Oh, yes, Adele could understand the reasoning. The analytical portion of her mind also understood why the heads of the Mundy family and their associates were displayed on Speaker’s Rock when their conspiracy came unravelled.
But in both cases, Adele’s stomach dropped into a frozen limbo while her mind spun pointlessly around the words and their implications.
The Princess Cecile was simply a small warship. Adele had first seen her less than a year ago, when she was a Kostroman corvette overflying a banal national parade. The Sissie was cramped and uncomfortable even at the best of occasions, and much of the time Adele had spent aboard her had involved danger and discomfort well beyond anything she’d previously experienced in a life with more than its share of squalid poverty.
And yet. . . .
A year ago Adele Mundy had been a lonely orphan eking out an exile’s existence in a third-rate court whose ruler affected to be an intellectual. Her title was Court Librarian, but her duties were those of a performing seal. Now she had her nation and even her childhood home back. She had the whole RCN for a family, and in Daniel Leary she had a friend who would stand with her to death.
None of these things were the Princess Cecile; but they had all come about through the Princess Cecile.
“Mundy?” Lieutenant Mon said in a worried tone. “Are you all right?”
Adele opened her eyes—she didn’t recall having closed them—and gave Mon a crisp smile. “Yes indeed, Mon,” she said. “A little sad, perhaps, but I’m on my way to a funeral, after all.”
Mon nodded solemnly, looking out at the six- to eight-story buildings along the tram route. The top floors were luxury suites with roof gardens; the ground level was given over to shops, often with the owners’ apartments on the floor above. In between lived ordinary people, bureaucrats and lieutenants with families larger than their incomes; librarians and mechanics and off-planet beggars jammed a dozen to a room. Lived and in their times died, because everything died.
Rest in peace, Princess Cecile. You too were a friend.
* * *
“Retired Rear Admiral Aussarenes and wife,” said the buzzy whisper in Daniel Leary’s left ear. A member of the staff of Williams and Son, Undertakers, sat in the back of a discreet van parked across from the Stanislas Chapel. She checked everyone in the receiving line against a database and passed along the information over a radio link. “He commanded the Bourgiba when your uncle was its third lieutenant.”
Not its third lieutenant, Daniel corrected mentally. Her third lieutenant. A ship was female, even when she was a cranky heavy cruiser with a penchant for blowing her High Drive motors—as Daniel remembered well from the stories Uncle Stacey and his cronies told in the office of the repair yard while his sister’s young son listened agog. Williams and Son specialized in society funerals, but the RCN was a very specialized society.
“Good morning, Admiral Aussarenes,” he said aloud. “Uncle Stacey would’ve been honored to know that you and your good lady have come to pay your respects. May I present you with a ring in remembrance of the occasion?”
He offered the velvet-covered tray. The bezel of each silver ring was a grinning skull surrounded by a banner reading Commander Stacey Harmsworth Bergen, RCN.
Aussarenes took a ring and tried it for size on the little finger of his left hand. He walked stiffly, apparently as the result of back trouble. “I don’t need a ring to remember Lieutenant Bergen,” he said in a rasping, belligerent voice. “A damned troublesome officer, I don’t mind telling you. Apt as not to be up on a mast truck when he was supposed to be on the bridge!”
“Darling,” his wife muttered in the tone of exasperated familiarity. “Not here.”
“Well, he was!” the admiral snapped. He looked up and met Daniel’s eyes. “But he was the best astrogator I ever knew. When Bergen conned us, even the Bitchgiba could show her legs to a well-manned battleship if the course was long enough.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Daniel said with a broad smile. “My uncle knew his limitations, but he appreciated praise when he was due it.”