Formality ended with a broad smile. “You look a lot better than she does, sir. Sure you were at the same party?”
Daniel laughed, glad of a way to break the tension. He sauntered across the wet decking, slippery for all its nonskid pattern. He wasn’t worried about seeing Weisshampl or really doubtful about getting her agreement.
He was very nervous about what would come next. Well, the Republic of Cinnabar expected her naval officers to carry on no matter what the circumstances.
The decks of a cylindrical starship ran the long way. The Aglaia had five decks, but the lowest two, Decks A and B, were under water when the ship floated normally. They contained bulk storage for consumables and reaction mass, plus the magazines of missiles and message cells.
On the Aglaia, unusually for a ship of her size, the ratings’ quarters took up most of the volume of Deck B. Normally the crew would have been accommodated on Deck D, but that region on the Aglaia was given over to passenger suites.
Daniel entered the central rotunda of Deck C. Armored staircases stood at the four ordinal points. Corridors fore and aft ran along both sides of the hull, but the regions immediately flanking the rotunda on this deck held the Aglaia’s two Tokamak generators. Their mass had to be kept close to the vessel’s center or the ship would be impossible to maneuver if the computer went down or control trunks were damaged in action.
Naval computer systems were many-times redundant and almost never failed. The space officers who survived to hold high rank were those who planned for unlikely disasters, and they saw to it that naval architects were of the same cautious frame of mind. The Aglaia could dance on a pin under manual control.
Deck C contained the machinery spaces and armament: the offensive missile systems and most of the antimissile plasma cannon. The Aglaia had a light cruiser’s normal defensive suite: six barbette turrets, each holding a pair of four-inch plasma cannon. The turrets were retracted and sealed beneath a hull fairing when the ship was under way, but here at rest on the surface five of the six were extended to increase the interior room. The exception was the turret on Deck A, twenty feet under water.
The Aglaia had four missile launchers and only three reloads per tube. That weakness was a nagging irritation to every fighting officer in her complement, but the communications vessel wasn’t meant to fight. Her missile battery was sufficient to see off any pirate she chanced into; and a commander who risked passengers’ lives in needless heroics would face a court-martial and certain conviction if he survived.
By tradition the odd-numbered stairs were up and the even numbers down. Daniel strode across the rotunda and through the open hatch of Stair 1. A grizzled petty officer who looked twice her probable age of forty stood on the landing holding hands with a local girl with a demure expression and nothing on above the waist. They looked startled.
“Carry on, Haynes,” Daniel called over his shoulder as he skipped up the stair tower two treads at a time.
“Give up on high life and come back to the working navy, Mr. Leary?” Haynes replied with echoing laughter.
The RCN was a disciplined force—and her enemies would be the last to deny it. Discipline didn’t mean spiritless, though, nor was there any attempt to instill the kind of top-down terror that the Alliance seemed to consider an ideal.
An unpopular officer was the butt of “accidents” that made her look ridiculous. An unpopular captain found himself without a crew after his next landfall: the merchant service paid well and didn’t ask employment histories in wartime when there weren’t enough trained ratings by half.
The crews followed officers they respected from ship to ship, and they didn’t respect weakness. By the same token, an officer who couldn’t be approached by ratings and wouldn’t share a laugh with them had no business and no future in the RCN.
The hatch to Deck D was open. An accordion played music of a style that Daniel had heard at the supper club. There was laughter as well, and the clink of bottles. The delegation wasn’t using the fancy compartments at the moment, but that didn’t mean the suites were going to waste.