by David Drake
Adele looked at him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever before seen an expression as bleak as hers.
“I’d rather a lot of things, Daniel,” Adele said. Then to Tovera in a voice like a whiplash, “Get moving! If he doesn’t recover, I’ll have you whipped out of my sight if I have to hire an army to do it!”
Tovera wiped the blade on the Bagarian’s tunic, then flipped the knife to Hogg to close and pocket again. She took the guard’s shoulders and lifted; he moaned softly. Hogg undogged the hatch and tugged it open before bending to take the ankles.
Adele settled back onto her console. “I’m going to call the Skye Benevolent Society,” she said, “and request that Secretary Yager return to us the items Tovera and I left there. I’ll feel more comfortable with my own tools. I don’t know that Tovera cares—”
She glanced down the corridor as Hogg and Tovera disappeared into the Medicomp amidships. The cruiser had two, here in officers’ country and on Level C where the enlisted personnel bunked.
“—but she’s a loyal retainer of the House of Mundy. I’ll not cause her to lose her possessions if I can avoid it.”
“Yes, all right,” Daniel said. “I’d like to lift within the hour, but realistically it’ll take longer than that to organize matters here. And if we had to wait a few minutes longer yet, the delay wouldn’t be critical.”
“Where are you going?” Lampert said. He remained kneeling with his eyes closed. The lids quivered upward minusculely, then squeezed firmly shut again. Tears dripped slowly down his cheeks.
“We’re going to raid Castle Four,” Daniel said cheerfully. He was setting up the courses, a task he found familiar and congenial. With astrogation to occupy his mind, he could ignore the mingled smells of blood, feces, and the bite of ozone from the coil-gun discharges. “The Ladouceur in company with the Princess Cecile, that is.”
“Let me go,” Lampert whispered. “I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you anything you ask. Don’t take me off to be killed, please.”
“Oh, it’ll be dangerous, I grant,” said Daniel, “but scarcely a suicide mission. The Alliance isn’t expecting a raid into their home system. If we make a quick job of it, I think there’s a very high likelihood of not only getting in but also getting out with twenty or so prizes. Think of the value of twenty prizes, Your Excellency! And the Ministry’s share is an eighth, remember.”
Seward was awake, but when Daniel glanced at him he closed his eyes and pretended still to be unconscious. Hoppler groaned softly.
“The crew doesn’t seem disposed to show itself, let alone make trouble,” Daniel said, speaking to Adele but perfectly willing to be overheard by the Bagarians present. “When Hogg and Tovera return, I’ll have them carry Captain Hoppler to the Medicomp also. We’ll need him fit when we get to Castle Four.”
“Why?” said Lampert. His voice sounded like leaves rattling through a graveyard.
“We’ll need everyone we’ve got who can program an astrogational computer,” Daniel explained. “We’ll have enough personnel to form crews for twenty prizes, but that’s no good unless they can navigate the ships back to Pelosi, you see?”
He grinned broadly. It was absolutely necessary that the captured vessels all start back toward the Bagarian Cluster. Most of them wouldn’t make it, of course, not if they were relying on computer solutions which would be completely predictable to the Alliance forces who responded to the raid.
But Daniel, as Minister Lampert’s orders made clear, no longer had a position in or duties toward the Independent Republic of Bagaria. He was an RCN officer, pure and simple, and he very definitely had duties to Cinnabar.
Chapter Twenty-two
ABOVE CASTLE FOUR
“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.
The Ladouceur 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.
The Ladouceur had initially dipped into sidereal space forty-five light-minutes down-sun from Castle Four. That allowed 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 guardship Siegfried in planetary orbit.
Astrogation, even over short intra-system distances, was partly a matter of chance even for Daniel. Still, the Ladouceur 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 the Siegfried.
Adele adjusted one of her laser transceivers to bear directly on the guardship. “AFS Siegfried,” 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 AFS Victoria 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 the Siegfried’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.”
The Ladouceur’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 the Victoria Luise,” Adele said. She was keeping the exchange boringly formal, hoping that would lull any concerns of the Siegfried’s crew. “We were directed here from Tadzhik where the Hildebrandt replaced us as guardship. 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. The Victoria Luise had been stationed on Tadzhik briefly, but that’d been eighteen standard years earlier. If the Siegfried’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 the Ladouceur 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 the Ladouceur 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 take hours 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 cargoes 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. “I have no 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 ship Star of Acapulco. Captain Hoppler himself, with twenty-four spacers whom he’d commanded on the Sacred 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 the Ladouceur 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 Three 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. The Ladouceur 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 the Princess Cecile or a converted freighter like the Sacred 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 the Siegfried had noticed that the “Victoria Luise” was launching missiles, but they would notice six-inch plasma bolts even if they were sound asleep.
Daniel’d planned to bring the Ladouceur from Pelosi to the Castle System in six days, and he’d believed that the Sissie 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, the Ladouceur’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 prybars.
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 to maybe, 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 the Siegfried’s report to Pleasaunce Control.
Because the Victoria 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, the Ladouceur’s closing velocity with the battleship added something to the kinetic energy. Daniel’s first missile struck a little below the Siegfried’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 the Ladouceur’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 4-inch turrets were now whining to life, however. Daniel was sure they wouldn’t bear on the Siegfried 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 the Siegfried 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 the Siegfried vanished in a scintillating ball of gas.
“Sun, you heard me!” Daniel shouted. “Acknowledge or I’ll break 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 the Siegfried, 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 the Siegfried.
It was war, and it’d been necessary; but it was regrettable nonetheless.
The Siegfried, debris tumbling in a gas cloud, drifted overhead as the Ladouceur 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 the Ladouceur 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.