by David Drake
Going into action with all sails set—most of them aligned to cancel one another in the Matrix—had been the correct tactical decision: the 15-cm bolt would almost certainly've penetrated the hull otherwise, and heaven only knew what internal damage the plasma-lighted fireball would've done in the ship's interior. As it was, the plates were pitted and icicles of steel hung down from the bitt Daniel'd used to belay the line. They'd melted from the bitt itself as well as being redeposited from the mast and yards.
So of course it'd been the right decision, but the ruin the bolt'd smeared across the Sibyl's bow was enough to make any spacer weep. Four antennas and their yards were completely destroyed; two more were usable for the time being but would certainly be replaced when the ship reached a repair dock. The steel exploding from Dorsal 1 had damaged sails all the way back to Dorsal 6, though to Port and Starboard the hull had protected all but the topgallants, and the ventral rig was unharmed.
It wasn't really that bad: with a good crew and himself plotting the course, Daniel'd venture to better the time over any distance that the Bennarians could've accomplished when the Sibyl was new. It looked terrible, though, and besides what was visible, the hull's torquing might've done worse than collapse one missile tube.
The other three tubes were clear, though. For the time being, the destroyer's ability to fight was more important than the possibility she'd taken structural damage.
Woetjans had straightened, but she was surveying the work in general rather than diving directly into another specific job. She was Chief of Rig, so the damage was hers to correct. Though technically she was acting under the Captain's direction, Daniel knew he had nothing to teach his bosun about the task in hand. He'd joined her as a moderately skilled helper, not to oversee her work.
Wrist-thick hawsers of braided monocrystal held the ships together at bow and stern. That way the vessels damped one another's slight moment, and the cables kept all strain off the thin transit line amidships.
Three figures were crossing from the Princess Cecile. The two on the ends carried the third between them in a basket of safety lines. Adele was the only person who was so valuable—and so frequently clumsy in free-fall—that Vesey would've provided such an escort from the few spacers still aboard the corvette.
Daniel signaled to Woetjans, then started for where the line was clamped to a stanchion on the Sibyl's hull. He moved in a rigger's long, loping stride, closer to skating than walking. It kept the lifted boot near the hull, the experienced spacer's alternative to a safety line.
There were times that you simply leaped for a cable because speed was more important than anything else; people who sailed the Matrix for a living didn't put a high premium on personal safety. That was true in spades of riggers and of successful RCN officers.
Butterick, a Sissie from the Power Room, was the first of those crossing; she unhooked a line from her belt and clipped it to Daniel's. Adele was on the other end. Between them, Butterick and the Infantan at the end of the procession slapped the soles of Adele's boots down firmly.
Daniel dismissed the spacers with a wave; they started back to the corvette. The Infantan would've given Daniel the second safety line also, but that was simply absurd. If not precisely humorless the Landholder's people were at least a deeply serious lot, so the offer probably hadn't been meant as a joke.
Daniel leaned to touch helmets with Adele. To his surprise, she backed a step and held out a half-watt radio intercom. His face blanked, but he locked the unit into the slot on his helmet.
"I know one doesn't normally use radio on the hull, Daniel," Adele said calmly. "I have things to discuss that I can't do where the Infantans might overhear, and I'm too awkward out here to do so while contorting myself to speak."
Daniel chuckled. "Intercoms can be issued for suit use only by order of the captain and the signals officer both," he said. "This is perfectly proper."
He still didn't like it: no rigger would. It'd take an unlikely series of things going wrong before one of these radios was used catastrophically in the Matrix, but things did go wrong. A smart spacer—a spacer who survived—avoided situations where he might screw up, because sure as hell he was going to screw up sooner or later if he had the opportunity.
But Adele wasn't out here on the hull without a bloody good reason.
"According to Vesey," Adele said, "you'll probably attack the Pellegrinians next time with both ships in company. Is that correct?"
Daniel shrugged invisibly. He hadn't had time to discuss the plan in detail, but Vesey'd served with him long enough to be able to figure it out on her own. It was the best use of his slight available resources.
"Yes," he said, "though at longer range than I'd expected to engage before I saw how alert the Duilio's gun crews are."
He licked his lips, then added, "That means the Sissie will simply be distracting the Pellegrinians. It's possible that she'll be sacrificed without any chance of doing actual harm to them."
"Daniel," Adele said, "I think I can convince the Pellegrinians that the Princess Cecile is actually the Sibyl. If we—if the Sissie—insert alone and at some distance from the Duilio, we'll draw her whole attention, won't we? And then you can attack with the Sibyl while they're not expecting you."
Daniel touched his lips again. "They'll be expecting two ships," he said.
"Will they?" said Adele. "Daniel, do you think a Pellegrinian officer would fake an attack in a ship which doesn't have missiles? And they know the Sissie doesn't have missiles."
So they did, from the inspection when the Sissie landed at Central Haven as well as from the fact that Daniel hadn't replied to the salvoes ap Glynn launched when the corvette escaped from Dunbar's World. But there was a basic flaw with the plan nonetheless.
"Adele, if we're close enough to threaten the Duilio, they'll have us in sight," Daniel said. "Sure, her optics are monkey models, not first-line gear built to Fleet specs, but nothing comes out of the Pleasaunce Arsenal that can't tell the difference between a corvette and a damaged destroyer within five light minutes."
He grinned, wondering if Adele could see him through the faceplates of their helmets. "The Sibyl's optics are the same quality, you know," he said. Regardless, she knew him well enough to hear the smile in his voice. "They're not the first thing I'd upgrade if I had the choice."
Another mare's nest of tubes and rigging spun slowly away from the destroyer, this time most of Starboard 2. Woetjans and her crew would have the damage cleared in another hour. Handling a ship with a badly unbalanced rig could be tricky, but Daniel'd sailed a jury-rigged heavy cruiser to Cinnabar in seventeen days. He wasn't worried about that aspect of the coming action.
"Yes, but Vesey says that if we remain end-on to the Pellegrinians and four or five light-seconds away," Adele said, "they'll have to depend on their computer to complete the identification. They won't have anybody skilled enough to be certain without the software."
Daniel pursed his lips, wondering why Adele was discussing this. Aloud he said, "I suppose that's true. But in fairness to our Pellegrinian friends, Adele, I don't know that I could tell a destroyer from a corvette under those conditions. In any case, they certainly do have the software to complete the identification."
"Yes," said Adele, "but I have all the communications codes from the Rainha. That gives me access to the Duilio's computer. If I'm quick enough, I believe I can enter a different—a corrected, if I may call it that—result."
"Oh!" said Daniel. The stars were a cold scatter in all directions; nowhere especially dense, but nowhere completely absent. To Daniel sidereal space seemed static and cold compared to the roiling excitement of the Matrix, a cut-glass vase instead of a cat quivering as it makes up its mind whether to pounce.
He looked at his friend again. His heart was leaden after its sudden thrill of hope. "I'm afraid that won't work, Adele," he said. "You have their commo, but that'll be completely separate from the battle computer which they use for identification."
"My
mother would have hated the term 'monkey model,'" Adele said with apparent irrelevance. "She was strongly against the practice of demeaning less technologically sophisticated peoples. Still, I don't suppose her views on the matter are controlling any more."
"Pardon?" Daniel said. It was Adele speaking, so the words meant something.
"Daniel, any ship built for us or the Alliance Fleet would handle communications, astrogation, and attack in physically separate computers," she said. "But the Duilio was built for export. All her functions are in a single unit, and I'll have access to it as soon as I'm close enough to the Pellegrinians to feed a signal through their secure network. Let us go in first and only follow when we've gotten their full attention."
"This is going to be very dangerous," Daniel said, thinking aloud rather than objecting. "The timing will be critical."
He understood why Adele hadn't wanted the Infantans to overhear. The plan was only possible because the Alliance had commo teams on all the ships supporting the Pellegrinian operation.
He clapped Adele on the shoulder, his gauntlet clacking against the glass-filled plate covering the joint of her suit. "By God, Adele, this doesn't do much for our chances of survival, but it certainly does make it more likely that we'll be able to put paid to that wog cruiser! By God it does!"
"My mother particularly disliked the term 'wog,'" said Adele austerely. "But as I said, I don't suppose her views are controlling."
* * *
"Counting down to extraction!" announced Pleshkov, the Infantan executive officer now in the Sissie's BDC. "Ten seconds, nine seconds—"
Adele grimaced and blocked her input from the general channel for the next eight seconds. The Infantans had their own procedures, and there hadn't been time to harmonize them with those of the RCN.
To correct them to RCN standard, she thought. She didn't need somebody yammering while she concentrated on a problem.
Adele sank back into the silence of her familiar display, a simulation of what she expected when they extracted from the Matrix: Dunbar's World, the Duilio in close orbit, and the Princess Cecile herself appearing 600,000 miles out, twenty seconds before the cruiser passed into the planetary shadow. The image gave the events a specious reality, but Adele knew they were as evanescent as the light beams interfering to create the holograms.
The Princess Cecile shifted out of the Matrix. For an instant Adele's bones were replaced by simulacra of frozen steel; they seared and shrank her muscles from the inside. The pain would've been disabling if—
Well, if she'd been a different person and not completely focused on the task in hand.
The Princess Cecile completed its transition back into the sidereal universe. Adele's body returned to normal, her flesh trembling slightly with remembered pain. The High Drive pushed her hard against her couch.
The enemy was in sight.
An icon on the top of the display informed Adele that the Sissie's antennas were adjusting automatically, as they were programmed to do. She'd chosen the laser communicator to enter the cruiser, since ap Glynn wasn't using it himself and also because the corvette's sending unit was of low mass and could be quickly slewed.
The latter turned out to be important, because the Duilio would cross behind the planet in seven seconds, not twenty. It'd take over three seconds for Adele's impulse to reach the cruiser.
She had the commands preset. When her laser communicator locked on to the destroyer, the queued data fed in a burst to a suspense file aboard the cruiser. The steps had to be executed in sequence, and she wasn't confident that the Pellegrinian computer would respond promptly enough to cycle through the instructions before the planetary shadow broke the transmission.
"—known vessel, lie to immediately or—" the Duilio ordered, the same demand it'd directed at the Sibyl when Daniel'd attempted his abortive attack. This time there was a difference, not in the formal hail which dissolved in static as Dunbar's World intervened but instead in the cruiser's general RF signature.
"Captain, both of the cruiser's turrets are rotating," Adele said, half-stumbling over the first word. She'd almost said Six. That would've keyed Vesey as intended, but it would've made both of them uncomfortable. "One was tracking us from the moment we extracted. Over!"
The last word sharply, because she'd almost forgotten it. Again.
Vesey didn't reply; there was no need for her to and she doubtless had other business. Adele felt the direction of down change, the result of the thrusters gimbaling to adjust the Sissie's course. The approximation Daniel and Vesey had created was remarkably close to what the corvette actually found when it returned to normal space, a comment on the high quality of planning and execution. Vesey had extracted within a few hundred miles of the intended point.
There was also a great deal of luck in the business. The Duilio had lifted into a marginally higher orbit since the Cinnabar officers made their calculations on the basis of data that was an hour old. That increased the orbital period, so only chance made the cruiser's location so nearly coincide with the prediction.
Adele wasn't sure what Vesey was trying to accomplish now. Accelerating a 1300-ton vessel was a slow process even with the High Drive operating at maximum output. The ship groaned under the strain, though, and Pleshkov shouted on the general channel, "Back off, you fool! The rig is set and—"
Adele disabled the Infantan's ability to transmit. That was no doubt very wrong: it was insubordinate, it was potentially dangerous since Pleshkov might have something useful to say at some later point, and it carried the risk of a serious incident as soon as the fellow realized what'd happened. Besides which, Adele's mother would've objected strongly to the discourtesy.
It's what Daniel would've wanted her to do. If Vesey felt otherwise, that was only because she put a higher value on protocol than Daniel or Adele either one.
If Pleshkov challenged Adele to a duel because of the insult, he wouldn't be the first person she'd shot; if he simply came storming onto the bridge to complain, Tovera would kill him without bothering about a challenge. And Evadne Rolfe Mundy had been dead for seventeen years. Some of her opinions still existed within her surviving daughter, but not to the degree that they'd affect Adele's willingness to do what Commander Leary would expect of her.
The Duilio swung back into sight; she'd stopped transmitting the challenge. Adele assumed that meant she'd decided the Princess Cecile was the destroyer returned to the attack. When the cruiser fired her plasma cannon, both guns from the dorsal turret but only one from the ventral, the assumption became a certainty.
"Hoo, that's right, laddies!" Sun crowed on the general channel. "Burn your bloody barrels out for nothing, why don't you! You couldn't raise a sunburn at this range!"
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 Adle 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 r
eset 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.