He started back into the tram; the footman holding it in place stepped across the doorway to block him. “No, no, that’s all right Morris!” Adele said. “My colleague Lieutenant Mon and I will travel together to the chapel. He’ll change when he gets there.”
They all boarded, the footmen first to clear space for their mistress—though the only others in the car were a disconsolate couple wearing shapeless blue robes. They cowered at the far end. Xenos was the capital not only of Cinnabar but of the empire which Cinnabar ruled. The city drew tourists, workers, and beggars from more worlds than even an information specialist like Adele Mundy could determine without checking the handheld data unit in a discreet thigh pocket on all of her uniforms, even these Dress Whites.
Adele smiled wryly. She’d be less uncomfortable stark naked but holding her data unit than fully clothed without the unit. Yes, she supposed she was eccentric. . . .
The monorail whined away from the stop, then jolted onto the main line. They’d switch to a northbound line three stops on instead of going west to the main transfer point at the Pentacrest.
She wondered if the foreign couple had a real destination or if they were simply riding the cars for want of other occupation. They didn’t look the sort to bury themselves in study as Adele Mundy had done when she was a lonely orphan in a foreign land.
“Ah, Mon?” she said, voicing another awkward topic that thought of poverty had brought to mind. Fastinelli’s was the large-volume naval clothier’s located near Harbor Three. Strictly speaking the firm didn’t have a storage facility, but it did loan money against items of uniform which were surplus to the requirements of temporarily embarrassed officers. “Since you’ve just landed and won’t have collected your pay yet, can I offer you a small loan for your storage fees?”
“What?” said Mon, obviously surprised. Whatever he was furrowing his brows over, it didn’t seem to involve settling with the pawnbroker at the end of the tram ride. “Oh. Oh. Thank you, Mundy, quite decent of you, but I’m all right. Count Klimov gave me a drawing account to arrange stores.”
Adele’s eyes narrowed minusculely. “You did just land, didn’t you, then?” she said, knowing that her tone was thin with a justified hint of displeasure. The lieutenant was obviously concerned about something, but that didn’t justify what by now amounted to rudeness in ignoring her initial polite question. “You brought the Princess Cecile back to Cinnabar, that is?”
Mon stiffened, then scrunched his face with embarrassment. “Yes, mistress,” he said. “Your pardon, please, for being distracted. Yes, we completed repairs to the Princess Cecile four weeks back. I brought her directly from Strymon in accordance to the orders that reached me while she was still in dry-dock. We landed at Harbor One a few hours ago, and I came to see Lieutenant Leary as soon as I’d rendered my accounts to the harbormaster.”
“Harbor One?” said Adele, puzzled at mention of the lake northwest of Xenos where the first human colony ship landed. Early in Cinnabar’s history Harbor One had sufficed for both her commercial and naval traffic, but those days were long past. Commercial transport had shifted to Harbor Two on the coast a hundred and twenty miles from the capital, while the RCN had built the vast artificial basin of Harbor Three for its operations at the close of the First Alliance War seventy-five years before.
“Why yes, mistress,” Mon said. “The Princess Cecile is being sold out of service. I assumed that you—that Lieutenant Leary, at least—had been informed of that?”
“No,” Adele said. “Daniel doesn’t know that. I’m quite sure he’d have said something.”
She sat back on the tram’s bench, staring in the direction of the scratched windows while her mind grappled with what Mon had said. She felt the same disbelieving emptiness as she had when she learned that her family had died during the Proscriptions.
The words were simple, the concept quite understandable. The Princess Cecile was a foreign-built corvette, badly damaged in battle off Tanais in the Strymon system. You could never trust a ship after structural repairs, and there were many conservative RCN officers who didn’t believe you could really trust a hull built on Kostroma in the first place. Now that Cinnabar and the Alliance were at peace, it made better sense to dispose of the Princess Cecile rather than bear the expense of maintaining her in ordinary.