papered in a scintillant peacock-tail pattern up to a frieze of mythological scenes.
Oddly enough, the RCN-standard filing cabinets and the four data consoles under the mirror the far side of the room made the original furnishings look out of place, not the other way around. Ratings were working at the consoles.
Across the table from Daniel sat three RCN officers—a commander in the center, a female lieutenant to his right, both in 2nd Class uniforms; and a grizzled man to his left in utilities so worn and stained that his rank wasn’t visible. He was probably a lieutenant also, commissioned from warrant rank for his technical abilities. The lieutenants had hand-held units on the speckled marble before them, and the engineer was sunk in his display.
“Sit down, Leary,” the Commander said, gesturing at the chairs on Daniel’s side of the table. “We just got the data twenty minutes ago. Not the way things ought to be run, of course, but needs must when the Devil drives, eh?”
Daniel seated himself gingerly. Hogg stood against the wall behind him, looking grimly expectant. The chairs were just as uncomfortable as Daniel’d expected. The seat tried to throw him into a back so deep it’d be extremely difficult for him to leap up suddenly.
He wouldn’t really have to, but his body had been trained by tens of millions of years of pre-human existence to categorize all threats in terms of physical responses: fight or flight. The chair wasn’t suited to either, and the situation was threatening.
“Ah, Commander . . . ?” Daniel said. The president of the board wasn’t anybody he recognized, and his name-tape was half-hidden. It was Brit-something, Britton or Britling, but it wouldn’t do to guess wrong. “Should I have defense counsel present?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Leary,” the president said, spreading three sheets of hardcopy before him. When he moved, Daniel saw that his name was actually Britten. “We’re the survey board, sitting on the Princess Cecile. The Senate authorized Admiral Keith to buy vessels to supplement his squadron. As you can imagine, we left in a hell of a hurry, a hell of a hurry.”
“Your corvette’s a godsend,” said the female lieutenant, Feininger unless a trick of the light made Daniel misread her name. “Worked up and with a trained crew.”
“We’ll need to draft some of that crew, of course,” Britten said, shuffling more hardcopy onto the table with a disgusted look on his face. “Sorry, Leary, but that’s how it is. Needs of the service, you know.”
“Ah,” said Daniel, organizing his thoughts to deal with a situation very different from the one he’d expected. “Sir, I suppose we could lose twenty personnel without struggling too badly, but you must recall that we had casualties in action with Alliance vessels.”
And so they had, seven riggers dead when the Bluecher’s missile cleared a section of the hull with a bubble of white-hot gas. The Sissie and Goldenfels together had shipped forty extra personnel, Alliance deserters and Morzangan natives who hadn’t fully understood what they were getting into, though.
“Twenty?” said Lieutenant Feininger. “Don’t be daft. You’ll send thirty trained spacers to the Kapila and thank God we need a corvette for long-range scouting even more than we need the other eighty souls in your crew!”
“Sirs?” Daniel said. They didn’t seem terribly interested in him, but there were things he needed to get out. “I should mention that nothing that happened at Lorenz Base, that is in the Radiance system, involved a Cinnabar ship—no ship that had ever been in RCN service, that is. And the action off Salmson 115 began with an unprovoked attack by an Alliance cruiser, so Princess Cecile had every legal right to reply. Technically.”
Commander Britten looked up in exasperation. “Technicalities be damned, Leary!” he said. “Are you an officer or a bloody lawyer? This is war or the next thing to it! I don’t want to hear you blathering about bloody legal bullshit. D’ye understand me?”