The Way to Glory

by David Drake

  At least two and probably three bolts from Z17 had struck 614 at the start of the action. Though dispersed by the extreme range, the ions had welded catches and sliding collars so that the shafts and spars of several antennas wouldn't extend fully.

  The sails had been furled to the yards at the time. Instead of blasting holes through the film, the plasma had fused layers so that each one had to be cut loose and then patched. The cutter didn't carry enough spare fabric for the task, so Woetjans had cannibalized the worst-damaged maincourse to repair other sails.

  Daniel wasn't checking up on the bosun: Woetjans knew more and cared more about the job than any captain she'd ever serve under, Daniel Leary included. He was out on the hull to show the riggers he appreciated what they were doing—

  And also to make sure that the Alliance escorts hadn't pursued Cutter 614 after it slipped from the sidereal universe. A spacer skilled at reading the fog of lights surrounding a ship in the Matrix could see—could tell, rather, because it was more a matter of soul than eyesight—when another vessel was on a parallel course. That was how pirates tracked merchant vessels, and there were regular naval personnel who were equally skilled or almost so.

  Daniel was that skilled. He wasn't willing to bet his crew's life that the Alliance destroyers didn't have somebody of equal ability.

  There'd been no sign of pursuit. There shouldn't have been, after all: it wouldn't have been a wise use of the convoy's few escorts to send them after a cutter simply for revenge. The shambles the Hermes and her flotilla had left behind could've made even a cautious officer angry enough to view revenge as a priority, though.

  Daniel reached the airlock but looked back again. A rigger waved. Daniel replied with a left-handed salute, but it wasn't the work or the spacers which drew him. The light around him, the splendor of a cosmos greater than human eyes or human imagination could encompass, held him for a further moment.

  Daniel wasn't a traditionally religious man—few veteran spacers were—but he believed in God, and he believed he was never closer to God than when he stood on the hull of a starship coursing the void between universes. That it was a ship he commanded was the cherry floating on top of perfection.

  The airlock telltale was green. He undogged the hatch, sealed it behind him, and was already taking off his helmet when the inner hatch passed him into 614's cabin. There were only ten people aboard at the moment, but the interior still felt tight.

  Adele smiled a greeting but didn't speak. It was for Sun to say, "How's it look, sir? Are we going to make it to Nikitin?"

  "We're going to make it to Yang, Mister Sun," Daniel said. "Or at any rate, to the Yang System, because I propose to land on one of the moons of Yang Six. The moon's gravity's only .3 standard units, and we're not going to have enough reaction mass left by that time that I'd care to land on a full-sized planet. We'll have to brake across half the system just to get rid of the velocity we built up before the attack."

  Hogg and Tovera stepped to either side of Daniel to winkle him out of his suit. They were wearing gloves; in space the external metal stiffeners radiated heat till they dropped to zero degrees Kelvin—unless they happened to have been turned toward the sun, in which case they might be hot enough to broil flesh.

  Daniel noticed that his voice was being repeated by the speakers amidships and aft so that the spacers there could hear without coming forward. Imagery appeared in the air: a schematic of the Yang System, replaced after a moment with the sixth planet, a gas giant, and the orbits of its seventeen moons as varicolored circles. Daniel hadn't asked Adele to do that, but of course you didn't have to ask Adele to be helpful.

  He looked at the scarred, rugged faces watching him from around the cabin. They were worried but nonetheless hopeful; they trusted their Mr. Leary to save them.

  Which he would do, if it was humanly possible and if it still allowed them to defeat the Alliance forces. Daniel was Speaker Leary's son: he didn't imagine that Cinnabar politicians were saints or that all the many Cinnabar protectorates rejoiced to wear the Republic's yoke.

  But he'd seen some of the "free stars" of the Alliance, gray worlds where family members informed on one another and villages which didn't pay their tax levy were cordoned off and burned, buildings and people together. Daniel was a patriot first and foremost: he'd have fought for Cinnabar against God and His angels if that were required. But in all truth, Guarantor Porra and his minions were very much the other thing. . . .

  "I intend to bring us out of the Matrix within ten million miles of Yang's sun," Daniel went on. This was a good time to explain the plan to the members of the crew who were present; they could pass it on to the riggers when they came aboard. "That's too close, I know, but we'll be going outward fast enough that overheating won't be a problem. We need solar gravity to brake us, or we can't lose the velocity we gained while we were coupled to the Hermes."

  Daniel didn't say that if he judged wrong the cutter might enter sidereal space too close to the sun—or even on the wrong side of it, diving into the solar corona at four tenths of the speed of light. His crew knew that already. They trusted him not to let that happen, and regardless—he was the captain. Even Mr. Pasternak, a senior warrant officer, appeared to feel that way.

  "I sent the other cutters to Nikitin," Daniel continued. He held his arms out straight so that the servants could draw the upper portion of his suit away from him. "We're going to Yang instead because it's closer, within nineteen hours by my calculations. We'll fill our tanks from leads in the moon's mantle where the primary's gravity has pulled the ice apart, then go back and hit the convoy—"

  He grinned at the gunner and nodded.

  "—with your remaining rockets, Mr. Sun."

  "Hey, we'll tear 'em apart!" said Timmons, a Power Room technician who'd acted as the Captain's Steward on the Princess Cecile.

  "I very much doubt that, Timmons," Daniel said, making his smile more general, "not with the four rounds we have remaining. What we will do, though, is keep the Alliance commodore off balance and afraid to divide his forces."

  With Hogg and Tovera each holding a leg, Daniel stepped out of the rest of the suit. Hogg slid the power switch recessed inside the waistband to off. The stiffeners went flat when their dynamic memory emptied, reducing the suit to a layer of thick fabric instead of an object with greater bulk than a human being.

  "If the Commodore decides there won't be further attacks," Daniel continued, "he'll send his less damaged vessels to Yang with the destroyers for escort. The cargo in those ships is probably sufficient to fortify Big Florida Island beyond what Admiral Milne and her squadron could handle by themselves. And as soon as the base defenses are up, the destroyers can coddle the jury-rigged remainder of the convoy there to safety."

  He shrugged. "When we hit them again," he said, "the Commodore won't know what's coming next. He hasn't seen anything of 615, but he knows that the Hermes should have six cutters in her flotilla. And there's always a chance that we're able to rearm all the cutters from a temporary base on an asteroid."

  Daniel's grin became a broad, bright smile. "If I'd had time, I'd have set one up," he added regretfully. "Though we didn't do too badly with what we had to hand."

  That brought the dusting of cheers and laughter that he'd been aiming for. He wasn't trying to conceal the coming danger from his crew—they were veterans; they knew—but he wanted them able to go into it cheerfully. Apart from anything else, they'd work better that way.

  "Guarantor Porra has a short way with officers who make mistakes," Daniel said. "The Commodore knows that if he sends away his destroyers—or even one of them—and we capture some of the cripples, he'll be shot on his own bridge. He won't take that risk. If he doesn't, Admiral Milne will be in position around Yang before the convoy gets there."

  There were nods of agreement, but nobody spoke until Sun again broke the silence, saying, "Well, I'm bloody glad we're having another crack at 'em instead of running back to Nikitin. I'd look a chump when we la
nded at Sinmary Port with rockets aboard and my strikers'd expended all theirs, right?"

  General laughter followed. Daniel, his face smiling, settled onto the command console.

  614 would be alone this time, and they wouldn't be attacking with the enormous velocity at which they'd made their first pass through the convoy. 614 would pin the Alliance force in place until they wouldn't be able to set up a base on Big Florida Island, but it would be at the probable cost of the cutter and her crew.

  Sometimes duty required that.

  * * *

  "Ship, this is Six," Daniel said over the intercom. To Adele he sounded . . . not bored, never bored; but certainly not excited either. He might've been a dentist discussing the state of a patient's teeth. "We will extract from the Matrix in thirty seconds from—now."

  Woetjans and eleven other riggers, as many as could pass through the airlock in two cycles, waited with their faceplates open. The remaining ten riggers would suit up as soon as the first group had gone onto the hull: there wasn't enough room in the cutter's cabin for all of them to wear their bulky rigging suits at the same time.

  The bosun looked down at Adele and muttered, "If it was anybody but Mr. Leary, I'd worry about coming out so bloody close to the sun. He won't let us down, though."

  "No, he certainly won't," Adele said calmly. She wasn't sure if she was agreeing with Woetjans or just responding to an indirect plea for reassurance.

  She supposed every living thing had some fear, even the rugged, seemingly indestructible bosun. Perhaps Woetjans was afraid of falling into a star.

  Adele Mundy was afraid of failing her friends. In the days not so long ago when she had no friends, she might honestly have said she feared nothing. But of course in those days Adele Mundy was already dead. . . .

  "Extracting!" Daniel said, banging his fingers down to execute the command. The cutter trembled. For an instant it wasn't between worlds but rather existing simultaneously in an infinite number of them. Adele felt ice in her bones. She was looking down on her own body, interested to see how empty her eyes were.

  Then they were back in the universe of humans and life as humans knew it. The hatch was open and Woetjans was leading her first section into the airlock.

  "Mistress Woetjans!" Daniel said, shouting because the riggers didn't have radios in their suits. "As I warned you, I'm sealing the outer lock for at least another minute. The antennas won't be at risk till I start thrust braking, and I won't have you going out on the hull while we're so close to the sun."

  The bosun didn't reply. She might have her own opinion of the matter, but Daniel controlled the command console.

  Adele was sorting the RF emitters which she'd begun to gather as soon as 614 returned to the sidereal universe. Obviously the cutter hadn't fallen into the sun, but the question hadn't really concerned her. Navigation was in Daniel's province; the business of Signals Officer Mundy was to let the Captain know what other vessels were in their neighborhood in a more accurate and detailed fashion than his own equipment could.

  Daniel's fingers were tapping through one screen after another with the regularity of a metronome; his face was composed, with a suggestion of amusement. That didn't mean his mind couldn't be wrestling with oncoming disaster, so rather than risk breaking his concentration Adele ran her data as a text crawl at the bottom of the command display:

  Frigate RCS Cutlass, Patrol Cruisers RCS Garnet and Chrysoberyl are on station above Yang. Garnet carries flag of Admiral Milne.

  "Are they by God?" Daniel cried in delight. Adele fed his words to the PA system, but he immediately tripped the intercom as well with, "Ship, this is Six. The Gold Dust Squadron has arrived a good three days before I imagined they could. Lieutenant Ganse is a fine astrogator, a remarkable one."

  He paused, then went on, "And whatever I may think about the Admiral's choice of bed-partners, she's done well also. There've been some who don't think my choice of bed-partners is absolutely the best either, after all."

  Among the peals of laughter and relief, Woetjans called from the airlock, "What's this mean for us, sir?"

  Instead of answering the bosun immediately, Daniel said, "Mundy, how quickly will we be able to communicate with the Garnet? With any of the squadron's vessels, over?"

  "When you say the word, Captain Leary," Adele said with deliberate formality. "I have laser emitters trained on all three vessels, though the Chrysoberyl's about to pass into Yang's shadow for about fifteen minutes. Over."

  She was being ironic, she supposed. Adele knew that Daniel was correct to revert to a professional demeanor when he spoke as her commanding officer, but she was human enough that it disturbed her. That was why she'd allowed herself to be irritated at the implication that she couldn't immediately connect 614 with any vessel she'd identified.

  "Thank you, Mundy," Daniel said. His image quirked a wry smile. "I'll call the Garnet in just a moment. Break. Ship, what it means for the moment is that I want the riggers to get the antennas stowed ASAP, because we'll rendezvous in Yang's orbit instead of landing a hundred and fifty million miles further out. On the other hand, fellow spacers, it also means that we don't have to worry about having enough reaction mass left to land in a gravity well, because we'll be filling our tanks from the Garnet. Out."

  The inner hatch had started to close at the word "ASAP," so Woetjans and her section probably didn't hear the last of Daniel's explanation. They didn't need to, of course; they already understood that part of the situation.

  Adele cleared her throat. "Ah, ready for transmission, sir," she said. "The squadron doesn't appear to be aware of our arrival, probably because we inserted so close to the sun. Over."

  "Gold Dust Command, this is Cutter 614, Lieutenant Leary commanding," Daniel said. He nodded, apparently to Adele's image at the top of his display. "We have information of immediate importance which we must come aboard to deliver. I'm braking to come alongside Garnet as soon as possible. Over."

  As Daniel spoke, his fingers continued to type commands. Adele could see that he was plotting a new course, though the detailed figures were opaque to her.

  Yang—the system's fifth planet—was fairly close to being in line at present with their original destination, the system's unnamed sixth world. Adele assumed that made the process simpler, but she'd seen the neat way Daniel could swallow intrasystem distances with short hops through the Matrix. The current problem was the cutter's velocity in normal space, not where they were in relation to Admiral Milne's squadron.

  The outer airlock pinged as it opened. Daniel made a single keystroke. The cabin filled with squeals, clanks and whines: the sails were furling, the yards were rotating in line with the antennas, and the antennas themselves were retracting. Daniel had waited till the bosun was on the hull to begin the theoretically automated process, because if a jam weren't immediately cleared it might lead to breaks and tangles which could take untold time to correct.

  The airlock telltale winked green; the second lockful of riggers entered it. They remainder of the outside crew were well into the process of donning their suits. Daniel continued to work—as did Adele, cataloguing the signals that were passing among the ships of the squadron.

  Milne's force was using the 20-meter band for general communication with no attempt at signals security beyond the automatic encryption feature. Adele supposed there was no reason to act otherwise under these circumstances. She would've, however.

  "Leary, this is Squadron Command," said a voice that Adele guessed might be Lieutenant Farschenning's. But wasn't he part of the base establishment? "The Admiral directs you to make your report by laser communicator. The Admiral adds that there's no danger of interception here, over."

  Adele suspected that what Admiral Milne had really said was less polite than the circumlocution Lieutenant Farschenning had spun from it. She was more than a little surprised that Daniel had made an issue of security in the first place. It wasn't a subject which had appeared to interest him in the past.

  Sm
oothly, Daniel replied, "Command, I'm very sorry but I'm afraid I'll have to deliver my report face to face. I estimate that we'll be alongside the Garnet within the hour, over."

  He resumed his course computations, his expression one of harmless naiveté. Adele frowned. The transmissions were voice-only, but Daniel's face wore a mask that proved something was going on. He never looked that innocent when he wasn't up to something.

  Cutter 614's first outgoing message had taken five minutes forty-seven seconds to reach the Garnet; the distances involved were significant, even for light-speed communication. The time lag would decrease as the cutter streaked toward Yang and the squadron, but it remained considerable.

  When the response came, it was in a different voice: "Leary, this is Admiral Milne. As soon as you've linked with the Garnet, report to my suite. When I've heard what you've got to say, I'll decide what to do with you next. And at the moment, my instinct is to lock you in a store room till we get back to Sinmary Port! Squadron Command out!"

  "614 out," Daniel said. For an instant his expression was blank, except for an unusual hardness around his eyes. Then he grinned broadly at Adele's image and said on their two-way channel, "Well, Adele. If it comes to that, at least I'll have more leg room than anybody here on 614, eh?"

  He laughed.

  Try as she might, Adele wasn't able to force her lips into a smile. "Daniel?" she said. "Why do you insist on reporting in person? Because I assure you that I can keep our transmission safe. At least from any spy who wouldn't be able to overhear a conversation in the Admiral's quarters just as easily."

  "Ah," said Daniel. For a moment, only one side of his mouth was smiling. "Well, you see, Adele, I'm not worried about interception. The squadron will've hit the convoy before an Alliance spy in the Yang system could possibly get word to them. If I go aboard the Garnet, though, Captain Toron can pass reaction mass to 614 at the same time. If I simply transmit the information, I very much doubt that Admiral Milne will delay to do that; and without reaction mass, we won't be part of the attack."