Free Commander by Phil Geusz

had begun as a noisy, celebratory crowd had turned quiet and thoughtful.
     
    After that the band played and sailors marched and there was much more in the way of pomp and ceremony. James and I hosted a banquet, and the highest-ranking officers from the fleet in orbit high above drank toasts to the new armed service far into the night. But there was a muted note to it all, and had been ever since I'd given my big speech. My god! the regular officers and nobles were asking themselves. Where is all this going to lead?
     
    Into the future, I could almost hear His Majesty whispering into his chocolate milk. A bigger, better and stronger future for us all.
     
    Including even the citizens of the Empire.
     
     

13
     
    It was a very pleasant thing, it didn’t take me long to decide, to have a spaceship to order about. Not that I often got the chance—the orbiting fleet needed their errands run and their personnel transferred every bit as much during peacetime as when at war. While I probably could’ve held onto Richard a lot more than I did for our own uses, such as training and publicity, it was even more important that we begin working out the mundane, day-to-day details involved in servicing the fleet. I’d created special fuel indent forms, for example, which the Navy Department had approved in full. But... Would a purser stationed light-years from home actually know what to do with one when he saw it? Almost never, we quickly learned. There were a million such inevitable and unforeseeable bugs to work out, and the more Richard and her crew interacted with the regular fleet the quicker they’d be resolved.
     
    It was just as well that I’d been able to slide Jean into a command spot so quickly—his ship-purchasing mission with the House buyers had utterly flopped. It wasn’t his fault by any means; the issue was one of sheer economics. The shipbuyers had been instructed to collaborate closely with Jean when and where possible, but no one could’ve foreseen that they’d arrive back home just in time for the largest, most impressive auction of used interstellar vessels in recorded history. These were Javelin ’s prizes, or at least those that’d broken through the blockade and made it back home to Royal space in one piece. They were the wildest assortment possible, of varying design, age, and purpose. Even more they were mostly very slow, which was part of why Javelin had been able to run them down and force their surrender to begin with. These traits combined to make them highly uninteresting to the fencibles. I had to admit, however, that in terms of renewing the House’s merchant fleet at a bargain price, well… They buyers couldn’t have done much better. Besides, there were sentimental factors involved as well. A small portion of the proceeds went into James’s pockets, as his share of the prize money. He in turn donated it to the recovery efforts. And I did the same when I learned that the Prize Court had ruled that since Zombie’s successful defense had made most of the captures possible, we were entitled to an equal share. The sum wasn’t all that large, but the newspapers gave our donations prominent headlines indeed. And, I was rather touched when the second-largest of these ships, a bulk-gas tanker, was rechristened the David Birkenhead . (The largest, of course, became the First Duke of Marcus .)
     
    So Jean was pleased indeed to be rewarded with an independent command after what a less understanding superior officer might’ve considered a complete failure. He did very well indeed; the endless headaches associated with his vessel being the first of its kind seemed to roll off of his back like water from a duck, and his social rank was complete assurance that Richard and its crew would be treated with dignity and respect wherever it went. Best of all, Snow sent me a letter assuring me that he was treating the Rabbits well. In my book, there was no higher authority than that.
     
    Fortunately for