by David Drake
The gunner shouldn't have been chattering that way, but Adele didn't cut him off because what he was saying was good for morale. Adele's morale included, since Sun had expert knowledge of the bolt's potential effectiveness.
The cruiser fired the same three guns again. One of the tubes must not be working. Had it failed recently, or could Adele have learned about it previously if she'd done a better job of sifting data gleaned from Pellegrinian files?
The Princess Cecile continued to brake hard. Her rigging creaked and muttered as thrust bent the antennas and their full array of sails. The hull twisted also, enough that Adele heard the keen of air leaking through spreading seams. She even thought she felt the internal pressure drop, but she knew that might be imagination.
It didn't matter. Adele wore a flexible atmosphere suit, as did all the other crew members save for those who'd chosen the even greater safety of rigging suits.
A slash of ions arrived simultaneously with the instrument readings indicating the Duilio had fired another salvo. Adele's display blurred and every light in the ceiling of the A Level corridor went out; a circuit breaker tripping from an overload, she supposed.
The damage wasn't serious: her display came back as sharp as a knife edge a moment later, and in seconds somebody reset the lighting circuit as well. Sun was stretching the point when he explained how harmless 15-cm bolts were at this range. . . .
Adele lifted against her seat restraints; loose gear flew about the compartment as though gravity had been abolished. In effect it had: the High Drive motors had shut down. Her first thought was that the bolt had crippled them, but after an instant's reflection she realized that Vesey was trying to throw off the cruiser's gunnery officer by the cutting the Sissie's acceleration. They could hope it'd work, at least for long enough.
Given that the corvette's mission was to draw the attention of the Pellegrinians, the question of how much damage the cruiser did to them wasn't significant. Adele smiled. For the sake of the friends she'd made in the Sissie's crew, though, she'd regret it if they were all killed. Most of them took a more serious view of oblivion than she did.
A new signal spiked on her display; the software matched it against a standard template.
"Captain, the Duilio's launched a missile," Adele said. "It's an Alliance Type 12A3, a single-converter type."
She was aware as she spoke that her voice sounded dry. That didn't change the content of the message, of course, but Adele'd learned the hard way that people were more likely to listen to tone than they were to words. So far as she was concerned, that was utterly wrong; but the analytical part of her mind realized that it was her job to communicate. She should work harder at sounding excited.
The cruiser's three operational cannon fired again, this time without hitting the corvette. The High Drive kicked in again, though the renewed acceleration appeared to be the 1 g that starships maintained to counterfeit gravity. On Adele's display—
"Captain, the Duilio has fired two more missiles," she announced. "And five more missiles, a total of eight. Over."
That was a full salvo for the cruiser. Adele wondered how long it'd take the Pellegrinians to reload their tubes. She recalled forty-five seconds to a minute being normal on the warships she'd sailed on, but she'd never been aboard a cruiser in action.
"I'm tracking!" announced Sun. The upper four-inch turret fired half a dozen rounds, rattling loose fittings. The lower turret joined in for another three or four, then both fell silent.
"Bloody sails!" the gunner said. "Cap'n, rotate us fifteen degrees clockwise so I have a clear shot, on my bloody soul!"
"Bridge, we must reenter the Matrix!" Officer Pleshkov said over the command channel. "There is time, please, but not much time. We must!"
Adele's wands twitched, but she didn't cut the Infantan out of the command loop after all. He was no doubt correct in his assessment of the danger, and it was his job to inform the captain in case she hadn't noticed it herself.
Which of course Vesey had, but Pleshkov wasn't speaking out of turn until Vesey told him to shut up. In which case Adele would instantly silence him. It didn't matter what happened to the Princess Cecile so long as they held the Pellegrinians' attention until—
Sudden activity lighted up the radio frequency band. It was as meaningful to Adele as close-range optical images would be to most RCN officers.
"The Sibyl's arrived!" Adele said. "The Sibyl's launching missiles, three missiles! Daniel's here!"
Apparently I'm capable of enthusiasm under the correct stimulus.
"Ship, we're inserting into the Matrix in fifteen seconds," Vesey said. "Gunner, cease fire to avoid disturbing our surface charge."
She paused there. Adele expected her to sign out—Vesey was punctilious about that—but instead she continued, "I think we have enough time, spacers. Commander Leary will be proud of us. Captain out."
Perhaps Vesey was putting a positive gloss on reality the way Sun had. Adele didn't have the equipment or the expertise either one to determine whether the Sissie could leave normal space before the Pellegrinian missiles intersected with their computed course.
Regardless, "Commander Leary was proud of them" wouldn't make a bad epitaph.
At the instant the destroyer inserted into the Matrix, the bridge rippled like a scene projected on a windblown curtain. Daniel barely noticed it. Generally short insertions didn't have the gut-wrenching effects you could face when you extracted after a long voyage without a break, and this'd been just a quick dip.
Many astrogators made touch-and-gos to get star sights to check their location. Not only did Daniel pride himself on his dead reckoning in the Matrix, the most cack-handed officer the RCN had ever commissioned could manage a hop of fifty-five light-minutes without missing his extraction by a significant degree.
What Daniel needed was a recent fix on the Pellegrinian cruiser. Five light-minutes out from Dunbar's World was the compromise he'd decided on, reasonably current imagery of the Duilio without putting the Sibyl so close in that the Pellegrinians might become aware of her before she arrived.
By making two insertion/extraction sequences while the Sissie covered the same short distance in one, Daniel also built in the delay he needed for the plan to work. He couldn't launch his attack on the Duilio too quickly this way—
And being too quick meant failure. If the choice were purely Daniel's to make, he knew full well that he'd shave thirty seconds or even a minute off the calculated interval. The Princess Cecile was his ship, many of her crewmen had been his shipmates throughout the past two years; and of course Adele had become even more important as a friend than as a colleague.
But the Sissie had to be alone long enough in the vicinity of Dunbar's World to completely concentrate the attention of the Duilio's crew. Otherwise they all might as well've stayed in Charlestown and partied the way Councilor Waddell had suggested in the beginning.
"We will extract in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," Cory announced from the BDC with careful formality. Daniel's display was as it'd been on the previous attack: Plot-Position Indicator above, attack board beneath.
He hadn't carried a Chief Missileer on this mission, since it would've been a wasted slot when the Sissie had no missiles. Besides, it was a task for which Daniel himself had both a flair and experience. His fingers poised.
The emptiness which Daniel's screens maintained in the Matrix now filled with data. The PPI showed the Duilio orbiting forty-six miles above Dunbar's World and over four thousand miles—4,173 and closing—from where the Sibyl had returned to normal space.
The real-time optical image inset in the upper right-hand corner of the display showed the cruiser as it emerged from the planetary shadow. Ap Glynn had taken in his rig since the destroyer's previous attack. The sails were furled and the yards rotated parallel to the masts before the masts themselves were folded against the hull. That gave the heavy guns full traverse and elevation.
The two ships were on nearly parallel courses
for the moment, but the Sibyl viewed the cruiser from thirty degrees below the center of her long axis. Both 15-cm turrets were rotated to track the Princess Cecile at a nearly reciprocal angle to the destroyer.
Landholder Krychek had been waiting for this chance. He adjusted the Sibyl's four turrets with a momentary squeal; then the 10-cm guns began to hammer.
Either Krychek or the destroyer's gunnery program blocked a weapon's discharge if anything was within 100 meters of the muzzle. The Sibyl's sails, those which remained after the previous attack, were set, so initially only six and after a few seconds four guns fired.
Flashes lit the Duilio's hull, patches of plating subliming under the lash of deuterium ions. The destroyer's weapons didn't deliver nearly the impact of 15-cm guns—the relation of bore to charge was logarithmic, not linear—and the cruiser's hull was much thicker besides, but the light weapons cycled much quicker also. Krychek was at least as accurate as Sun would've been at this short range, and Daniel knew from experience that the bolts would do serious if not incapacitating damage.
But that was the gunner's business; Daniel was picking the first of his new preset attack orders. The calculated spread of his salvo—only three missiles this time, but that was still one more than the Sissie herself could've managed—showed in green lines which flared as each missile separated after burnout. That didn't spread the footprint significantly in the present instance because the target was so close; without adjustment none of the missiles would pass within ten miles of the Duilio on her predicted course.
It felt like an unconscionable length of time before Daniel got the corrections entered into his attack board, but in all truth it was a matter of seconds. It would've taken a minute or more if he'd had to plan the attack from scratch instead of tweaking a preset order.
He was pretty sure they didn't have a minute. Until the moment Daniel twisted and depressed the execute key, it was a toss-up in his mind as to whether they had the seconds the present reality had required.
Whang!
"Ship, launching three!" he shouted over the general push. He wasn't so much reporting to the crew—they'd already heard the first missile launching, followed at five-second intervals by the whang! whang! of the other two—as he was crowing with pride at having executed a difficult operation in a timely fashion.
The Princess Cecile was a speck on the PPI, driving slowly off at a tangent from Dunbar's World. The salvo of missiles the cruiser'd launched were closing at .07 C. They'd divided at burnout and were now a spreading straggle of chunks, each weighing a tonne or more.
"May the God of Battles aid you!" Daniel muttered under his breath, but his present duties were to the Sibyl and her crew. Blantyre had the conn, but he'd ordered her to hold course at 1 g acceleration unless the bridge took a direct hit; in that case she could use her discretion. Daniel's concern was his attack board.
Missiles rumbled on their tracks, shaking the destroyer like freight cars shifting in her belly. The fore and aft tubes had separate magazines to keep the feed run short; jerks and clanking indicated to Daniel's experienced ear that the launchers were reloaded even before green ready lights flashed along the side of his display.
An iridescent cloud blurred the Duilio's real-time image. On the sidebar of the attack board, a legend under the cruiser's icon indicated she was braking hard. Captain ap Glynn had reacted to the oncoming missiles by lighting both High Drive and plasma thrusters. He must be running them up to overload output.
Plasma flared with molecules of antimatter which hadn't combined in the High Drive. Though ionized, the thrusters' exhaust was nonetheless ordinary matter. It converted completely to energy along with antimatter when they mixed.
If the Duilio's antennas had been stepped, the strain of deceleration would've sheared them at the base hinges. Even as it was, the cruiser's hull must've been flexing like a rubber toy. Daniel'd commanded ships in similar straits. He knew how terrifying the groans of plates against the ribs and the squeal of escaping air would be to the crew, particularly those who didn't have immediate duties.
Daniel knew, but he had no sympathy at all. The Pellegrinians were The Enemy, the people who'd chosen to fight the RCN. He'd grind them into the dust, by God he would!
The Duilio had been firing at the Sissie when Daniel's display locked into sidereal space; the bolts of heavy hydrogen, detonated by laser arrays in the breaches of the cannon, showed as tracks on his attack board. The cruiser's turrets began slewing as soon as the Pellegrinian gunnery officer realized he had a much more pressing target, but her heavy acceleration made both aiming and traverse more difficult.
Daniel recalculated for his second salvo. Ap Glynn was fighting the inertia that carried his ship into the Sibyl's initial spread of missiles. Allowing for that—
Whang!
"Launching three!" Daniel said as the crew cheered over the continued hammering of Krychek's guns.
Whang! Whang!
The attack board covered too small a region to show the fleeing Princess Cecile, but on the PPI the missiles were red beads nearing the blue dot of the corvette. God of Battles, aid them!
Daniel saw almost as soon as his missiles released that he'd misjudged. Though the board predicted that the yellow tracks of his second salvo would cross the orange bead of the cruiser, Daniel—and the battle computer, but a computer can't feel embarrassment when it screws up—had failed to factor in the gravity of Dunbar's World. This salvo would miss ahead of the Duilio just as the first had. The cruiser, wrapped in a cloud of fire-shot radiance, was slipping into the planet's shadow as it continued to plunge toward the surface.
Ap Glynn wasn't as certain as Daniel that the Sibyl's salvo was misaimed, or at any rate he'd decided not to take chances. The single working tube in the cruiser's ventral turret fired, catching a missile just before it separated. Half a tonne of solid metal swelled into a fireball, thrusting the remainder of the projectile away at an angle that increased the Duilio's margin of safety.
The next trio of missiles shook the destroyer on their way to the launching tubes. Daniel had to hope that they'd continue to feed smoothly, because he didn't have trained missile crewmen aboard to correct problems. That was why he was holding a straight course at 1 g acceleration, ideal conditions for the conveyors. There was always a chance of something breaking on a ship that'd sat idle for several years, however, and the missile-handling equipment provided more opportunities for failure than most installations.
As the remaining missiles of the salvo slanted into the atmosphere, they corkscrewed before breaking up in a tumbling light show. Daniel regretted the danger to people on the ground, but even a civilian can slip getting out of the bathtub. . . .
For a moment Landholder Krychek had all four turrets clear. The simultaneous rapid fire of his 10-cm guns made the destroyer shake like a dog come in from the wet. Daniel clenched as his fingers computed the next salvo, knowing that if Krychek could shoot then there were at least four points at which the Sibyl's spreading sails didn't protect the hull from the cruiser's bolts.
The Princess Cecile vanished from the PPI as the swarm of Pellegrinian missiles crossed her computed track. At this range, the Sibyl's electronics couldn't determine whether the corvette had slipped into the Matrix or had been reduced to a cloud of gas and debris.
The cruiser'd been maneuvering too hard to launch missiles at the destroyer, a bloody good thing. From the evidence of her first salvo, her Chief Missileer knew his business.
The Duilio's dorsal turret fired at the destroyer. Red telltales on the command display quickly switched back to green. A circuit breaker astern had tripped, but neither bolt struck squarely.
The shroud of plasma and pure energy bathing the Duilio suddenly streamed a sparkling curlicue. That stream pinched off, but two more—one bow and one stern—blazed out in the wake as the cruiser continued to descend.
Daniel was poised on the execute button and his mouth was open to shout, "Launching three!" Instead he jerked his hand up,
allowing the button to twist back into its safety position.
"Cease fire!" he said. "All personnel, cease fire!"
The Sibyl's guns were still firing; only four of them now, but that was a result of the angle rather than because Krychek was taking a gradual approach to obeying orders. Daniel'd expected that. It took him a moment longer to find the gunnery lockout on this command console than it would've done on the Sissie's familiar display, but only a moment.
The guns fell silent. At the gunnery console, the Landholder shouted curses as he furiously fault-checked his equipment. Eventually he'd figure out what'd happened, at which point he and Daniel would discuss the matter in whatever fashion he chose.
Or Hogg chose, if Daniel didn't watch his servant carefully. Still, that was a problem for a later time.
The cruiser's guns had missed because three of her High Drive motors had destroyed themselves violently. Captain ap Glynn's complete focus on the oncoming missiles had dropped his ship too deep into the atmosphere for the High Drive to operate safely. When the motors began to fail, they shook the Duilio like a rat in a terrier's jaws.