The Way to Glory

by David Drake

  "Yes, that's quite right," Ganse said, though his tone wasn't so much one of agreement as of desperate pleading. It wasn't the way a commissioned officer should've been talking to a warrant officer, a mere technical specialist. He'd definitely heard rumors about Adele Mundy. "He's plotted the entire course to Nikitin even before we lift from Cinnabar. All seventeen days in the Matrix, with the interim returns to normal space to take star sightings."

  Daniel had said he thought the Hermes could make the run in twelve days; that the tender mightn't be as clumsy as folk thought, not if the captain stayed out on the hull and watched the ghostly shimmering of universes beyond the bubble that enclosed his own ship. It was possible that Slidell could reach the Gold Dust Cluster as quickly or nearly so: from his record, Slidell was a highly skilled astrogator himself.

  Adele smiled as she completed her analysis: the difference was that Slidell saw no present need to press the ship and its crew to the limit, whereas Daniel would see no reason not to. No doubt the RCN needed both types of officer, but there was a reason Lieutenant Leary wearing full medals could be mistaken for an admiral.

  Ganse looked as though he were about to say more, but the five-minute signal rang. The Hermes used an electronic chime quite different from the Sissie's solid brass bell. Though this was a perfectly good signal in its own right, Adele's face froze with irritation every time she heard it.

  She smiled in reaction. On the other hand, she'd gotten used to greater changes in the past.

  "Mister Pasternak, bring the thrusters to sixty-percent flow but keep them open," Slidell ordered. "Ship, this is the Captain. Close all hatches, repeat, close all hatches. Captain out."

  Ganse stared at his display, his left hand dancing across the number pad by practiced reflex. "Ship, all hatches are closed," he announced. Adele heard the words in her helmet earphones a heartbeat before they reached her through the air. "Battle Center out."

  The thrusters roared into the pool, buoying the tender on a pillow of steam. Because the nozzles were flared, the plasma dissipated instead of trying to lift the ship into the air as the present flow might do if concentrated.

  By now Adele knew that it was better to close the nozzles with the thrusters already at high output than to lift on rising output, since the nozzle petals were more uniform than the feed pipes might be. She knew quite a lot about how an RCN warship should operate, because she'd spent years aboard one of the best. . . .

  Ganse looked toward her again. "Ah . . ." he said. "I suppose you've heard about the mutiny on the Bainbridge? Well, of course you have. Everybody has."

  "Yes, but gossip doesn't interest me, Lieutenant," Adele said with a frown. She returned her eyes to her own display. Unless my duties require me to be interested, of course.

  Adele monitored traffic throughout Harbor Three. Since the ionized exhaust washed across the radio frequency bands, that meant tapping the harbor's modulated laser transponders and decoding the downloads . . . which she and her equipment did very handily. The results were of no significance, but the practice would stand her in good stead at future, more dangerous, times.

  "It isn't what people are saying!" Ganse blurted. "The Captain was being careful and he had a right to be careful. The Bainbridge is a very small ship. There was no way to be sure other plotters wouldn't have freed the three we had in irons and taken over the ship still."

  "Cutter crews, prepare for liftoff," Captain Slidell said. The cutters were fully prepared, of course, because Adele had chosen to pipe the tender's general communications to them from the first. Insets across the top of her display gave her miniature panoramas of the interior of the six small vessels.

  "You understand that, don't you?" Ganse begged.

  Adele looked at him. That was a direct question, so she couldn't ignore it. She'd give a good deal to know who Ganse thought he was talking to, though. Lieutenant Leary's friend? Mistress Sand's agent? Or some third thing his mind and his despair had invented? He certainly wouldn't have been talking this way to the warrant officer in charge of the Hermes' communications.

  "Lieutenant Ganse," she said, "I understand that you believe . . ."

  Her voice trailed off. Because she was Adele Mundy, she wouldn't speak a near truth that was a lie. She looked Ganse in the eye and said, rephrasing the statement, "I understand that you believed the executions were necessary at the time they occurred. I don't know what you believe now, nor do I care."

  "Ship, this is the Captain," Slidell said. "We are lifting off. Out!"

  The roar of the thrusters redoubled; Adele felt acceleration begin to weigh her body.

  "Next stop, Nikitin!" Hogg called cheerfully.

  Adele wasn't quite sure, but she thought that despite the thunder she heard Tovera's cool voice reply, "For some of us, anyway."

  CHAPTER 9

  Above Nikitin

  The environmental system moaned as it ventilated the Battle Direction Center, and the consoles themselves whirred and squeaked. Even so, the Hermes was as quiet as an operational starship ever got.

  Adele paid no attention to Nikitin, the planet they were orbiting, beyond noting that it was a glowing blue ball of ocean dotted with islands. That was true of many of the worlds where the RCN based its outlying fleets.

  Sea worlds made it easy to refill tanks with reaction mass—any liquid would do, though water was ideal—but that was a relatively minor consideration. Broad seas gave a ship with mechanical problems a wide variety of places to land safely: thrust reflecting from hard ground created dangerous turbulence in the instant before touchdown, the last thing the captain of a vessel with a clogged feedline or cracked nozzles wanted.

  And if things went wrong anyway, a ship crashing into the ocean was less likely to fling dangerous debris into the port facilities than one hitting the land. Naval planners had to include that possibility in their considerations also.

  "Very satisfactory for a shakedown cruise," Daniel said. He lifted his helmet and rubbed his fingers through his fine blond hair with a pleased expression. "Aside from those three seventy-foot spars fracturing at the central weld, that is, and that just meant we had to fish the others from that batch."

  Adele suspected that he would've been disappointed if nothing had gone wrong during the voyage. Daniel wasn't the sort to stir up trouble where there wasn't any, but he always seemed just a touch more alive when there was a serious problem to solve.

  Her mouth quirked into her familiar wry grin. Daniel had certainly chosen a profession to suit his temperament, because an RCN officer was rarely faced with a shortage of life-threatening situations. Nor, she'd noticed, was a librarian who chose to accompany Lieutenant Daniel Leary.

  As a vessel newly arrived over Nikitin, the Hermes remained in unpowered orbit until Planetary Control in Sinmary Port cleared them to land. Because Nikitin was a major naval base, an orbital minefield of X-ray lasers pumped by fusion bombs protected it. They'd automatically destroy any vessel that did anything but float in orbit till Planetary Control vetted it and gave permission.

  Adele disliked weightlessness a great deal. The Hermes would probably be cleared to land in a half hour or so, but to fill the gap she threw herself into the mass of information which a new planet offered her. So long as Adele's mind was occupied, she didn't care—didn't know—what her body was doing.

  Several data strands combined into something extraordinary. "Daniel," she said, ignoring his cheerful prattle. "The Cornelwood's been damaged. That's the—"

  "Good God!" said Daniel. "That's the flagship of the Gold Dust Squadron! Was she attacked?"

  Although she and Daniel were at adjacent consoles, Adele had spoken over the intercom connection she'd set up for the two of them alone. She was using her console's sound-cancelling feature to prevent anyone nearby from hearing her words directly.

  Peeker, the engineer's mate, a gunner's mate named Enescue, and two midshipmen were at the other consoles. The remaining three midshipmen sat on jump-seats along with Hogg and Tovera. A
dele didn't mind the others knowing the information she was providing to Daniel, but she didn't want to advertise to them that she had learned it. Based on the way Lieutenant Ganse had talked, there were already too many rumors regarding Mistress Adele Mundy going around.

  "No, it seems to have been an accident," Adele said, sorting as she spoke. "On landing after returning from Haislip Prime . . ."

  Her control wands flickered through reams of extraneous data as if she were a miner clearing overburden. Recent communications—and there was an enormous volume of them; most of the base traffic for the past three days was devoted to the subject—dealt with salvage and repair. Getting back to the cause of the trouble was unexpectedly difficult.

  "Yes, I see!" Daniel said. Sinmary Port was directly below the Hermes at this stage of her orbit. Daniel had switched his display—echoed in miniature on Adele's—to a real-time image of the harbor, then magnified it till a single large vessel completely filled the field. "She's sunk on her port side. The outrigger must've ruptured, but there should've been at least six separate compartments. . . ."

  His fingers hammered commands into his console's virtual keyboard. You could've asked me to find the information, Adele thought in momentary annoyance—and caught herself with a grin of self-awareness.

  And so he could have, but on this particular point Daniel was faster than she'd have been searching for data which to her was unfamiliar. He'd simply highlighted the vessel half-sunk in the natural harbor and called up design particulars with a keystroke.

  "Right, ten sealed compartments in each float," Daniel said with satisfaction. "It should've been that many for a heavy cruiser, but the Tree Class has enough other design problems that I wouldn't have sworn they hadn't skimped on safety measures. How in hell did they manage to lose integrity on the port side almost completely?"

  "There!" Adele said. She'd finally gotten to the correct file in the archives of Squadron HQ. It was classified, which didn't keep her out, but it'd kept the location from appearing during her initial data search. "A thruster nozzle burst as they were coming down."

  There was even imagery of the accident, taken by automatic cameras in the harbor and on the cruiser's underside to aid investigation of situations just like this one. At one moment the vessel's thrusters were all spewing rainbow jets of plasma. In the next, a nozzle midway along the vessel's port side blew into glowing tungsten shards.

  "Ah!" Daniel said as he watched the archival feed. "What bad luck . . . though I would say they were coming in rather hot."

  Plasma-streaked steam enveloped the image of the Cornelwood, smothering the ship's own cameras and those of the port facilities as well. The present file was optical only, which was probably sufficient; but being who she was, Adele reminded herself to look for microwave or sonic imagery as soon as she had a moment.

  The Cornelwood splashed into the harbor and reappeared, bobbing violently as the curtain of steam cleared. To the distant cameras she was obviously listing to port; the ship's own imagery showed rips in the port pontoon until they sank beneath the surface. The nozzle had burst like a bomb, riddling the whole length of the float.

  The other portside thrusters were still glowing from what'd probably been overload to counteract the cruiser's too-swift descent. They cracked one after another in gushes of steam as they dipped into the water. Their failure wasn't violent enough to damage the float further, but it was already a total loss.

  The images from the Cornelwood's cameras went black. Their mechanisms were sealed against worse environments than this, but they couldn't see through harbor scum.

  "What very bad luck," Daniel repeated, this time in a tone of wondering amazement. "Raising and refitting her's going to take the whole port establishment, so we'll have to do all our own repairs."

  "Should we report this to the Captain?" Adele said. If Daniel had been in command, the answer would've been, "Yes, of course!" but Daniel wasn't in command.

  "We should, but I'm afraid he'd think we were boasting," Daniel said, voicing Adele's own thought. "He'll be informed by the port authorities as soon as we're on the ground, so—"

  "Sir?" said Midshipman Vesey on a BDC-only channel. "There's something wrong with the flagship. She's too deep on the port side, and there's barges around her in the water, over."

  Though Vesey was in a jump seat, gathering data through her helmet display, she'd seen what Bragg and Cory at the consoles had missed. Her partner Dorst was viewing a signal imported from her helmet—Adele checked by reflex—but Blantyre beside them was searching for the image with her mouth set in a grim line.

  "Roger, Vesey," Daniel said, winking at Adele. "Break, Captain this is Leary. Midshipman Vesey has noticed that the flagship is half-submerged. Salvage appears to be in progress. Over."

  After a moment, Slidell's voice replied, "Roger, Mister Leary. It looks like we'll have to handle our own refit, and I wouldn't wonder if they drafted some of our crew for their project as well. My regards to Mistress Vesey; that's the sort of observation that the RCN needs. Out."

  Without asking permission, Adele clipped Captain Slidell's comment and relayed it to Vesey. The midshipman straightened in her seat, beaming like an angel.

  "Sir?" Vesey said. "You've got experience lifting a ship with another ship, and they're certainly not going to get the cruiser up any other way. Over."

  "We'll see what my superior officers wish, Vesey," Daniel said. He grinned at Adele and added over their private channel, "Though from my viewpoint, it'd be rather a vacation not to be directly under Commander Slidell's eye the way I've been during the past seventeen days!"

  * * *

  Daniel, wearing his best 2nd Class uniform with a saucer hat instead of a commo helmet, stood in the entry hold. To his left was Captain Slidell, to his right the five midshipmen in declining order of seniority. Lieutenant Ganse remained on the bridge as duty officer—the traditional place of the junior lieutenant at a new landfall.

  Neither Pasternak nor Woetjans, the Chiefs of Ship and Rig respectively, were present. A crew of six techs under Brouwer, a Senior Mechanic from the Bainbridge, were in the hold with a large toolchest, but they weren't members of the party waiting to greet the delegation from the port establishment and the staff of Admiral Milne, who'd come aboard as soon as the slip cooled enough.

  "It seems quite idyllic," Adele said through the miniature phone in the canal of Daniel's left ear. He couldn't respond, of course, but it was nice to have her coolly chatty presence as he wasted time in an uncomfortable fashion. "There're trees up to eighty feet over all the islands that I've checked, except where colonists have cleared them. The flowers are striking, so I suppose you'll have plenty of new animals to observe too."

  Daniel smiled; so long as his First Lieutenant held himself at Parade Rest, Captain Slidell couldn't complain that his mouth had quirked. Adele wasn't any more interested in flowers than she was in manufacturers of plasma thrusters. They and most of the rest of the world about her were bits of data to be stored and classified, generally at the whim of someone else.

  Hydraulic pumps whined, forcing the main hatch open for the first time since the Hermes closed up on Cinnabar. It squealed loudly: metal surfaces have a tendency to migrate in vacuum, so the hatch and its coaming had grown minusculely together during the voyage. Steam and a hint of strange spices curled in as the ramp lowered.

  "Another bloody hellhole," a tech muttered. "It seems it's always a jungle or a bloody glacier. How's about a nice city some time?"

  The senior mechanic caught Captain Slidell's glare. He muttered, "Belt up, Murtagh."

  It wasn't that Adele didn't have personal interests—she could discuss books and manuscripts with as much enthusiasm as anyone in the human universe. But so far as Daniel could tell, most of his friend's attention went into what she could do for others.

  He smiled again, then let the expression fade. That made Adele Mundy sound like a saint . . . which in an odd fashion she might be. A fashion that included the pisto
l in her pocket, and the cold certainty with which she used it at need.

  The ramp squawled, then stuck halfway. "Coop and Filippa, get the number three jack, and you get the heavy hammer, Murtagh!" Brouwer snapped. He and his team rushed to the jammed lower hinge. Captain Slidell scowled, then seemed to relax.

  "The islands are made by coraline algae," Adele continued. "Plants that form limestone."

  She paused, then continued, "Hmm. The algae grows from the top, but the mats reach down as the lower portions die. If they touch the bottom, they form islands. I'd never heard of anything like that."

  Nor had Daniel, and it gave him something interesting to ponder while he waited silently. He understood the need for drill and ceremony. He'd never be much good at it, but he wouldn't be a good engineering officer either; that wasn't the problem. It simply didn't seem to him that the landing of a tender at a distant station was a proper venue for formality.

  "I got it, chief!" Murtagh said. "Gimme room, just gimme some bloody—"

  The rest of Brouwer's team leaned or stepped backward, depending on where they stood. Murtagh brought the sledge around in a three-quarter's circle that ended in a bell-like whang-g-g. The ramp jumped, then settled into smooth downward movement till it squelched into the ground at the edge of the slip. The maintenance crew moved out of the way with murmurs of satisfaction.

  Murtagh and the rest of the team Brouwer had chosen for the present duty were former Bridgies. From what Daniel had seen during the voyage—and now—they knew their business. He'd have been happier if Brouwer had integrated his crew, though, the way Woetjans had done with her rigging watches.

  The last of the eddying steam cleared, leaving a familiar stench of baked loam that would linger for days. The slips of Sinmary Port were of natural earth rather than being concrete lined, so volumes of organic compounds burned when plasma vaporized the water they were suspended in.

  The two lieutenants waiting on the quay sauntered up the ramp. One wore utilities, while the other was in Grays but with no decorations except the scarlet collar flash of a staff officer. There was no sign of the formal greeting party Captain Slidell had obviously expected.