"Ship, preparing to extract," announced Blantyre from the Battle Direction Center. Adele went over her prepared screens once more. At the moment they had a pearly blankness because they being fed by a universe whose physical constants were utterly different from those of the human universe where the equipment was built. "Extracting!"
Adele felt her bone marrow vanish, then spread itself on the outside of her skin. Her body was cold, beyond cold, and she was seeing Blantyre's words as a pattern of light varying from bronze to muddy brown.
TheLadouceur reentered the sidereal universe. Her body felt normal-she hadn't been able to move for a moment-and her display lit segment by segment as the hull sensors came live.
Nobody liked the process of extraction from the Matrix, and Adele probably disliked it as much as anyone. She'd found, however, that so long as she concentrated on her work, nothing else really touched her. Extraction was merely a subset of life itself for her.
TheLadouceur had initially dipped into sidereal space forty-five light minutes down-sun from Castle Four. That Daniel to plot his approach on the basis of orbital traffic above the planet and Adele to preset her instruments. They'd then reinserted for a short hop, knowing that the cruiser would arrive well before the light from its previous appearance reached Castle Control-and more particularly, before it reached the guard shipSiegfried in planetary orbit.
Astrogation, even over short intrasystem distances, was partly a matter of chance even for Daniel. Still, theLadouceur had arrived within ten thousand miles of where she was supposed to be: 142,000 miles above the dun surface of Castle Four, curving past from east to west in contrast with theSiegfried.
Adele adjusted one of her laser transceivers to bear directly on the guard ship. "AFSSiegfried," she said, using the accent to which she'd been exposed during the decade she'd lived on Blythe, studying and then working in the Academic Collections following her family's massacre. "This is AFSVictoria Luise requesting landing clearance, over."
She'd thought of doubling the message on the 20-meter frequency, but that'd be read-correctly-as an insult if theSiegfried 's crew was halfway competent. Adele would be saying that she didn't trust them to have reliable tight-beam capability on a major-if very old-Fleet asset. If she had to repeat the call on short wave, she would, but for now she was assuming that the signals section knew its business.
"Victoria Luise, this is Four Control," said a female voice. "State your business on Four, over."
TheLadouceur 's sensors were scanning the ships on the planetary surface. There were over three hundred vessels concentrated around three ice mines-two near the poles and the third at 71 degrees of north latitude. The cluster at the north pole contained more than half the total number of vessels.
"Four Control, this is theVictoria Luise," Adele said. She was keeping the exchange boringly formal, hoping that would lull any concerns of theSiegfried 's crew. "We were directed here from Tadzhik where theHildebrandt replaced us as guard ship. We're to be surveyed preparatory to sale or salvage, over."
Adele had set up the search for targets on the ground, but Rene was running it from the console to her right. She watched the results as a sidebar inset onto her main display, but she found no need to interfere or even comment. Rene was grading ships according to their state of readiness; those coded red were capable of lifting off in thirty minutes. There were forty in that category in the northern cluster, three at the south pole, and none in the mid-latitude grouping.
"Victoria Luise, hold one," the duty signaler said.
The lengthening pause suited Adele's-Daniel's-purposes even better than empty conversation. TheVictoria Luise had been stationed on Tadzhik briefly, but that'd been eighteen standard years earlier. If theSiegfried 's officers searched the records, they'd learn that just as Adele had done. It'd confuse them, but the natural assumption would be that the records were wrong.
"Victoria Luise," said a forceful male voice, "this is Castle Four Control. We have no record of you being authorized to land here. Hold in orbit until we receive instructions from Pleasaunce Control, over."
The cruiser's rig was coming down in a chorus of metallic shrieks, rattles and clangs. There was more noise than usual so far as Adele's experience went, since theLadouceur had twelve rings of antennas instead of the corvette's six. Even a thin atmosphere like that of Castle Four would strip away the rigging unless it'd been furled, folded, and locked to the hull before the vessel started its descent.
Raising and lowering the sails was a completely automated process if everything worked as it was supposed to-which of course it never did. The riggers were outside to splice broken cables, free frozen joints, and all the thousand other ways machinery that'd been exposed to vacuum and the rigors of alien universes might choose to fail. Normally both watches would be on the hull to get the rig in quickly in preparation for landing.
Though theLadouceur had a full crew of nearly four hundred on this voyage, only a short crew of riggers was at work. The remainder of the personnel waited in the three entry holds, formed into boarding parties. After the cruiser landed, they'd capture Alliance-flag vessels and sail them back to Pelosi.
"Four Control, please," said Adele. Daniel had briefed her on what to say at this juncture; she hoped she could rattle it off in a believable fashion. "That'll takehours with the planets in opposition like this. We don't have enough reaction mass to hold a powered orbit for that long, not and land besides. Can't you give us clearance and we can work the details out later, over?"
Besides the racket the antennas and yards made, Adele felt a low rumble of quite different character. Sun was at the gunnery console, swinging the dorsal turret and elevating the 6-inch guns. According to plan, the Port Three main course would remain set to hide the turret from the guard ship's view until it was time for the guns to go into action.
"Negative, Victoria Luise!" thundered the battleship's spokesman. He was obvious a senior officer. "You are not, I repeat not, cleared to land. If you're short of reaction mass, that's nobody's fault but your own. A few hours of weightlessness isn't going to kill you. Four Control over!"
Daniel had split his screen. The left half was an attack board, while on the right he oversaw the boarding party assignments. Rene passed to Blantyre information on the cargos of the ships ready to lift on short notice; Blantyre then chose and briefed the section that would capture the vessel, usually half a dozen spacers under a petty officer who at least in theory could program an astrogational computer.
"Four Control," Adele said primly, "I must protest. This is mere harassment. I demand to speak to your superior officer, over!"
"You dickheaded landsman, you're speaking to Captain William Dunn!" the voice snarled. "Ihaveno superior this side of Pleasaunce, and it's for Pleasaunce to respond that you're bloody well going to wait. Four Control out!"
Blantyre had assigned the last of the intended prizes: the ten-thousand tonne grain shipStar of Acapulco. Captain Hoppler himself, with twenty-four spacers whom he'd commanded on theSacred Independence, was to capture and sail the big ship home.
Daniel straightened, shrank down the assignments board, and grinned broadly toward Adele. She nodded to his miniature image in the upper register of her display.
"Ship," called Daniel over the intercom. "Prepare to launch missiles!"
"Firing four!" said Daniel, mashing his thumb down on the Execute button. On theLadouceur the switch itself was virtual but the cage over it was physical and spring-loaded; it flopped back when it was released.
As a jet of live steam hammered the first missile out of its tube, Daniel used his left hand to furl the Port 3 main course and rotate the yard in line with the antenna. If the sail jammed instead of furling, he'd fold the antenna anyway rather than wait for riggers to clear the problem: all the riggers were supposed to be within the hull.
If the antenna jammed also, the first plasma bolt would clear a path for the second and future rounds. TheLadouceur could suffer much worse damage than losing a single antenna and he'd still consider it a cheap victory.
The second missile banged out five seconds after the first. That was a shorter separation than he'd have allowed in thePrincess Cecile or a converted freighter like theSacred Independence, but the cruiser's mass and the stiffness of a warship's hull meant the launch of five tons of steel and reaction mass didn't seriously twist the vessel.
He glanced toward Sun at the gunnery console, his right hand poised over the Execute key. "Officer Sun, you may fire when you bear," he said. It was barely possible that nobody aboard theSiegfried had noticed that the 'Victoria Luise' was launching missiles, but theywould notice six-inch plasma bolts even if they were sound asleep.
Daniel'd planned to bring theLadouceur from Pelosi to the Castle System in six days, and he'd believed that theSissie could've done it in five. The latter was probably true, but the cruiser'd taken seven.
Now that he had a moment to consider, he decided that they'd made a pretty good run at that. Not only was the whole crew new to the ship, always a recipe for error and confusion, theLadouceur 's folding antennas were like nothing most of the riggers would've ever seen before.
The ship rang with the third missile's launch. Additional missiles were rumbling down the tracks from the magazine. It normally took forty-five seconds to reload, but Daniel was shaving time by starting rounds on the way before the tubes were empty. That'd mean a serious problem if he had to abort the launch; there was no mechanism for returning missiles to the magazine except by chocking them, unclamping the harness, and levering the massive weapons back up the rollers with pry bars.
On the other hand, he'd only abort the launch if there was a serious problem to begin with. Being able to send out a follow-up salvo thirty seconds sooner could be well worth that risk.
The fourth missile launched with the same hammer-on-anvil crash as the others. The whole process, beginning to end, had taken only thirty seconds. Daniel knew that, but it felt like a day spent at Navy House, waiting for a clerk tomaybe, please the Gods, call the number of his chit.
The dorsal turret fired, a spaced CLANG! CLANG! much sharper than the missile launches, though a layman might not've made a distinction. Adele'd highlighted the communications antennas that the guard ship was using, a cluster near the bow. That was Sun's aiming point. The range was too long for even six-inch bolts to penetrate a battleship's plating, but scouring off the antennas would delay theSiegfried 's report to Pleasaunce Control.
Because theVictoria Luise had been a Cluster Command vessel instead of a unit of the Fleet proper, she carried single-converter missiles, none of which had been manufactured on the advanced planets of the Alliance. They'd reach the same terminal velocity as first-line missiles which had dual antimatter converters feeding twin High Drives, but they accelerated at only half the rate. At the short range from which Daniel'd launched at the guard ship, that was a significant handicap But not a crippling one. Besides, theLadouceur 's closing velocity with the battleship added something to the kinetic energy. Daniel's first missile struck a little below theSiegfried 's center of mass, on Deck G instead of E. The flash of rending metal preceded by an instant the fireball of friction-heated steel burning in the gush of escaping atmosphere. It dwarfed the yellow-white lash of Sun's plasma bolts licking the bow.
Daniel ran theLadouceur 's High Drive motors up to full thrust, braking her toward the planet's surface. The cruiser's old 6-inch guns required a minute between discharges, so the dorsal turret was silent; the four-inch turrets were now whining to life, however. Daniel was sure they wouldn't bear on theSiegfried soon enough to be of any service, but he was equally sure that Sun was going to fire them anyway.
The second missile slammed into theSiegfried forward, scalloping away the bridge in another flash and flare. Captain Dunn had been wrong about there being no authority higher than his in Four orbit.
"Sun, cease fire!" Daniel said. "This is Six. Cease fire or I'll break you back to wiper, I swear I will, over!"
The third missile struck the Power Room. Like the previous two, it punched a hole through the plating instead of vaporizing a thousand tonnes of hull the way it'd have done if it'd been at terminal velocity.
The difference wasn't noticeable this time. When the fusion bottle ruptured, the stern third of theSiegfried vanished in a scintillating ball of gas.
"Sun, you heard me!" Daniel shouted. "Acknowledge or I'llbreak you, I swear I will. Cease fire! Cease fire!"
He thought the last missile was going to miss because the Power Room explosion had devoured the part of the battleship it was aimed at, but the blast shoved what remained of the hull into the projectile's path. The impact was almost delicate in comparison to the fusion bottle's rupture, but it'd certainly killed another hundred or so spacers.
It was war, and Commander Daniel Leary hadn't gotten his reputation by being unwilling to go for an enemy's throat. Even so, if Daniel could've been certain that his first three missiles would eliminate all danger from theSiegfried, he'd never have launched the fourth. His bellowing fury toward Sun wasn't because he knew the gunner was so focused on the chance to use his weapons that he didn't care that his bolts'd be killing harmless spacers who might otherwise survive; it was because Commander Leary himself had just killed all but a handful of the six hundred or so human beings aboard theSiegfried.
It was war, and it'd been necessary; but it was regrettable nonetheless.
TheSiegfried, debris tumbling in a gas cloud, drifted overhead as theLadouceur plunged toward Four's surface. Plumes of sparkling ions made the wreckage look as though it were burning.
The cruiser's motors began to ping. "Ship, shutting down High Drive," Daniel said. It was all rote and reflex, now; he could probably land a starship in his sleep, so ingrained were his responses to sensory inputs. "Lighting thrusters… light."
Because Four's atmosphere was so thin, they were closer to the surface than they'd have been on a fully habitable planet. In only a few minutes theLadouceur would be on the ground. Very likely more people were going to die in the process of capturing a score of Alliance prizes and destroying others by gunfire.
"Ship, prepare for landing!" Daniel ordered.
It was war, and it was necessary.
But it was also regrettable.
CHAPTER 23: Minehead North on Castle Four
"IBSLadouceur toDieEhre Muenchens," Adele said. Normally she ignored the external world while she was heavily involved in message traffic, but of present necessity one quadrant of her console showed a real-time view of a new-looking Alliance freighter. Plasma and Four's friable soil rose in a shroud as the vessel ran up its thrusters preparatory to lifting. "Shut down immediately. If you attempt to lift off, we will destroy you. Over."
Her voice was as dry as the plain outside. She felt a degree of exasperation at theEhre 's captain for being a pigheaded fool, but she'd learned not to let that concern her. Somany people were pigheaded fools.
Rene was at the console beside hers. It was intended for the sailing master, but the closest any crew of Daniel's had ever had to that senior warrant officer was a common spacer being trained to handle the ship's boats.
He'd been echoing Adele's display while she kept track of the boarding parties and channeled relevant information to Blantyre in the Battle Direction Center. He was handling those duties alone, now, while she dealt with the freighter which was trying to escape.
TheEhre started to lift. Her shining hull rose, free for the moment of the plume of dust. The captain herself must own the vessel; surely no hireling would risk her life to avoid a mere monetary loss for an absentee owner?
"Ehre, this is your last chance," Adele said. Would she be more effective if she sounded excited? Surely the words were clear enough in themselves. "Shut down or we will destroy-"
The freighter was half a mile away, and there was a score of other grounded vessels between it and theLadouceur. It'd now risen twenty feet in the air, however, which meant Sun had a direct line of sight to it from the cruiser's dorsal turret.
"-you certainly."
The freighter continued to rise. Sun stabbed his gun switch. The six-inch guns fired, right tube and then left. The miniature thermonuclear explosions seemed to echo; weight anchored theLadouceur firmly to the ground through the outriggers, so the hull didn't flex as it would while under way.
The streaks of plasma lifted vortices of dust through the thin air; if boarding parties were outside in the vicinity of the track, they'd be cursing the gunner. The Bagarians were wearing suits, however, so they shouldn't be in real danger.
The first bolt stuck theEhre on A Deck, a little forward of the midpoint. Telescoped masts flew up in a geyser of steel. The vessel started to roll away from the thrust of her own vaporized fabric, so the second round struck a little farther down.
TheEhre 's bow tilted; Adele couldn't tell whether that was a direct result of damage or if the captain had simply jerked her controls in shock. The stern slammed into the ground. When the thrusters shut off or failed a moment later, the bow dropped with a terrible crash. The freighter bounced upward, rolled onto its port side when one outrigger collapsed, and hit the ground again.
"Six, I shoulda let her get a little higher and used the lateral turrets on her," Sun crowed happily. "I mean, we don't know that the four-inchers even work, right? But praise theGods, didn't the big boys do a job on that dumb sucker, over?"
Adele blocked the transmission; the gunner was just chattering in his joy at the destruction he'd achieved. Daniel was busy programming courses for the merchant vessels which boarding parties from theLadouceur were capturing all across Four's northern port area.
Adele had been amazed at how quickly the Bagarians spread out on their mission, given that on the voyage from Pelosi they hadn't shown anything like the spirit she'd been accustomed to in crews under Daniel's command. After a moment's reflection, though, she saw that these spacers understood they were in the home system of the Alliance. They were simply trying to get away.
They might think that if they were captured, Guarantor Porra would have them all shot out of hand in retaliation for the raid. Adele smiled faintly. She suspected that their concern was well founded.
"Mission Control," said a breathless voice on 3625kH. "This is Blackwell! We've got theJabez Croftand we're buttoning up for liftoff! Over!"
Adele's wands danced. David Blackwell, an engineer's mate from Thuer; had experience as watch officer on tramps in the Viscount Region though no formal astrogation training. In charge of six spacers, Unit 17 in Blantyre's terminology, directed to the 2300-tonne freighterJabez Croft out of Wakeland, over a half mile to the west of where Daniel'd brought theLadouceur down.
"I'm transferring your data to Control Six, Blackwell," Adele said. She sent it to Daniel with a dip of her left wand and copied Blantyre as well, since the midshipman was coordinating the boarding parties. "Prepare for liftoff, but don't leave the ground until Control Six has given you clearance."
One of the prizes lifted in the next row over from theLadouceur. Half a dozen other ships She checked herself out of habit: nine ships had already lifted, and this one made ten. The number didn't matter, but the fact that she'd been so far out in her mental tally was disquieting.
Ten prizes were already away, and two more were running up their thrusters. The operation was on schedule, though of course nobody knew how much time they really had before Alliance forces on Pleasaunce reacted. In an ideal universe it might even be days.
The universe had rarely shown itself to be ideal in Adele's experience, but the present raid was so audaciously unlikely that there wouldn't be mechanisms in place to counter it. A smile lifted the left corner of her mouth again. Daniel made rather a habit of that sort of stroke.
A plasma cannon fired in the mid distance. Adele had closed the electronic window in which she'd viewed theDieEhre Muenchens; now she opened it again and began to hopscotch through real-time imagery from captured ships, searching for one which would show her where the shooting had occurred. It seemed to be to the northwest of theLadouceur.
The ground thumped to an explosion; a piece of something banged against the cruiser's hull. It could've simply been an impeller slug, but it sounded heavier than that. Adele'd heard a lot of impeller slugs and sub-machine gun slugs and pistol slugs in the two years since she met Daniel Leary…
"Signals, it's all right," said Rene over the intercom. "It's Rasmussen and Harned, using the gun on theScarlettto make theMP5052open up. They called while you were talking to theEhre, over."
An icon pulsed in the window Adele'd opened; she expanded it with a click. Most ships trading on the fringes of the settled universe carried light armament to discourage pirates. TheScarlett, a three-thousand tonne Kostroman vessel, had an old 10-cm plasma cannon in a nose blister.
"Signals, theScarlett's deadlined because her climate control's shot," Rene explained. "Her other systems still work, though, so when theMP5052wouldn't open up to the boarders, I told Blantyre. She sent Rasmussen and Harned to her. They got the gun working, over."
"I see," said Adele. Beth Rasmussen and Richard Harned were a Power Room tech cross trained as a gunner and a very tough rigger. Perhaps the Bagarian boarding party could've handled the job, but at best they hadn't come up with the plan themselves.
Adele didn't see the expected cratering of a plasma bolt on theMP5052 's hull, but a chemical explosion had blown antennas Dorsal Two and Dorsal Three off the hull. She selected memory and ran the imagery back to before the gun'd fired.
As expected, she found that theMP5052 had mounted a basket of free-flight rockets on her spine for defensive armament instead of a gun. They'd exploded when Rasmussen put a bolt into them. Though the blast hadn't seriously damaged the hull, the ears of everybody on the freighter's A Deck would ring for a month.
Adele checked her apparatus, then made a pair of adjustments. TheMP5052 's commo system was wide open, so it was no great trick to take control of it.
"FreighterMP5052, this is the IBSLadouceur," Adele said. Her voice would be thundering through the PA system as well as on the main console. "You saw what happened to theEhre when they refused to surrender. You've had your only warning. Open your main hatch to a boarding party from the Bagarian Republic in thirty seconds, or we'll melt you to slag, over."
Could they melt a freighter to slag? Not with a low-powered four-inch gun, certainly, but she supposed Sun would find a way if she gave him his head on the subject. Regardless, it was a permissible part of her job to exaggerate for effect while speaking to an enemy.
"Mistress, they're opening up," said Rene. "Break."
He shifted circuits for the next portion of the call, informing Blantyre that the operation had been successful so she could recall Rasmussen and her bodyguard. They discussed whether the freighter was too badly damaged to lift-decided it wasn't-and shifted their attention to theAntipodes out of Carnera; the prize crew said that vessel was missing two thruster nozzles.
Adele listened to the conversation long enough to determine it was none of her concern, then returned to panicked messages from the boarding parties. She was acting as Port Control, a task well beyond her rank and rating, but Daniel was busy writing astrogation programs for the prizes.
Two more ships lifted from opposite sides of the large harbor. According to Daniel, Castle Four's loess soil didn't reflect thrust the way most dry land did. Each liftoff and landing was in a curtain of dust, but that was no worse a problem than the steam that blasted up from normal water operations.
Though it didn't impede operations, the dust coated everything instead of draining off the way condensate would. That was simply unpleasant, though, and there was very little about star travel whichwasn't unpleasant in Adele's estimation. It didn't matter, because she wasn't going to be on Four long.
Only a handful of the Bagarians would bother to use Daniel's complex programs. For the most part they'd let the computer take them toward Pelosi by the simplest route, pleased not to have officers aboard to roust them onto the hull to make manual adjustments. But Daniel would've tried to keep them clear of Alliance pursuers, would've done his duty and gone well beyond it. That shared attitude was why Adele found him such a congenial friend.
"Ladouceur, this is Sissie Five," said Vesey's clipped voice. "We're on station. There's no sign of unusual activity in the vicinity of Pleasaunce, over."
Adele ran the message as text at the bottom of Daniel's display. While it didn't interfere with his computations, he'd notice it there.
How very typical of Vesey that she'd give two critical pieces of information and not ask any questions. Most people, even most RCN officers, acted as though their excitement and nervousness were more important than whatever the party they were jabbering at was doing.
Another prize lifted. The initial vibration was as violent as that on water, but the sound through Four's thin atmosphere was only a shrill whisper. The plasma flare was so bright, however, that the display dimmed it with a 10% mask.
"Acknowledged, Sissie Five," Adele said. "The operation appears to be proceeding well. Over."
TheAntipodes lifted while the immediately previous prize was still in mid-sky. Clearly Blantyre and Rene had made the right decision. The cargo-Adele's wands flicked-was Carnera brocades; they'd be quite valuable if they reached Pelosi.
Daniel transmitted the latest course data-to theMP5052, Adele noticed-and switched to the still-open channel with thePrincess Cecile . He winked at Adele.
"Sissie Five, this is Six," Daniel said, stretching his arms to the sides. He arched his shoulders backward to loosen those big muscles too. "We'll be lifting in theAgaveas soon as the last of the prizes has lifted, which I judge to be within the next half hour. We'll get a light hour distant before we exchange personnel, though, over."
Daniel was grinning with satisfaction; Adele found herself smiling back at his image. He had reason to look satisfied. Even if things went badly from here on out, Commander Daniel Leary, RCN, had singed the beard of Guarantor Porra. Nothing would take that away.
"Roger, Six," Vesey said. Despite the compression, there was more animation in the lieutenant's voice than Adele'd heard since the day Midshipman Dorst had died in battle. "I'm looking forward to relinquishing command. Five out."
"Six out," Daniel replied. He rose from his console. Adele turned when his image blurred from her display.
There were only five of them on the bridge. Daniel grinned and said, "I'm going to offer my resignation to Minister Lampert in the BDC now, I believe. Would any of you like to come along? We'll leave for theAgave in ten minutes."
"I'll wait," said Sun, intent on his display. "Somebody might try t'lift, you know?"
He really loves those heavy guns, Adele thought. Well, he was a gunner; he should. Sun didn't think of the result as ruin and charred corpses. Rather, it was the meaning in his life.
"Adele?" Daniel said.
She shook her head. "I'll stay at the equipment here until we leave the ship," she said. "Just in case."
Sun would understand. And of course Daniel understood also.
"Here you go, master," said Hogg, handing a sub-machine gun to Daniel. He took the weapon but frowned in surprise.
Hogg hefted his impeller. "Most of who's aboard isn't Sissies," he said, "and they been issued guns for the business out there. Just in case, you keep that with you."
He nodded at Adele and added with a touch of challenge, "Tovera's in the BDC. I told her I'd take care of things on the bridge so she could watch the wogs there. Understood?"
"I do indeed," said Daniel with a spreading smile. "And I assure you, Tovera isn't any more concerned about Officer Mundy's safety than I am."
Adele grimaced, but she didn't speak. Daniel strode off the bridge, cradling the sub-machine gun. He was whistling.
WhistlingThe Handsome Cabin Boy, Daniel sauntered toward the Battle Direction Center at the end of the A Deck corridor. Tovera stood in the hatchway; she gave him a glance and a cold smile, then returned her attention to the interior of the compartment.
"Her cheeks appeared like roses…," Daniel whistled as he stepped past her. Tovera lifted the muzzle of her sub-machine gun politely so that it didn't point at the middle of his back, but she didn't bother to greet him.
Daniel grinned. He preferred Tovera's silence to her speech. When she spoke, he felt as though he were talking with a viper sunning itself on a rock; albeit a very useful viper.
"Well, I'll tell you, Duncan!" said Blantyre, sitting at one of the star of five consoles in the center of the BDC. "If you don't think you can handle a ship that big with six men, then you've got a choice. You can get some of the Alliance crew to sign on with you, or you can bloody walk back to Pelosi! Now, make up your mind in the next three minutes or stay here and rot. Control Two out!"
James Shearman, a Power Room tech who'd been learning the rudiments of astrogation, sat at another of the consoles. He nodded awareness to Daniel but didn't speak. Seward was at the console nearest the hatch, but Lampert sat hunched on a bench folded down from the starboard bulkhead. When he looked up at Daniel's entry, his eyes were dull as mud.
Blantyre caught the motion in the corner of her eye and turned also. "Sorry, sir," she said. "I had to redirect Team Twelve toThe Cimmerian Queen because theSwordsmith 's High Drive motors had all been taken off. Not a bloody thing on record about it, but they were!"
"I'll send a strongly worded protest to the Harbormaster's Office, Blantyre," Daniel said dryly.
"What?" said Blantyre, blinking. She was a stocky woman, perhaps a hair too forceful but shaping into a very good officer. "Oh, sorry sir. Sorry. Anyway, theCimmerian 's nine thousand tonnes where theSwordsmith was twenty-three hundred, so Matt Duncan wants somebody to hold his hand. There's no time for that now, I figure."
"As do I," Daniel agreed. Changing tone slightly, he went on, "You and Shearman are ready to transfer to theAgave in a few minutes?"
"Yes sir," said Blantyre. "The forward party shifted our gear with their own."
"Roger that, Six!" said Shearman. He had straight black hair and was cultivating a thin moustache to make himself look older than his twenty standard years. It actually made him look more like a rat, but a very keen rat. "Ready and willing!"
Minister Lampert stared at Daniel, wringing his hands but saying nothing. Seward turned but didn't get up from his console. He said, "Are you going to let us go, Leary?"
When Seward moved, Daniel noticed that he was watching looped imagery of the attack on theSiegfried. Daniel found it odd to view a record of what he'd given only passing attention to after the first missile hit. At that point the guard ship was out of the war; the additional destruction was more a matter of embarrassment than pride. He couldn't have afforded to take a chance, though.
Daniel turned toward Lampert and made a slight bow. "I'm here to resign my commission," he said, "if that's what you mean. And-"
He returned to Seward.
"-surrender command of theLadouceur to you, Captain," he said with a smile. "I'm leaving you with a crew of two hundred and fourteen. That should be more than sufficient for your return to Pelosi, though I'll admit the prize crews have left you short of leading spacers and riggers more generally."
"That's not a proper crew for a light cruiser!" Seward said. "That's not half a proper crew."
"It's more than sufficient to work ship," said Daniel. "You'll want to avoid combat, of course, but-not to be pointed, Captain, but I'd have expected you to avoid combat regardless."
"You can't resign," said Lampert. He straightened on the bench and his voice grew stronger with each word. "You were dismissed. You're a pirate!"
The Minister was wearing clothing from the ship's stores, a coarse tunic and trousers with soft-soled boots. The dress uniform he'd boarded in was unsuitable for general use, even if it hadn't been soaked in blood and other matter when authority was transferred back to Daniel. Spacers' slops were unflattering garments at best, but Lampert looked like a burlap sack half-filled with beans.
"Well, that's one for the lawyers, I suppose, your Excellency," Daniel said with a bright smile. "In any case, theLadouceur will be in your hands, yours and Captain Seward's, just as soon as the last of the prizes have lifted. I brought those crews into the situation, so I feel responsible until they've gotten out again. Then I'll leave with my cadre, the Cinnabar contingent-"
He'd almost said, "My Sissies." The Bagarians might've misunderstood.
"-on another captured freighter. I wish you and the Bagarian Republic all deserved fortune." Daniel coughed, then added, "I programmed a course back to Pelosi by way of the Heart Stars, Captain, but that was just a courtesy. I have no desire to influence your actions after the moment I relinquish control."
"Sir," said Blantyre, "Duncan's closed up theCimmerian Queen. They'll be lifting in five."
"Ten, I suspect, Blantyre," Daniel said with a grin, "but I like to see optimism in my officers."
His face hardened, though his cheerful smile remained. He looked from Seward to Lampert.
"Captain, your Excellency?" he said. "I told you that I don't wish to influence your actions. I think I should mention, though, that while I'll be leaving theLadouceur 's guns in fully operable condition, it might be better if no one goes near that console until after my cadre and I have lifted on theAgave. You see, if there were an accident, well… ThePrincess Cecile 's in orbit and Captain Vesey-for all her other virtues-is notoriously without a sense of humor."
Daniel gestured to Seward. "Captain," he said, "you might want to explain to his Excellency precisely what it means to try to climb out of a gravity well with a hostile vessel in orbit above you."
Seward scowled. "Just leave, Leary," he said. "Nobody's asking more than that. Just leave."
"Quite," said Daniel, nodding. "I regret that matters didn't work out better between us, and I certainly understand your attitude. But one thing, Captain?"
He cleared his throat, then dipped his left index finger toward the imagery on Seward's display. It'd cycled around to theSiegfried 's fusion bottle venting again.
"You'll recall your guard ship ignoring thePrincess Cecile when we arrived above Pelosi," Daniel said. "Your colleague Captain Hoppler said something to the effect that the corvette was too small to be of concern, even if she'd been hostile. I led the way here in theLadouceur because she was already in the Alliance books with her authentications in place, but I assure you that theSissie 's two missiles per salvo would've been quite sufficient to eliminate any guard ship. They certainly would've eliminated a converted transport like theIndependence."
Seward glowered. Daniel smiled more broadly and said, "A word to the wise, is all."
"Sir," said Blantyre with a touch of urgency. "TheCimmerian 's running up her thrusters and they all read in the green."
"Thank you, Blantyre," said Daniel. "Inform the bridge crew that we're transferring to theAgave immediately, and inform theAgave that we're coming."
"Done, Six!" said Shearman, rising from the console.
"Then let's move, Sissies!" Daniel said, striding toward the hatch. He glanced over his shoulder and added, "You Excellency? I wish the best of luck to you and the Cluster, but you're in a real war now. If you ever forget that, it will go very badly for you all."
"It'd be kinder for me to shoot them now than leave them for the Guarantor's amusement," Tovera murmured as she followed Daniel out of the BDC. "Besides, I'dlike to do it."
The bridge party was on its way down the corridor from the other direction. Sun led, and Hogg was chivying along Adele and the civilian.
"I'm sure both those things are true, mistress," Daniel said. "Just the same, we're going to leave matters in the hands of the parties involved. Sometimes they'll surprise you in a good way."
But not this time, Daniel thought. Not Lampert and Seward. But he'd still leave it to them.
CHAPTER 24: One Light-Hour to the Solar North of Jewel
"Admiral Guphill's exercising his squadron off Zmargadine," said Daniel as he viewed the Jewel System on theSissie 's command console. The volume of space involved meant that even a gas giant like Zmargadine was an icon rather than a scaled image. "The ability to do that may be a bigger advantage to the Alliance than the numbers are, over."
He was speaking on the command channel so that all the commissioned and senior warrant officers could hear, but it was basically a tutorial for the midshipmen.
With the exception of Vesey, the others on the push didn't know or care about fleet tactics, and Vesey already knew this lesson.
Adele was listening also, in fact if not by right. When Daniel came to think, he realized that she might be interested in knowing simply because itwas knowledge. Adele was less likely to be directing a fleet in battle than even Woetjans was, but if it ever happened she'd already know the theory.
Daniel shrank his field of observation by orders of magnitude. The Alliance ships became beads with three-letter designators: PLE and FOR for the battleshipsPleasaunce andFormentera, with similar abbreviations for the fourteen lesser vessels exercising with them. They were several light minutes from Zmargadine, using the bulk of the giant planet to conceal their activities from observers on Diamondia. As Daniel watched-more accurately, an hour before Daniel's observation-the squadron vanished raggedly into the Matrix.
Daniel expanded his field of observation again, but for the time being he couldn't tell where the Alliance ships had gone. Guphill had probably taken them out in a wide sweep, making several doglegs a few light-days out from their base. The exercise would keep his crews sharp, and Admiral James' squadron wouldn't be able to take advantage of the brief Alliance absence. By the time the data'd been recorded and analyzed on Diamondia, Guphill's ships would've returned.
A pair of Alliance destroyers cruised in powered orbits at a comfortable distance from Diamondia while the minesweeping flotilla ground inexorably away at the planetary defense array. Nothing had changed there since thePrincess Cecile lifted for Pelosi, except that there were fewer mines. The deterioration wasn't significant yet, but its slope led inexorably toward the capture of Diamondia by Alliance forces.
Daniel shrank his field of view again, this time focusing on Zmargadine, its rings, and its dozen moons. The Alliance base was on Z3, an ice moon with standard gravity and easily-obtained reaction mass for the squadron. It was at present on the opposite side of its primary from Diamondia, so RCN observers there couldn't tell when ships lifted or set down.
"Signals," Daniel said. He considered shifting to a two-way link with Adele but decided this was legitimately business for the whole command group. "Do you have equipment which would punch a laser signal from Zmargadine's rings back to Diamondia? That is, equipment that could be used from an escape capsule, over?"
"Yes, of course," said Adele with her usual disregard for protocol. Perhaps she felt that the question touched her professional abilities. The Mundies of Chatsworth were-Daniel grinned-notably punctilious of their honor. "For it to work from a capsule, I'd have to operate it myself, though. What do you want me to do? Over."
"Signals, I can't afford to lose you from theSissie 's complement," Daniel said, nailing down the important part of the exchange first. "I'd like to put an observer in Zmargadine orbit, though. A capsule with everything but basic life support shut down could hide in the rings for months. That'd give us detailed information on how Admiral Guphill reacts when he gets orders from Pleasaunce."
He cleared his throat without closing, then said, "Might Cory be able to handle the equipment, over?"
"No," said Adele. The edge was certainly there this time. "I told you, I'd have to do it myself."
"Mistress, I'd try, over," said Cory quickly.
"Yes, of course you'd try," Adele snapped. "And I'd try to land a starship if I had to. But I'd fail and you'd fail at this, Cory, so stop making a fool of yourself!"
"Officer Mundy," a new voice said with a hint of tremolo. "This is Cazelet. I can keep the laser head manually aligned with Diamondia. Ah-what I can't do, though, is maneuver the escape capsule. I have some basic shiphandling, but keeping station and a line of sight to Diamondia within a ring system is realistically beyond me. If Midshipman Cory can pilot the capsule, though, I don't see a problem, over."
"Bloody Hell, Cazelet, this is thePrincess Cecile!" Daniel said. "Half the crew can plotz about in Zmargadine's rings without dinging anything badly. Woetjans, take care of it! Over."
"Roger, Six," said the bosun. She'd lost twenty pounds while hooked to the Medicomp, but her voice was strong and she'd made it clear that she was still theSissie 's bosun. "And it's more'n halfI'dsay. All my riggers anyhow, over."
"Officer Mundy," Daniel said. "Do you agree with the plan, over?"
There was a pause. Then Adele said, "Yes, I suppose I do. I… can vouch for Master Cazelet's skill with the equipment. Ah, over."
"Very good, then," said Daniel, feeling his cheeks crinkle with the breadth of his grin. By all the Gods, he had a crew here! And Cazelet too, it seemed: as surely as Hogg and Tovera were Sissies, so was this boy of Adele's. "Break. Ship, this is Six. We'll be making a quick side-jaunt into Zmargadine orbit to discharge cargo, then jumping straight to Diamondia since we've already got the codes for the defense array this time. It'll be a little hairy, fellow spacers, but nothing to us Sissies, right? Six out!"
He started programming the short insertion that'd take thePrincess Cecile into the third of Zmargadine's four belts of debris. It was the sort of maneuver that'd make most spacers blanch.
But as the cheers he'd deliberately provoked rang through the corvette's compartments, Daniel grinned. What he'd said was the truth, after all: it wasn't an unusual task for the crew of thePrincess Cecile.
"Mistress Mundy…?" said Cory over a two-way link. "Ah, this is Cory, mistress. Ah. I'm watching the sensor display. If you'd like to see your, ah, assistant off, I'm… well, I'm watching the sensors. And we won't be in normal space long, over."
Adele frowned. The fact that Cory'd asked meant he thought it was what she should do. Rene had, after all, taken on a task that was rightly hers. The capsule would be quite uncomfortable, not that a corvette was a luxury liner either, and the job was dangerous.
Likewise staying aboard thePrincess Cecile was dangerous, of course. Still.
"All right, Cory, thank you," Adele said. She rose from her console. Over the command channel she continued, "Commander Leary, I'm going down to the missile bay to see Cazelet before he, ah, leaves. If that's all right? Mister Cory will be on the board in my absence."
"Roger, Signals," said Daniel, turning his head from his display to look at her directly. "We'll be extracting from the Matrix in eight minutes, forty seconds. Over."
Tovera led the way off the bridge; she'd been listening to the exchange. Tovera's technical skills didn't permit her to circumvent the software blocks that protected Adele's console, but she'd put a transponder under the fascia which rebroadcast to her all conversations. Adele was aware of the bug, of course, but there was no reason Tovera shouldn't have complete access to her conversations.
The missile bays were on D level but well forward, so when Adele stepped into the corridor she had only a short further walk to the double-width hatch. Her footsteps and those of Tovera continued to whisper up and down the armored companionway like distant surf.
Inside the bay, the squat, blunt-nosed cylinder of an escape capsule waited to be inserted in the launch tube. The hatch was open, but Rene and the spacer who'd do the shiphandling were already aboard. Beside it stood Chief Missileer Borries, three technicians from his section, and to Adele's amazement Woetjans and Lieutenant Vesey.
Both rigging watches were on the hull, poised to react if anything malfunctioned while the corvette maneuvered in the Matrix. The two short transits that remained-into Zmargadine's ring system and from there into the planetary defense array protecting Diamondia-both required a great deal of precision. Adele'd expected Woetjans to be out with her riggers.
The bosun must've understood Adele's blink of startlement because she replied with an embarrassed smile. "Mistress," Woetjans said, "Six said Riley and Harrison'd do on the hull between them, but he wanted me to make sure the capsule gets away clean. Maybe he thinks there's still a stitch in my side from the slugs but, well, that's not what he said."
"Commander Leary's generally correct," Adele said coolly. Certainly he's right about Woetjans not straining herself on the hull in her present condition, though of course she didn't say that aloud. "I'm glad you and Officer Borries are both here."
Which left the question of what in heaven Vesey was doing in the missile bay instead of being in the BDC. Vesey flushed, but instead of answering the obvious question, she said, "Officer Mundy, I didn't know you'd be seeing Master Cazelet off."
"Cory said he'd handle the signals duties," Adele said. Vesey'snon sequitur seemed to require some sort of response, but the whole situation was baffling. "We'll only be in this location for a matter of minutes, after all. I can examine any new data while we're in the Matrix again."
"Mistress Mundy, I'm honored!" Rene said as he stuck his torso through the low-fitted hatch. He was wearing an air suit with the helmet off for the present. Escape capsules-Adele'd been transported in one above Kostroma-were pressurized, but they were so flimsy that passengers were safer wearing suits despite the discomfort that entailed.
"You're satisfied with the installation, then?" Adele said, kneeling so that she and Cazelet could look at one another without contortions on his part. She resisted an impulse to frown. What did the boy think she'd done to honor him or anyone else?
"Yes, mistress," he said. He stuck his arm outside and gestured toward the bow. "The antenna's welded on a stub mast to the nose. It'd be a problem in an atmosphere, but we won't be in one. And the controls-"
Rene backed so that Adele could see through the small hatch; he pointed to the panel clamped to a rack welded to the curved starboard bulkhead. The capsule's interior was spartan even by the standards of a prison.
"-are here. I've made sure everything moves, and if a joint binds after we're deployed, Matthews assures me we'll be able to go out and clear it."
The spacer sharing the capsule, a stocky woman, gave Adele a flat stare. She wore a rigging suit, again without the helmet. The three parallel scars on her right cheek appeared to be a result of ritual rather than injury.
"Very good," said Adele, straightening. She'd thought she was done speaking, but another point struck her.
"Ah, Cazelet," she said, kneeling again. "I don't expect the Alliance squadron to be keeping close watch for a boat like yours, but there are more than thirty ships including the minesweepers. If only one of them has a Signals officer who's doing her job, there's a chance that your transmissions will be observed."
"Mistress, it's low-power laser," Rene protested with a frown. "Unless they're virtually in line, I don't see how anyone could intercept my signals."
"You're in a ring system," Adele snapped. "That means there's a great deal of dust, which will scatter your signals to a degree no matter how tight they are at the sending head. It'll be faint, I grant you, butI would notice it. Don't ever assume that your opponent is incompetent."
She paused, then added in a softer tone, "Though goodness knows, that's where the balance of the probabilities lies. And not just your opponents."
"Yes, mistress," Rene said. "I apologize."
"Use your own judgment," Adele said, "of course. But I recommend you transmit only when you have something which won't appear to careful observers on Diamondia. I know it'll be difficult to seem to be doing nothing, but you may only get one chance to send information. Make sure it's the information we need."
Rene sucked in his lips and nodded.
"Ship," said Blantyre's voice over the PA system, "we'll extract from the Matrix in sixty, that's six-zero, seconds from-now!"
"Mistress, time to button up," Woetjans said. Adele scrambled back.
As Woetjans started to swing the hatch closed, the spacer inside the capsule called, "Don't worry, mistress. I'll bring your boy back to you!"
"Very good," Adele muttered, though she doubted anyone heard her over the clang of the hatch. It was simply polite chattering, after all, the sort of thing one said in a social situation. The Sissies were her family, so she made an effort to behave the way people were expected to behave in society.
The capsule rattled down its track, then vanished into the launching tube. Borries himself threw the switch for the hydraulic ram that closed the breech.
"I figured they'd be cooped up bugger knows how long," Woetjans said quietly to Adele. "That's why I left the hatch open to the last, you know? Besides for you, I mean."
"Very thoughtful, bosun," Adele said. She knew there were RCN bosuns with a reputation for knocking a spacer down to make sure he listened to the order that followed, but Woetjans clearly cared about her personnel. Not that she was slow to knock somebody down if she thought the circumstances called for it.
"Extracting…," Blantyre said. "Now!"
Adele's body vanished and her eyeballs turned inside out to engulf a whole universe of frozen crystal. Why did Blantyre think she had to inform anybody of the hell of extraction?
"Stand by to launch," Daniel said. "Launching."
With the word, the bay rang loudly. Adele had never been standing near a launch tube when a jet of live steam shoved an object out of the ship. From that standpoint, an escape capsule was no different from a missile.
"Preparing to insert into the Matrix," Daniel announced. "We will insert in three minutes thirty seconds. Repeat, we will insert in three minutes thirty seconds, out."
"We'll return to the bridge, Tovera," Adele said. She really had no idea of where the capsule had been placed, nor what was around it. Her instrumentation would have stored that information for her.
Vesey was staring at the launch tube. She didn't move. Adele couldn't see the lieutenant's face, but her hunched posture made her look anguished. Adele frowned, but it was none of her business unless Vesey brought a problem to her.
"Ah, mistress?" Woetjans said. "I know what you're maybe thinking with your friend and Matthews cooped up for so long, but you don't have to worry. Bird ain't going to get ideas, and if your friend maybe does-I'm not saying anything, but you know what men are like-Bird'll convince him otherwise. And likely without breaking anything major."
"I don't-" Adele said, the creases of her frown tightening. Then suddenly shedid understand. "By the Gods, Woetjans, you don't think…?"
She couldn't go on. She stared in opened-mouthed horror at the bosun.
Tovera giggled and touched Adele's sleeve. "Come along, mistress," she said. "You've business on the bridge."
Tovera was still giggling when they reached the companionway.