The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  Because Vesey was intelligent and extremely skilled, the first choice off the top of her head was likely to be the correct one. Whether or not it was the best possible choice, remaining frozen by indecision—her natural response—was certainly the worst choice in a crisis.

  It had to be very hard for her, though. Adele had once allowing a brute to strip-search her so that she could carry out her mission. It had been necessary, so she had accepted it. She was, after all, an RCN officer.

  As was Lieutenant Vesey. A very good officer, now seated at the command console of the most efficient ship in the RCN.

  “Ship, extracting in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds,” Vesey announced. The riggers stepped to the edges of the rotunda, ready either to let the hull watch enter without congestion or to rush out to join them if the situation required.

  “We’re extracting three light minutes out from Sunbright,” Cory said, continuing his conversation with Adele. “This is just to get us away from the cruiser so that we can build up velocity in normal space. No matter how good Six is—or Vesey, of course—it’d take us a month to reach Hester with no more way on than we had when we inserted.”

  “Extracting,” Vesey said.

  Because Adele wasn’t lost in the data on her display, the transition struck her with unexpected savagery: her left eye flared with rings of rosy light, and the right side of her body felt as though it were being shredded with garden cultivators. She gasped and dropped her right stylus.

  The High Drive slammed on again, though this time without the thrusters added. Adele called up the system schematic to see how much reaction mass remained.

  She became furious at her mistake. As soon as she had the answer—7%—she realized that she could not, and had known she could not, interpret the data.

  “Master Cory,” Adele said, speaking formally because of her embarrassment. “How serious is our lack of reaction mass, if you please?”

  “Well, bad and not bad, mistress,” Cory said. “We’ve got plenty to get to get to Hester. Other than go back to Sunbright, though, that’s about the choice. Once we get to Hester we’ll be fine from there to Madison if that’s where we’re going. Or even Kronstadt, though we’ll only be filling the aft tank instead of both.”

  Adele frowned, but the only really foolish thing she could do at this point would be to fail to ask for clarification when she lacked the knowledge to answer her own question. “Why won’t we fill both tanks, please?”

  “Oh, well, because we’d contaminate what’s left in the bow tank,” Cory said. He didn’t sound surprised, let alone exasperated, by the question, so perhaps it wasn’t as foolish as Adele had thought. “The antimatter converters work on any fluid, but if we run sulfuric acid through the water purification system, it’ll eat the guts out and then we’d have nothing to drink.”

  “Ah,” said Adele. “Thank you, Cory.”

  She noticed the precursor effects of a ship extracting before the watch officers did; perhaps she had her console set to higher sensitivity, perhaps it was just that she was expecting this to happen.

  “Daniel, there’s a ship coming,” she said sharply. With a heartbeat more to remember that Daniel wasn’t in the command console, she added, “Ship, another ship’s—”

  The High Drive switched off.

  “—appearing close by, over.”

  In a moment she could read the scale and calculate the distance from the newcomer to the Sissie. It wasn’t second nature to her, though, as it would have been to one of the ship’s officers.

  “Inserting!” Daniel said. The Princess Cecile shuddered out of normal space with what seemed to Adele to be a nasty corkscrew motion that only affected her lower legs. She wondered if that had something to do with the fact that Daniel hadn’t allowed as much time as usual between shutting down the High Drive and insertion.

  “Daniel,” Adele said. Visual identification of the newcomer would not be certain at the point when the Sissie left sidereal space, but the electronic signature was. “The other ship is the Estremadura. She tracked us through the Matrix.”

  “Roger,” said Daniel. “Break. Ship, this is Six. I have the conn, out.”

  Lieutenant Vesey had done exceptionally well. Nevertheless, Adele was sure that Vesey breathed a sigh of relief at those words like everyone else on the corvette.

  It was time for the first team to take over.

  ***

  Daniel had the calculated courses of the Estremadura and the Princess Cecile on his display, but he shrank the hologram because he wasn’t watching it anyway. Within fifteen seconds of when the corvette had dropped into the Matrix, her enemy would have been close enough to anchor her in sidereal space if her gunners were good enough.

  The Estremadura’s gunners were good enough.

  The consoles in the Battle Direction Center faced inward in a five-pointed star. To Daniel’s left was Fiducia; then Rocker; and Blumelein, a Technician Third Class who would be in charge of the fusion bottle if something happened to the Power Room crew. The chance of there being a fusion bottle if the whole Power Room crew was incapacitated seemed to Daniel to be vanishingly unlikely, but he didn’t argue against what Chief Pasternak considered a reasonable precaution.

  Midshipman Cazelet, backing up the astrogation officer, sat to Daniel’s right. He faced his display, but his hands didn’t move and he was watching Daniel out of the corners of his eyes.

  Grinning, Daniel turned to him and said, “If you’re hoping I’ll turn into a beautiful woman and pledge you my undying devotion, Cazelet, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

  The midshipman cringed. He still didn’t look directly at Daniel. “Sir,” he said, “I’m—”

  He composed himself and faced Daniel with a shy smile. “I didn’t want to disturb you, sir,” he said. “I don’t see any alternative except proceeding to Hester 27514CH at our present rate, and I’m afraid that the Estremadura would be able to pursue us even there.”

  Daniel chuckled. To put the midshipman at his ease, he said, “How long would the voyage take, Cazelet.”

  “Seventeen days,” Cazelet answered without hesitation. “That is, I estimate seventeen days. But you can probably cut time from that, sir.”

  “Though not enough to matter, I think,” Daniel said cheerfully. It cheered him up to learn—he’d expected it, but the confirmation was nice—that Cazelet had not only plotted the course to Hester but had already calculated the time it would take the Princess Cecile to arrive if she were not able to accelerate beyond her current modest sidereal velocity. Vesey, Cory, and Cazelet were all first-rate astrogators, and Daniel Leary could justly claim a portion of their skill for his own efforts.

  Fiducia was listening to the conversation as best he could, Rocker might be, and Blumelein was wholly lost in her display. Daniel didn’t mind others listening to this conversation if they wanted to, but he was treating it as a discussion with a fellow officer whose opinion he could pretend to value. He did value Cazelet, of course, but at present all he wanted from his subordinate was a way to rigorously check his own speculations.

  “Sir?” Cazelet said. “How are they able to track us in the Matrix? I mean, the Palmyrenes did, but they were conning their cutters from out on the hull.”

  “Well, partly…” Daniel said, “they’ve got somebody good piloting them from the hull, yes. Somebody better than me, certainly. I don’t know whether they’ve got anything as sophisticated as the mechanical hull controls that the Palmyrenes used, but there’s something. And it looks like her owners hired the pick of the specialists they wanted when the Fleet put ships in ordinary when the Treaty of Amiens was signed.”

  As Daniel spoke, he brought up his course calculations. The Sissie was proceeding on Vesey’s track, not his own, but he doubted there was a whit of difference between them.

  Which was the problem. The route from Sunbright to Hester 27514CH was straightforward and short—only about three days if the Princess Cecile had been able to a
ccelerate in normal fashion. Woetjans would have arrived at virtually the same solution by pushing buttons on the astrogation computer.

  “They know where we’re going,” Daniel mused aloud. “I was able to shake them when the Savoy lifted from Madison because they didn’t expect me to strike straight for Sunbright. Once they’d realized that I hadn’t set a course for Cremona, it was too late for them to pick up our track.”

  He gestured to the display. Cazelet couldn’t see the data, but Daniel wasn’t really speaking to the midshipman.

  “Now, we have nowhere to go except to the water point or back to Sunbright. If we return to Sunbright, the Estremadura won’t catch us but the Funnel Squadron certainly will. I don’t know precisely how Governor Blaskett will respond, but I don’t expect it will be a pleasant meeting after we’ve committed piracy. And there’s Grant on board, of course.”

  “If we can’t run, sir,” said Cazelet, frowning, “what other choice do we have?”

  Daniel shouted a laugh and slapped the fascia plate of the console with both open hands. “Yes!” he said. “Of course, Cazelet, thank you!”

  Daniel switched his display to an attack screen. He began entering calculations.

  “Sir?” Cazelet said diffidently. “I don’t follow you.”

  “We’re RCN,” said Daniel in a tone of pleased wonder. “We can attack. We can always attack.”

  ***

  “Well, Sissies,” Daniel said. “I believe we’ve run long enough. It’s time to change the game.”

  To Adele, his voice sounded calm but forceful. That was a fairly accurate description of Daniel under most circumstances.

  “The Alliance cruiser which is pursuing us,” he continued, “is being conned very ably from her hull. Whenever we extract from the Matrix, she follows. What I propose to do at our next extraction is to launch two or I hope three pairs of missiles toward the point where our past experience predicts the cruiser will extract. We will insert again and very shortly extract a second time to repeat the process if necessary.”

  The plan sounded reasonable on its face. She lacked the expertise to determine whether it really could work, but Daniel was as good a judge of that question as anyone she could think of. For the first time since the Estremadura reappeared, Adele could imagine a future which did not involve either capture by Alliance forces or execution out of hand by the crew of the cruiser whose paymasters had been bankrupted when the Princess Cecile took her leave from Cremona.

  “We’ll be making quick insertions and extractions, Sissies,” Daniel said. “We’ve done that before. Because we’ve done it, we remember how bloody awful it is, and how much we all prayed that we’d never have to do it again. Well, we have to, it’s that simple, so that’s what we’ll do. I have nothing more to say except this: RCN forever!”

  The cheers that followed were real and expected, which made Adele smile wryly. Being on a ship in the Matrix was uncomfortable for human beings. The environment led to hallucinations or perhaps to visions of things which were real—somewhere or somewhen—and were therefore even more uncomfortable to consider.

  But the transition between normal space and the Matrix was infinitely worse than time spent beyond the barrier between universes. Sequencing back and forth quickly from one state to the other could leave even veteran spacers vomiting or unconscious on the deck.

  As Daniel said, it was necessary. A spacer who pretended that “necessary” allowed him to choose was very quickly dead.

  Adele kept the faces of fellow officers as small insets at the top of her screen. To her surprise, Sun looked doubtful instead of enthusiastic as she expected from him when they were about to see action. She echoed his display and found that though he had a gunnery board up, he wasn’t participating in the computerized training scenario.

  “Master Sun?” she said on a two-way link. The gunner wasn’t actively involved in the immediate problem, and he certainly looked as though he would appreciate having his thoughts diverted from their present course. “Why do you doubt the success of Captain Leary’s plan?”

  “I never said—” the gunner blurted, spinning to stare at her. He saw only Adele’s profile, of course. Though they were at adjacent consoles, she preferred to communicate through a filter. Her holographic display provided the illusion of distance even when the reality was less comfortable.

  Sun’s horror relaxed into a rueful smile. “No point in trying to kid you, is there, ma’am?” he said. “Look, Six is playing some game, I know he is; but what he says he’s doing, that won’t work. The gunners on that Alliance bitch are just too good, though I hate to say it, over.”

  “Explain what you mean, please,” Adele said. Experts often assumed that when they had given an answer, the steps by which they had arrived at the answer were obvious to their listeners. That was even true—

  She smiled very faintly.

  —of experts in data collection and sorting.

  “Well, ma’am, it’s like this,” Sun said, turning his attention toward his display but replacing the training scenario with a blank screen. He either realized that Adele would be echoing it or he had forgotten about her in his focus on the question. “We come out—”

  A blue bead appeared, though at the front in the lower right corner rather than in the usual center of the display.

  “—here. And they come out here—”

  The red bead appeared kitty-corner from the blue one on the three-dimensional display, on top at the upper back.

  “—always at the same vector, which they do because that gives them the best angle for their guns. So Six knows where they’ll be, right enough, and if nothing else happened I’d lay odds on him fixing their wagon just like he plans. But we’re too close and their gunners, they won’t let it happen!”

  Adele frowned. I need to show more charity toward people who are puzzled by what I say, she thought.

  She regretted displaying her ignorance so abjectly, but it was better to seem foolish than to take the foolish option of remaining needlessly ignorant. She said, “How is being close a problem, Sun? That leaves less time for the enemy gunners to nudge our missiles out of the way, does it not?”

  Missiles weighed five tons apiece and achieved their effects by kinetic energy. They separated into three pieces after they had run all their reaction mass through the High Drive motor which accelerated them to a noticeable fraction of light speed.

  There was no way to stop an incoming missile; a target could either dodge it or redirect it with plasma bolts. The metal which a bolt sublimed from one side of a missile shoved the remainder of the projectile in the opposite direction. Skillfully used, plasma cannon could save a ship which was, after all, a point target at the ranges of a normal space battle.

  “If they’re reached burnout, sure,” said Sun, but he wasn’t agreeing. He pointed to his display. “But ours won’t, you see? They’ll still have half their reaction mass aboard, and that means—”

  Pairs of azure tracks as fine as spider webs spread from the blue dot toward the projected course of the red dot. One by one, the tracks broke into wobbling spirals. None of them intersected the red dot or even its course.

  “—they’ll blow up when the gunners catch them. Which they will, as sure as we’re sitting on the Sissie’s bridge, ma’am. The reaction mass will boil and burst the tank, and the gods alone know where the missile goes off to. It can’t work.”

  “I see,” said Adele. Her mind considered the options. Then, with what for her was a broad smile, she said, “That means there’s a factor we aren’t considering, Sun. I have no idea what it might be, but I’m certain there must be one. If this were a desperation play that Daniel didn’t believe could work, he would have said so.”

  “Extracting,” Vesey said.

  The Princess Cecile dropped into sidereal space like light striking a prism. Adele felt ice in her bone marrow, but it was a sensation rather than pain. Her mind was focused on the information appearing on her display. The Princess Cecile
began to accelerate at the highest rate possible with the High Drive alone.

  “Launching one,” Daniel announced. A jet of steam, expanding so quickly that it rang like a hammerblow, shoved the missile out of its launch tube. The High Drive motor didn’t light until it was in vacuum where the corrosive exhaust would not damage the Sissie’s fabric.

  “Launching two,” and another clang! that rocked the ship and startled anyone who wasn’t familiar with the sequence of events.

  Cranes had shifted missiles from the two magazines onto roller tracks. They had started rumbling toward the launch tubes even before the first salvo had left the ship. Because the missiles were so heavy, every stage of the process made the hull tremble as much as the straining High Drive motors did.

  Pistons shoved the missiles into the corvette’s pair of tubes. The Princess Cecile’s rate of fire was only half that of a destroyer and a tiny fraction of what a battleship could launch in a single salvo. Still, a well-aimed missile from the Sissie would finish any target.

  Vesey had the conn, so Daniel must consider the attack to be the critical part of his plan. Chief Missileer Chazanoff was very able, or he wouldn’t have been a member of the Sissie’s crew. He wouldn’t publically object to Captain Leary pushing him out of his job, but it would offend him. Daniel treated his officers with as much consideration as possible, so he must not have thought he had time to explain the situation to Chazanoff and leave the execustionexecution in his hands.

  “Launching three,” Daniel said. “Launching four.”

  The ringing launches followed his calmly spaced words. It was possible for a missile’s track to perturb that of another launched at the same time, so Daniel was providing a two-second delay. He sounded as though he had nothing more on his mind than the question of what to have for lunch.

  Because Adele had been considering Chazanoff’s reaction, she echoed his display for a moment. She didn’t expect to make any sense of it—it was an attack board, as she had expected—but though the columns of numbers were meaningless, the schematics seemed clear enough.