Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  I’d warned the crew that we’d be in freefall at the rendezvous until we actually launched the attack. There weren’t any real complaints, though Lieutenant Smith did comment loudly that freefall made him queasy. Barnes’ even louder comment was that anybody who puked got to clean up the mess.

  That probably wasn’t the correct way to respond to an officer, but I didn’t say—or feel like saying—anything. The run had been stressful for everybody, myself included.

  I was queuing up my arrival message when I got a tight-beam microwave squirt from the Sunray. This consisted of WAIT FOR Magellanes and sharpened visuals of Karst.

  Through El Cano’s equipment I’d been able to see that ships were orbiting the planet. The new data showed that they were four light cruisers, probably preparing for a short work-up voyage.

  It was possible that they were actually about to embark for Saguntum. A squadron of light cruisers could overwhelm Saguntum’s defenses, though I would have expected Karst to use destroyers and transports for their attack.

  “Captain?” Red asked from the other side of the console, where he had the attack screen up. “What do we do now?”

  “Crew,” I said, using the PA system. There were overhead speakers in the cabin and the machinery spaces. “We’re waiting for the remaining sloop to join us. I expect that when the Magellanes arrives, we’ll attack immediately.”

  “Well, where is it?” Smith said. “Why aren’t they here? Aren’t we in danger all the time we sit here?”

  “Lieutenant Smith,” I said. “Take your bunk and wait there until I order you to do something else! As for danger, no—not particularly. So long as we’re drifting here, shut down except for the environmental system, it would take a better sensor pack than any Karst warship carries for anybody to notice us.”

  That was more true than not, though I wasn’t nearly as certain as I tried to put in my voice. I didn’t say anything about why the Magellanes hadn’t arrived, because I didn’t have a clue. Cory was a better astrogator than I was, and he had Dasi and Carlyle to tone up his Saguntine rigging crew.

  I used the time to plot approaches to Karst, starting with the rig as it was and then modifying the sail plan variously. If I hadn’t done something, I’d have gone nuts waiting for the Magellanes to arrive.

  I was working on another attack plan when the upper-left quadrant of my display flashed to a real-time plot of another ship’s arrival—close enough to the Sunray and Lezo that all three would fit within a twelve-thousand-mile-diameter sphere. I focused my optics on it and found the Magellanes. Her ventral antenna had carried away.

  I remembered my struggles to plot a course when the Alfraz was running with a partial rig. Granting that he had a full crew, Cory was an even better astrogator than I’d thought.

  “Crew!” I said. “Prepare for action. All riggers suit up, though I don’t think you’ll be going onto the hull. Captain out!”

  I used the console’s cancellation field to cut off the babble of my crew. I had nothing more to say to them, and I was afraid that they might distract me from the message which I expected from the Sunray in a few minutes.

  In fact the message came within ten seconds: RESPOND WHEN READY TO EXECUTE THIS ATTACK. The message accompanied an updated plot of the space above Karst, this time showing five cruisers in orbit and another rising from Hegemony Harbor. One of the orbiting ships pulsed red. The adjacent legend identified it as the Forbin; her antennas were raised, but the only sails set were the topsails of the C and D rings.

  The target was suitable for my original attack plan. We would make it without any adjustment to the sails, which was why it had been my first choice. I didn’t want to have people on the hull until we were in the Matrix again and outbound.

  I sent my attack plan to the Sunray with the header READY. To the crew I announced, “Ship, prepare to insert for attack. Extraction is calculated in fourteen minutes.”

  Because I saw people—everybody but the two Sunrays—trying vainly to shout through my cancellation field, I added, “I will not be deploying riggers. Break. Darter, are you ready for action, over?”

  “Get us there and then get us the hell out!” Red said. I echoed his display in my right quadrant and saw that he had a targeting screen overlaid on the predicted image of the Forbin when we extracted.

  SQUADRON, EXECUTE! the Sunray ordered.

  I pressed Execute. El Cano entered the Matrix. I shivered from reaction to what was happening, not to the insertion itself.

  I set the latest target imagery from the Sunray to advance as the console predicted. If my astrogation was as precise as the console’s mathematics, the projection now on the display would be replaced seamlessly by the real-time visuals of the Forbin when extracted.

  After that there was nothing to do for the remainder of the fourteen minutes and five seconds of the programmed run. I rotated my couch to face the cabin. That was better than watching the image of a cruiser crawling across the image of a planet.

  I had an urge to go out on the hull for no reason—absolutely no reason. I could almost certainly get back to the console in plenty of time, but that was like saying that someone as careful as I was didn’t need a safety line while working on the hull. It was a stupid idea!

  I grinned at my own foolishness. Having silly thoughts was harmless so long as I didn’t try to execute them—just as in much of life.

  My expression had nothing to do with the crew, but when my mind returned to the present I saw that all the eyes in the cabin were on me. From what I could tell, they’d relaxed. I smiled more broadly.

  The little red warning signal pulsed in a corner of the display. I caught the reflection and had started to rotate my couch before the bell tone which followed the light.

  “Ship,” I announced. “Prepare for extraction. Extracting—now.”

  El Cano slipped back into the sidereal universe. For an instant the lower half of my body vanished. I could feel my intestines sliding onto the metal couch frame.

  The predicted imagery on my display had been replaced with reality. Which was nothing like what the console had predicted.

  While El Cano was in the Matrix, the Forbin had begun to accelerate outward. That was half the problem; the other half was that I’d done a really crappy job of astrogation. We were almost two hundred thousand miles from our target instead of being within thirty thousand as I’d planned.

  Red was adjusting his point of aim. I shouted, “Hold off! We’ve got to get closer!”

  “We got to get the hell out of here!” the darter shouted. He reached for the Execute key. I locked his controls and shouted, “Inserting!”

  My skin prickled and we were back in the Matrix. I could feel my lower body again.

  “Ship, we’ll attack again in a moment!” I shouted. I left the cancellation field on. I started calculating.

  I didn’t have time to explain to the crew what was going on. To be that far out in a short hop I had to have reversed a couple digits, but that didn’t matter now. I couldn’t return to the past, but I could get us close to where the cruiser would be when we extracted.

  Foss, an able spacer who’d been a welcome member of the crew during the run, decided in frustration to shout in my ear if he couldn’t be heard through the cancellation field. Wedell clipped him with a wrench. Then she and Barnes stood between me and the Saguntine spacers.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lieutenant Smith join the two Sunrays. He just might have a future as an officer after all.

  “Ship, we’ll be inserting for thirty-seven seconds,” I announced. I unlocked Red’s controls. “Break, darter, are you ready? Over.”

  “I was ready before,” said Whitlake. Maybe he sounded sullen. I wasn’t in the best shape myself.

  We were back in sidereal space. Usually a short insertion meant that extraction was relatively mild for people. This time, though, I felt as though somebody had slugged me in the middle of the forehead with a hammer. My vision went fuzzy, and everything I
saw pulsed between orange and violet.

  We were almost on top of the Forbin. Red turned a vernier control and stabbed FIRE with both thumbs together. Our antiship missile ignited deafeningly and ripped down in its port-ventral channel. The chemical exhaust—boron fluoride—scoured El Cano’s hull and gave the ship a jolt.

  “Inserting!” I shouted.

  The Karst cruiser was within fifteen miles. She mounted a pair of fifteen-centimeter plasma cannon and eight ten-centimeter guns. One bolt from even the smaller weapons could breach El Cano’s hull.

  The Forbin didn’t fire. As we vanished into the Matrix, her turrets were still locked fore and aft so as not to shift during acceleration.

  In our last visual, a bright flash cloaked the cruiser. Our hypervelocity missile had struck an extended antenna, vaporizing itself and a portion of the ship’s rig.

  I engaged the escape route I’d prepared before the initial attack and felt our hull groan as the rigging shifted us onto a new course. Not the correct one, because we’d jumped twice since I calculated it. I’d plot something better after I caught my mental breath, but for now the crucial thing was to get us away from the Karst system. Even a random course would do that, and what I’d loaded would be better than that.

  “Starboard watch on the hull,” I ordered, hearing my voice as a croak. I needed something to drink.

  “I’ll go out in place of Foss,” Wedell said. “Somebody watch him and make sure he doesn’t have a concussion, okay?”

  I started recalculating our course.

  * * *

  I made the first extraction at twelve hours. There was no chance that Karst pursuit could have followed us. Captain Leary had a reputation for supernatural skill at astrogation, but I don’t think even he could have tracked El Cano.

  Our insertion had been the next thing to random. I had a bad couple minutes while the console processed the star sights when we extracted, though I sure tried not to let the crew know I was worried. It’s possible to get so far off course in the Matrix that you can never get back to known space.

  When ships vanish, as they do every year, there’s always the question of whether there was a hardware failure—the fusion bottle overloaded, a thruster burst while landing on an uninhabited world to take on reaction mass, or a thousand other mechanical problems. Or if it was an astrogation failure and the ship is stranded somewhere in the void, a coffin for the crew when supplies and life support finally give out.

  We got our bearing points. I announced to the crew, “Next stop, Saguntum,” and engaged the program. I knew it might not be quite that easy, but I hoped to do as well as I had in our run to the Karst system.

  The crew was in a good mood. Sure, we’d been out a long time for so small a ship, but this was the run for home. El Cano was no longer facing an unknown but certainly overwhelming force. So far as they were concerned, we’d won our battle, and we were going home.

  We hadn’t won our battle. We’d taken an enormous risk and escaped only because our enemy was slack. Despite being at point-blank range, our dart had missed the cruiser and purely through luck had damaged its rigging. I grinned when they bragged and asked to watch the log of “our hit” over and over again. They’d done their parts after all, everybody but Red Whitlake.

  And if I’d done my job better, we might not have been so far out of place on the initial attack. The darter had gotten thrown out of his course of action. If he’d been more experienced, that might not have happened; but it was still my error.

  I went through our log during the run back and found exactly where I’d made the mistake: I’d transposed two digits in the course sequence. The good part was that I could tell Captain Leary where the error was. The bad part was that I had an extra three days to kick myself for it.

  * * *

  Halfway into the first stage, Red linked through the console, saying, “Captain, can I talk to you on the hull, over?”

  I said yes and put my suit on, leaving Barnes at the console. Truth be told, I’d been hoping never to have to see or speak to Red after we landed on Saguntum.

  When we were out on the hull, I looked at the rigging and remembered returning with Monica to Saguntum in the Alfraz. I’d become a machine, a part of the ship’s complex mechanism. I didn’t want to do that again, but I was proud to have done it once … and the experience was still with me.

  This was where I belonged. I hoped with the RCN, but out among the stars for certain.

  When I’d viewed the rig, I turned my attention to my companion. Red was watching me. The Matrix didn’t provide enough light for me to read his expression. He took a step closer and leaned sideways to bring his helmet toward mine. I shifted into contact but I waited for him to begin the discussion.

  “Sir,” he said. “I funked it. I was too scared to take proper time to adjust the dart. You haven’t reamed me out in front of the crew, but you know it too.”

  I cleared my throat. “I thought you’d been hasty,” I said. “I’m not a darter myself. I was going to hand the log over to the Defense Force staff in Jacquerie and leave it to them.”

  “Look …” Red said. The helmet-to-helmet transmission made his voice sound thin, but I thought I heard desperation as well. “We were trained to hunt pirates who don’t have anything much to shoot back with. Sure, we’re supposed to go after big ships if somebody’s trying to invade, but that’s a bloody suicide run and nobody expects it. I bloody well didn’t. And I panicked.”

  I didn’t respond; I didn’t know what to say. Red suddenly blurted, “Sir, just give me another chance. That’s all I ask!”

  “Whitlake,” I said, “I’m only in temporary command. As soon as we land, I’ll go back to my duties under Captain Leary. I don’t know what they’ll involve, but I don’t expect command of a dart sloop to be one of them. But—”

  I cleared my throat, partly to let me choose the phrasing, before I continued, “I have been planning to study dart gunnery when we reach Saguntum because I don’t know anything about it. The RCN doesn’t use dart sloops, so there’s no training at the Academy and I’d never even spoken to someone who’d used them before now. Maybe you could find me some training materials?”

  “Bloody hell, sir,” Red said. “We don’t have to wait for that. There’s a training program on the console and I can help you with it. Ah—if you like?”

  I laughed and said, “I like. Let’s go back in and we can get started.”

  * * *

  We made Saguntum in five hours and twenty-nine minutes less time than our outpassage. I could have cut several hours off our inbound time if I’d been willing to run down our reaction mass by longer acceleration in sidereal space, but I didn’t like the thought of an emergency planetfall to refill the sloop’s small tank.

  As it turned out, we had over a quarter tank left when we arrived in Saguntum. I didn’t regret playing it safe.

  Orbital Control was now a dismasted freighter, probably snatched from the scrapyard. Seeing her reminded me that our raid on Karst wasn’t the end of the business. We were at war.

  We landed in the Military Harbor, where the Sunray and two of the three other sloops already floated. I wasn’t surprised that Captain Leary was waiting on the quay when I opened up the ship.

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Smith,” I said. “El Cano has just reverted to the control of the Naval Defense Forces of Saguntum. I’m going to see my commanding officer, and you’re in charge.”

  I smiled at him, shouldered my bindle, and started for the ramp.

  “Want me to carry that for you, sir,” said Wedell.

  “No thank you, fellow spacer,” I said. I doubted whether that was required in the RCN for officers as junior as I was, and the Sunray was a civilian vessel anyway.

  “But, Captain?” Smith called plaintively. “We’ve always just closed the ship when we land and report to the Navy Building.”

  I paused for a moment, then said, “Well, follow normal Defense Force protocols then. But Smith
? See to it that the ship is rearmed. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

  “Requisition a replacement dart?” Smith said. “Oh, yes sir.”

  I smiled again, saluted him, and strode off to meet Captain Leary. He was waiting alone, except for Hogg. I’d hoped to see Monica.…

  “Sir …” I said. I didn’t salute because Six didn’t like them, but I paused two paces from him and braced to attention. “I screwed up the attack. I’d made an astrogation error, I caught it on the run for home but it was just”—I shrugged—“dumb. I think the darter would have been all right if I hadn’t spooked him by having to go in again.”

  The crew of El Cano streamed past us, chatting happily. Even Red seemed to be in good spirits. Trying to train me had bucked him up no end. He really did know his job, and what I’d just told Six was the truth.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call the attack that bad a screw-up,” Captain Leary said, smiling at me. “The Forbin’s hull has serious structural damage—you hit the Dorsal Three mast with the folded mainyard, and the transmitted shock must have warped two or three frames.”

  He pursed his lips and went on, “Using Saguntine darters may have been a mistake. I had to override mine or we’d have missed Surcouf, and neither Cory nor Lieutenant Esterhazy got a hit either, I think for the same reason. I am a little concerned about your decision to jump closer to the Forbin when the target had been warned, however.”

  “Sir?” I said, startled. “Sir, it was all pointless if we didn’t press home!”

  Six smiled slightly. “Weren’t you afraid that the Forbin was going to blow you to atoms before you could escape?”

  “I was bloody terrified when I had time to be, the whole fourteen minutes to extraction,” I said. “They must’ve been bloody asleep! But sir, there wasn’t any choice.”

  I frowned and said, “I’ve been studying dart gunnery on the way back. But I really think that Darter Whitlake is going to be all right the next time. Not that he’s RCN business any more.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when I talk to Colonel Foliot,” Six said. “And speaking of the Foliot family”—he looked back to where the quay jutted from the shore—“I think that somebody’s waiting for you at the end of the dock. You’re off-duty till 0800.”