The Princess Cecile stood out like a jewel on a mudbank. Other ships made do with a single area light at bow or stern, but the corvette’s auxiliary power unit was still live. Not only were her running lights on, open ports flooded the slip with illumination from her cabins. The harbor water winked, and the indirect glow cast a memory of romance over the scarred concrete quay.
Music sounded from a bow compartment—”Ize the bye that builds the boat and Ize the bye that sails her. . . .” It was a song from the East Capes, the region where the Leary estates lay. A trio of male voices were singing to the accompaniment of a flute.
Daniel hadn’t expected more than a minimal anchor watch—and those spacers very likely drunk, as their fellows were drunk in the taverns nearest the harbor, spending the advances crimps had provided at steep discounts against the pay parade in the morning. Instead at least a dozen crewmen in their glittering, beribboned shore-going uniforms sat or stood in the entrance hold, talking quietly.
A catwalk led from the quay to the main hatch. Daniel walked toward it. Woetjans—the big bosun was unmistakable; her leave cap sported a ribbon for every port she’d called in during thirty years in the RCN—saw him approaching and straightened. She keyed the rubidium-plated control stub hanging from her neck on a chain, her badge of office, and the corvette’s public address system piped Captain coming aboard. The singing forward stopped and everyone in the entrance hatch came to attention.
Daniel felt a shiver of delight at the bosun’s call. He didn’t expect he’d ever lose that feeling, even if they were carrying him on a litter to die aboard the ship he commanded.
“Stand easy!” he said as his boots thumped the narrow, quivering catwalk. He walked as straight as a rigger, never looking down. The RCN trained its midshipmen to do every job the common crewmen did. Officers who couldn’t walk the yards while the sails billowed to the thrust of Casimir radiation, or replace a scale-clogged thruster feed while a vessel was under weigh, didn’t deserve to command spacers who could.
He smiled at the group as he stepped onto the Princess Cecile’s nickel-steel C Deck. The armored companionway up to B and A Decks was to the right, forward; the down tube to the Power Room and bulk storage was on the left. Even floating in harbor the ship felt shiveringly alive. There was nothing quite like being aboard a starship; and for a spacer like Daniel Leary, there was nothing better.
“I’m not the captain, you know, men,” Daniel said. “I thought I’d come aboard the old girl once more as a private citizen.”
“Right,” said Woetjans. “You’re not captain and I’m not a rigger. In your ear!”
Sun, the gunner’s mate—acting gunner on a corvette, which didn’t rate a senior warrant in that slot—held out a squat, long-necked bottle; in place of a label, a medallion was cast into the dark ruby glass. “Here you go, sir,” he said. “Ah . . . ? It’s all right. Barnes and Dasi have the duty and they’re sober.”
“It’d be all right regardless, Sun,” Daniel said. “Tonight.”
They were all sober or the next thing to it, though some had probably put down more liquor than a landsman who intended to walk away would’ve done. Vesey, one of the pair of midshipmen from the Strymon cruise, was among them; initially Daniel’d missed her slight form between Barnes and Dasi, who’d returned to Cinnabar with Daniel aboard a requisitioned Stryomonian cutter. Those riggers—and several other crewmen in the immediate group—had come to the Princess Cecile tonight for the same reason Daniel had: to say goodbye.
Daniel swigged from the bottle. It was excellent brandy, though he couldn’t identify it closer than that. He offered it to Sun, but the gunner’s mate said, “I’ve had mine, sir,” and gestured toward the four machinists who’d appeared down the forward corridor. One had stuck a short flute into a pocket of her coveralls. Daniel gave her the brandy instead.
“Midshipman Dorst will be back shortly, sir,” Vesey said. She was trim and blond, scarcely half the size of her male shipmate; and lover, though Daniel didn’t carry his duty of standing in loco parentis to his midshipmen to the extent of involving himself in that sort of private business. “He went to see his mother as soon as we docked, is all.”