The Road of Danger

by David Drake

  Sun moved at the corner of Adele’s eyes. She didn’t look away from her duty, but she could imagine the shrug.

  “ — you remember what happened to Trent Johns when a line snapped, right?”

  “Yes,” said Adele. She had seen people killed in various colorful fashions since she joined the RCN. Johns, a rigger who had been cut in half the long way by a beryllium monocrystal cable which whipped back after breaking, was probably the most memorable, though. She hadn’t realized how far the blood would splash under those conditions.

  “Well, now they can all get aboard without casting off and linking again,” Sun said. “It’ll save time, maybe half an hour. And the only reason it’s that quick is because of how good Six is, and Five too.”

  “Thank you,” said Adele. Four more suited figures, then a fifth, were coming over the line. The first pair and last pair were swinging hand over hand, but the one in the middle must be Tomas Grant: he was linked by short safety lines to the figures immediately in front of and behind him.

  Much as I would be, Adele thought.

  Woetjans had carried air suits from the corvette’s stores when she hauled over the line; she must be the large figure immediately preceding the rebel leader. That left an extra person coming toward the Sissie, but Daniel would have matters under control. He always had matters under control, even when it didn’t seem that was the case.

  At the top of Adele’s display, along with the row of faces of the corvette’s officers, she had inset an icon for the Plot Position Indicator. It pulsed orange to call attention to itself.

  She brought the PPI up to full-screen to see what change had triggered the alert. The Sissie’s sensors were reacting to the precursor effects of a ship transitioning from the Matrix to normal space. It was a hundred thousand miles out from Sunbright but significantly closer to the Princess Cecile herself.

  “Officer Mundy, this is Five,” said Vesey on the command channel, which included all the commissioned and warrant officers who were linked at the moment. “Handle any necessary communications chores, if you will, over.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. She shrank the real-time images to an icon — she should have closed it down, but she was superstitiously afraid to — and brought the location of the incoming vessel to half-screen.

  The highest likelihood was that the newcomer was a blockade runner which had chosen to make a close approach to Sunbright instead of initially extracting several light-minutes out to judge the position of the blockading ships. That could have been simply an accident, of course. Most astrogators were abysmally bad by the standards Adele had learned to expect in the RCN.

  Her smile was real, though it didn’t reach her lips. Let alone the standards set by the Princess Cecile’s officers.

  The ripples in sidereal space-time gave no indication of the size or course of the extracting vessel. That became clear in a shivering rush, the way a bag expands when tugged through the air with its mouth open.

  The newcomer was the anti-pirate cruiser Estremadura.

  Adele considered the options as quickly and coldly as a computer would have done. Having decided, she locked the gun turrets, said, “Vesey, this is an enemy if it recognizes us, but I hope it won’t. Break . . .”

  She drew a deep breath. Then — using laser, because it was hardest to intercept and she really hoped to keep Base Saal in ignorance of what was going on — she said, “Unknown vessel, this is RCS Princess Cecile, Captain Leary commanding, over.”

  When the Estremadura was patrolling above Madison, it might have noticed the Sissie in harbor. At the time, though, the corvette was masquerading as the House of Hrynko, so past observation shouldn’t be a danger.

  The problem was that although Commander Doerries was Adele’s enemy and was obviously playing some game at variance with the official policy of the Alliance, he was also thoroughly competent. Doerries might have connected the destruction of Platt’s outstation in Madison with the sudden departure of Principal Hrynko and her yacht from Madison. Adele would have noticed that, and she would then have tried to match the yacht to other known vessels.

  Adele was quite certain that the Princess Cecile was in every Fleet database, even those of outlying regions like the Forty Stars Sector. The Kostroman rig was only camouflage until someone looked at it closely, and it seemed probable that Officer Adele Mundy was as well known to Fleet Intelligence as Captain Daniel Leary was.

  The Estremadura did not reply to the hail. That could have various meanings, but the cruiser’s rig was coming down and it had lit its High Drive. Adele’s display indicated that the ships were 23,000 miles apart, but the cruiser was unquestionably accelerating toward the Sissie.

  “Bloody hell!” Sun said. He wasn’t using the intercom, probably because he had forgotten about it. “Bloody hell, mistress, you’ve got to free my guns! She wants us so bad she’s had a topmast carry away from the thrust! Mistress, she’ll be launching missiles any moment, and if I don’t deflect them, we’ve screwed the pooch for sure! We can’t maneuver — we got Six out on a line!”

  “Ship,” ordered Vesey on the general push, “action stations. Missiles, prepare to attack the Estremadura but do not unshutter your tubes. Break.”

  There was very little chance that the missileers, Chazanoff and his mate Fiducia in the BDC, weren’t already plotting attacks on the Estremadura. They would have done the same if an RCN battleship had appeared instead of an Alliance auxiliary cruiser.

  Good missileers, just like good gunners, liked to train with real-world targets instead of simulations thrown up by the attack console. Vesey was just making explicit what they already must have assumed: the Estremadura was a real enemy.

  Vesey was playing it safe by ordering them to leave the missile tubes shuttered also. It would require a careful observer with good optics to notice whether the Sissie’s tubes were closed — as they were to reduce turbulence during liftoffs and landings in an atmosphere — or opened for use; but the cruiser had been built on Pantellaria, where optics were a specialty, and the efficiency it had demonstrated in the Madison system gave no one reason to trust that its watch officers would be blind or inept.

  “Sun,” Vesey continued. Adele would have eavesdropped on the message even if Vesey had used a two-way link, but in fact the captain was manually copying to her signals officer. “If you argue against Officer Mundy’s decision again, I will not only derate you but also transfer you out of the Sissie’s crew. Do you understand, over?”

  “Sir!” the gunner said. “Understood, sir!”

  That was a little stiff, Adele thought. But Vesey was letting Adele get on with her job, so it was only common courtesy to leave questions of crew discipline to the first lieutenant, whose duty it was.

  Vesey almost certainly knew that the Estremadura didn’t carry missiles: they would be a useless bulk and expense for a ship intended to engage pirates and blockade runners. Sun probably knew that also, though it was possible that he had forgotten in his desire to go into action.

  Adele was certain that Vesey would have given the same order if a salvo of missiles had been driving straight at them, however. Six had told her to defer to Adele’s judgment, so Vesey would defer.

  “Unknown vessel,” Adele repeated, “this is RCS Princess Cecile. Please identify yourself, over.”

  She continued to speak calmly, but she carefully injected the least note of irritation into her tone. Any emotion in Adele’s voice was probably artificial, though very occasionally real anger came through.

  Not when she was in a killing rage, however. Then she became icy cold.

  The Estremadura still did not reply. Adele sighed and unlocked the gun turrets.

  “Vesey,” she said, “I’m going to try once more, but I think we have to assume that the Estremadura intends to attack us. Break. Unknown vessel, identify yourself or we will treat you as hostile. RCS Princess Cecile, over.”

  The corvette shuddered as the main hatch started to close. The vibration was worse than us
ual because the ship was in free fall instead of having water or even solid earth to absorb the trembling.

  “Ship, they’re aboard!” Cory shouted, using the general channel instead of the command push. The common spacers were just as concerned about Six as the ship’s officers were. “I’ve jettisoned the line instead of reeling it in, out!”

  The plasma thrusters as well as the High Drive motors kicked in. Vesey was a careful officer who normally brought the High Drive on line gradually. That way she didn’t risk an explosion in the event a feed anomaly led to a buildup of either matter or antimatter in the mixing chamber before its opposite was injected; this time she must have slammed the valves wide open.

  Even accelerating at the maximum rate — a little over 2 gs — by using both propulsion systems, the loaded Sissie’s 1300 tonnes were slow to get moving. It was unusual to use plasma thrusters in hard vacuum, because they were much less efficient than the High Drive’s annihilation of matter and antimatter. Vesey was doing so to get the corvette under way as quickly as possible.

  Which wasn’t going to make any significant difference in the rate with which the Alliance cruiser closed with them. The Estremadura had extracted at .004 c. It would have had difficulty braking to land on Sunbright, but its captain appeared to have come with the intention of fighting.

  “Ship, prepare to insert,” Vesey said. The drives shut off as abruptly as they had been switched on. Adele’s styluses no longer weighed in her fingers, and her body rose against the console’s restraints.

  Hatches squealed deep in the lower hull. The Princess Cecile shook herself in a fashion that Adele had never before experienced; she wondered if maximum thrust had damaged the ship.

  The Estremadura had not begun firing, though it was sure to do so momentarily. At this range the bolts wouldn’t damage even the Sissie’s rigging, but the bath of ions would prevent her from escaping into the Matrix.

  The real hammering would begin shortly thereafter, as the cruiser’s proper motion brought the two ships within knife range. Sun and Rocker were as good as any gunners in the RCN, but the Estremadura’s gunners had proven they were first-rate in Sun’s estimation also. The Alliance cruiser had twice the armament and nearly three times the hull size over which to spread the damage.

  A single thruster burped. The clang — it felt as if someone had kicked the hull with a steel-toed boot — was as unexpected as it was infuriating. Somebody — it was probably Woetjans — roared on the command channel, “What the bloody hell are you playing at!”

  Even Adele knew enough to be horrified. The jolt of plasma would delay insertion by ten or more seconds, during which —

  The image of the Estremadura blurred on Adele’s display, then tightened to a false sharpness as software enhanced the signal into what it believed was the correct form. What’s happened to the sensors?

  The cruiser opened fire, six guns rippling with minimal separation between the bolts. The charges did not reach the Princess Cecile, but the void between the ships flared.

  “Inserting!” Vesey said.

  For an instant, reality for Adele flattened. She felt infinitely thin, infinitely extended —

  And the Sissie was fully in the Matrix. Adele’s display became a pearly blur inset with the miniature faces of her fellow officers. The console was displaying the input of the external sensors, but there was no longer reality in human terms beyond the corvette herself.

  Daniel, groping for the catches of his rigging suit, clashed up the final steps of the companionway and entered the bridge. He had taken his helmet and gauntlets off already. Hogg, wearing an airsuit, followed at his heels.

  Vesey started to get up. Daniel said, “Sit right where you are, Captain Vesey! Start plotting us a course for Hester 27514CH.”

  Daniel sat at the astrogation console — empty because Cory had been in the entry hold; not that Cory would have objected if Six ordered him out. He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. Then he grinned, fully himself again.

  “Ship,” Daniel said, orally keying the general push. His voice echoed from the PA speakers and through the intercom. “We’re safe in the Matrix instead of getting our butts toasted in normal space because Acting Captain Vesey dumped reaction mass back along our course and then kicked us out of it by kissing the thrusters. What I think — ”

  His face split in a smile of boyish delight.

  “ — is that we owe Captain Vesey a hearty cheer. Hurrah for Captain Vesey!”

  The ship rang with “Hurrah!” and “Hurrah for Five.”

  “Up Cinnabar, fellow spacers!” Daniel shouted, and the crew echoed him again.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Matrix

  Adele continued to review internal ship discussions as text blocks, but in the Matrix she had no communications duties proper. Instead of going back to processing data from Madison, she decided instead to learn about Hester 27514CH, the planned watering stop.

  The Sailing Directions for the Macotta Region, published by Navy House, gave only a brief notation: “Uninhabitable/Can provide reaction mass.” She grimaced, then searched for information with more body.

  That was readily available, because Adele always updated the Princess Cecile’s database with all the material she could find on the region to which the corvette would be travelling. They had paused only briefly on Cinnabar on their way from Zenobia to Kronstadt, but Adele had not stinted her information-gathering. She could sleep during the voyage, after all.

  The log of a trader from Novy Sverdlovsk two centuries earlier provided the fullest account. The ship, the Twelve Apostles, had landed after a reaction-mass tank had carried loose and ruptured. The crew had made repairs, then diverted to Hester 27514CH to refill the tank.

  The Sverdlovians had found no land except for active volcanoes. Storm-lashed waves wore the cones down quickly if they ceased to erupt. The atmosphere was low on oxygen and poisonously full of sulfur — as was the sea, causing it to be extremely acid. Two crewmen had died when their suits failed, and a third had drowned. The ship itself had nearly sunk in the open sea when a squall swept in, and damage from the water and atmosphere had required extensive repairs when they got to their destination.

  Surely there has to be a better choice for replenishment than this hellworld?

  Sun and Rocker were rotating an image of the Estremadura on their gunnery screens, discussing aiming points and arguing whether concentrating or spreading plasma bolts across the target was the better idea. More accurately, Rocker was arguing in favor of separating the turret controls so that they could disable more of the cruiser’s individual gun mountings in a given interval; Sun was adamant that a single point of aim opened the possibility of punching a hole in the Estremadura’s hull and ending the fight quickly.

  Adele followed the discussion as text. It interested her as an observer of human behavior. Sun and his assistant were capable specialists who knew their lives were at risk unless the Princess Cecile performed at top efficiency. Each argued to maximize his individual authority, but they couched their arguments in terms of the general good.

  Rocker wanted to control a gun turret; Sun wanted to control both turrets. Sun was senior, so the argument in favor of concentrated fire would carry the day.

  Adele wasn’t concerned about the question itself: the conflict would determine whether she lived or died, but she didn’t particularly care which so long as she had met the standards which she set for herself. Listening to that sort of discussion, however, convinced her that she herself was a member of a species which merely shared physical similarities with human beings.

  By reflex, Adele checked the file’s history; she found that Cory had accessed the log of the Twelve Apostles shortly before she did herself. After checking Cory’s console to make sure he wasn’t in the midst of calculations which shouldn’t be interrupted — he was merely studying the log in question and had lined up several other references to Hester 27514CH, none of them more informative than the Sailing Directions �
�� she said, “Cory?”

  “Ma’am?” he said on a two-way link, turning to look at her.

  “Is there no better place for us to water than Hester 27514CH?” she said. “It appears to me that at best we’ll be seriously damaged by landing there. Ah, over.”

  “What?” said Cory. He laughed. “Because a Sverdlovsk tramp had problems? You’ve seen how sloppy civilian freighters get, mistress, even when they’re Cinnabar flagged. And let me tell you, Sverdlovsk warships, they’re no better. You put them together and you’ve got a ship that leaks from all the seams and a crew in suits where just the big holes are taped closed. I’ve seen tramps sink in Harbor Two on Cinnabar — it’s the wogs, not the planet, where the trouble is, over.”

  Adele considered the matter. She discounted the notion a stranger might have had: that Cory was trying to cheer her up by putting a positive face on what he expected to be a disaster. In a crisis, RCN officers had a tendency to react with professional dispassion, which left civilians petrified with horror.

  Furthermore, Adele had the impression that the Sissies were no more likely to lie to her than to the ship’s steel hull. They didn’t regard Officer Mundy as human, either, though they took a more positive of what she was than she did herself.

  “I see,” she said. Daniel, Vesey, and now Cory all believed that Hester 27514CH was a suitable planet on which to replenish reaction mass. She knew of no one whose professional opinion she would support against those three officers. “Thank you, Cory.”

  Tomas Grant stood in the rotunda adjacent to the bridge, surrounded by off-duty riggers. Adele could probably have seen him if she turned to look out through the hatchway, but she preferred to use imagery from the ceiling cameras.