She and the Count had changed clothes since he saw them at the pay parade this morning, but the style was the same. Daniel wondered if the Countess intended to wear bulky outfits throughout the voyage. The Princess Cecile’s corridors and spaces—and those of any other warship, even an 80,000-ton battleship—were tight to allow the greatest possible quantity of equipment and stores to be packed aboard.
“With all respect to your friends, Countess . . . ,” Daniel said, seating himself at the command console to bring the navigational display live in the center of the bridge. “They’re civilians and don’t appreciate how much luck and the professionalism expected of every RCN officer went into the stories they heard. Besides which there was—”
He grinned through the pearly blur that was coalescing into a star chart.
“—quite a lot of media fabulation, to be frank.”
The Collesios weren’t a family familiar to Daniel. In all likelihood they were a merchant house with interests on Novy Sverdlovsk, whose members had stayed with Count Klimov or his ancestor while visiting that planet. The Collesios were now returning the hospitality.
The Countess patted his cheek. “I am Valentina, yes? Georgi can be the Count all he likes . . . ,” she gave her husband a look that Daniel classed as “appraising” in the same sense that one appraises a suite one may rent. “But my father was a duke, and the title doesn’t have the same ring in my ears.”
“Your father, the duke with thirteen daughters on the right side of the blanket,” Klimov said. The words had the sound of familiarity; if there’d ever been passion in the exchange, time had cooled it. “You did well to get me, and you know it.”
He stepped back so that he could see Daniel without looking through the air-formed hologram. “Now, Captain Leary, what do you propose for our itinerary?”
Spacers were passing up and down the A-Deck corridor with a frequency that duty didn’t explain, but so long as they didn’t intrude on the bridge Daniel was happy with them getting a look at the Sissie’s new owners. Most of the crew was at liberty for the next five days anyway, though Pasternak and Woetjans had teams making bloody sure that the series of aggravating failures in both rig and powerplant ended before the ship lifted from Cinnabar.
“Well, sir,” Daniel said, cueing the first of the presets he’d loaded into the computer this morning before joining the bosun aloft on the replaced antenna, “the red pip is the Sverdlovsk system, green is Strymon, and blue here is Cinnabar, that’s just for scale.”
He gestured. A fourth dot, this one orange, appeared at a considerable angle to the others among the milky dusting of stars too small to see as individuals. “And here is Todos Santos, the capital of the Ten Star Cluster and the entry point to the North for vessels sailing from Cinnabar. You know, of course, that distance—time, really—within the Matrix doesn’t precisely equate with that of sidereal space, but it gives you a feeling for what’s involved strictly as a matter of astrogation.”
“Yes, yes, of course it is very far,” Klimov said, his tone marginally short of sounding irritated. “Thus we buy a fine ship and hire you, not so? Why are you telling us this when I ask you what planets we will stop at on our course through the North?”
“Very good, sir,” Daniel said mildly. He’d listened to what the Count was saying instead of simply flying hot . . . and Count Klimov was quite right. He’d meant what he said, not what Daniel had assumed he meant.
“The short answer . . . ,” Daniel continued, touching the control panel; Novy Sverdlovsk and Strymon sank into the sparkling mass, leaving only Cinnabar and Todos Santos highlighted. “Is that we’ll put in at Todos Santos, both to refit the Sissie after a long run and to gather better information about the region. Through me and my Signals Officer, Mistress Mundy, you have access to the best information available in the Republic about the North; but that’s none too good. Besides Todos Santos, I expect we’ll put into Radiance at the other end of the Commonwealth of God. By then we’ll probably be ready for a further refit.”