The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  The Chief Missileer’s screen was identical to Daniel’s, except that in addition to the pale blue missile tracks, there were four—

  “Launching five,” said Daniel’s voice. “Launching six.”

  —now six, additional white tracks leaving the Princess Cecile. Chazanoff was predicting that the Estremadura would appear at a slightly different location from the one which Daniel was targeting. At the speeds and distances involved in a space battle, the choice was of critical significance.

  The High Drive shut off. “Preparing to insert,” Vesey announced as the corvette drifted.

  The precursors of a ship extracting from the Matrix pulsed in the miniature PPI Adele had retained as a sidebar. Adele imported the new data to her echo of Chazanoff’s attack board.

  Chazanoff had been correct: the Estremadura was appearing where he, not Daniel, had predicted. The cruiser’s gunners wouldn’t burn out their cannon bores by firing at missiles which did not endanger their ship.

  “Inserting!” Vesey said. The Princess Cecile slid from the sidereal universe into the realm of infinite possibility

  ***

  Daniel was breathing hard, both in response to the past half hour and to what was certainly going to happen when they extracted again in approximately ninety seconds. Even if things went as well as he could hope, the Sissie was in for a bad time. The possibilities ranged downward from there, and perhaps a long way downward.

  “Command,” he said, keying the system. He had considered using the general push since he liked to keep all the ship’s personnel informed about what was going on, but present matters were really for the command group alone. He didn’t want his officers to feel that they were being judged in front of an audience of their juniors.

  “Missileers, as soon as we’ve extracted, launch at maximum rate toward what you predict as the position at which the Estremadura will extract. Continue launching after the enemy appears, until and unless I countermand these orders.”

  All he could hope from missiles launched on this extraction was to attract the Estremadura’s attention, but that was an extremely valuable asset. It was certainly more valuable than retaining the missiles in the Sissie’s magazine to add to the value of the loot she would offer to her captors.

  “Gunners,” Daniel continued, “you may open fire as soon as your target appears. She’ll be out of effective range, but what happens to your gun tubes is less important than making the enemy feel threatened.”

  Daniel had kept the missileers and gunners both on a short leash while preparing for this moment. That had been necessary, and he certainly didn’t apologize for it: he was the captain and he would have been shirking his duties if he hadn’t given the commands he felt were necessary.

  Nonetheless, it pleased him to know how thrilled Chazanoff and Sun—as well as their mates, if the Chiefs were willing to give them a piece of it—were allowed to do their jobs however they pleased. Even aboard a ship that saw as much action as the Princess Cecile did, the gunner and missileers spent almost all their time running simulations.

  “Bosun, all your riggers should be within the hull,” Daniel said. “Are they all inside, respond please, over?”

  “Aye, they are,” said Woetjans in a growl of frustrated anger. “We ought to have a squad on the hull, though, even if you are Six, out.”

  Simply the fact that the bosun spoke proved to Daniel that she had obeyed his orders. Woetjans would never have ordered her riggers onto dangerous duty without joining them herself.

  Woetjans didn’t have to agree with Daniel’s assessment, she just had to obey it. In the present case, his assessment was that it wouldn’t be dangerous to have riggers on the hull when the Princess Cecile extracted this time: it would be suicidal.

  Daniel would spend his spacers if he had to. He was the captain of a warship, and that meant sometimes having to send personnel to their deaths. He wasn’t going to throw his Sissies’ lives away for nothing, though.

  Aloud he said, “Bosun, I’m going to need your people badly when we repair our rigging after we’ve defeated the Estremadura. I have no intention of putting them outside now to be fried while the sails are.”

  He looked at the clock counting down on his screen. “I am taking the conn,” he said. “Break. Ship, we are extracting.”

  Daniel thumbed the toggle. He didn’t have vernier control at this station as he did on the command console, but the simple electronic in/out was the correct choice this time.

  The Princess Cecile dropped into normal space and the certainty of battle.

  “Launching one!” said Chazanoff. The clang! of his release blurred the final syllable.

  “Launching two!” said Fiducia, a little quicker off the mark than would ideally been the case. Still, the corvette’s tubes were on opposite sides of the hull so the missiles themselves wouldn’t affect one another. The danger was that the hull, flexing as it expelled a five-ton projectile, would bind the second missile in its tube.

  That was unlikely at any time. Under the present circumstances, the possibility could scarcely be said to increase the Sissie’s danger at all.

  Rocker made a minute adjustment to the ventral gun turret. Like the Chief Missileer, Sun was sharing the duties with his subordinate. It was probable that the Princess Cecile would be taking damage very shortly, and splitting control between the bridge and the BDC from the beginning would make for a smoother handoff if one or the other specialist were incapacitated.

  Were maimed. Killed. Completely obliterated.

  Daniel grinned. Or not, of course.

  “Launching three!” followed by, “Launching four!”

  Even over the intercom, Daniel could hear the excitement in the missileers’ voices. Well, excitement and the strain of acceleration.

  He had considered getting the rig in before the Sissie extracted this time, but the antennas and sails would go some way toward protecting their hull against the punishment of the Estremadura’s guns. The anti-pirate cruiser’s 10-centimeter weapons were actually less affected by the sails than heavier cannon would have been, because their high rate of fire allowed them to clear fabric with one bolt and follow it quickly with another bolt and many after that.

  “Launching five!” said Chazanoff.

  “Launching six!” echoed Rocker.

  A ship began to congeal out of the Matrix some 23,000 miles from the Princess Cecile. The missileers’ predictions had been quite good: at least three of the recent launches were tracking toward the target, and the other three would inhibit the Estremadura’s opportunities to maneuver—if the cruiser bothered to maneuver, which it would not.

  The corvette’s four plasma cannon began to fire, but at their low rate, fifteen rounds per minute per tube, rather than the high rate of double that. The Estremadura was still out of range, and Sun knew that high rate would erode the bores logarithmically faster than a rhythm which permitted the bores to clear and cool between shots.

  Sun was a skilled expert. A sleet of ions, even if it was too dispersed to do real damage, would make the recipients nervous and might cause them to make mistakes. He was doing his best to keep his tubes functional for when the range closed to where 4-inch bolts were effective on a ship’s hull. Given the cruiser’s proper velocity, that would be very soon.

  The Estremadura snapped into normal space; a box on Daniel’s attack board read est and would expand to full particulars if he highlighted it. He grinned, because the expression was natural to him. He didn’t need to check the data bank to know what they were facing.

  The cruiser began firing very quickly. There was always a delay while personnel recovered from the transition, and for the Estremadura as well as for the her quarry, the quickly repeated in-and-out would have been wearing.

  The complements of both vessels were used to the experience. That didn’t make a repetition less painful, but it taught them to function despite the pain.

  The Sissie’s missileers knew where their target would appear. Likewis
e, the Estremadura’s gunners knew where to lay their cannon before they extracted.

  The three missiles which Daniel had considered dangerous tumbled from their courses one after another. The cruiser carried its cannon in individual mountings, but they appeared to be salvoed in groups of four or even all six—the other two did not bear on the target from this angle—at a time.

  Then for good measure, the other three missiles ruptured and spun hopelessly off course. A missile’s body was merely a thin tube. Most of the mass was concentrated in the solid frontal portion. A plasma bolt flash-heated the reaction mass to steam which thrust the missile in the opposite direction.

  “Launching seven! Launching eight!” said the missileers. They were RCN. You don’t stop trying simply because you know that you’ll fail.

  The Princess Cecile shuddered as though she were entering a planetary atmosphere. This buffeting was from the Estremadura’s guns, which had switched their aim to the corvette. Sail fabric vanished; steel masts and yards sublimed into balls of gas which rattled nearby tubes and slapped the hull itself. The noise deafened anyone aboard without sound-cancelling headgear.

  Some bolts hammered the hull directly, but the range was still too great for a single round to penetrate. The range was closing quickly.

  The Sissie’s guns were now firing on high rate, but the recoil that would have been wracking by itself was lost in the cacophony of the incoming bolts. The dorsal turret halted, then resumed with single shots. Either the Estremadura had hit the turret, or a gun had failed from the stress of action.

  “Launching—” Chazanoff began.

  A segment of missile moving at .007 light speed passed ahead of the Estremadura at a quartering angle. The separation was too close for the Princess Cecile’s sensors to determine without processing, but it was certainly less than a hundred feet and might have been within the thickness of a coat of paint.

  “What the bloody hell!” Chazanoff screamed.

  A second projectile hit the Alliance cruiser at the base of a dorsal antenna. At the combined velocity, tons of steel expanded as a ball of white-hot gas, throwing the Estremadura into a cartwheel and stripping off all but the ventral antennas on her aft four rings.

  “Ship,” said Daniel. He had almost forgotten his duties in his sudden delight. “Cease fire, I repeat, cease fire. They’re done, Sissies! We’ve won!”

  Her hull probably hasn’t been penetrated, Daniel thought, but the whipping from a punch like that must have started every seam.

  Another segment passed through the gas ball, swirling eddies into the glowing steel. This projectile would have hit the Estremadura amidships if the previous glancing blow hadn’t shoved her out of the way.

  I doubt any of the crew will thank me if we happen to meet in the future, though, Daniel thought.

  The Sissie’s ventral turret fired five more rounds before responding to the cease-fire order. Daniel could have locked the gunnery and missile consoles if he had wanted to, but a few unnecessary rounds into a beaten enemy weren’t the worst thing that could happen in wartime.

  He hadn’t been at all sure that the Estremadura would have given quarter to the corvette’s crew if the battle had gone the other way. From Adele’s description of how the cruiser’s corporate masters had fared on the other end of the Sissie’s guns, they at least would have been pleased to learn there were no survivors.

  Daniel let out a deep breath. Then, grinning like a happy cherub, he said, “Ship! Up Cinnabar! Up the RCN!”

  Then he closed his eyes for a moment and let the cheers roll over him.

  ***

  Adele put the battle, starting with the appearance of the Estremadura, on a loop as soon as she had cleaned it up. None of the lenses had taken a direct hit, but side-scatter from the cruiser’s bolts had degraded the exterior sensors. Adele’s software reduced the blurring, though she had been careful not to let it give the imagery the gloss that screamed “Fake!” to a viewer.

  She had then made a shorter loop of the climax: the Estremadura suddenly silhouetted against the white flare that scoured her aft hull as bare as a rock in the desert. That was the scene that the spacers would watch over and over again when they returned from cleaning up the damage and getting a rig of some sort back on what remained of the Sissie’s antennas and yards.

  Adele was probably the only person aboard the Princess Cecile who was unhappy; angry, even. Oh, they were all alive, and they had defeated a more powerful enemy vessel by a masterstroke; that was certainly good.

  But Officer Mundy had watched the whole thing take place, and she still did not understand what had happened. She was angry with herself.

  Pursing her lips, Adele got up and walked the two steps across the bridge to stand beside the astrogation console. “Lieutenant Cory?” she said. “Do you have time to explain to me what happened to the Estremadura?”

  Adele had checked what Cory was doing before she spoke, of course. He was the watch officer, since Daniel was out on the hull clearing damage and Vesey had used her rank to insist that she be permitted to go out also. She wasn’t as physically strong as Cory, and brute force was what the present job needed; but Vesey didn’t want the reputation of a clever officer who was unfortunately too frail for hard work.

  Cory looked up in surprise. He was going over course plots to Tattersall, comparing his own with the proposals Vesey and Daniel had filed. Cory wasn’t vain; he was probably determining where he had gone wrong so as to do a better job the next time.

  “Mistress?” he said, pleasantly surprised. “Why, yes. Won’t you—”

  He looked nonplussed for a moment.

  “—ah, well, sit down?” He gestured toward the training seat of his console; then, diffidently, hooked his thumb toward the signals console and added, “Unless you…?”

  Adele folded down the jumpseat and sat primly, facing Cory. Using her data unit, she expanded the console’s active sound cancellation to include both of them. Otherwise the buzz of the High Drive combined with the metallic shrieks and hammering from the hull would require that that shout unless they wanted to use the intercom.

  “Thank you, Cory,” Adele said, meeting the young officer’s eyes directly. He had shrunk his display when she accepted his offer. “I’m punishing myself for not being able to figure the business out by myself.”

  Cory blinked to hear that. He didn’t protest that she shouldn’t feel that way or any of the other nonsense with which people tended to respond to the blunt truth. If he didn’t understand Adele, he at least understood how she reacted to what she considered to be failures.

  “Well, it was a slick piece of work,” Cory said, grinning slowly. “Even for Six, ma’am. And I’ll bet the cruiser’s officers still don’t know what hit them. The ones that’re still around to wonder, I mean.”

  He brought up an attack board. Adele frowned. It was not the layout of the battle just over but rather that of the first exchange with the Estremadura, when the corvette fled as soon as the cruiser extracted.

  “You see,” Cory said, “the problem was that the Alliance pilot was extracting too close for missiles to be effective. Not on top of us, but out just far enough that they could gut our missiles as quick as we launched.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Adele said. She frowned again. Cory was overlaying missile tracks, but they were Chazanoff’s preferred—and more accurate—plots, not the actual launches Daniel had made.

  “But what Six did was this,” Cory said enthusiastically, adding the real tracks of Daniel’s missiles. “Which are far enough off that the Estremadura wasn’t going to bother about them, but they look like they’re aimed to hit, right? So her captain doesn’t think anything about them, and the Matrix pilot they’ve got out on the hull doesn’t even know they’ve been launched. You see?”

  “Daniel—” she said but caught herself. She began again, stating rather than asking, “Captain Leary aimed at the point where the target would extract after the next insertion, not the current extrac
tion. The missiles had broken into segments, and they were at terminal velocity when they hit the Estremadura. The Estremadura’s crew wasn’t expecting attack from that angle anyway.”

  She smiled faintly and added, “I understand now, Cory. Thank you.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked without the Alliance pilot being so bloody good,” Cory said, shaking his head at the recollection. “Say, I wonder if he was a Palmyrene? Do you think so?”

  “I can check the information from Cremona and possibly find an answer,” Adele said with a shrug. “If he was on the hull when the missile hit, I suppose he’s dead now.”

  “I bloody well hope so!” Cory said with unexpected venom. “He just about turned my hair white, I’ll tell you.”

  The airlock in the rotunda cycled open. Daniel stamped in, holding his helmet, with a lock-full of riggers and technicians behind him. The Estremadura’s gunfire had damaged the propulsion system as well as the rigging, though Adele had the impression that it wouldn’t affect them too badly.

  “It’ll take a dockyard to get us back to where we want to be,” Daniel said cheerfully, unlatching his hard suit as he entered the bridge, “but in ten minutes we should be ready to insert. I think we can make Tattersall in five days, and just possibly we might be a little luckier than that.”

  Adele rose, but she waited for Daniel to get out of his suit. Under ordinary circumstances he would have stripped it off in the rotunda, but he had obviously wanted to get back to where he belonged after fighting the recent battle from the BDC.

  A rigger gathered up the sections of Daniel’s suit and went off to stow them. Adele crossed to her proper station, and Daniel settled onto the command console with a sigh of relief.

  He opened his eyes and grinned broadly. “By all that’s holy!” he said. “There’s never been a better crew than my Sissies. Never!”

  Yes, Daniel, Adele thought as she reviewed the imagery of the Alliance cruiser flaring into impotent ruin. The Princess Cecile has exactly the kind of crew that its captain deserves.

  CHAPTER 26: Above Tattersall