Some Golden Harbor

by David Drake

  The inner airlock opened; Woetjans, unmistakable because of her height, led a party of hard-suited riggers back aboard. The destroyer had a second lock in the stern ventral position; a faint clanging and an icon on Daniel's display indicated that the rest of the outside crew was returning there. There was no advantage to leaving the riggers on the hull during this attack, and the risk was suicidal.

  "Are you with me, Sibyls?" Daniel said.

  "Urra!" Krychek shouted, grinning like a bearded fiend. "Urra!"

  Spacers, Sissies and Infantans both, cheered enthusiastically. Their voices rattled in the big hull. If Adele'd been aboard, she'd have cut the crew's voices into the PA system, but this was good enough.

  "Extracting into sidereal space in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," Midshipman Blantyre announced from the Battle Direction Center.

  As the familiar queasy feeling came over Daniel, indicating the ship was about to shift out of the Matrix, Landholder Krychek said over a two-way link, "You are a crazy man, Leary. Almost as crazy as me, I think."

  His laughter boomed in Daniel's ears as the Sibyl dropped into normal space to fight a ship four times her size at knife range.

  Above spread glowing beads and clouds of light so subtle that Adele always suspected that she was seeing colors that didn't exist in the sidereal universe. The Matrix touched her with stimuli which an irrational part of her mind insisted didn't come through her eyes.

  Adele had intended to use a simple air suit. The Infantan officer who acted as bosun of the Princess Cecile during Woetjans' absence had insisted with scatological determination that if Lady Mundy must go on the hull, she would wear a rigging suit. Tovera quietly explained that the Sissies who'd gone off aboard the destroyer had made it very clear to the Infantans that Adele Mundy was as valuable and delicate as a masterpiece in spun glass.

  Disgruntled but with no way to do anything about it—Tovera merely smiled at her mistress' protest—Adele had let crew members lock her into a hard suit. The limbs and panels were stiffened, and shields overlay the joints to prevent catastrophic decompression in case of a fall. Riggers got used to their suits, but a layman like Adele would be bruised and scraped on the suit's interior by the time she took it off.

  Nobody seemed to mind about that except Adele herself. Likewise, she was the only one who didn't care if she died in an accident.

  The Sissie wore a partial suit of sails, midcourses on the dorsal and ventral antennas and midcourses with topsails to port and starboard. They had a precise, balanced look, more regimented than Adele was used to on a ship of Daniel Leary's. But Daniel wasn't the Sissie's captain now.

  A rigger twenty feet away—one of the original Sissies; the Infantan rigging suits were ribbed with battens—gestured toward Adele, then brought his—her?—right arm down three times sharply as if chopping wood. Riggers used a complex semaphore code to communicate while ships were in the Matrix; even the tiny output of an intercom was enough to throw an astrogator's calculations wildly off. Adele didn't know the hand signals, however, and it was a moment before she realized that the spacer was simply telling her to look behind her.

  When she did, she saw Vesey walking toward her from the stern. The acting captain had her own rigging suit; its helmet was painted white to identify her to the crew when she was on the hull. Her magnetic boots clamped and released like strokes of a metronome

  .

  Adele was standing on a relatively open section of hull. Thinking that she might be in Vesey's way, she sidled toward the base of the nearest antenna, Dorsal A. Vesey made a circular sweep with her left hand and adjusted her own course.

  She's coming to me, Adele realized, and crossed her arms in front of her. She felt mildly uncomfortable, uncertain about what Vesey wanted and more than a little embarrassed to be where she was. She'd never before come out on the hull of a starship unless Daniel was present.

  Vesey bent sideways toward Adele so that their helmets touched. "Mistress Mundy?" she asked. "Is there something wrong?"

  "It's just a whim on my part, Captain," Adele said. "I've done all the preparation I can, and I decided to come out here. If that's all right?"

  They were standing side by side, shoulders and helmets touching but both of them looking out over the corvette's bow. The lights glittered more brightly there. They weren't stars, as Adele knew now, but rather universes in themselves. Every one was as real as the worlds in which she and other humans had been born, but their realities were as inimical to life as the hearts of suns.

  "Of course, Mistress," Vesey said, as if shocked by the question. "I was—"

  She paused. Vesey—and the late Midshipman Dorst, who'd had everything an RCN officer needed, except the luck to stay alive in the places Daniel Leary led him—always treated Adele with the greatest deference. That pattern continued even now that Lieutenant, Acting Captain, Vesey was in formal rank far the superior of a junior warrant officer aboard her ship.

  "I'm concerned about this . . .," Vesey continued. "About my duties, about the situation. I'm afraid—"

  She turned to look at Adele, breaking the contact between their helmets that was the only means they had to communicate. Grimacing, she laid her head beside Adele's and said, "I'm afraid that I'll fail Mister Leary. We're to join the Sibyl at the rendezvous point he set a light-hour from Dunbar's World. We'll wait there, of course, but if they don't arrive within an hour as Mister Leary specified . . . It's then I worry about."

  Adele almost jerked her head around to stare at Vesey. The Infantans in the mixed crew would almost certainly mutiny if the acting captain didn't make every attempt to rescue their Landholder, but that was nothing to the reaction of the Sissies. Signals Officer Mundy would be leading them, of course.

  Restraining herself but in a very cool voice, Adele said, "In that case we jump to Dunbar's World ourselves and view the situation from close at hand, surely?"

  Vesey stepped aside and gestured with both hands to the bosun's mate standing at the control panel offset between Mast Rings 3 and 4. He immediately punched his keyboard. The hydro-mechanical semaphore near him swung into life; another on the opposite side of the hull would repeat the signal. Adele saw the topsails begin to shift. Starboard 3 must've stuck, because an Infantan rigger started briskly up the antenna.

  Vesey's wry smile was visible through her visor in the instant before she touched helmets with Adele again. "Yes, we sail to Dunbar's World," she said. "That's what the RCN expects, that's what Mister Leary showed me to do by his example. But mistress—"

  Her helmet moved, then instantly clicked against Adele's again.

  "—if Mister Leary were in command, he'd know what to do then. He'd save the Sibyl if she could be saved, defeat the Pellegrinians if they could be defeated, he'd know. I'm afraid I'll fail him because I don't know, It's like staring at a bulkhead, mistress, and trying to imagine what's on the other side. I can't see anything but gray!"

  Adele smiled. "I came onto the hull," she said, "because this is where Daniel would be if he were in command. So long as I stand here, I can imagine that he's beside me. Inside I tend to imagine him having been torn to atoms in a battle that's already concluded."

  She smiled still wider, though she knew it wasn't an expression that'd suggest humor to anyone watching her.

  "Unlike Daniel," she went on, "I find the Matrix a very unpleasant environment. That's useful also, because the lesser discomfort takes my mind away from a possible future I would find very bleak."

  Adele hadn't been thinking of Dorst until the words came out of her mouth. She froze, though of course no one could see her expression anyway.

  "Yes," said Vesey. Her voice was tinny because it was transmitted helmet to helmet but perhaps it'd beome a little thinner, a little colder than before. "That would be a tragedy, for all of us and for Cinnabar."

  "Captain," Adele said in the silence, "I came out here to pretend Daniel was present. I found you doing exactly what he'd have done, adjusting the Sissie's course by ey
e to bring the best out of her. He is present, in you and in me and in everyone aboard who's served with him in the past. If the Princess Cecile has to make the run to Dunbar's World alone, we'll do everything humanly possible to bring the best result for Cinnabar. That's what Daniel taught us."

  Vesey's laugh was shaky, but it was still a laugh. "Yes, of course," she said. "Now, let's go below. We'll be extracting in a few minutes and our sensors will tell me more than my naked eyes. Especially since I have the best signals officer in the RCN."

  Adele remembered to take up her safety line as they started toward the forward airlock. Her left arm twinged as she moved it.

  All around her the Matrix blazed, but it no longer felt quite as hostile as it usually did.

  As the Sibyl shuddered into normal space, Daniel felt a curtain of ice slide through them bow to stern. The bulkheads and furniture whitened in a broad line, then returned to normal, leaving him uncertain as to whether he'd really glimpsed it or if instead it was a hallucination caused when his mind attempted to grasp the simultaneous realities of mutually exclusive universes.

  It didn't matter now: Daniel had a battle to plan.

  An image of the volume of space centered on Dunbar's World filled his display. Initially it ranged 100,000 miles out from the surface, but the AI quickly adjusted the scale to the minimum needed to contain the Duilio's elliptical orbit, some 49,000 miles across the long axis.

  The observed track was purple; its expected continuation showed light blue. A dark blue bead marked the cruiser's predicted location at the moment the Sibyl extracted from the Matrix to attack.

  Imagery gave the plan solidity, but Daniel knew how many variables, how many assumptions, were in the equation. His plans were as insubstantial as hoarfrost or that memory of ice.

  He had the plot of the cruiser five light-seconds away. Adjusting his planned course minusculely, he nodded to himself and said, "Ship, prepare to insert into the Matrix now."

  Instead of a caged rectangle with the word execute printed on it like that of the Princess Cecile, the Sibyl's button was oblate and bright red. Daniel twisted it clockwise to free it, then thumbed it down.

  As the electrical tension built, Daniel pressed himself against the back of his seat and stretched. He was wearing his hard suit. Looking about, he realized that despite his orders some of the Infantans were in utilities. One of the riggers just in from the hull had started to strip off his gear also, but Woetjans had that under control.

  "Ship, this is Six!" he ordered. "All personnel suit up immediately! There won't be time after we take hull damage, and there's a bloody good chance we will take hull damage! Over."

  Daniel switched his display into two separate screens: on top, a Plot-Position Indicator, now blank—in the Matrix, a ship has no position. Beneath it was an attack board on which pastel spheres overlay one another, waiting for the targets and vectors which would appear when they returned to the sidereal universe.

  Cobwebs dragged the surface of his mind. For a moment, he saw the bridge inverted. That was a common delusion when slipping between universes, but when Daniel blinked in reflex he was in the center of jagged fluorescent lines which twisted into infinity without losing color or sharpness.

  He opened his eyes instantly, shocked speechless. There was nothing overtly threatening in what he'd seen, but he knew beyond question that the environment he'd glimpsed was inimical to anything a human would recognize as life.

  Daniel licked his lips. Sometimes people went irretrievably mad during travel through the Matrix. That was an unavoidable risk for a spacer, but it'd seemed slight as risks went. The moment just past, though, made it seem a lot more real.

  "Extracting into normal space in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," Blantyre warned. Under normal circumstances the bridge controlled insertion, but the BDC kept watch on the timing of extractions.

  Daniel grinned. His glimpse of madness had the benefit of proving there were worse things than being smashed by a missile or vaporized by a plasma bolt. It was good to remember that, especially when you were about to go up against a cruiser in a destroyer you'd never commanded before.

  Daniel's surroundings flickered silently from purple to orange and back a dozen times or more; then the light was normal, sound was normal, and the PPI showed the Sibyl, an orange bead traveling at .04, only 12,000 miles from the blue bead of the vessel orbiting Dunbar's World. An instant later both the PPI and the attack board threw the legend dui up beside the other vessel. If Daniel'd wanted he could've highlighted the legend and read the full particulars of the Pellegrinian cruiser Caio Duilio, but he hadn't had the least doubt about its identity from the moment they extracted.

  "—unknown vessel," said a voice on the 20-meter hailing frequency, "brake and lie to or we'll destroy you!"

  Bloody hell, they're waiting for us! Daniel thought as his fingers moved swiftly. The Sibyl's virtual keyboard had a slightly wider stance than he was used to. He didn't make mistakes, but each stroke required serious concentration. Preset 3 will work, but I need to adjust for relative motion. . . .

  "Our guns are trained on you!" said the voice from the Duilio; ap Glynn himself, Daniel thought. "No vessels are allowed to land on Dunbar's World until the pirates there have surrendered to the forces of Nataniel Arruns!"

  Of course! The Pellegrinians didn't expect an attack, but they were keeping a close watch to prevent anyone from reinforcing Councilor Corius. They probably hadn't identified the Sibyl as a warship yet—Daniel had learned tricks from Adele to cloak a ship's electronic identity—but they were prepared to rake a freighter with 15-cm bolts if it didn't halt as ordered.

  "Prepare to launch!" Daniel said. His right hand twisted the execute button free. Before he could press it, the Duilio's dorsal turret fired.

  The single round was probably aimed across the destroyer's bow as a warning, but the Pellegrinian gunnery officer hadn't properly factored in the target's high velocity. The powerful bolt didn't spread very much at all in the millisecond between leaving the muzzle and blasting into the topsail yard of the Sibyl's Dorsal 1 antenna.

  Thirty linear feet of the tubular steel yard and antenna exploded in a rainbow fireball. The shock wave stripped the sails from all but the ventral antennas in Rings 1 and 2 and slammed the destroyer's hull like a load of gravel. The blow pushed the Sibyl away like a hydroplane leaping from a deceptively high wave.

  Everything happened at once. A loud clang amidships signaled the flash of steam trying to expel the first of the four queued-up missiles. Daniel hadn't finished executing the launch order—he didn't think he had—but the impact or the momentary bath of ions was enough to trip the control.

  Missiles didn't cut in their High Drives until they were well clear of the ship launching them. Otherwise antimatter in their exhaust would eat away the rigging and possibly the hull. This time a grinding shriek still louder than the hammerblow of steam indicated something had gone wrong.

  Daniel didn't have time to look at the damage control schematics, but he had a pretty good notion of where the trouble was: the destroyer's slender hull had torqued enough to collapse the launching tube, binding the missile inside it. If the High Drive lit now, it'd dissolve enough of the vessel's interior to hold Adele's town house. He couldn't do a bloody thing about that for the moment, so he focused on the one action that might save his ship and crew.

  Shunting his display from fire control back to astrogation with his left hand, he slammed the execute button home. "Inserting immediately!" he said. Shouted in all truth, though the intercom software would take care of the volume.

  A charge built across the exposed surfaces of the destroyer's hull, easing her from normal space into the interstices between other universes. The Sibyl was tumbling on her long axis like a thrown knife, though the motion was too slow to be worse than uncomfortable.

  If the Duilio fired again, the bolts would tear the destroyer apart in the seconds before she left sidereal space. Ap Glynn didn't fire. Daniel grinne
d wryly. Hitting the Sibyl was almost certainly an accident; the Pellegrinian, for all his fury, was probably concerned about what he'd done by mistake.

  A rapid clang-clang-clang-clang from above and below the bridge shocked Daniel. It wasn't enemy action: Landholder Krychek, his forward turrets cleared by the Pellegrinian bolt, was shooting back in the instant his guns bore on the Duilio.

  Daniel grinned even wider. As the destroyer slipped into the Matrix, Krychek and the other Infantans were singing, "Should I meet my death, I'll perish as a bold trooper!"

  CHAPTER 27

  Above Dunbar's World

  The sun of Dunbar's World was a moderately bright star forty light-minutes from where Daniel stood on the Sibyl's bow. The sun of Bennaria was a less bright star above the Princess Cecile, which hung a quarter mile away, parallel to the destroyer. Starlight gave the hulls a ghostly presence, as if they were mirrored in polished ice.

  He and Woetjans were working on the stump of Antenna Dorsal 1. He held a safety line belayed around the bitt at his feet. Its tension braced the bosun on the other end as she leaned into a prybar longer than she was tall.