That laugh again. The Commodore threw her neck and tossed her loose copper-silver curls again. Confident, assured, effortlessly slick. “Not bad? A place like this, and you would be content with not bad? Dear girl, this night of nights is hardly an occasion to settle for modesty. Are all hired dogs so spartan?”
So many beats to address there, so many moments where this officer and her too-perfect hair just made Lathe squirm. It was the rank, it had to be. In the days when the Kitezh Imperium could still maintain a standing land army–with the Enemy on the prowl with its great dread fleets, the ones even the lowest mercenary coxswain knew as SCYLLA and CHARYBDIS–a Commodore’s equivalent would have been among the Generals. This was a woman who definitely had at least one painting in her home depicting her holding a saber and staring melancholically forwards. Two tops. Still, it was kind of her to address her like that without all the faffing around of having to correct her. Half her ducats squandered at the end of every month-cycle getting her estrogen from a conjugation mountebank, and still she had to have the much-maligned corrective conversation with half the flotilla.
Dear girl.
Lathe wasn’t even going to touch the dog thing.
“Just when we’re on the job, ma’am,” Lathe said, and slurped at her brew again. Stout beer, rich and slightly sweet–certainly not to the measure of whatever they’d be keeping in casks under the bar for the guests with actual ducats, though.
“Look at you, so serious. ‘Ma’am’ this, ‘ma’am’ that. You’d have made a formidable enlisted woman. But ah, I’m afraid I’m not here for shop talk, much as a go-getting slayer of men like you would have likely humoured me,” the Commodore said, “To the crux of why I’m here. Thought you might want some company, in any case.”
Restraining her shock, Lathe said, “Very kind, ma’am.”
“No bother, dear. Mercenary you may be, but you are a guest all the same. Suppose we can’t have you simply knowing me as ‘ma’am’, though, even if it is courteous and most well-mannered of a privateer,” the Commodore said. She removed the dark glove from her remaining flesh hand and held it out to Lathe, glove clutched to her chest in the ceramic digits of the mechanical hand. “Lady Angela Harker, Commodore of the greater Lugh fleet, at your service.”
Flatly, Lathe shook Commodore Harker’s hand, the masterworked mechanism of steel and ceramic a testament to whatever clout her Ladyship conferred. Bionics among Lathe’s current crew were mostly hunks of riveted iron held together with wires and oil carts, sometimes without any digits to speak of. When Lathe remained largely unaffected–save her present panic at whatever set of paracausal coincidence led to this Commodore having any interest in her–she noticed some subtle twitch of confusion on Harker’s face, a bewildered smirk.
“The Scourge of Cygnet? I led us to victory against the Leonov Grenzer Enclave?”
Lathe shrugged.
“Well! That’s certainly a first for this evening, isn’t it?”
“Apologies, ma’am. I’m afraid I’m only a hired musket, not brave enough for politics.”
“Oh, goodness, no need to tarnish your station on my behalf! I so envy your admittance to disengaging. How liberating that must be.”
Lathe wasn’t sure how sleeping in a hold with twelve other unwashed bodies was particularly liberating. It was better than living with her parent, she supposed.