RCN 11: Death's Bright Day (eARC)

by David Drake

  Lamson’s smile was broad enough to show that he was missing upper incisors on the left side.

  “All right, spacer,” Daniel said with an easy grin. “You know your job. Now, do you have the guts to do the job I’m giving you? Draw fire from a battleship?”

  “At the bonus you’re promising, yeah, I do,” Lamson said. “It’s enough that I’ll be able to buy a ship of my own. Okay, nothing as big and new as the Montclare, but I’ll get there.”

  “You’ll be paid the bonus,” Daniel said. He caught the eye of Minister Robin, who nodded curtly.

  He looked down into the lake, its deep blue brightened by reflected sky and clouds. When rafts moved across the surface or simply bobbed as they were loaded or unloaded, they sent out ripples. Movement gave the water life.

  “Captain Burk?” Daniel said, turning to the other civilian captain. He was younger, thinner, and more sour than Lamson.

  “We’ll be loaded by nightfall,” the Montcalm’s captain said. “We had a mare’s nest in the holds from the sails you stripped from the merchant ships at Brownsville, but we’ll have it struck down in six hours tops.”

  He turned from Daniel to Vesey, then looked back again. “I gotta say, Captain, it would’ve been a bloody sight easier to make the transfer in Brownsville where we had the harbor cranes and proper lighters. A little foresight would’ve gone a long way.”

  “I’m sure that would have been easier, Captain Burk,” Daniel said, gesturing with his left hand to forestall Cory. “We’re trying to conceal our intent from people in Brownsville, however. Whatever their politics, there are certainly some who would sell us out to the rebels for a good price.”

  Just as well I’m only meeting with the commissioned officers; Woetjans would’ve knocked him down before I could stop her.

  “But we cleaned all the spars and fabric out of Brownsville, even stripping ships in harbor,” Burk said, brow furrowing. “How’s that a secret to anybody?”

  “Burk,” said Cory, facing the civilian squarely. “Everybody in Brownsville knows we’re going off to fight, so it’s no surprise that we’re loading as much spare rigging as we can find. If they saw that we were shifting the spares from the cruiser to a couple transports that shouldn’t even be in a battle—that’s going to make them wonder.”

  “And if the rebels figure out what Six is planning,” said Cazelet, glaring from the other side, “then it’s kitty bar the door. We have to take them completely by surprise. Particularly the Almirante!”

  “Look, I said the Montcalm would be loaded in six hours,” Burk muttered. “And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back aboard and see if I can speed the business up. All right?”

  Daniel thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, unless anyone has further business. Anyone? Then, dismissed.”

  His officers began trouping down the slope to the docks and temporary housing at the edge of the lake. Adele and the servants remained behind, as did Christopher Robin.

  The scars where trees had been cut for timber were ugly, but they would grow back before long. The spacers didn’t have the sort of heavy equipment that crushes the soil to the consistency of brick. They had moved the felled trees on rollers cut from lesser trunks, pushed by the muscles of a hundred or more spacers used to working together.

  The installations would rot away within years or at most a few decades. In fifty years, no one viewing the site would have realized that a squadron of warships had prepared here for battle.

  The Minister kept brushing at the tiny insectoids which flew about his face. They were drawn to the warmth of human flesh, but they didn’t bite or sting because their chemistries were too different for people to be food. In long-inhabited portions of Chevalier, the parasites which settlers had brought along were just as annoying as they would have been on Cinnabar—or Earth, for that matter.

  Daniel closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Sometimes I need to remind myself…” he said. Adele and the Minister of War were listening—so were the servants, for that matter—but he was really speaking to himself. “That the other fellow’s troubles look just as bad to him as ours do to me.”

  “Do you mean that this is a bad plan after all?” said Robin. “I thought…”

  Daniel opened his eyes and smiled cheerfully at the minister. I shouldn’t speak my mind in front of laymen. Maybe I shouldn’t speak my mind period, except to Adele.

  “Not at all, sir,” he said aloud. “I’m imagining that I’m commander of a Karst battleship. Far from home, supporting rebels whose command structure is more absent than rickety, dependent on foreigners who hold me in contempt. And well aware that if things go wrong, my home world will abandon me as a mutinous pirate. Why, if that were me, I’d be considering suicide!”

  His analysis of the Karst admiral’s position was accurate. The statement of his own probable reaction was not. Pleased as Daniel was at his squadron, he would much rather be leading the Almirante with her Karst crew against any cruiser in the galaxy.

  “Well, I see what you mean,” Robin said. “Speaking as a layman, which I realize I am…well, I’ll be glad when it’s over.

  “That’s quite understandable, sir,” Daniel said with a bright smile. “Lady Mundy, is your part of the business ready?”

  “The software is prepared,” Adele said. “We won’t be able to test it until the transports have been modified, since the fabric swathing will affect propagation.”

  She shrugged, then added, “We’ve completed as much as we can at this point.”

  “Then I think I’ll give a last surface check to the ships,” Daniel said. “I want to be sure that we’re ready to lift off as soon as the loading is complete.”

  He smiled in bright assurance. Screw it. Battles are fought by people, not equipment.

  Sidereal Space, between Chevalier and Danziger

  “I’m opening her up,” Tech 3 Shingawa, the pilot, warned over the PA system.

  Barnes gripped Adele’s right wrist while Dasi on the other side rechecked the catches of her air suit’s helmet. Their caution was both excessive and irritating, but—Adele grinned wryly—her demonstrated clumsiness at any kind of normal shipboard maneuver was so far beyond the spacers’ comprehension that she sympathized with their concern.

  The Triomphante’s cutter supposedly held thirty personnel in its single compartment, but they would be squeezed in like canned fish if they were wearing any kind of protective gear. It wasn’t a problem at present because Adele and her two handlers—both wearing rigging suits—were the only passengers, and the trip was a thirteen-minute excursion from the Montcalm to the docking ring above one of the flagship’s forward dorsal airlocks.

  The hatch popped open, venting the compartment’s atmosphere. The cutter didn’t have an airlock. They had boarded through a pressurized personnel tube already fitted to the Montcalm, but Adele was in enough haste that she didn’t want to wait for one to be attached to the warship.

  Dasi floated through the hatch, then pulled Adele after him by her safety line; he had already clipped the free end to the docking ring. The hatch was sized for big men wearing rigging suits and thus more than adequate for a slender woman in an air suit, but Barnes nevertheless hoisted her directly into his partner’s arms.

  Adele grimaced. The flat, undiffused light of vacuum caused her problems, so the riggers’ care was more necessary than she would have chosen to admit.

  Dasi handed himself down the ring to the hatch, which he opened. Only then did he gesture Adele to follow him—while he held firmly onto a second safety line. She entered the airlock with a gentle push from behind by Barnes as he pulled the hatch closed and dogged it.

  The riggers started releasing their helmet catches immediately, but when Adele reached up to hers Dasi caught her hand. How can it be dangerous for me if it’s safe for them? She didn’t speak aloud, though.

  When the tell-tale winked green, Dasi opened the inner hatch and Barnes lifted off Adele’s helmet. They were treating her as though s
he were an infant!

  “Barnes?” Adele said. “Would you give this kind of service to Minister of Defense Forbes?”

  “I bloody well guess not,” Barnes said.

  “Ma’am, you’re the Mistress,” Dasi said with a look of puzzlement. “If we didn’t treat you right, Woetjans’d break us down to Landsman. And she’d be right to!”

  “The Minister of Defense never did a bloody thing for any of us,” Barnes said. “You’ve saved our lives every time we got in a tight spot, and with Six leading us that’s pretty bloody often!”

  True enough, I suppose, Adele thought. It was a different—and positive—view of behavior which she had found irritating.

  The whole squadron was in freefall. That simplified the job of shrouding the transports in sailcloth to bulk their outlines up to that of heavy cruisers, but it would have been a chore for Adele to traverse the rotunda without her escort. The volume was much larger than that of similar chamber on the Princess Cecile because it served two airlocks and four up/down pairs of companionways.

  The two riggers were bosun’s mates now and could have held bosuns’ slots if they had been willing to leave the Sissie. Each grabbed one of Adele’s arms and sailed across the rotunda to the bridge hatch.

  A spacer from the Triomphante came out of a companionway at the wrong time; Dasi grabbed him by the shoulder and swung him out and behind. The maneuver looked casual, but Adele noticed that Dasi had used the fellow’s mass as a fulcrum so that the contact didn’t affect the line in which she and her escort were moving.

  Daniel attracts good people…or maybe he makes people better. Myself included.

  Hogg stood beside the open bridge hatch, ready to catch them if necessary. It wasn’t: Barnes and Dasi swung their boots forward and clacked to a smooth halt, absorbing the shock with their bent knees.

  Hogg took Adele’s hand. Locking himself to the hatch coming, he tossed her to Daniel, who had risen from his console. He and Vesey were using the stations at which Adele and Braun had been sitting when she captured the Upholder.

  I wonder if all of Braun’s blood and brains have been cleaned up? Well, it doesn’t matter.

  About a dozen of the stations were occupied; some of the cruiser’s officers stood to get a better look at what was going on. Adele took the flat-plate station across the aisle and reached for her personal data unit. It was inaccessible beneath her air suit.

  “We’re on it,” said Barnes, who with his partner must have followed her onto the bridge. He lifted Adele without ceremony while Dasi unlatched the suit’s waist catches and pulled the lower portion off her. The stiff fabric slipped away more easily than Adele had ever managed when she was doing it herself.

  “Want the top off, ma’am?” Barnes asked solicitously.

  “This is fine,” Adele muttered as she brought up her data unit. The remaining portion of the suit was slightly awkward to work in, but she decided she was sufficiently embarrassed already. Personnel who didn’t know her from the Princess Cecile were gawping with amazement.

  “Would you like me to clear the bridge?” Daniel said, bending forward to speak without bellowing. Though the ship was in freefall, the echoes of many hundreds of systems working in a large steel box were burdensome if not deafening.

  “No,” said Adele as her wands flickered. “But I’ll set up a cancellation field for the three of—there. The three of us.”

  She had coupled the three stations into a single cell of active sound cancellation so that they could speak normally and not be overheard. The latter wasn’t a concern at this point, because the squadron was sealed off from enemy attention until after they went into action.

  “Should I leave?” said Vesey. “We were going over squadron tactics but I don’t need…”

  “Stay, I’m glad you’re here,” Adele said as Vesey started to rise. “The Montcalm’s short and medium-wave transmitter is non-functional, has been non-functional for six months that idiot Burk tells me. But he didn’t think to mention it before I started to install my equipment and found there was nothing to hook up to.”

  “But they’ve been communicating?” Daniel said. “I’ve spoken to Burk, the Montcalm has sent normal reports.”

  “Using microwave and laser,” Adele said curtly. “And their receiver works, so they were getting signals in normal fashion.”

  I mustn’t take my anger out on innocent people, whom everyone but Burk himself is. Though if the signals officer had been doing his job, it would have been taken care of regardless of whether the captain saw the need.

  “Mistress?” said Vesey. “If the Montcalm can still send, why is it a problem not to have short and medium wave?”

  Adele looked at her. Maybe I’ve been too hard on Burk, since I know that Vesey is competent and smart.…

  Aloud Adele said, “In order to appear to be a particular ship, a heavy cruiser in this case, we need to send out all the electronic signals the cruiser itself does. Every electric motor, every switch—anything whatever which uses electricity is also a transmitter. Much of the noise is longer than microwave. The missiles in their cradles are transmitters!”

  She cleared her throat in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m frustrated, but that’s no reason for discourtesy. That was one of my mother’s strongest beliefs.”

  Adele smiled faintly. She added, “It remains a belief which I personally hold.”

  In contrast to mother’s belief in the innate goodness of the common people.

  Tovera hadn’t accompanied Adele to the Montcalm for the installation. She appeared at the bridge hatch and hauled herself by the overhead rail to Adele’s side. She hooked her toe beneath a seat frame as an anchor.

  “Can we repair or replace it?” Daniel said. “I’m willing to pull the transmitter out of one of the destroyers if that’s what it takes. Frankly, the best use I can think of for the Alfonso is to divide the rebel fire.”

  “On a merchant ship…” Adele said carefully. “This is all handled by the main console, the only console.”

  She hadn’t realized how specialized her knowledge base was. Well, knowledge regarding starship communications systems. She had known from childhood that information gathering and data management were a blank wall to most people, though for the life of her she couldn’t see what was difficult about it.

  “Ah,” said Daniel, nodding. “Which is responsible for astrogation and sail attitude among other things. Even if we could replace the console, we couldn’t calibrate it in less than a week, even if we had a proper dockyard.”

  “Mistress?” said Vesey. “We’ll have a destroyer keeping station as close to each transport as they can. To launch missiles, you see, because we can’t rig the transports to do that in the time we’ve got.”

  “At anything less than ten light minutes,” Adele said, “the difference would be obvious to even a civilian console. The larger vessel would act as both a reflector and a barrier, depending on the angle to the receiving antenna. The console might not identify the transmitter correctly, but it couldn’t be fooled into believing it was really a heavy cruiser.”

  She pursed her lips as a thought occurred to her. “If we could import the signals to the Montcalm through a cable,” she said, “we could broadcast them from the larger ship. That would work, or I hope it would.”

  “We can hook a cable in normal space,” Daniel said. “I was hoping to arrive with the deception in place, but if we can’t, we can’t.”

  “Six?” said Vesey. “I—I don’t mean that I’m as good as you are, that anybody’s as good as you are, but…”

  She paused, looking stricken. She licked her lips to moisten them.

  Adele felt her anger flare again. She deliberately looked away and brought up the list of biographies of officers on the Almirante—not because there was any significance in it but just to prevent herself from slapping the younger woman out of her funk.

  That probably wouldn’t be helpful.

  Adele smiled and turned to h
er companions again. Her rational analysis of what anger was suggesting had quenched the anger.

  “Go ahead, Vesey,” Daniel said calmly.

  “Six, I can hold the transport steady during an insertion,” Vesey said in a whisper. “And you—you can hold station with me, I know you can. We can do this!”

  “You know…” said Daniel slowly. “That might possibly be true.”

  He smiled like the sun breaking through clouds. “At any rate,” he went on, “I think we’re going to try it. Adele, figure out what you’ll need for the hook-up, and Vesey and I will come up with a protocol. That creates one new problem, though?”

  “Six?” said Vesey.

  “Since I’ve just moved Vesey from the Triomphante to the Montcalm, I need someone to captain our only major combat asset,” Daniel said, his smile slipping.

  Adele called up another biography, checked it, and said, “Captain Joycelyn is familiar with the Triomphante, as she is now. And his war record is very good.”

  Daniel and Vesey looked at her. Vesey said, “If we can trust him.”

  “I think,” said Daniel, “that we can trust Joycelyn…but I’ll put a safety in place just to make sure. Adele, please summon Captain Joycelyn from the Ithaca, and also call Midshipman Hale from the BDC.”

  He smiled. Adele thought he looked satisfied.

  * * *

  Hale entered the bridge fast. That was proper for an acting lieutenant responding to the captain’s summons, but her expression betrayed an understratum of concern overlaid with a neutral gloss.

  Daniel felt a twitch of embarrassment at having accidentally frightened an able officer. He gestured to the bulkhead station beside Adele’s and said, “Sit down, Hale. I need a Sissie here on the bridge of the Triomphante, so I’m transferring you to the Signals slot. I’m moving von Golz—” a Tarbell lieutenant who had originally come from the Fleet; the current Signals Officer “—to the Montclare.”

  “Ah, yes sir, of course,” Hale said, confused now rather than worried. “But my understanding was that you would be commanding the Triomphante yourself?”