He looked at Adele. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s the business of a naval officer to tell other people how to live their lives,” he said.
“I don’t suppose it is,” Adele said mildly. She was searching files so that she had a reason to keep her eyes focused in front of her. Any data would do for the purpose.
Daniel sighed and relaxed. “Maybe Admiral Lasowski’s right about my temper,” he said apologetically. “Sorry.”
Adele looked at the mortality statistics for inmates of the Electoral Home for Orphans and Foundlings. The information didn’t surprise her—after all, why assume that aspect of Electoral whim would be better organized than the library was? It was amazing, though, that so many of the children were able to walk at all, given the rate at which inmates died after admission to the home.
“Look,” Daniel said, smiling but quite clearly not looking at the procession while the orphans were still in sight. “There’s parties all over the city tonight. I’ve made friends with a few of the Kostroman naval officers, a decent enough lot, and I’ve got an invitation to the Admiral’s Ball.”
The roof began to tremble at a very low frequency. Adele felt the vibration more as a queasiness than a sound, but the roof tiles clicked together at a gathering rate.
“Ah!” Daniel said. “That’ll be the Princess Cecile lifting from the Navy Pool. Don’t—”
He handed Adele his goggles again. “Here, it’s best to use these if you’re going to look straight at it, even this far away. They’ll adjust for the glare.”
He frowned and added, “I hope they’re not going to overfly below three thousand meters.”
Adele could hear the sound of a starship’s motors through the air now. She held the goggles to her eyes, but it was gentle pressure of Daniel’s hand that turned her to look south instead of west toward the Floating Harbor. A ship was rising on a plume of plasma.
“The navy uses a lagoon with a barrage across the mouth,” he explained as she watched the vessel rise. It wasn’t particularly large. “The navy warehouses are there too; that’s where the ball tonight’s going to be. Mostly the ships are in storage, but they activated the Princess Cecile for the celebration.”
“I see,” Adele said as she returned the goggles. The Princess Cecile had leveled out at what seemed to her a reasonable altitude and was cruising north toward the city.
“She’s a corvette,” Daniel said as he watched the ship. “Quite a nice little vessel, really. Kostroma built, but with most of her electronics bought from Cinnabar and her armament from Pleasaunce.”
Plumes of colored smoke streamed from the corvette’s outriggers, white on the right and purple from the other. The smoke mixed with the plasma exhaust into glittering, no-colored swirls like mica flakes strewn on mud.
“What I was going to say . . .” Daniel resumed. He offered the goggles; she refused them. “Is that I suppose you’ve got parties to go to yourself—”
Adele sniffed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort, and he was quite right.
The Princess Cecile began to launch fireworks to either side. Sparks of color purer than anything in nature rained from the airbursts. The boom of the charges was dull and arrived many seconds after the light of the display it ignited.
“Anyway,” Daniel said, “if you’d like to see how the navy does it, I’m to bring a guest and—”
He paused in momentary horror. “That is,” he resumed with formal caution, “if you’d care to attend the Admiral’s Ball as a colleague of mine, Ms. Mundy, I would be very, ah . . .”
Adele chuckled. It wasn’t a sound she often made. “I appreciate the offer, Daniel,” she said. “But I think . . .”
She in turn paused. What did she think? That shutting herself in her shabby room was a better way to spend the evening?
And there was Markos, the man and his intentions . . . but she really didn’t want to think about that.
“I think,” she said, “that while I’ve never been interested in mating rituals in either the abstract or the particular, it might be interesting to attend the ball, yes. As I’ve found this event—”