He looked up, his face again uncommonly hard. “However, the Sissie’s crew have decided that he’s an unlucky captain,” Daniel continued. “They may well be right. Mon won’t be able to hire a trustworthy crew, I’m afraid, and the risks on a voyage to Radiance will be very great. Unacceptably great, I would say, unless your need were also very great.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Adele nodded, turning the stem of her wineglass between thumb and forefinger. “That’s my judgment as well,” she said dispassionately. “My acquaintance made clear her opinion that the matter is of weight comparable to the risk.”
“With all respect to your acquaintance,” Daniel said, his voice very much that of his father’s son, “I doubt she has a proper grasp of the danger involved under these precise circumstances. Uncle Stacey opened most of the present routes to Radiance. Lieutenant Mon for all his undoubted virtues is neither Stacey Bergen nor a man who’s ever made the run to the North himself.”
Adele sipped her wine, letting the remembered flavors recall for her a simpler, sunnier childhood. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Daniel,” she said, “but I’m sure beyond question that some colleague of mine will be aboard the Princess Cecile on this voyage. I have no idea who it would be, but I’m confident that there’s no one more familiar with the Sissie and her capabilities than I am. And I’m afraid—”
She smiled wryly across the table.
“—that the Mundy family’s involvement in the Three Circles Conspiracy leaves me under more of an obligation to the Republic than an ordinary citizen would be.”
Daniel rose to his feet. “I’ll give the matter some thought,” he said. He sounded suddenly nonchalant. “There may be a way out.”
He smiled broadly at her. “For now,” he said, “I’m going to bed. I need to be at the mustering-out ceremony for the Sissie’s crew in the morning. You’ll be joining me, I hope?”
“Yes, of course,” Adele said as she stood to show him to the door. She, like Daniel himself, had been on half-pay since they’d returned to Cinnabar six weeks earlier; they had no official connection with the Princess Cecile. If he wanted her present, that was a good enough reason to be there, however.
“Good,” he said, skirting a stack of books on the floor. Each was marked with the name of the person who’d loaned it because Mundy of Chatsworth was collecting information on the Galactic North. Adele’s family connections had become useful again.
“There’s usually an answer if folk of good will get together to find one,” Daniel said, grinning as he stepped through the door she’d opened for him.
Despite what Adele could only think of as the puerile silliness of the comment, she found herself grinning back. The Daniel Learys of this world somehow made childhood homilies not only seem true but, based on her own experience, come true.
CHAPTER 6
A dozen spacers from the Princess Cecile and the civilians of both sexes attached to them shared the tramcar with Adele and Daniel as it slowed to the siding at Harbor One. She frowned again at her civilian clothes and said in a quietly tart voice in Daniel’s ear, “I really could have worn my dress uniform too, you know!”
Daniel looked down at his own resplendent Whites. Instead of medal ribbons, he was wearing the awards themselves. That meant a startling amount of glitter—in particular the Order of Strymon in Diamonds, an aiguillette of gold and silver cords fastened at his breast and epaulette with clasps whose stones were the size of a child’s teeth.
“Oh, that’s not called for,” he said in a tone of mild satisfaction. “I’d never look like this at a real RCN affair, but to impress civilians—and civilians from Novy Sverdlovsk besides—I thought it was the thing.”
He met her eyes; his smile had just the least professional crispness. “That’s my job,” he added. “You’ll want to stay inconspicuous, I believe.”
The tram rocked to a halt. Without thinking about it, Daniel stepped through the mass of spacers standing closer to the door; they were squeezing against the sides to let the officers by. Adele followed, realizing wryly that she was the only person on the car who didn’t take it for granted that the captain and signals officer would get out first. Her parents would have understood perfectly—not that they’d ever have ridden in a public conveyance—but Adele herself had lived in poverty for long enough to have lost the instincts of privilege.