Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  Rechecking wouldn’t necessarily catch my errors; it hadn’t when we attacked Karst. It was the only thing I knew to do, however, so that’s what I did.

  Wedell reentered the cabin, holding her helmet under her arm. “It’s all solid, sir,” she called. “I was worried about the port mainspar, but it only hung up the first time. It’s been right as rain since.”

  “Ship,” I said, using the PA system though with the propulsion systems shut down in the Matrix I wouldn’t have had to. “We’ll extract in three minutes. Red, launch when you bear. Over.”

  Wedell nodded and settled onto her bunk. Whitlake, running the console’s simulation of the Erich Koellner, nodded but didn’t speak.

  For want of anything better to do, I began plotting a course to Benedict. Succeed or fail, El Cano couldn’t very well land again on Saguntum. It made very little sense to plot so distant an escape course, but I preferred doing that rather than watching a clock read down.

  When my screen pulsed pink to alert me, I switched the console to current sensor data—there was none, so the display was an opalescent cloud—and said, “Ship, prepare for extraction in five seconds. Extracting—now.”

  We extracted into normal space. I felt my bones freezing as the display came into sharp focus: The Koellner was exactly where the console had predicted it would be if I’d done my astrogation correctly.

  I was reaching to engage the High Drive motors when a plasma bolt hit the starboard antenna. The mainsail diffused it slightly, but the heavy steel tubing caught most of the energy and slammed El Cano. We lurched; the second bolt hit the ventral topsail and yard.

  The Koellner had registered the disruption to sidereal space caused by a ship extracting from the Matrix. She’d begun firing before El Cano even existed in the normal universe. Four of her heavy cannon could be brought to bear on our predicted location, and the last two bolts met us when we appeared.

  My display fogged; vaporized metal from the rig had recondensed on the sensor pick-ups. If the first bolt hadn’t jerked us out of our original alignment, the second would have struck us straight on in the bow.

  A jolt and a roar, not another plasma bolt but El Cano’s weapon launching. “Dart away!” Whitlake shouted. “We got the bastard!”

  The third bolt hit the underside of our port outrigger and spun the sloop like a flipped coin. The Koellner’s big guns were slower firing than the four-inch weapons which the RCN standardized for destroyers, but she got in that one additional round.

  Our hull was leaking. Whipping when the outrigger was ripped away had started seams. My helmet was clipped onto the couch fitting intended for the purpose. I donned and latched it before the pressure had dropped to the level where riggers in the airlock going out would bother.

  My first job after getting the helmet on was to correct our spin. The third hit had vaporized most of the outrigger. The bubble of gaseous steel had acted like a sudden rocket burn driving us clockwise. I engaged the motors on the starboard outrigger, giving them a five-second burn.

  I was afraid to overcorrect because I had no way to deal with a counterclockwise rotation. The portside motors had vanished with the outrigger on which they’d been mounted.

  The Koellner fired twice more while we spun. The plasma bolts appeared as glowing tracks in the glimpses I got of the screen. Neither of them came close; the damage we’d taken had flung us out of any predictable path.

  My finger poised to try another tiny burn. I wondered if the destroyer would continue firing at us when the captain realized that El Cano was harmless junk. I guessed they would: Gunners don’t get much chance to use their weapons, and the sloop was a real live-fire exercise.

  I tapped the MANUAL EXECUTE icon. As I did so, the Erich Koellner turned inside out, scattering bits of itself and its crew like a slow-motion piñata. Our dart—Whitlake’s dart—had gutted it like a fish.

  “Sir! Sir!” Whitlake was shouting. “I did it! I really did it!”

  I heard the words—he was shouting them into a two-way link formed by the word “Sir”—but I wasn’t really connecting them with the wreck of the Alliance destroyer. Some of the Koellner’s crew must have survived—riggers suited to go out on the hull, damage crews standing by to glue sheeting over torn seams and to pinch off ruptured hydraulic lines.

  Many of those drifting figures must be shouting in hope and terror, but I couldn’t hear them; I couldn’t hear anything from outside our cabin, not even static.

  I brought up the communications screen. There was nothing, zero, on any of the media: long wave to microwave radio, modulated laser, anything. We were cut off from all forms of communication.

  I stared at the debris spreading from what had been the Erich Koellner. They at least could call for help.

  “Come on, Wedell,” I said. “Let’s go out and fix what’s wrong with our commo suite.”

  * * *

  Wedell and I went out together, leaving Whitlake at the console viewing over and over again the logged moment when the dart struck the Koellner just starboard of her central axis and quartered through the ship. The fusion bottle didn’t vent, but that honestly couldn’t have increased the damage much beyond what the dart had done to her as it was. Red had every right to be proud.

  So did the Koellner’s gunners, as I saw even before I stepped out onto our hull. The airlock was on the port side. We had to push the outer hatch open with our shoulders, not because of warping as I’d first thought but because a mist of gaseous steel had cooled over everything facing what had been the port outrigger. The coating was as smooth and even as the layers of a pearl.

  I supposed that steel similarly coated the commo suite, a blister on the port bow, but the problem there was even simpler: A chunk of outrigger, still solid, had shaved off the blister and a six-by-three-foot patch of El Cano’s outer hull. If the angle had been slightly different, it would have come through the bridge and carried most of both me and the console out the other side.

  There was nothing to fix about the commo suite. It was just gone. I took a look at the plasma thrusters. The starboard pair was apparently all right. The portside thrusters were problematic. The sphincter petals were bright with redeposited steel, which would keep them from opening and closing initially, but during use the stellite leaves should burn clean in seconds or at worst a minute or two.

  Wedell had been looking over the rig. I signalled her to join me back in the cabin. We still had to keep our helmets on, but it was marginally more comfortable. The proper leads would have permitted us to speak through the console, but El Cano didn’t have them; we were helmet to helmet inside as well, but without the risk of colliding with drifting debris.

  “How’s the rig?” I asked Wedell.

  “Starboard may retract,” she said. I’m sure she was shrugging in her rigging suit. “What’s left of dorsal ought to be easy to cut away. Port is torn bad but’ll be a bitch to cut the rest of the way, maybe as bad at if it was still as-installed. And Ventral, I’d say we’re screwed. All the joints are plated. It’ll take days to cut. Explosive’d be better, but we don’t have any aboard. Do we?”

  “No explosives that I know about,” I said—also shrugging. “I’m going to see if I can angle the thrusters to counterbalance the surviving High Drive motors. I’ll retract the outrigger if I can—that’ll help.”

  Whitlake leaned forward from the striker’s seat to tap me on the leg for attention. He pointed enthusiastically to the display, then settled back to continue watching on his own reduced screen. Wedell and I shifted to see what was happening on the main display.

  Default on a military display was to caret movement, so even with degraded optics I could pick up not only the ship nearing orbit but the one that was rising through the atmosphere. I touched a control and a legend appeared next to either ship in a contrasting color: They were the Magellanes and the Lezo, respectively.

  Whitlake shouted something I couldn’t hear; I didn’t need the words to understand his delight. As he spok
e, a third caret appeared when our surviving sensors could distinguish the ship from the Military Harbor from which it rose. The legend CONCHA confirmed my expectation.

  I shouted and slapped my thigh; the gauntlet cracked sharply on the stiffened plate of the rigging suit. “By heavens!” I shouted—to myself. “If they know what they’re doing, they’ll handle the Meduse even though she’s on the alert!”

  The trouble was—as I saw at once—the sloops’ crews didn’t know what they were doing. They weren’t extending their antennas to enter the Matrix and come at the destroyer from unpredictable directions.

  A destroyer with skilled crew, knowing what to look for, could pick up the disruption of sidereal space for up to ten seconds before a ship extracts from the Matrix. The Erich Koellner had done that, and we’d been lucky that her plasma bolts hadn’t detonated our dart’s fuel before Whitlake was able to launch.

  The Meduse’s crew probably wasn’t that good and the Karst vessel might not even have had sufficient sensor discrimination to do that. The sloops were surrendering their greatest advantage by coming straight in. In addition, the sails protected the target’s hull from gunfire—once. Plasma bolts loosed all their energy on the first object they hit.

  All the Meduse had to do was to keep at a distance and to fire at the sloops until the darts exploded or the darters launched them beyond burn-out range. When a dart’s fuel was expended in vacuum, it no longer had any homing ability.

  The Meduse was accelerating. I think the Karst captain initially planned to engage the Magellanes. When a second sloop joined her with a third rising behind them, the plan must have changed. The Meduse was accelerating not only at the best rate her High Drive could manage, but for over a minute, with the plasma thrusters burning also.

  Her drives shut down. “I swear …” my lips said, but what my mind was really thinking was, “Pray heaven …”

  The destroyer faded from our display as she inserted into the Matrix. The Meduse’s captain had watched one dart sloop destroy an Alliance vessel that was more powerful and better crewed than his own. Here were three more sloops.

  The Meduse was running rather than face them.

  I hugged Wedell, and Whitlake sprang up to join us. Space above Saguntum was now firmly in the control of the Saguntum Naval Defense Force.

  I looked at the display again to see whether any of the sloops were shaping toward us. We had no way to communicate with anybody.

  Whitlake slapped me on the shoulder and pointed into the holographic display, disrupting it until he took his hand away. I looked at the planet again instead of toward the sloops.

  A fourth vessel was rising from the Military Harbor.

  She was the Alfraz. I cheered myself hoarse.

  Chapter Forty-three

  After the first rush of relief—I’m not going to die when the air runs out!—I realized that I had more work to do. Using the thrusters with the petals flared open, I managed to kill our spin completely. I’d gotten close enough with the High Drive that there was no discomfort to the crew, but if we were going to transfer to another ship it’d be a lot better if we were dead still.

  I had another concern that I wouldn’t have spoken aloud even if it’d been easier to communicate while wearing suits: I didn’t trust the shiphandling skills of whoever was crewing the Alfraz. It was possible that somebody in the Saguntine force was expert, but there was no reason any of them should be. As for the Sunrays, Gamba might have played with shiphandling, but ordinary riggers wouldn’t have. Generally warrant officers had some experience conning small boats, but they’d all gone off with Captain Leary.

  Wedell attached a full air bottle and went back out on the hull. I stuck at the console in case there was something I could do. I could maneuver El Cano to a degree, but I didn’t intend to do so since I had no means of communication with our rescuers.

  The Alfraz swelled slowly on my display. I half expected her to collide with us, but tiny blooms from her thrusters damped her motion perfectly. She hung alongside us, so close that we’d have touched if our dorsal antenna had been full length.

  I could see three spacers on the hull. There was a clang—felt through my boots, not heard in the vacuum—as a magnetic grapple locked on. Wedell moved into the field of my optics and proceeded up the line arm after arm.

  I tapped Whitlake on the shoulder and pointed to the airlock. It was time for us to be going also.

  * * *

  I put Whitlake on the line ahead of me and waited till his magnetic boots were on the hull of the Alfraz before I followed him. Mixon gripped me and motioned our helmets together.

  “Anybody else?” he asked.

  “Just the three of us,” I said.

  He gestured the three of us to the airlock and with his fellow Sunrays began coiling up the grapnel after cutting the power to release it. Three people—two of them in rigging suits—was about capacity for the Alfraz’s lock, so I didn’t argue the point.

  We had our helmets off when we stepped onto the bridge. The people greeting us were clinging to whatever each one could, since they weren’t wearing boots with magnetic soles. I’d hoped Monica would be here, but I had to call, “Watch it!” when she would’ve thrown herself into my arms. “There’s metal fittings on this suit and they’re cold!”

  It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Maeve Grimaud might be aboard. She stood against the rear bulkhead, gripping the vertical support of a stack of bunks. She was smiling coolly and trying to look as though holding herself in place that way wasn’t a strain.

  I was almost as surprised to see Lal seated at the console. “I have done this before, sir,” he said, nodding politely. “I am glad to see you well.”

  And of course he’d maneuvered ships together in the past. It was a rare skill among honest spacers, but fairly common among pirates.

  “Lal!” I said. “Where did you come from?”

  “It was kind of your Captain Leary to offer me a place,” he said. “It seemed that such an excellent organization as the RCN, however, was not a suitable place for so humble a person as me.”

  The Sunrays came in from the hull, laughing about how well the operation had gone. “Hey, good to see you, sir!” Gadient called. “When we heard what you’d done, we figured that was all she wrote for you.”

  “And pretty bloody close from the way the ship looks!” Mixon said.

  “The Koellner looks worse,” I said. “Say, can we get under way now? Unless there’s a problem, Lal, just bring us up to one gee. We’ll worry about the course later.”

  I finished getting my suit off a moment after the High Drive kicked in to provide the equivalent of gravity. I turned to find Monica, but she was already beside me. The Sunrays cheered as we kissed.

  Then she stepped back and with an unexpectedly serious look said, “Roy, you asked where Lal came from. Mistress Grimaud located him and convinced him to join us. And she really planned this whole operation. Except what you did yourself.”

  Maeve hadn’t moved from where she stood, though her nonchalant appearance seemed a trifle more genuine now that she no longer had to grip the stanchion. She said, “I thought it was possible that my loyalty to Cinnabar might have been in doubt. I’ve tried to allay those doubts.”

  “I didn’t realize the two of you had met,” I said, smiling brightly and really wishing I weren’t in the middle of this conversation. “Ah, Maeve”—I thought of calling her Mistress Grimaud but didn’t—“I’m pretty sure that when this story gets back to Xenos, you’ll find your superiors lining up to take credit for sending you to Saguntum.”

  “One can only hope,” Maeve said with a cold expression.

  “Ah, sir?” said Cassidy, the big man in battledress whom I’d met as Colonel Foliot’s second-in-command. “I’ve got some wounded men and I’d appreciate if we could get them to help sooner rather than later. Ah—if you could?”

  “The temporary capital is at Borodin,” Monica said. “It’s on the other side of the Genevieves
and you can land starships there. The Kurfurstendamm brought armored vehicles as well as men, but Dad says he can block the passes if they try to move on Borodin.”

  “Sure, let’s set down there,” I said. “But—wounded? Who?”

  “Mistress Grimaud got the roadblock on Holywell Street moved before we arrived,” Monica said, “but Major Cassidy and a platoon of Special Police hidden in a furniture van were necessary to get us into the Military Harbor. They’re on the couches in the hold—it was the best way to escape.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  I was trying to decide what next to say when Lal got up from the console. “Captain?” he said. “Since you’re here, would you care to land us? I would rather that you did.”

  I settled behind the console. I had a lot of questions to ask and I’d get around to them. Right now, though, I was glad to have a moderately challenging job to do that would prevent anybody from talking to me for an hour or so.

  * * *

  Borodin was at a river mouth. It wasn’t much of a place by itself, but the Annotated Charts said the river system drained most of the plain to the east of the Genevieve Mountains. The agricultural products—mostly grain—were taken to Jacquerie by sea on bulk carriers and loaded on starships there for export. Though Borodin wasn’t a starport, it had plenty of sheltered water to land on, and better facilities than Salaam to serve any ships that did land.

  I’d figured to set down without landing control, but in fact the signal from Borodin was sharp and professional. That puzzled me as I started braking us in. Then I remembered the station and microwave link in the mountains above us. Boelke and Sacrisson were earning their pay, possibly for the first time. A fire department isn’t a waste of tax money, even if those assigned to it spend most of the time washing their cars.

  Harbor Control brought us down on a spot not far from the surface docks. I let the console make the landing. I grinned as I recalled that the facilities here were a considerable step up from what we’d found when we first stopped to take on water after our escape from Salaam. To begin with, we weren’t going to have a giant slug—or whatever the devil it’d been—crawl aboard through the pump intake.