RCN 11: Death's Bright Day (eARC)

by David Drake

  “My intention,” Daniel said, “was to control squadron operations from the cruiser’s BDC while Lieutenant Vesey—”

  He nodded to her in the adjacent station.

  “—commanded the Triomphante herself. That’s changed because of an equipment failure on the Montcalm. Vesey will be commanding the transport, and I’ll be taking over the Princess Cecile.”

  He smiled. The Montcalm’s commo failure was an irritation which made a risky plan even more dangerous, but he was glad that he’d be back aboard the Princess Cecile during the coming battle. The heavy cruiser had a fine crew which by now was reasonably well worked up, but the Sissie was home.

  That will be a problem if I ever reach flag rank. Which in turn won’t be a problem unless we’re luckier at Danziger than I’d give odds on.

  “Oh,” said Hale, her face going blank. “Well, I—”

  Hale looked at Adele, then back to Daniel. “Sir?” she said. “Six. I’m honored by your choice and I believe I can handle the commo work as well as the next space officer. But I’m not in a class with Lieutenant Cazelet. His leg won’t keep him from doing the signals job, and he’s got more determination than, well, than just about anybody. He can do the job, sir!”

  Daniel listened, hoping that his surprise didn’t show. Hale and Cazelet were simply two shipboard colleagues: her recommendation was completely disinterested.

  He nodded and said, “Cazelet is very good, as you say, and I agree that he’s physically capable of handling the commo duties. What he couldn’t do, psychologically, is to shoot Captain Joycelyn if he began to act in a fashion not in the best interests of the Tarbell Stars.”

  Hale swallowed. She didn’t speak.

  “I think Cazelet could command the Triomphante in battle adequately in Joycelyn’s place,” Daniel added, giving Hale longer to process the information, “but Cazelet would never be able to do what was necessary to take control.”

  “I suspect you’d be a better combat commander also,” said Adele. “I would put you in charge rather that Rene, even if I were on the bridge to murder Joycelyn.”

  She smiled. There was no humor in her expression.

  “I have a great deal of experience in murder,” Adele added.

  “But Six…” Hale said. “Yes, I’ll carry out any duties you give me, and I didn’t need the Academy to tell me that part of what an RCN officer might do was to kill the enemies of the Republic. But what if I’m wrong?”

  “Lieutenant Hale,” Vesey said. “We’re about to fight a battle. It’s nearly certain that some people will die, and possibly everyone in the Tarbell forces will die. Like the rest of us, you’ll use your best judgment with whatever situation arises.”

  Her expression softened a little. “Based on what I’ve seen of your conduct…” Vesey said. “Your judgment is sound.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Hale said to Vesey. She turned to Daniel and said, “Sir, do I wait for a formal announcement or do you want me to just move onto the bridge immediately?”

  “Let me intrude,” said Tovera. “People like me and Hogg generally keep quiet when our betters—”

  She grinned. Daniel had no idea how Tovera saw herself in relation to human society, and he wasn’t sure he’d find her joke funny if he did understand it.

  “—are talking, but I have something to say.”

  Daniel looked at Adele. She shrugged and said, “Go ahead, Tovera.”

  “Mistress,” Tovera said, nodding in acknowledgement. She looked down at Hale at the station on Adele’s other side. “Hale, you’re a crap pistol shot, right?”

  Daniel thought of saying something but immediately smothered the reaction. He’d left the question of permitting Tovera to speak to Tovera’s mistress. He wasn’t going to second guess Adele in a matter which she understood much better than he did.

  Hale didn’t react for an instant. Then she said, “You saw the hash I made of it when we took over the Upholder, so there’s no point in my arguing, is there? I know to get close this time, if it comes to that.”

  “Good answer,” said Tovera, grinning like a happy serpent. She reached into her attaché case and handed her little sub-machine gun butt-first to Hale. “This is another answer. It’s got lighter recoil than the service pistol you were using, but from here to the command console—”

  She gestured with her left hand.

  “—it’ll slice him open as nice as Hogg could do with that knife of his. Aim at the waist and it’ll recoil straight up.”

  None of Daniel’s group said anything for a moment. Those on the bridge who’d gotten up to stare at Adele’s arrival had gone back to their business. They’d better have, or they’ll learn that goggling at their captain isn’t a good career move.

  Hale took the weapon and after a moment slipped it into the right side-pocket of her utility jacket to get it out of sight. “Thank you,” she said carefully.

  “You’re welcome to the holster,” Tovera said. “I think you’d be better off carrying it in your waistband, the way you did on the Upholder.”

  “Thank you, mistress,” Hale repeated. “Ah, isn’t this—”

  She touched her sagging pocked.

  “—something you may need yourself.”

  “Officer Mundy and her servant will be aboard the Princess Cecile with me,” Daniel said. “I’m not expecting that sort of problem, but I’m confident that we can outfit Tovera with small-arms should something arise.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hale. “I’ll carry out my duties to the best of my ability, sir.”

  Daniel smiled at her. “As expected, Hale,” he said.

  Hale had been a classmate of Cory in the Academy. She had taken a common spacer’s slot under Daniel on a private charter because she wanted to learn how Cory had changed from a dull cadet to a lieutenant with a name and a future.

  Well, she’s learning.

  “Captain Joycelyn is in the airlock,” Adele said, watching her display.

  “Very good,” said Daniel. “Why don’t you and I—and you, Vesey, since you’re still in command of the Triomphante, take him to the captain’s duty cabin off the bridge and inform him of the new arrangements.”

  He got to his feet and smiled again. “Not your part of the arrangements, Hale,” he added. “I don’t expect he’ll ever learn about that.”

  “If I’m sufficiently accurate,” Hale said, “he won’t learn even if things go tits up.”

  Vesey winced, but Daniel and the servants were all laughing as they shepherded Adele back to the rotunda to meet Captain Joycelyn.

  CHAPTER 26

  Danziger System

  Adele felt as though the right half of her body was missing and the left half was ice cold—all except her head, where the sensations were reversed. Extracting from the Matrix into normal space was always unpleasant but it was also always different—both as a personal experience and for individuals undergoing the extraction in the same ship.

  I could collect and correlate reactions to extraction, Adele thought. I could set up a program throughout the RCN, I have enough influence to do that, and I could probably expand it even wider.

  Her mind cleared, bringing her back onto the signals console of the Princess Cecile. There were worse reactions to returning to sidereal space than that you find yourself constructing silly plans, but neither was this a situation in which to dawdle idly.

  The bulk of the Montcalm filled a large sector of the panoramic display at the top of Adele’s screen. The transport was only a hundred yards away, too close for the ships to extend all their antennas without contact.

  The distance at which hostile vessels could view the two as separate ships depended on the observing optics, the sharpening software, and the skill of the user. Adele believed that there was a high chance of success that their extraction into the orbit of the system’s fourth planet would at least initially appear to be a single vessel.

  Moreover, the optical fiber linking Adele’s console to the transmitting antennas on the
Montcalm has survived the Transit. That was truly an amazing piece of shiphandling for Vesey and even more for Daniel, who was controlling the Princess Cecile from a pulpit on the ship’s hull, connected to the command console by a hydro-mechanical linkage.

  The reason that trying to correlate reactions to extraction was a silly idea was not because the information would be useless. All knowledge was equal in Adele’s mind, though she might not have an immediate practical need for most of it at any one time.

  Rather, it was silly because the data would have to be subjective. Adele didn’t trust subjective data. Though she could organize it, she would never in her heart feel that it was real. She supposed that was a failing in herself, but she doubted whether a practical ‘normal’ scholar would press her to carry out that particular research.

  This had been the first real-world test of Daniel’s outside control rig. He had added it after operations in the Sunbright System had proved how effective it could be in the hands of a skilled enemy.

  Most astrogators didn’t read the Matrix the way Uncle Stacy Bergen had taught Daniel to do; Daniel in turn had taught his junior officers. Reading the Matrix had made Commander Bergen the most famous explorer in Cinnabar’s history.

  A different skill was to be able to follow another ship in the Matrix. That was a pirate’s skill. Daniel had fought pirates. From sheer determination to master every aspect of his profession, he had taught himself to do whatever a pirate could do.

  Shiphandling wasn’t Adele’s concern. They had extracted fifteen light-minutes from Danziger, as planned; they were within the orbit of the next planet in the system, though the planet itself was a quarter of its way around the sun.

  The three rebel destroyers—Ithaca, Truth, and Justice—were orbiting Danziger. Initially Adele couldn’t tell whether they had just lifted off or whether they were arriving and were preparing to land. There was no sign of the Almirante.

  The Katchaturian was already on station, two thousand miles from the Sissie. The Triomphante extracted three seconds after the Sissie and Montcalm—which for this purpose were claiming to be the RCS Powerful—and about a thousand miles away, good station-keeping for proceeding in the Matrix.

  The Mindello flickered into sidereal space at the same time, then vanished back into the Matrix when Cory realized that his charge, the Montclare—AKA RCS Terrible—hadn’t arrived. Quick in-and-out maneuvers were brutally hard on the crew, as Adele knew very well, but there was no help for it.

  When the Montclare arrived a minute later and two thousand miles out, the Mindello reappeared, then vanished into the Matrix for final adjustments out of sight of the enemy. When Cory extracted the third time, he was tucked almost as close to the Montclare as the Princess Cecile was to the Montcalm.

  Even the best spacers would be vomiting and weak after that series of insertions. Cory had expected it—and had brought a pistol from the Sissie’s weapons locker before he returned to take command of the Mindello after a last conference with Daniel. If spacers who were not used to the standards of the Princess Cecile decided to mutiny, Cory would deal with it.

  “Warships in the vicinity of Danziger,” Adele said. “This is Admiral Beukes of the RCN. Identify yourselves and stand by for boarding, over.”

  She was sending on the twenty-meter band, the standard hailing frequency, using the Montcalm’s antennas. It would be fifteen minutes before the destroyers received the signal and another fifteen before their reply reached Adele, even if they responded instantly.

  Daniel, wearing his rigging suit except for the helmet, clanked onto the bridge. He nodded to Adele as he passed on the way to the command console.

  Farber, a lieutenant from the Katchaturian whom Cory had spoken well of, commanded the Sissie from the BDC while Daniel was on the hull. Daniel settled onto the couch and said, “Command, this is Six. Farber, continue to conn the ship until I relieve you—which I may not do until after our next insertion. Over.”

  “Roger, Six,” Farber replied. “I tweaked Thrusters Three and Four to match the transport’s notion of one gee, nothing else. Control over.”

  “Six out, break,” Daniel said. “Signals, what’s the situation, over?”

  Rigging suits didn’t have any form of electronic communication. In normal space that was only a minor disadvantage: riggers used hand signals and mechanical semaphores to communicate.

  In the Matrix, not only would radios not have worked, the effect of RF signals on the sails would have been to drive the ship on a wild career through the cosmos. It was better not to fit suits with radios than to accept the results of the mistakes inevitable if the equipment was there to be used at the wrong time.

  “The rebel destroyers are orbiting Danziger,” Adele said. “There—the Ithaca has begun braking to land so they must have just arrived. There’s no sign of the—”

  As she spoke, sidereal space rippled, the precursor to a mass extracting from the Matrix. The center of the disturbance was equidistant from Danziger and the Tarbell squadron: roughly in the orbit of the fifth planet but leading it by as much as the Tarbells were trailing.

  “Correction,” Adele said. “The Almirante is now extracting. That is, extracted fifteen minutes ago. One moment.”

  She switched from intercom to short wave again. The beams were directional, so she adjusted a second antenna to focus on the Karst battleship. The hardware would have been standard on a heavy cruiser, but they’d had to jury rig a fitment to the Montcalm.

  “Warships in the Danziger system,” she broadcast. “This is Admiral Beukes of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Identify yourselves and stand by for boarding, over.”

  Daniel was figuring courses on the astrogation display. Each sweep of his finger through the display was translated into alphanumeric notations on a sidebar; when he banged the Execute button on his keyboard, the calculations went to a compiler which translated them into adjustments to the antennas and sail plan.

  “Warships in the Danziger system,” Adele repeated. “This is Admiral Beukes of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Identify yourselves and stand by for boarding, over.”

  The rebel ships would not have received even the first transmission yet, but the repeated demand might disturb the rebels’ composure. She went back to reviewing the chatter among the rebel ships for the fifteen minutes before the Princess Cecile had arrived in the Danziger system. It was an ordinary discussion of landing procedures, enlivened only by a question from the captain of the Truth as to whether the other ships knew the whereabouts of the Almirante.

  They didn’t, of course. Even a civilian sensor suite would have been able to spot a battleship within the confines of the Danziger system, so if the Truth couldn’t find the Almirante, the Almirante couldn’t have arrived yet.

  It should have pleased Adele as a member of the RCN to learn that their enemies were stupid. She had quickly learned that it didn’t: she had a romantic ideal of what human intelligence should be; though unlike her mother she didn’t carry it to the point of denying reality.

  Esme Rolfe Mundy had had as little as possible to do with the Lower Orders, whom she claimed contained an innate nobility which needed only to be directed by the leaders of the Popular Party in order to bring a new Golden Age. Adele had lived at the squalid bottom of society where what her mother meant by “the Lower Orders” were a ceiling above her; she hadn’t noticed a great deal of nobility among them.

  “Signals,” said Daniel as he slammed Execute again, “copy my course calculations to the Montcalm. Break. Cinnabar Peacekeeping Detachment—” the squadron’s public name “—proceed to close with unidentified battleship. Peace Six out.”

  Daniel checked the Plot-Position Indicator. “Ship,” he said, drawing on his gauntlets as he spoke, “I’m returning to the control station on the hull. Farber, you remain in command until I reach my position. Six out.”

  He stomped off the bridge, lifting his helmet in both hands to clamp it in place as soon as he was in the airlock.

&n
bsp; Adele looked at her intercepts, converted to texts on her display. The rebels still weren’t aware of the Tarbell arrival.

  “Unidentified warships in the Danziger system,” Adele said. “Identify yourselves and stand by for boarding by the RCN peacekeeping force, Admiral Beukes commanding!”

  * * *

  Daniel stepped into the chest-high framework he’d had built just forward of the Dorsal A antenna. The enclosure had room for one person in a rigging suit and a pillar like that of the semaphore stations by which the interior of the ship communicated to the spacers on the hull.

  Instead of a semaphore’s six arms, this station had a joystick with a mode button, currently set for sidereal space. Daniel put his right gauntlet on the handgrip and clicked the mode switch to Matrix operation and then back to indicate to the bridge that he was in position.

  The rigging watch waited, as motionless as the antennas and sails. Above them hung the Montcalm, her natural lines swollen grotesquely by a suit of sail fabric which gave her the apparent bulk of a heavy cruiser. She was barely maneuverable in the Matrix because her only controls were the transport’s topgallants, all that protruded from the camouflage.

  The coming insertion would be a short one and very simple: she and the Sissie, together the heavy cruiser Powerful, would in company with the Triomphante and the Montclare/ Terrible extract within one light minute of the Karst battleship. The battleship’s captain would have—just—had time to digest the demand which Adele had broadcast at the Tarbell squadron’s first appearance.

  At one light minute a battleship’s optics would easily be capable of determining that the two transports weren’t really RCN heavy cruisers. RF sensors, however, were the default system on most consoles, and they would continue to indicate the RCS Terrible and Powerful.

  What happened then depended on Captain Staples’ orders, and even more on his personal courage. Even a very brave man—and from his record, Staples wasn’t a coward—knew that if he provoked Cinnabar to declare war on Karst, the best he could expect from his home government was a quick execution.