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Power Room crew, lubricant and finely divided metal had turned them a dirty black.
    Officers wore RCN utilities on shipboard duty. For most of the crew, utilities were dress uniform—and formed the base for liberty suits.  
    “A voyage to Zenobia will certainly keep the brave Captain Leary out of the political arena for a suitable period of time,” Adele said dryly as she skimmed information on Zenobia. There were specialist databases—virtually every database on Cinnabar was open to a combination of Adele’s skill and the software which Mistress Sand had supplied—but it scarcely seemed necessary here. Unless the readily available material—which included the Sailing Directions for the Qaboosh Region, published by Navy House—was wildly wrong, Zenobia had no depth to go into.
    “Yes,” said Sand. “It fits that criterion amply, since it’s a sixty-day run for merchant vessels.”
    She smiled wryly and added, “I have no doubt that you’ll tell me that Captain Leary can better that estimate, Mundy. Nonetheless, the distance justifies our hero being absent for as long as the campaign season requires.”
    “Any RCN vessel could better the estimate, I suspect, mistress,” Adele said, hearing a touch of asperity in her tone. She smiled, amused to realize that she had become just as protective of the honor of the RCN as she was that of the Mundys of Chatsworth. “It’s as much a factor of the larger crews of a naval vessel as it is of the much higher level of astrogation training to be expected of the officers.”
    “I bow to your greater experience in the matter, Mundy,” said Sand. Adele wondered if the older woman would have been less amenable to the pedantry if she weren’t so relieved to be past the awkward scene with which the interview had opened.
    Clearing her throat, Sand continued, “Zenobia is typical of the Qaboosh Region, meaning it’s of no particular account. Both we and the Alliance have tributaries and a naval base there, but the region is such a backwater that both parties chose to ignore it during the recent hostilities. Sending a real fighting squadron to the Qaboosh would have wasted strength which was needed closer to home.”
    “Is Zenobia an Alliance possession?” Adele said, scrolling rapidly through data without finding the answer she wanted. “It appears to be one, but there shouldn’t be a Cinnabar Commissioner if it were.”
    “Zenobia is technically independent, with a Council and an executive—the Founder—elected for life by that Council,” Sand said. “Foreign policy and realistically everything more important than the level of the food subsidy for Calvary, the only real city, is in the hands of an Alliance Resident. I suspect that if the Resident cared about the food subsidy, he could change that also.”
    Adele nodded, her eyes on her own data streams. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she found considerable detail.
    “You’re probably wondering why we even have a Commissioner on Zenobia,” Sand said. She tapped the bottle forward again, but Adele was absorbed in her information gathering.
    “Not at all,” Adele said, more curtly than she would have done if her intellect hadn’t been focused in other directions. “A good quarter of the region’s spacers appear to be from Rougmont, one of our client worlds. I suspect very few of them are actually Cinnabar citizens, but based on what I’ve noticed on the fringes of civilization, most will claim to be Cinnabar citizens when they’re jailed for being drunk and disorderly. Their normal state when they’ve been paid upon landfall.”
    A Resident was a senior official in the Cinnabar’s Ministry of External Affairs. He or she directed the local leaders of worlds which were Friends of Cinnabar: that is, tribute-paying members of the Cinnabar Empire.
    Not that anybody put it that way. Those who did were promptly imprisoned for Insulting the Republic.
    “Ah,” Adele said with more satisfaction than