“You of course know Lieutenant Mon,” Sand said quietly, setting down the empty tumbler. “Are your relations with him good?”
“Yes, certainly,” Adele said with a flash of irritation. “He has my confidence, of course. But. . . .”
She rose to her feet and slid the data unit away in its pocket. “Mistress Sand,” she said. “I understand the importance of the matter to, to the Republic. But I don’t wish to give you an answer immediately, because if I must my answer will be no.”
Sand nodded calmly. “I appreciate your concerns, mistress,” she said. “I’ll expect your answer when you’re able to provide it.”
Adele turned to the door as the servant silently opened it. She wondered how long it would take to get a tram out here to Portsmouth. . . .
“Mundy?” the spymaster asked. Adele turned. “Would your decision become easier if the Klimovs hired Lieutenant Leary instead of Mon as their captain?”
Adele smiled, though only someone who knew her well would recognize the humor in the expression. “Yes,” she said, “it would. But the likelihood of Daniel maneuvering a fellow officer out of a position he desperately needs is something less than the chance that Daniel will decide to join a celibate religious order.”
She was still grinning as the servant led her to the front door where Lieutenant Wilsing waited for her.
CHAPTER 5
The tram ran only to the gate of Harbor One. Three drunks sprawled against the side of the kiosk. One of them straightened as Daniel dismounted and called, “Begging your pardon, lieutenant, but could you spare an old spacer the price of a drink? I was gunner’s mate aboard the Burke oncet, till I lost me arm at Xerxes Two.”
Only one strip light in the kiosk’s interior still worked; the speaker was in shadow, his voice so rusty that Daniel was scarcely willing to swear he was male. He was missing his left arm, true enough, though that could’ve been the result of a drunken accident as probably as an incident of Admiral Cawdrey’s great victory over the Alliance a generation ago.
“Yes, of course, my man,” Daniel said, fumbling in his purse for a one-florin coin. He found a five instead—and tossed it to the fellow. “Can you perhaps tell me where the Princess Cecile is berthed? She arrived from—”
“Slip Seventeen, that’s the third on the right as you go in the gate,” said another of the drunks. His voice was muffled because he’d pulled his woven cap down over his face. “Arrived oh-eight-one-seven hours this morning from the Strymon system, scheduled for immediate disposal.”
“Ah?” said Daniel. “Indeed, thank you sir.”
He reached for another coin. The first drunk raised the five-florin piece in his only hand and said, “Bless you, lieutenant, but this is as much as we can drink in a night. Any more’d only be stolen, and our throats slit besides like enough. God speed your course, sir.”
The guard at the gate was chatting with several civilians; he merely threw a casual salute to the lieutenant’s badge on the saucer hat Daniel wore tonight with his 2nd Class uniform. Daniel walked into the enclosure.
Harbor One was historic in the sense that it had launched the ships by which Cinnabar returned to the stars after the thousand-year Hiatus which ended Mankind’s first ventures into the wider universe. For several centuries the harbor had remained the main starport of the expanding Republic, but it’d continued to be used after it lost importance. By now the site was a nautical jumble shop from which every piece of its evocative past had been razed to make room for something newer—or simply something else. Uncle Stacey had remembered when a rank of pre-Hiatus brick barracks stood on the eastern edge of the compound, but woven-wire cages of salvaged High Drive motors were there now.
Ships, generally several to a slip, filled the basin. For the most part they were berthed too close together for one to lift off without damaging others; they’d have to be towed into the center of the pool for that. Many of them weren’t in condition to lift, of course. The vessels in Harbor One sometimes had a past, but there was no future for them, at least in the RCN.