by David Drake
Woetjans grinned broadly. “Yes sir,” she said.
“You’ll launch when we’re opposite the planet from the Bremse,” Daniel said to the bosun’s mate. “That’s about seven minutes, so don’t waste time.”
Adele raised herself from her seat, trying not to stagger under the strain of her added mass. Without comment Barnes and Dasi stuck hands under her elbows and lifted her with easy grace.
Lamsoe murmured, “Proud to be chosen, mistress. There’s always something happening where you are.”
“It’s an occupational hazard for librarians,” Adele said with a feeling of amusement that surprised her.
They started down the corridor to one of the circular stair towers. The sailors continued to carry Adele though she dabbed her feet to the deck in stubborn determination not to seem completely helpless.
“Baylor to the bridge,” the general call ordered in Daniel’s voice.
“I’ve never worn an atmosphere suit,” Adele warned. “I’ll need help putting it on.”
She’d need help with more than that, and she’d need luck as well. Thus far she’d had both.
And the greatest luck in Adele Mundy’s life was that now for the first time she did have help.
* * *
Chief Baylor entered the bridge. He’d barked his left knuckles; his right arm to the elbow was a black smear of congealed lubricant; and his expression was furious enough to face down a fox terrier.
“Sir,” he said, “I’ve got fucking work to do so I’d really appreciate you getting to the fucking point!”
“You’ve become Attack Officer,” Daniel said calmly. “That’s your console.”
He pointed to the navigator’s console, empty since Adele’s departure. “I’ve programmed the first two missiles but you’ll launch any others. There are others, I hope?”
“Oh,” said the warrant officer. “I—”
Baylor seated himself. He typed with the power of somebody driving nails expertly: far harder than necessary for the job but absolutely precise. The PPI switched to a targeting screen, similar in gross essentials but vastly different in detail and the keyboard functions associated with it.
“Well, not so very different from ours,” he said with something short of approval.
Baylor looked back at Daniel. “Sir,” he said, “we’ve got ten missiles aboard, all of them in the ready magazines now and I think they’ll at least launch. Those wog cretins just let them sit in the grease they got them in from the factory. I swear! They’re Pleasaunce built, though, and they seem to power up all right.”
He shook his head. “They’re low-acceleration models. Seven gee max. I wish to God we could’ve transferred some of my babies from the Aglaia before, before …”
The Princess Cecile was over Kostroma City at this point in its orbit. A quadrant of Daniel’s display showed an enlarged view of the scene below. Dawn had broken over the capital, but fires blazed beneath trails of smoke. Explosions flashed in the Floating Harbor.
A warship on the surface fired plasma cannon in quick, nervous flickers. So far as Daniel knew there was no real enemy for the bolts to engage.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I regret that too.”
If he’d been wishing for things, he’d have started some distance beyond a chance to transfer missiles between ships. That was an all-day job and they didn’t have the heavy equipment to carry it out besides. He knew, though, that Baylor was mourning the loss of what were “his babies” in every sense but the biological.
Baylor gave him a faint, thankful smile. “I guess worse things happen in wartime, sir,” he said. He reached for the commo key as he added, “I’ll put Massimo in charge at the tubes. She’s a good man. I got a good team.”
Message traffic was passing from the Bremse to the ground at an increasing level of frustration, and from the ground to the Bremse with frequent contradictions caused by a complete collapse of the civilian communications net. Since the Alliance forces hadn’t yet built an alternative net, commo was unit to unit rather than through a multilateral system which could analyze the data from all points simultaneously.
Locking bolts withdrew with a clang. The cutter spurted clear of the hold. The Princess Cecile shuddered in reaction. Bolts rang again to reseal the corvette.
Daniel wondered if the confusion in Kostroma City was a result of something Adele had done but hadn’t bothered to mention, or if it was a chance result of the burgeoning disaster. People talked about the fog of war, but the truth was a much harsher thing. In war a fire swept across all sources of information. Equipment failed and humans, trying to balance dozens of competing crises, lost them all in crashing shards.
“I thought you’d be handling the Attack Board, sir,” Baylor said. His hands were spread across the virtual keyboard. He faced the display with an expression as solidly determined as the nose of one of his beloved torpedoes.
Daniel looked at him. The missileer was setting up course data based on possible locations of target and tube. The courses would have to be refined when it came time to actually launch, but having a setup in the computer made that simpler by a matter of seconds or even minutes.
“If shooting starts, chief,” Daniel said, “I’m going to have my hands full with the ship. If things go better than I expect, we’ll just wait here for the cutter to return.”
A particularly bright flash lit Daniel’s display. When he turned to view the image directly the Floating Harbor was completely shrouded by steam. The fusion bottle of one of the moored vessels had failed catastrophically.
“They didn’t do so bad, did they, sir?” Baylor said with a wistful smile, looking at the display over Daniel’s shoulder. “My b— Our missiles from the Aglaia, I mean.”
“No, chief,” Daniel said. “They taught some wogs what it means to go up against Cinnabar.”
He said the words to console the missileer, but as they came out Daniel felt his own pulse surge. It was childish and for that matter uncivilized to feel this sort of murderous patriotism. That didn’t make the reaction any the less real.
The Aglaia’s missiles were of the twin thruster design with dual antimatter conversion systems. They were the only type in first-line use in either of the major navies.
Kostroma had purchased single-thruster missiles to equip its warships. These were much cheaper, since the High Drive was the system’s only expensive component. Guidance was loaded before launch. Complex sensors and terminal guidance equipment would have been a waste of money due to the high velocities involved and the fact that missiles were ballistic at normal engagement ranges.
The Princess Cecile’s missiles were the same size and would reach the same velocities as those of the Aglaia—or the Bremse—but they did so at a leisurely rate by comparison. This was a particular handicap at short ranges; and if it came to a fight with the Alliance cruiser, it would be very short ranges indeed by the standards of interstellar warships.
“What do you think our Alliance friend has to send us, chief?” Daniel asked. “If it comes to that.”
Baylor wrinkled his nose. “Four tubes only,” he said. “The fire director’s the same type they fit in the Krestovik class with twice the tubes, though, so they can keep rounds coming at ten-second intervals as long as there’s anything in the magazines.”
He spread his small, muscular right hand above his keyboard without touching it. “The magazines, though, that’s a guess, but carrying a full defensive constellation I’d guess thirty-six missiles. Maybe thirty-eight if their missileer knows his business, and maybe only twenty if some dickhead with a lot of braid thinks, ‘They’re not coming to fight, so let’s use the stowage for something useful like fancy rations.’”
Baylor cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Not meaning to insult you, sir,” he added.
“I wouldn’t feel insulted even if I had a lot of braid, chief,” Daniel said. “Which I most certainly do not.”
“Thing is, sir,” Baylor said, “they’ll be high-acceleratio
n types and ours aren’t. There’s no getting around that.”
“Bremse to unidentified vessel at thirty-nine thousand kilometers!” the communicator snarled. The Alliance cruiser had noticed the cutter at last. Too bad, but Daniel had expected it. “Cut power and identify yourself immediately or we’ll destroy you. I repeat, identify yourself immediately! Bremse out!”
Daniel touched a console button whose protective cage he’d flipped back even before the Princess Cecile reached orbit. The vessel’s general alarm, sets of three treble pulses, sounded in all compartments.
He lifted his finger from the button and said over the communicator, “General quarters. Prepare for action.”
To Baylor Daniel added, “Well, chief, let’s see what we can do with the present equipment, shall we?”
Covering a mind full of doubt with a tight smirk, Daniel stroked the firing toggle to launch the corvette’s first pair of missiles.
* * *
“—repeat, identify yourself immediately or we’ll destroy you!” said the voice from the communicator. “Bremse out!”
“You’ll do wonders,” Woetjans muttered reflectively, glaring at the cutter’s minimal display. “Put us in the shadow of one of the mines they been dropping, Lamsoe. If you can, anyhow. I’d say put the command node between us, but we’re too fucking far.”
Here aboard the cutter, Adele had no feeling whatever for distances or even directions. Because of space restrictions the Plot-Position Indicator was projected on a concave combiner lens in front of Lamsoe, the pilot, rather than as three real dimensions in the air above the console. Adele wasn’t even sure whether the cutter was one of the points on the curved display or if they were instead the center of the display’s lower horizon.
She turned to Dasi, strapped into the fold-down seat beside her, and said, “Will they fire at us?” It didn’t occur to her until after she spoke that the sailor might think she was frightened.
Dasi shrugged, though the loose-fitting atmosphere suit barely quivered. “They can try, but I don’t guess they’re going to do much across forty thousand miles. You know how plasma spreads.”
The cutter had a single thruster. The deck quivered as the nozzle gimbaled around. When the thruster fired at its new heading Adele found herself hanging from the strap as the bulkhead tried to accelerate away from her. The plasma flow’s high-frequency vibration made dust shimmer in the air.
Adele tried to settle herself. That was impossible while wearing an atmosphere suit. The suits were meant for transfer in vacuum, not work. They were awkward, uncomfortable constructions of rubberized fabric with stiffening hoops. One size fit all—in Adele’s case, fit very badly. The gauntlets separately clamped to the cuffs came in three sizes, though for Adele a pair marked SMALL wasn’t.
The helmets were plastic castings shaped like the bottoms of test tubes, clear on the front and with round lenses like miniature portholes on either side. Aboard the cutter the Cinnabars wore the helmets open on the hinge at the back of the neck. They had no communication equipment, nor was the plastic clear enough for piloting a spacecraft.
“Think we’re worth a missile?” Barnes wondered aloud. Neither of the men seemed concerned, either by the situation or by Adele’s state of mind.
“A little tub like this?” Dasi scoffed. “No! Though she handles pretty good, don’t she?”
“The captain’s launching,” Woetjans said. Adele couldn’t place the emotion she heard in the petty officer’s voice. “He’s taking the cruiser away from us, I guess.”
“God have mercy!” Lamsoe muttered over the plasma whine. “That big bastard’ll eat them alive.”
His fingers moved on his control keys. The flow cut abruptly. The thruster pivoted again, then resumed firing. In a tone of professional detachment Lamsoe went on, “One minute thirty to docking.”
All four sailors stared at the display. Woetjans stood beside the control console, gripping attachments because she wasn’t strapped in. Barnes and Dasi, facing one another in jump seats, leaned forward for a better view.
Adele could see the display past the pilot’s shoulder, but it meant absolutely nothing to her. The full-sized console aboard the Princess Cecile had been simple to understand. When three dimensions were flattened to two, they became an alien world. It horrified her to realize that Barnes and Dasi, who (not to be unkind) between them might approximately equal her intelligence, watched with full appreciation the data which passed before her in a cascade of gibberish.
“Missed!” Dasi said. “Shit, they weren’t even close!”
Barnes shook his close-cropped head in dismay. “Well, the captain’s young,” he said. “Not everybody’s born to be an attack officer.”
Woetjans turned toward them in fury. “How about shutting the fuck up, will you?” she said. “Did you ever think he just spit a couple missiles out in a hurry because our asses was in a sling?”
“That Alliance bastard didn’t even maneuver,” Dasi said in disappointment. “Missed ’em clean, and there’s only ten missiles aboard.”
“Eight now,” Barnes agreed sadly.
Adele felt cold. If Woetjans was correct, it was an even more damning indictment of Lt. Daniel Leary that he hadn’t used the available time to set up his initial attack on the cruiser/minelayer. She couldn’t believe that: she’d watched Daniel updating his launch sequence throughout the time they were on the bridge together.
No, Daniel wasn’t slack. He just wasn’t very good at that part of his job. He’d told her that his Uncle Stacey hadn’t been a fighting officer for all his courage and skill in other aspects of spacefaring. Apparently Daniel had that part of the Bergen heritage as well.
It was unfortunate that they were all learning this in the middle of a battle. Though perhaps that didn’t matter. The sailors obviously thought the battle was unwinnable to begin with.
“Docking!” Lamsoe warned. He lifted his hands from the controls and swung his helmet into place.
Automatic systems took control of this final portion of the journey. Adele felt the cutter rotate minusculely under the impulse of the maneuvering jets, steam rather than plasma. Even for the experts she assumed this Cinnabar crew were, the process of manual docking would be a maddening, time-consuming task.
She reached for her own helmet. The hinge was at the back of her neck so she couldn’t see what she was doing. Dasi’s big hand gently brushed hers away.
“Hunch a bit, mistress,” the sailor said. Adele tried to obey but the edge of the helmet still grazed her forehead as it pivoted down over her head.
There was a click and a cool pressure as the helmet sealed. The oxygen bottle switched on. Simultaneously Adele felt the rasp of the cutter’s docking mechanism interlocking with its mate on the command node’s surface.
The sailors drifted in the weightless cabin. Heavy wrenches dangled from their belts. They couldn’t carry real weapons because the programmers wouldn’t open the airlock’s inner hatch to an obvious threat, but burly sailors with wrenches should take command of the situation without difficulty.
Woetjans was opening the cutter’s hatch. Adele tried to get up. She couldn’t. Dasi—or was it Barnes?—reached down and released her safety strap.
The hatch released and pivoted inward. The gush of cabin air into vacuum would have carried Adele with it if Dasi—she was almost certain it was Dasi despite two distorting layers of faceshield—hadn’t gripped her.
The node’s airlock was three feet away, hard to see because of the flat lighting. Woetjans spun the wheel and pulled the lock open, using the cutter’s hatch for purchase. She entered; the sailors launched themselves after her. Dasi and Barnes each held one of Adele’s hands in the process, and Lamsoe clamped the outer lock shut behind them.
The chamber’s interior was illuminated. Adele could tell that atmospheric pressure was building by the way the figures of her fellows filled out as air molecules began to scatter the light.
The sailors unlatched their helmets. Adele s
truggled with hers for a moment before Dasi did the job for her. The air was thin, frighteningly thin for a moment, but the sailors didn’t seem to mind.
The hatch to the node’s interior had a small window with a speaker plate directly beneath it. An eye showed through the window and the plate demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?” in a tinny voice.
“We’re from the Katlinburg,” Adele said in her Bryce accent. “She exploded in the harbor. Let us in.”
“You don’t belong here,” the voice said in a mixture of anger and puzzlement.
“For God’s sake, let us in!” Adele said. The Katlinburg was one of the Alliance transports; very possibly she had exploded by now. “We can discuss what we’re doing here then!”
The eye vanished. For a long moment Adele was afraid that this was the end: the frightened programmers simply weren’t going to let strangers into the command node.
The inner lock rang as bolts withdrew. The hatch pivoted into the station.
Four worried-looking technicians were in the node’s central concourse. They were unarmed. From their dark complexions and hazel eyes they were natives of Willoughby, a world the Alliance had conquered less than five years earlier.
The technicians were probably political prisoners. At any rate the Alliance authorities obviously didn’t trust them because there was also a detail of four uniformed soldiers with them on the command node.
The soldiers had submachine guns. They were pointed at the Cinnabars.
* * *
Daniel Leary sat at the command console of the Princess Cecile, as integral a part of the corvette as the sensor suite or the High Drive that responded to his touch.
He was braking at 1.8 gravities, the most strain he was willing to put on the corvette’s structure. Even that was harder than he’d initially intended, since he knew the hull was modular and had been maintained by personnel with lower standards than the RCN would accept.
Daniel had been unjust to the Princess Cecile. Liftoff had proved the craft was as tight as a unit-built Cinnabar hull. Whatever else you said about Kostroma, they knew how to build starships here. The Princess Cecile would be a prized command in Cinnabar service, a handy little vessel whose crews would love her. All she needed was a once-over to make right a decade of neglect.