Free What Distant Deeps by David Drake

Cinnabar
    “Ma’am?” said Benthelow. He was a Power Room tech who’d been on guard duty when Adele boarded the Princess Cecile an hour before. He probably still was, but he’d left his sub-machine gun back in the boarding hold with his fellow guard before he came up to the bridge. “There’s a guy here that, well, I thought you might talk to him.”
    Adele was alone on the bridge. Tovera had gone off on her own business; Adele made a point of not knowing what her servant did in her free time. She sat at the Communications console, going over the software she had just installed.
    Every time Adele landed on Cinnabar, Mistress Sand’s organization provided her with updates for the codes she might encounter. The top Alliance military codes were still effectively closed to her if they were applied properly, but the computing power necessary to guide a starship through the Matrix could by brute force gut almost any commercial code like a hooked fish.
    And even unbreakable codes were often misused. Adele found that people were frequently careless.
    Other people, that is.
    She got to her feet. Adele was wearing civilian clothes because she had come from her townhouse and hadn’t bothered to change into utilities before she went to work. Her garments were similar in cut to RCN utilities but were light brown instead of mottled gray on gray, so she could wear them in public without violating regulations.
    “Yes, sir?” she said to the man in the hatchway behind Benthelow—who really shouldn’t have brought the fellow up with him, but Signals Officer Adele Mundy wasn’t the proper person to give lectures on following protocol. Nor was Captain Daniel Leary, if it came to that.
    “I apologize, mistress,” the man said. He was over six feet tall; well over, in fact, though the way he hunched forward tended to conceal his height. He had limp, sandy hair and a high forehead, making him look older than his forty or so standard years. “I asked to see the captain for permission to view our quarters, but this man brought me to you. I’m Pavel Brown. Ah, my family and I are to be his passengers.”
    “I’ll take care of this, Benthelow,” Adele said. “And yes, Commissioner Brown, I’ll be happy to show you your quarters. I’m Adele Mundy.”
    She patted her trousers with a smile that was mostly for show. People liked other people to smile.
    “When I’m in uniform, I’m Signals Officer Mundy. A moment, please.”
    She sat again, this time crossways on the bench. The data unit which she used as a control interface was on her lap. Nobody was likely to meddle with Adele’s console in her absence, and nobody except Cory or possibly Cazelet would be able to get into it anyway. Nonetheless she made sure everything was switched off before she rose, slipping the PDU into her cargo pocket.
    “Surely not Lady Mundy?” Brown said as he followed her into the corridor and down the forward companionway. “I was told that she might be a passenger on this voyage as well, though I assumed that was one of those silly departmental rumors.”
    “Watch your footing,” Adele said as their footsteps echoed within the armored tube. Her clumsiness on shipboard was something of a joke among the spacers she’d served with, but the slick steel treads of the stairs between levels of the ship had never given her trouble: she’d spent years trudging up and down similar steps in the stacks of research libraries. A warship’s companionways were a memory of home to her.
    “I’m Mundy of Chatsworth,” Adele said as she exited onto D Level, the deck below the bridge. In harbor on Xenos the companionway doors were left open, but in combat they would be closed and could be locked both for structural strength—maneuver and battle damage both twisted a ship’s hull, which the transverse tubes resisted—and to limit air loss in event of penetration. “But not aboard the Sissie, where I’m a warrant officer, not a passenger.”
    She led the way