by David Drake
"I think we're all lucky," Adele said after a moment's reflection. It wasn't a question to take lightly; well, no question should be taken lightly, for all that most people seemed to respond without considering what they were saying or even what they'd really been asked.
That wasn't a thought she wanted to pursue so closely on the heels of remembering that Speaker Leary and the Proscriptions had been absolutely necessary for Adele Mundy to find a friend and a family. The universe posed questions that a human mind, even a mind as good as Adele's, simply couldn't answer.
To change the subject, she returned to the concern she hadn't gotten out a moment before: "Sun, are we going to be able to manage with so short a crew? I know we're not meant to be fighting, but—"
"Lord love me, mistress!" the gunner said in surprise. "We handled the Millie well enough, didn't we, ten times the size? And jury-rigged too!"
"Well, yes," said Adele, feeling a little defensive but trying to keep it out of her tone. "But we came from Nikitin to Cinnabar without maneuvering any more than absolutely necessary. I know that Mister Leary normally replots the course from a masthead every few hours."
Without Adele consciously intending to, her wands flicked her display back to the Battle Direction Center. Daniel was still talking with animation to the midshipmen, but this time they were examining Power Room readouts.
"Oh, aye," said Sun. "But don't worry, Mistress. Woetjans had her pick of riggers from the whole Gold Dust Squadron, though I don't think she took anybody who hadn't shipped with us before. Between them and the ship having a fresh rig with no frays or splices, we'll show our heels to most anybody. With Six conning us, of course."
"Of course," said Adele, but her mind was full of wonder at what her life had become and who she shared it with. I am lucky beyond human understanding. . . .
"Ship, this is the captain," Vesey said. "Before we lift, I'd like Commander Leary to say a few words. Break, Commander Leary, over?"
Vesey hadn't warned Adele that she was going to do that—had she warned Daniel?—but Adele's wands moved by reflex to export Daniel's real-time image to every screen and commo helmet aboard the Princess Cecile. Where the screen was already busy—the displays in the Power Room bubbled with data—Adele placed the image as a variable that waxed and waned with the gaps in the existing display.
Daniel smiled engagingly at the crew whom he saw only in memory: Adele hadn't seen any point in filling Daniel's display with seventy-odd expectant faces.
"Fellow spacers," he said. "And you are that, but you're also my brothers and sisters by now. We don't know what we'll be facing on this mission; it's not to a theater of war, at least not war the way you and I know it. Space and the Matrix have enough dangers without the Alliance getting involved, though, don't they, Sissies? And from what I hear of Ganpat's Reach, we might at least find ourselves alongside a pirate for long enough to keep our reputation as the best fighting crew in the RCN."
Adele heard Sun cheer even over the sound of the thrusters, now settling into a dull drumming from below. The whole crew was cheering, she knew. . . and as Daniel had known. He had a real talent for telling people what they wanted to hear, perhaps because they knew he meant every word of it.
Adele echoed Vesey's display out of curiosity and saw what expected: across the top a line of green lights indicated closed ports and hatches. A red telltale at the end showed a pump sucking water from the slip to replace the slight amount of reaction mass being expended in running up the thrusters. It was unlikely that the difference between "tanks topped off" and "tanks down by a hundred gallons" would ever matter, but Lieutenant Vesey'd been trained by an officer who only took chances deliberately.
"We don't know what we'll face," Daniel repeated, "but there's one thing for certain: we know we can trust our shipmates. The spacers next to us will do their jobs, just as surely as we'll do ours. And so far as I'm concerned, that makes us the luckiest folk in the RCN. Cinnabar forever!"
Daniel raised his right fist on the display. Sun raised his too and cheered again. Faint echoes came down the corridor from riggers suited up to go onto the hull when the Princess Cecile reached orbit. Adele, affected but smiling at herself, blanked the image.
"Ship," said Lieutenant Vesey, "this is the captain. Prepare to lift in thirty, repeat, three-oh, seconds. Out."
The rumble of the thrusters built into a snarling roar. Adele settled herself against the seat cushions. Her mind was lost in memory.
En Route to Bennaria
Daniel shifted slightly to bring his helmet in contact with midshipman's and said, "I don't think there's anything as beautiful as this, Blantyre. On my oath as a Leary, I don't!"
"Sir?" said Blantyre, her voice thinned by contact transmission. "I can sort of see what you mean, but. . . ."
Casimir Radiation, the sole constant among the infinite bubble universes of the Matrix, impinged on the microns-thin sails of charged fabric. Even an intercom signal or the electromagnetic field of a tiny servomotor on the ship's exterior would be sufficient to modify the charge and incalculably distort the ship's course. The yards were worked by hydraulics rather than electricity and communication on the hull was by handsignals, semaphores, or occasionally helmet-to-helmet contact.
"Sir," the midshipman repeated more forcefully, "maybe it'd be beautiful if I didn't have to work in it, but I do. You expect me to see courses the way you do and I want to. But to me it's like porridge, a porridge of light instead of oatmeal. Until I learn to read it, I won't be able to call it pretty."
Daniel took his head away from Blantyre's helmet so that she wouldn't hear his laughter and think it was directed at her. The Princess Cecile was a cylinder with six mast rings numbered from bow to stern, each with a mast at the four cardinal points: Dorsal and Ventral, Starboard and Port. He and Blantyre were on the highest yard of mast 6D. Facing the bow they viewed not only the rippling light of the cosmos but also the corvette herself.
The Sissie was a trim vessel, but even Daniel knew that the ship's beauty was in his eyes rather than being an objective thing. Her sails were set in the asymmetric pattern which he'd chosen to match the conditions of the present, and the web of cables bracing the masts and yards was as confusingly complex as a black widow's web.
The High Drive motors recombined matter and antimatter to impart velocity to a ship, but it was only by shifting from the sidereal universe into bubbles with different constants of time and velocity that interstellar travel became practical. The sails didn't drive a ship through space: they moved it among the manifold bubbles of the Matrix, multiplying its sidereal velocity so that it could reenter the normal space light-years or hundreds of light-years from where it'd inserted.
Daniel brought his helmet back against Blantyre's with his usual care. They were in rigging suits, stiff and bulky but intended for the knocks that spacers got when they moved at speed on the hull. There were enough dangers inherent in standing on a ship in the Matrix, though, that he didn't intend to increase them by tapping helmets clumsily.
"Blantyre," he said, "the sensors and the astrogational computer treat the Matrix as a problem. They do a better job of analyzing it than you or I could. What people can do that the machines can't is to feel the patterns."
He stretched his arm toward the sky, being careful to bring it within the midshipman's field of view. Rigging suits traded field of view for strength. Skilled riggers—and RCN midshipmen were trained to do the work of the spacers they'd be commanding—allowed for that instinctively, both in their actions and in the way they turned constantly to compensate for the peripheral vision they lacked.
"You said you couldn't see the beauty in this sky till you'd learned to read it," Daniel said. "It's the other way around: find the beauty and the Matrix gives up all its secrets. They used to say my Uncle Stacey knew what the sky would be in six hours from when he last glimpsed it. I thought it was magic, but it's not—I can almost do that myself. And when Lieutenant Vesey's on, which she is more and more every day, she's ve
ry good too. You and Cory can learn it, Blantyre. Just open yourself up."
"Sir," Blantyre said. It wasn't just the awkward means of communication that made her voice sound desperate. "I hear what you say, but I don't understand. I really don't!"
Daniel moved his arm to call attention to it, then pointed toward the flaring ambiance below the starboard bow. It wasn't the sky, though that's what spacers called it:, it was the edge of the bubble around the Princess Cecile, the limits of the miniature universe surrounding the ship herself.
"You see the sequence of bright spots, there between the topsail yards of Starboard Two and Three, right?" he said. "Seven of them, ranging from ruby down through deep amber."
"Yes sir," said Blantyre, wary but more relaxed. "Those are universes."
"That's right," Daniel said, "and the bluish-whitish cloud they shine through is a universe as well. You can see the energy gradients. Now, you've studied the computer's course plot, haven't you?"
"Yessir!" the midshipman said. "I've memorized it! Ah, I think I've memorized it."
"Then you know the computer would send us through the fourth in the line there, MDG446-910," Daniel said. "That will get us to the next stage. What will happen if we enter MGD446-833 instead?"
Blantyre didn't respond instantly. "The lowest of the seven, the amber one," Daniel said, his voice calm. He couldn't expect a midshipman to have the Universal Atlas at her fingertips. It'd taken him years to understand how Uncle Stacey did it, not by memorizing numbers but rather by understanding the dimensional relationships of the cosmos.
"The gradient between us and it's lower," Blantyre said quickly, "so we'll enter quicker and with less strain. That's good. And those bubbles are a set—"
Daniel smiled. She was probably guessing as much from what he'd said as from anything she understood herself, but a good RCN officer learned to use any data available to solve a problem.
"—so the constants'll be similar. So we should steer for MGD446-833 instead of the plotted course!"
Beneath them, 6D's topgallant yard began to rotate ten degrees clockwise along with those of the other dorsal yards. The port and starboard rigs were shifting also; as were, Daniel knew from the semaphores, the unseen ventral masts.
"Which is just what we're doing, because Vesey saw the opportunity when she took a view three hours ago," Daniel said. "It's not magic, Blantyre, it's just common sense and a feel for the most perfect beauty there is."
The furled sails spilled out, trembling minusculely. 6D deployed properly, but half of 5D hung on a kinked cable. A rigger scrambled up the mast even before the semaphore relayed Vesey's instruction from the bridge.
"I'll try, sir," Blantyre said. Her tone might pass for hopeful, but it certainly wasn't optimistic. "I'll keep trying, I mean. But. . . ."
Daniel chuckled and patted the midshipman on the shoulder, his gauntlet clacking on her vambrace. "We'll land on Pellegrino to get a look at things from their side before we go to Bennaria, Blantyre," he said. "We're twelve days out from there now. You and Cory'll be aloft with either me or Vesey on every watch. By the time we touch down, you'll both be able to conn the ship as well as any merchant captain and not a few in the RCN."
"I hope so, sir," said Blantyre. "I'll try."
Daniel looked at the spreading, flaring sky, the most beautiful sight in all the universes. It was perfect and splendid, and for this instant it was all his.
CHAPTER 4: Above Pellegrino
Daniel'd moved onto the bridge after liftoff from Cinnabar. He figured he'd made his point and—unlike Adele—his world was primarily what he could touch with his hands, not within a computer display. He was at the astrogator's station, however, leaving the command console to Vesey; Hogg sat on the jumpseat, whittling a block of structural plastic into a chain. The knife he was using looked much too big to do such delicate work.
The Princess Cecile was in a powered orbit above Pellegrino to maintain the illusion of gravity. Many worlds required that vessels wait in freefall until they'd been boarded and inspected—Cinnabar did for one—but according to the Sailing Directions, Pellegrino had a more relaxed attitude toward visitors, at least under normal circumstances.
Vesey's dialogue with Pellegrino Port Control was running on Daniel's audio channel, but his attention was on two ships: the freighter Rainha rising from the port, and the Pellegrinian light cruiser Duilio waiting in orbit to escort her to Dunbar's World. The cruiser was a fairly modern ship, built in an Alliance yard or at least to an Alliance design.
Six of the Duilio's thirty-six masts were telescoped and apparently out of service, suggesting she was short-crewed. Conned by the right officer, the light cruiser could still show her legs to the smaller Sissie. Daniel doubted Pellegrinian navy had anybody who could put so potentially handy a vessel through her paces, but he wouldn't bet his life on that belief.
He smiled. Unless he had to, of course.
The airlock just aft of the bridge cycled open for a team of riggers to clump ponderously into the foyer. They'd removed their helmets in the lock chamber. Their fellows from the other watch helped them out of the heavy suits, talking with loud enthusiasm about the task just completed and the ground leave to come.
Woetjans would normally've put both watches on the hull to telescope the masts and fold them against the hull in preparation for landing. She hadn't done so this time because the size of the Sissie's crew would've given the lie to the tale Vesey was spinning to Port Control.
Vesey sounded determinedly bored: "Pellegrino, we're a private yacht carrying our owner to Ganpat's Reach. No, he's not a merchant, he's a Cinnabar nobleman. We're setting down here to refill our reaction mass tanks and to give the crew ground leave. We've got two turrets, each fitted with a pair of 4" plasma cannon. I'm not crazy enough to come so far beyond the established trade routes without at least that. Yes, the Sissie used to be a naval vessel, but she isn't now. Our missile magazines are empty."
The story was mostly true, and more important it was perfectly believable. Chancellor Arruns wouldn't willingly provoke the RCN into sending a fighting squadron, but it wouldn't be a good idea to tell him and his bureaucracy that Commander Leary'd come to Ganpat's Reach to thwart the plan that'd absorbed half of Pellegrino's military. An accusation of smuggling could delay the Sissie's departure for months and risk nothing worse than a note from the Ministry of External Affairs on Xenos.
The Rainha was an ordinary regional freighter, a plump cylinder of three thousand tons burden and sixteen masts—as many as such a small crew could handle properly. She was rising ponderously on four plumes of plasma; when she reached orbit her captain would switch to the High Drive to build the velocity that she'd take with her into the Matrix.
High Drive was vastly more efficient than plasma discharge, but the process of turning matter and antimatter into energy was never perfect. If the High Drive was used in an atmosphere, there was always enough antimatter in the exhaust to destroy the motor and its mountings in spectacular fashion.
As soon as Daniel was sure the Rainha was an ordinary freighter, he shrank her image to a cameo in one corner and expanded the Duilio across his full display. His trained eyes could pick out tags of dangling cable and smears of leaking hydraulic fluid. One of the missile tubes was missing the hatch that should've closed it, though that didn't mean the launcher itself wasn't working; even if it were, the cruiser had seven others.
The corvette's lack of the missiles that should've been her primary armament worried Daniel. If he'd had time on Cinnabar he'd have gotten missiles one way or another, but if the Sissie hadn't lifted immediately somebody would've noticed her crack crew.
How many missiles were there in the cruiser's magazines, though? That was the important question, and there was no way to tell from an image of the ship's exterior.
The Duilio mounted two pairs of 15-cm cannon, powerful weapons but much slower firing than the Sissie's. Wondering if all the guns were in operating condition, Daniel boosted magnification a
nd focused on the forward ventral turret. As he did so, vivid purple letters crawled across the bottom of his display:
touch here * for manifest and pay list of Rainha.
touch here * for manifest and pay list of Duilio.
He glanced over his shoulder reflexively, seeing only the back of Adele's head at her console across the compartment. She's probably watching me on her screen—and laughing, he thought. Well, not laughing. He'd heard Adele laugh, but no more often than he could count on one hand.
Signals Officer Mundy was entirely a marvel. His friend Adele was something even better.
Daniel touched the second button with his right index finger, stabbing it hard as though the empty air could feel the difference. Data for the Duilio flashed up as a sidebar, shrinking the main image to make room.
Nineteen officers—far too many; naval commissions must be a perquisite of the Chancellor's friends and their families—and 229 enlisted personnel, where 350 would've been the bare minimum to handle the cruiser properly. Sixty-seven missiles in magazines which could hold 120.