The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "Oh, heavens, yes," Daniel said. "Only we're down to 58%, which means we'll have to make at least one landfall before we reach Todos Santos."

  He coughed and continued, speaking with a degree of reserve, "Chewning did a fine job, a very professional job, but instead of orbiting at the rendezvous point, he kept the power on to maintain artificial gravity. He's experienced, but he'd never seen action before. I don't think I sufficiently emphasized to him that in war the only things you can count on are the ones you hold in your hand."

  "Daniel?" Adele said. He'd brought it up himself, noting that the Sissie was a private yacht. "Have you considered what will happen if the Commonwealth government lodges a formal complaint? We're not at war with the Alliance, not officially, and very likely there were Commonwealth citizens killed at Lorenz Base also."

  This wasn't something she wanted to talk about, but she felt she had to. There were no secrets within a starship, especially a small ship like the Princess Cecile carrying thirty-odd crew in addition to her Table of Organization. Out here on the hull, though, no one could overhear what she had to say.

  "Yes," said Daniel. "That what we did was technically piracy, you mean?"

  He snorted, then went on, "Call a spade a spade—it was piracy, of course. I thought about the fact that the Goldenfels rather than a Cinnabar-registered ship made the attack, but the story'll get out after we dock. Assuming matters go as we hope they will in the Radiance system and afterwards, of course, so that we do get back."

  Daniel looked at the heavens, reached for the semaphore control, and brought his hand back without touching it. He leaned his helmet against hers and said, "Adele, I never had the stomach for politics, but Speaker Leary's son isn't going to grow up without knowing how the game's played. I understand very well that the best result so far as the government of Cinnabar is concerned would be if the Princess Cecile vanished without a trace and the attack on Lorenz Base remained a mystery. Guarantor Porra would be more than happy to suppress the news, I'm sure. But . . ."

  He turned his face upward again, though this time Adele was by no means sure it was anything within the Matrix that Daniel was focusing on. Touching her helmet again, he said, "Adele, every soul aboard the Princess Cecile trusts me to get them home. I don't know that I'm going to succeed—our trick of backtracking wouldn't have fooled me, and I don't expect it'll fool Captain Semmes either. But I owe the Sissies more than I owe Cinnabar, and by God! if I fail them, it won't be for want of trying."

  "No," said Adele. "Nobody who knows you would imagine anything else, Daniel."

  And just maybe, God was on the side of Cinnabar.

  CHAPTER 32

  "—now!" said Daniel's voice over the general channel, and everything except the interior of Adele's mind blurred in what had become a familiarly horrible fashion. Transition was worse than travel in the Matrix, and that was uncomfortable enough.

  Adele thought for a moment about the times in her life when she hadn't been uncomfortable. There'd been many of them, long periods in fact, but they all involved her being lost in her studies or her work. It was difficult to work while the starship was in transition, but perhaps she ought to try harder in the future.

  The Princess Cecile had been three days on the voyage from the rendezvous point—Salmson Catalog 115A3 but otherwise unnamed—to Radiance, a distance the Goldenfels had covered in a little over a day. The difference was the ship's velocity at the time they entered the Matrix. They could've dropped back into normal space to increase speed once they'd gotten clear of the Bluecher—Dorst had asked about the possibility—but Daniel had preferred to take the longer, less exposed route.

  As Adele knew from their private conversations, Daniel didn't believe they had gotten clear of the Bluecher. While the Princess Cecile was in the Matrix, she couldn't be touched by an enemy who, no matter how skillful, was literally in another universe.

  The sidereal universe returned as though somebody'd rolled back the rug covering Adele's existence. Things were brighter, sharper, and the communications display came alive with RF emitters. Adele had purpose again, so she was content.

  They'd reentered normal space 250,000 miles from Radiance and almost three times as far from Gehenna, on the sunward side of its primary. There were thirty-seven vessels in what Adele had set as her immediate coverage area, a sphere with a million-mile diameter centered between Radiance and the moon. Many of the ships were orbiting Radiance at a lower level, preparing to land or to light their High Drives before entering the Matrix. Those were the normal traffic of a busy commercial port.

  Another of the ships was the Bluecher, orbiting Gehenna within the Planetary Defense Array.

  "Unidentified ship exiting Matrix," said a male voice transmitting from the cruiser on microwave. "This is AFS Bluecher. Identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you, over."

  "Daniel," said Adele, clipping the syllables short as her wands arranged the other thirty-six vessels by type at the edge of her display. "They're calling on tight-beam, that means they were watching us return to normal space."

  Ten of the ships orbiting Radiance were elements of the Commonwealth fleet. They were 600-ton vessels no different from those trading and raiding all over the Galactic North save that their crews were paid—indifferently—by the State, and that they were armed with batteries of short-range rockets. No Commonwealth warship had been aloft when the Goldenfels attacked Lorenz Base four days earlier. That disaster had obviously convinced the Commonwealth government to lock its barn door, now that the horses had been stolen.

  "Roger," said Daniel imperturbably. "And targeting us, no doubt. They'll have visual identification shortly, but stall them if you can, over."

  Adele opened her mouth to reply to the Bluecher and froze. Good God, would they be able to recognize her voice? She switched her transmission to the upper sideband so that the compression would conceal her voice to most ears—and said, "Bluecher, this is AFS Nymphe, Lieutenant Archimbault commanding. Admiral Raeder sent us ahead to make sure Lorenz Base is prepared to take his squadron in thirty hours time, over."

  If the Bluecher had them under optical observation, they couldn't pass for a country craft—Adele's first choice—nor even a merchant vessel from the Alliance or one of the neutral worlds outside the two power blocks. The Princess Cecile's slim lines and the suit of sails that required a large crew to work marked her as a warship beyond question. The only option was to pretend to be an Alliance warship.

  "Nymphe, shut down your High Drive," the voice ordered after a delay greater than the considerable distance separating the vessels explained. He didn't make any comment about the fact the "Nymphe"—a real sloop in the Fleet list, one of a series of false identities Adele had ready for emergencies—was responding on a single sideband in the 20-meter range. "Our cutter will board you after you've fallen into orbit, over."

  The Bluecher must have a very skilled team on its sensors to've been able to spot the distortion of the Sissie's imminent arrival. Still, they seemed to be fooled—

  "Sir, they're launching!" Sun shouted over the command net.

  Daniel's hands moved. The thrusters and High Drive lit together, braking the Princess Cecile more fiercely than Adele had ever before felt.

  "Mr. Betts, fire one!" Daniel shouted as he fought the throttles into balance. The solid CLANG of a slug of vaporized reaction mass ejecting the 30-ton missile rang through the Buzz! and Burr! of the power units. "Fire two!"

  Adele didn't have leisure to call up a realtime display, but the relative positions of the ships on her signals board indicated that the Princess Cecile was diving toward Radiance. She was confident Daniel knew what he was doing, and regardless she had enough things on her plate to occupy her.

  The emitter of the laser communicator was formed by fifteen separate light guides. They could operate in unison, in bundles, or as individual lenses sending an ultra-tight-beam message in fifteen simultaneous directions.

  Adele split the emitter to target the
ten Commonwealth warships and said, "Peacock Throne—" the call sign of the control station in the Palace of Delegates below "—to all Commonwealth vessels. The Alliance of Free Stars is launching a surprise attack on the Commonwealth. Destroy the cruiser Bluecher at all costs! It's preparing to launch missiles into the spaceport and palace. Destroy the cruiser at once!"

  She was scrambling her message according to the Commonwealth naval code for the month. The automated response from the receiving units indicated that three of the ships didn't have the code loaded, so she looped her signal alternating scrambled and clear. Idiots! Couldn't anybody do his job?

  Sun's bow guns hammered, trying to turn an oncoming missile by blasting material off one side to nudge the remainder in the opposite direction. It was impossible to destroy a solid, multi-ton projectile, but with luck and sufficient time the plasma cannon might redirect it. The range here was probably too short for even that.

  "Holy God our savior!" cried somebody who must've been watching imagery of the battle. Almost with the words, a vibrating Whang! heeled the Princess Cecile violently to starboard. A missile had severed an antenna or mainspar, thick steel tubing whose structural strength couldn't withstand the impact of a projectile accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

  The Sissie launched two more missiles in succession, rocking with the recoil of each. Adele had studied the data on their opponent while she was providing it to the command group. The heavy cruiser mounted twelve missile tubes and had a hundred and twenty reloads in its magazines. The details would mean more to Daniel than they did to her, but it would be obvious to a child that a straight-up slugging match between a cruiser and a corvette with only half her normal twenty missiles could end only one way. "Bluecher, what in God's name are you doing!" Adele screamed into the sideband transmitter. "Admiral Raeder will feed you to the antimatter converters, you idiots! Stop shooting!"

  She didn't expect her feigned panic would convince the Bluecher to cease fire, but it might. She wondered how the Bluecher had unmasked them. Probably they'd gotten a solid visual identification and had acted on it; Captain Semmes was obviously a decisive captain as well as a skillful one.

  Adele focused a microwave on one of the net of communications satellites orbiting Radiance. She linked to channels for the Commonwealth navy and government, and also to The Word of God, the state-run civilian broadcasting system. "Alliance warships are attacking Commonwealth vessels!" she said. "Launch all ships immediately or they'll be destroyed on the ground! The cruiser Bluecher is attacking Commonwealth vessels!"

  The confusion of additional scores of vessels milling above Radiance would make the Bluecher's calculations more difficult. It might not help much, but it'd help; and anyway, it was something for Adele to do while the Princess Cecile maneuvered violently.

  Other people could put their faith in God, but Adele would get along with belief in the things she could touch:

  Semmes was skillful, but he wasn't as good as Daniel Leary.

  The Bluecher's spacers weren't as good as the Sissies.

  And whoever Semmes had for a signals officer couldn't match Adele Mundy.

  "Alliance warships are attacking the Commonwealth!" she cried as she felt two more missiles slam from their tubes. The plasma cannons' firing drummed through the hull, and a heavy shove twisted the corvette as something ripped away part of her sails.

  "Launch all ships immediately to engage the cruiser Bluecher!"

  * * *

  The Sissie's antennas were raised, so Daniel couldn't land on Radiance even if he'd been ready to kill the riggers on the hull. Buffeting on the way through the atmosphere was rough even with the antennas and yards telescoped and the sails furled about them. The best that'd happen if the ship came down with her antennas at full extension was that everything would wrench off. If by some miracle it didn't, they still couldn't set down on the ventral row.

  Woetjans had both watches out, ready to instantly adjust the sails however Daniel wanted them. She'd figured that they wouldn't want to stay in the Radiance system any longer than they had to, once Daniel had calculated the best escape route based on what he saw when they came out of the Matrix. This would've been their first star sighting since they'd fled Salmson 115A3.

  The bosun was correct about them not having much time, but unfortunately they had even less time than that. The Bluecher was so close and so alert that the corvette had no chance whatever of returning to the Matrix before a salvo of missiles arrived.

  But if Radiance wasn't a bolthole, at least it was big enough to stop Alliance missiles and direct observation. Daniel was diving toward the planet as the only chance the Princess Cecile had of surviving the next five minutes. After that—well, first get the five minutes.

  "Betts, fire at will!" Daniel shouted over the command push as he tried to do three things at once. It'd be tempting to conserve the Princess Cecile's slight stock of missiles, but unless they managed to screw up the Bluecher's plans, the corvette would shortly take a direct hit that'd vaporize the missile magazine along with everything else.

  Not even the coolest officer likes to see hostile missiles streaking across his attack board toward him. The slight chance of disconcerting the cruiser's command group was worth all the "what if?" fairy gold of saving rounds for later.

  Daniel had programmed the first two missiles, but the rest Betts would have to aim. It was his job, after all, and he was perfectly able—he wouldn't have been aboard the Princess Cecile at this time if he weren't. He couldn't read Daniel's mind, though. In a perfect universe the Sissie's missile launches and maneuvers would be parts of a choreographed whole.

  Well, in a perfect universe the Sissie wouldn't have been trapped by a heavy cruiser commanded by a man who'd get Daniel's vote for Best Captain in the Alliance Fleet. And if it came to that, a perfect universe wouldn't need warships and fighting officers to command them. Daniel'd play the hand he'd been dealt.

  There was only so much he could do. Semmes hadn't expected his prey to dive for the planet, but his twelve-missile salvo had allowed him to hedge his bets. Space might be infinite, but in human terms a corvette covered a considerable volume of it with her antennas extended seventy feet from the hull in all directions.

  Daniel's Plot Position Indicator was three-dimensional and multi-colored. The incoming missile tracks were blue with their predicted continuations in purple. A purple trace appeared to intersect with the yellow line of the Princess Cecile's course. Daniel expanded that tiny segment till the corvette's 230-foot length filled the width of the display. The purple line was still there, merely a thread even at the larger scale.

  Bloody Hell, it was going to—

  Daniel couldn't add power, so he shut off the thrusters instead. The High Drive took thirty seconds to build or collapse, so he didn't bother with it. The effect of reduced braking was to move the Sissie slightly higher above Radiance and slightly forward of the path the astrogational computer had predicted.

  The incoming missile segment slipped beneath her hull. If they'd been lucky it would've missed entirely, but it clipped Antenna Ventral B. The impact converted twenty feet of the mast to vapor which shredded the sails of VA and VC. Expanding gases rang the hull like a steel drum.

  Daniel lit the thrusters again, knowing he was stressing the corvette beyond what her frames were meant to bear. He loved the Princess Cecile as much as a man could love a machine, but if she got her crew clear of this and back to Cinnabar then they could scrap her. Pray God, just get the Sissies back to Cinnabar!

  Daniel reverted to a standard PPI. Instinct showed him the opportunity that the software couldn't have computed. He throttled the thrusters back to 70%, a slight but calculable reduction. The Bluecher's sensors noticed the change and fed it into the attack computer. Three seconds later, the cruiser launched another salvo of missiles.

  Missiles under power could follow a curving course. The Princess Cecile was ducking into the ballistic shadow of Radiance, but the cruiser
's attack computer could send missiles into her predicted position even though there was no line of sight between the Bluecher and her prey.

  "Chewning, get the riggers inside!" Daniel ordered, wishing he'd thought to say that before they lost people—almost certainly—on Ventral B. The riggers were of no use outside as things were. If the Sissie escaped into the Matrix they could go out again, but they weren't going to attempt to enter the Matrix while the Bluecher followed.

  The cruiser had waited in an unpowered orbit so she was slow getting under weigh, but the acceleration of her missiles meant the launching vessel's speed didn't matter. The Sissie could keep Radiance between her and the Bluecher for the time being, but she couldn't get away; and when the cruiser got moving, the corvette couldn't hide either.

  Daniel watched the PPI as an incoming missile's curving track changed from purple to blue—then stopped abruptly when it intersected a Commonwealth warship. Daniel had factored in the other vessels, but the Alliance missileer had not. The victim bloomed as a varicolored fireball, not only superheated metal but the propellant and warheads of its rockets.

  Another Commonwealth ship launched three salvos of forty-eight rockets apiece at the Bluecher. The range was too great for the primitive Commonwealth fire control computer, but the sheafs of tiny projectiles caused three more of the country craft to launch also. As soon as they'd emptied their external rocket racks, they dived for the surface of Radiance.

  Daniel continued maneuvering to keep the planet between the Princess Cecile and the cruiser. He was dropping deeper into the gravity well also so that Radiance subtended a broader arc. It was a temporary expedient at best, since they were only ten thousand miles above the surface. That was a considerable altitude under most circumstances but a matter of minutes when it's your lifeline.

  He'd expected to lose realtime imagery of the Bluecher as soon as he put the Sissie behind the planet, but there was no gap in coverage after all: the cruiser continued to be visible as a blur in the midst of ionized exhaust. Adele was importing a signal, probably from Lorenz Base. Commonwealth observation satellites were unlikely to be this clear if they even existed. How had she been able to do that?