Deck E was officers’ country and the Aglaia’s command and control area. The turret mounted over the rotunda was extended so Daniel didn’t have to walk around it as he’d done during the voyage. The turret hatches were raised as well; fresh air and a skirl of birdsong filled the corridor as he walked to the dayroom.
The clerk’s desk was empty, but the door to the Officer of the Day’s office was open. Lt. Weisshampl sat upright behind the console, looking morose. Daniel grinned and threw her a sharp salute from the doorway.
“Leary,” she said, “if you screw around saluting, I swear I’ll lock you in the lower turret and not let you out till we’re back on Cinnabar. How the hell do you look so fresh?”
She frowned like a thunderhead. “And don’t tell me it’s youth!”
“Not all of us spent the evening practicing assault drops onto concrete, Maisie,” Daniel said. Weisshampl was twenty-eight Terran years old, quite young to be XO of a parade ship like the Aglaia.
Weisshampl laughed, then rubbed the back of her neck with a groan. “Yeah, you might have something there,” she admitted. “But for God’s sake sit, so I don’t have to look up at you.”
Daniel took the indicated chair. The deck’s resilient surfacing was pierced in what looked to an untrained eye like a pattern of tucks. The holes were threaded into the plating beneath. Cinnabar naval furniture was built to multiples of the same pattern so that any piece could be bolted in place within a few inches of where the user wanted it. There were no large objects unsecured on a ship that was under way.
“I came for a favor, Maisie,” Daniel said. “I’d like you to release a detail of twenty ratings to me under a solid petty officer. You can log it as building a positive relationship between the nations of Cinnabar and Kostroma. So far as you’re concerned, it’ll keep some people out of trouble while you’re on the surface and there isn’t enough to do.”
Weisshampl looked at him with an appraising frown. They both knew that Daniel wasn’t one of the Aglaia’s officers and didn’t have command authority over her crew, so she didn’t bother to mention the fact.
“You know,” she said, “that’ll look like some kind of fiddle, officers using ratings to make money on the side. And if it was plenty of other officers, that’s what it’d be.”
She grinned in a combination of humor and cynicism. “I don’t say I wouldn’t agree, you understand. But that’s not what you’re after.”
Daniel shrugged. He wasn’t sure how he could describe the situation, and he didn’t intend to try.
“I served under your Uncle Stacey when I was a midshipman,” Weisshampl said as if changing the subject. She picked up the object she used for a paperknife. It was a feather whose vanes were fused into a sharp, glassy membrane. It came from a bird that spent its life swimming in a sea whose high salt content didn’t freeze above -4 degrees Celsius, but which nonetheless was frozen over for half the year.
“He had a nose for shifts in the Matrix,” she went on, rolling the feather between her paired index fingers. “I was amazed at the time, and the more I see of other astrogators—”
She smiled coldly at Daniel.
“—the more amazed I am. You’re good, Leary. Better than me. But you’ll never be what your uncle was.”
“No,” Daniel said, “I won’t.”
Weisshampl touched a button on her console. “Chief of Rig to the dayroom,” she ordered. Her voice rang from the speakers in every compartment and corridor on the Aglaia.
Domenico, the bosun, must have been in his quarters just down the corridor. He was at the door of Weisshampl’s office before the echoes of her voice had ceased. “Yes sir?” he said, his voice slightly muffled as he pulled his tunic on over his head while he was speaking.
“I want you to round up a detail of twenty under . . . Woetjans, I think,” Weisshampl said. “They’ll be on detached duty under Mr. Leary, here. For choice pick them from people who’ve spent their pay advance already.”