by David Drake
Captain Daniel Leary had nothing to do but to watch the Alliance escort react, and to choose the last safe moment for the Hermes to escape again into the Matrix. He smiled. That was a sufficient responsibility. If he misjudged their timing, a missile would vaporize the tender and her skillful, hard-working crew; and unless he got fully into the head of the escort commander, he wouldn't be able to disrupt the convoy.
The Scheer didn't shift her position at the front of the loose globe of freighters. The destroyer nearer the Hermes, the Z21 according to the legend which Adele's software had careted onto the display, was braking to drop rapidly behind the convoy. Within ten minutes she'd be between the remaining Alliance vessels and the Hermes.
She would also be in position to pursue if the tender remained in sidereal space. Destroyers were built for speed and maneuverability. Newly constructed vessels like the later Z Class had a high enough power-to-weight ratio to accelerate at 3 g, and their sturdy frames could accept such stresses.
The Scheer launched a pair of missiles. Daniel nodded approvingly. The heavy cruiser had twelve missile launchers and her magazines carried over a hundred reloads. Possibly two hundred, though the higher figure was unlikely in a vessel fitted out for a long voyage. A Z Class destroyer carried no more than fifty missiles, including those in her six launchers. The Alliance commodore didn't expect to hit the Hermes, but he could afford to expend two rounds from the cruiser to hasten the RCN vessel on her way.
Daniel's instinct caught a distortion in the PPI even before a visible blip appeared. He highlighted it and snapped, "Signals, get me full particulars on this vessel—"
A line of data appeared at the bottom of his screen in lime green letters: House of Zerbe, registered Caxton's World; 3,000 tonnes nominal; present identifier number C7.
"ASAP, I was going to say, Mundy," Daniel went on with a broad smile. "But you were a little quicker than that, as usual. Break. Ship, this is Six. We are inserting into the Matrix—"
He pressed the code key with his index and middle fingers together, initiating the sequence he'd programmed days earlier. At the moment the details didn't matter as much as entering the Matrix before that pair of missiles reached the point in sidereal space which the Hermes at present occupied.
"—now! Out."
Daniel felt the universe shiver as the tender and all those aboard her prepared to enter another of the interpenetrating bubbles of the Matrix.
He had plans for what came next as well; the planning was easy.
Executing those plans, though—that wasn't going to be easy at all, and it might not even be possible. But he was going to try.
CHAPTER 24
The Interstellar Void
"There you go, mistress," Midshipman Dorst said, his mouth close to Adele's helmet so that she could hear him. He pulled back with a doubtful expression, then bent close again and went on, "Ah, ma'am? Would you like me to go along and, you know, give you a hand?"
Hold me by the hand is what he means, Adele thought tartly. The concern irritated her no less for being a reasonable one.
"Thank you, Midshipman," she said, speaking with exaggerated lips movements since the air suit's clear helmet would muffle her voice. "I don't believe that will be necessary."
The Hermes was in sidereal space where radio communication outside the hull would've been safe, but nobody'd bothered to fit radios. The riggers were used to working without them and the suits—minimal garments like Adele's as well as the heavy rigging suits—required two keys, the signals officer's and the captain's, before radios could be installed. The danger if somebody accidentally transmitted from a vessel while in the Matrix was simply too great to be risked.
Adele entered the airlock and closed it behind her. She had the chamber to herself. She should've told Dorst, "I hope that won't be necessary."
She smiled as she waited for pumps to evacuate the chamber. If she did manage to stumble off into space, lost hopelessly among the stars of a galaxy far from the one in which she'd been born, her last words to another human being would've been a half truth. Her honor required that she not stumble.
The indicator light on the outer door of the chamber switched from red to green; the illumination was flat because the air was too thin to scatter light and provide visual depth. Adele pressed the latch and stepped onto the hull, hooking her safety line to a staple while the lock cycled closed behind her.
She'd been on the hull of a ship in vacuum scores of times by now, in sidereal space and in the Matrix where Daniel had tried to give her a feeling for the seething wonders of the cosmos that so thrilled him. To her it was all a confusion of harsh half-lights. She'd never been able to see what Daniel saw, but she appreciated the enthusiasm he felt.
This time Adele was sure that the riggers found what was going on nearly as confusing as she did. The antennas were extended fully to keep them out of the way, but the sails were furled. The crew was clambering over the waist of the tender, covering the four remaining cutters beneath a layer of molecule-thin metallized film: the vessel's complete set of spare sails. Spacers lashed together the sails using the grommets that would ordinarily have bound them to the yards.
Like most of the other spacers outside the ship Daniel wore a rigging suit, but his had been painted white. He stood out even in the faint starshine bathing the Hermes, a score of light-years from the nearest planetary system.
Adele had expected to find Daniel on a mast truck. Instead he was on the hull not far from the airlock she'd come through, looking toward the bow across the ship's waist. Adele checked her line—it ought to reach—and started toward him, her magnetic soles clacking each time she put a foot down or bent it upward again to release.
A spacer—Woetjans, judging from her size—on the tender's forward section made a series of hand gestures toward Daniel, then pointed. Daniel turned, saw Adele, and gestured her to him. He was probably smiling, but she couldn't tell in this light.
Daniel touched his helmet to hers and said, "What do you think of her?" He swept his arm in an arc across the waist of the ship.
"I don't think Commander Slidell would approve," Adele said dryly. "I accept that you know what you're doing, Daniel, but I have no idea what that is. In this case, I doubt anyone but you knows."
"Yes, well . . ." Daniel said. "It may be that what I'm doing is killing all of us to no purpose, I'll admit."
His chuckle came through the joined helmets as a series of clicks, but Adele had no difficulty visualizing her friend's grin.
"I'm afraid that even if all goes well it's likely to be a suicide mission," he went on, "but it won't be purposeless. I can't hide the Hermes, she's far to big to lurk in the debris near the convoy's remaining waypoints. I couldn't manage that even with a cutter, now that the Alliance commodore's been warned. You noticed that—"
Daniel broke off; probably chuckling again, but this time in embarrassment. When he touched his helmet to Adele's again he said, "I'm sorry, of course you wouldn't have. The convoy had shifted the point at which it returned to sidereal space from the fifth planet of the Cancellaria system, a gas giant with a ring and over a dozen satellites, to the fourth planet—a cinder which has neither. The fourth planet isn't nearly as good a navigation aid which is a problem for some of the pigs in that convoy, but it doesn't provide any camouflage for a potential attacker."
"Ah," said Adele as she considered the situation. She knew nothing about astrogation, so it hadn't crossed her mind that the convoy wasn't where the data she'd decrypted for Daniel had said it should be. What she had noticed, however, was—
"Daniel, we entered the system at the same place where the convoy did," she said. "Roughly, I mean. And I don't believe that you made a mistake in your navigation."
"Well, no," Daniel said. "I rather thought the Commodore would've done what he did. The other choice would've been to go outward, but Planet Six is a double system with a common center of gravity. I certainly wouldn't trust the civilian captains he's shepherding not get
into serious trouble if he chose Six A and B for a rendezvous."
He cleared his throat and added, "He's really quite able, you know; the Alliance commodore, I mean. I wouldn't want his job."
"I certainly wouldn't want his job with Lieutenant Daniel Leary planning to wreck him," Adele said, allowing more warmth in her smile than she might've done if there'd been anybody to see her face. "But I don't understand what you're disguising us as. I've never seen a ship—"
Which by this time in her RCN career was a fair number of vessels, she realized.
"—that looks anything like this."
She gestured also. The riggers had strung cables between the tender's bow and stern sections, and the sail fabric was being wrapped over them. That hid the cutters moored along the waist section, but it certainly didn't look like plating.
"Umm," Daniel said. "I suppose you could say I'm disguising us as not an anti-pirate tender rather than as anything in particular. You're the one who's going to make the convoy believe we're the House of Zerbe, you see."
Adele felt her face go still as she considered what Daniel had just said. "I see," she said, and she at least thought she did. "Mimic her signals, you mean? Yes, I can do that, but—"
"Not just her signals," Daniel interrupted. "Her automatic identifier, her emergency beacons in case one of the escort vessels is clever enough to trip them for a cross-check, and—"
"Yes, yes, all that," Adele said sharply. "I meant her signals, not just what her captain sends to the Commodore when she rejoins the convoy in normal space. As for her rescue beacons, she doesn't carry any—or any that work, at any rate."
She made her face blank, half regretting that she'd snapped at Daniel. Though he shouldn't have treated her as if she needed to be taught her job. "The difficult part will be masking our resting RF signature—the various fans, pumps and oscillators—and then projecting the pattern I've recorded from the Zerbe."
Adele turned to look at him, then realized that Daniel couldn't hear her unless their helmets were in contact. Of course they could butt their foreheads together. . . .
Adele didn't remember ever giggling. She didn't giggle now either, but she felt a momentary urge to.
She leaned sideways against Daniel, temple to temple, and added, "Will that be possible? It's really a matter of tuning our systems. It'll require a certain amount of trial and error, but I'm almost certain that I can get a very close approximation if, ah, if you'll permit it."
"It's possible," Daniel said. "We can get along without full environmental controls during the few minutes before all hell breaks loose."
He clapped Adele on the shoulder in a gesture of careful camaraderie. She was sturdy enough and Daniel knew it, but he was apparently being cautious about her light-weight suit.
"As it will, I promise you," he continued. "Mind, I don't think anybody in the convoy would be capable of matching the passive signatures of one ship with another, but I'm always willing to support an artist when I meet her. As soon as I'm back at a console, I'll tell Pasternak to give you full facilities."
"Thank you," Adele said, smiling at herself. "I like to do a thorough job."
She felt her lip quirk in almost a smile. "And it'll give me something to do besides going over the same data for the twentieth time."
She cleared her throat. "But however careful I am with our RF transmissions," she said, "we still aren't going to look like the House of Zerbe. Are we?"
"From a hundred thousand miles, I think we are," Daniel said. "Certainly we are to the civilian vessels, if they even bother to put a telescope on us. The escorts with Fleet optics are going to see a ship of about the right size and about the right lines—remember our rigging screens the details of the hull."
He gestured to the section of waist that was already wrapped in sail fabric; riggers were still working on the portion nearer the bow. "The cloth reflects radio waves, you know," he said. "The thing that makes a tender so very obvious is the radar reflection being multiplied by all the signal traps in the waist. Though the sails don't look very much like hull plating, they have exactly the same effect on radar."
Adele heard the clicking sound of Daniel chuckling again. "That's why I made us so obvious when I scouted them at Cancellaria," he went on. "When we meet them again in the Bromley system, we'll give a normal radar image; and since they already in their hearts know that we're the Zerbe, that's what they'll see. Mind, they'll be very surprised that the Zerbe managed the leg more or less as quickly as the remaining vessels required this time."
He lifted a hand, palm up; the suited equivalent of a shrug. "I hope that's what they'll think," he said. "For long enough, at least."
"Yes, I believe they will," Adele said. She sniffed, then curved her lips in a smile as hard as a fish-hook. She'd realized with disgust and despair over the years that people didn't really look at things, they saw what they "knew." Now she had a friend who saw and understood reality the same way that she did, and who'd become phenomenally successful because of that.
Instead of spending his life, as Adele Mundy had spent most of hers, in a state of frustrated irritation.
Her smile warmed. Well, she was getting better. She was taking lessons from a master.
"I'm going below now to check data," Adele said. "In a few hours I should have a test run for our RF signature prepared, if that's agreeable."
"It's very agreeable," Daniel said. He didn't nod as he'd normally have done if their helmets weren't touching. "You have a good thirty hours, though I don't imagine you'll need anything like that long."
He put his gauntleted hands on his hips and stood watching the work for a moment. Just as Adele turned toward the airlock, Daniel brought their helmets in contact again. "Everything's going splendidly!" he said. "Thanks to the best crew any RCN officer ever had!"
That too, perhaps, Adele thought as she clacked back along the hull. Though we wouldn't be much use without our captain.
Perhaps the thing that most puzzled her about Daniel was that he saw the world as clearly as she did, but he was cheerful and enjoyed the life he lived so fully. Possibly some day she'd be able to learn how he managed that.
She smiled without humor. Possibly.
* * *
"Fellow spacers," said Lieutenant Daniel Leary, facing the video pick-up in the center of his command console. "Fellow Cinnabars. We've come from various ships, but now we're all together on the Hermes. I couldn't ask a finer command."
Three of the cutters remaining in the flotilla were fully manned and closed up, ready to launch. They were overmanned, in fact, because the entire crew'd have to abandon the tender after the next series of shifts through the Matrix. There were only two crewmen aboard Cutter 614; her hatch remained open to receive Daniel and the rest of the personnel who'd guide the tender on her final course.
"The RCN expects us to do our duty whether it's easy or hard," Daniel said. "This time it's going to be hard. Those of you who've served with me before know what I mean, and I'm sure the rest of you have heard stories."
He took a deep breath. He was speaking on a one-way channel while Adele blocked the chatter on others, but Daniel'd made enough live addresses to know that at this moment everyone under his command was waiting in tense silence anyway. They trusted him, but they were experienced spacers who understood the risks.
"We're going to bluff our way into the middle of an Alliance convoy," Daniel said, "then attack and cripple as many of the freighters as we can. When the reinforcements that our comrades in Cutter 615 are summoning arrive, they'll finish the job. We'll avoid the escort as best we can, but our priority is to damage Alliance ships rather than to save our own skins. We're RCN and the needs of the Republic have to come first now."
The Hermes would reenter the Matrix in just under two minutes. She was accelerating at 1.2 gravities, enough to make those aboard her feel uncomfortable but not enough to prevent them from carrying out their duties in normal fashion. Daniel wanted as much speed as possible when the ten
der returned to the sidereal universe for the last time.
"We'll be making hit and run attacks," Daniel said. "Each cutter will drop into the Matrix and head for Nikitin as soon as it's expended its rockets. There's no point in sticking around. I've provided the cutters' officers—"
The cutters were commanded by Vesey, Dorst and Blantyre, with Bragg backing—if that was the right word—Dorst and Cory backing Blantyre. Any of the five should be able to make it to a planet where they could top off the air and reaction mass tanks, even if they didn't have the skill to reach Nikitin on the load they'd taken aboard from the Hermes.
"—with courses and waypoints, but once a vessel enters the Matrix it's an independent command."
He glanced toward Adele at the console beside his. Her eyes were on her display, and the control wands were twitching in her hands.
The sight took Daniel aback for a heartbeat. He'd paused for effect, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth momentarily. She's my friend as well as my colleague; isn't she interested?
And then he remembered that she was Adele Mundy. Of course she'd be looking at his image instead of directly at his face; and of course she'd be keeping an eye on commo traffic and goodness knew what all else while also listening to him.
Daniel grinned broadly at the thought, beaming toward everybody viewing his image on the tender and the three linked cutters. "We're not committing suicide, fellow spacers," he said. "We're taking only the risks necessary to cripple the Alliance. That's bad enough; but some of you've gotten out of hard places with me before, and those who've only heard about those places, well, you heard it from spacers just as real and alive as you are yourselves."
He lilted an honest, open laugh. "And maybe you were buying the drinks for the folks telling the story, eh?" he said. "Well, you'll have stories of your own to tell, spacers. We all will, all of us who come through this one."