by David Drake
“To what we see as soon as we extract again,” Cory went on, entering a new set of parameters. “That gives us both ends of each course, you see. For as short a gap as we’ll have, say three minutes and a half at worst, well, there’s probably only one way they can get from before to after. And the computer will calculate it, you see?”
Adele let her consciousness play with the words, twisting them about until she saw how their meanings fit together. “Yes,” she said when she was sure her statement was true. “I understand. Thank you, Cory.”
“Thank you, mistress,” Cory said. He was blushing. “It’s, that is, I’ve put an icon at the bottom of your left sidebar. You can bring it up any time after we extract. Or, well, you can do it now but it won’t—”
“I understand, Cory,” Adele said gently. “Thank you.”
What she didn’t understand—one of the many things she didn’t understand—was why people treated her with such deference. She was owed courtesy as a human being who was herself courteous, but she didn’t deserve the degree of stumbling embarrassment to which she’d been treated this time and often. Cory was a commissioned officer, far Officer Mundy’s superior in RCN terms, and she didn’t trade on her civilian rank—
Lady Adele Mundy grinned coldly.
—unless someone pressed her the wrong way. And even then it wasn’t her rank but herself that the other party found themself facing, generally to their great discomfort.
Very deliberately Adele said, “If our duties following extraction permit, Cory, I may ask you to help me interpret the imagery as well, since I suspect it will involve more knowledge of shiphandling than I have.”
“Yes, ma’am!” said Cory. “I’ll be pleased to, of course!”
“Extracting!” said Vesey.
Adele split her main screen between the display on the command console—because Daniel would be looking at whatever was most important to the mission—and the communications inputs which were her primary duty. Ordinarily the latter would consume all her time and more, but the Palmyrenes didn’t signal in any sense that was useful to her, and the Alliance destroyers—
Adele felt herself cascade back into sidereal space. This time it was a blazing rush that made her tremble for a moment, an irritating delay before she could resume use of her wands.
As expected, the Plot Position Indicator indicated that the allied destroyers hadn’t yet arrived at the rally point, though both had managed to escape from their lunge down the throat of the Horde. The Z 42 had inserted ahead of the Sissie, now that Adele thought about it, but it still wasn’t a surprise that the Alliance destroyer was still in the Matrix. She expected Daniel’s command to outperform rivals, any rivals.
“Why haven’t the cutters come after us this time?” Cory said. The link was still open—and being Cory, he probably realized the fact. “They’re still in place above Zenobia, all of them but one.”
Adele clicked up an echo of Cory’s display. He’d overlaid a time-corrected pre-insertion image of the enemy fleet onto the real-time image, with significant discrepancies highlighted in yellow. There was a single bright caret, a cutter which had inserted into the Matrix and which probably meant nothing. Certainly the Palmyrenes hadn’t decided to overwhelm the defenders in response to their attack.
The Turgut was deeper in Zenobia’s atmosphere. The Alliance missiles must have missed, though von Gleuck had launched from point-blank range; the pair from the Princess Cecile were still distant from their target. Even if Daniel had aimed perfectly, the Palmyrene destroyer could easily maneuver clear—so long as her crew didn’t ignore them in confusion and the press of other business.
Adele watched stiff-faced, then replaced the real-time image with the simulation Cory had prepared. All the missiles had been launched before the Sissie inserted, so re-creating the events was, as Cory had implied, a simple matter of physics.
It wouldn’t have been simple for me. I have a great deal of technical knowledge, but it’s deep rather than broad, and it doesn’t include astronomical simulations.
The missileers were chattering on an intraship channel. Something had gone wrong with the starboard rollerway, but apparently it was fixed now: the deep rumble of a missile resumed, then ended with a squeal as hydraulic rams seated the weapon in the launch tube. Moments later the breech closed and locked.
In the simulation, the Alliance destroyers—blue beads—launched missiles, four and three paler blue lines, toward the red bead of the Turgut. The Princess Cecile was white, and two off-white missiles crawled away from her.
The Z 42, then the Z 46, vanished from the display. Adele frowned in concentration, then tried to magnify the simulation as though it was real imagery. To her delight and surprise—she hadn’t given Cory enough credit—the dots expanded smoothly into shapes. She centered the Turgut and increased the magnification still further.
Filling the right half of the signals display, the Alliance destroyer had a vague graininess that could have tricked even Adele into believing it was real imagery had she not known otherwise. Apparently the software manipulated the initial image instead of creating an icon of greater precision. She would have to learn more about the system, when she had leisure.
Iridescent plasma wreathed the Turgut as thrusters slowed the vessel’s plunge into the Zenobian atmosphere. A sparking trail marked its slanting course downward; at lower magnification the ship would look like a comet.
The Turgut’s turrets were withdrawn into the hull as if the destroyer was making a normal landing. As Adele watched, the pair on the spine lifted from their secured position. The Princess Cecile—any ship that Daniel commanded—would have kept its guns ready for action while attacking a hostile planet, but Daniel had more experience in such situations than most captains. Where were Palmyrene officers trained, anyway?
Before its guns could slew or elevate, the destroyer shuddered violently. Instead of continuing to descend, it hung at the same altitude for a moment, its train of plasma wobbling behind it.
A blue flash on the underside silhouetted the hull momentarily. The Turgut began to rotate slowly to starboard on its axis, its nose tilting down.
Two more flashes, vivid and instantaneous, lighted the port side. Half the port outrigger sagged; after a moment it tore from the hull and twisted toward the surface on a separate course.
A section of missile, probably one of the three from the Z 46, corkscrewed by so close to the Turgut that it appeared momentarily on Adele’s closely focused display. The Palmyrene captain had cut in his High Drive to avoid incoming that his thrusters alone couldn’t accelerate clear of. He’d been successful in that, but several motors had failed and crippled the destroyer.
Adele nodded crisply, a salute to Captain von Gleuck that he would never see. The Turgut would continue down to the surface and probably make a safe landing: High Drive motors were mounted on the outriggers, so their explosive failure hadn’t damaged the hull. Even so, the destroyer would not for some while yet be freeing and supporting the troops sequestered on Diamond Cay.
Adele halted the simulation, then shrank it to an icon on her sidebar. Cory’s miniature image watched her hopefully from the top range of her display. I don’t need your help after all, she thought. She might have smiled, but that would have been cruel. The boy—he was a boy, twenty-two years old—so desperately wanted to be of service to her.
The Z 42 extracted twenty-one hundred miles sunward of the Princess Cecile. Both Alliance destroyers were fully rigged, giving them a plump, bristling appearance. By contrast, the Palmyrene cutters had only a single set of four antennas and wore minimal sails on them.
Adele suspected that in many cases the cutters only owned a partial rig. The little vessels had limited storage volume. If the Palmyrene logistics system was as chaotic as every other aspect of their organization, ships probably went without food, let alone sailcloth and cables. But they certainly could sail in the Matrix.
“Posy Three to Posy Two,” Daniel said. Adele had s
et her console to transmit automatically through a single laser head unless she overrode the default herself. “Over.”
“Posy Three,” replied the destroyer. The Z 42’s captain was Fregattenkapitan Henri Lavoissier, but the speaker was female. “Resume communications silence unless told otherwise! Out!”
Adele’s face went blank. I may have something to discuss with one Fregattenkapitan Lavoissier when this is over, she thought; then she smiled with a sort of humor. It wasn’t her business but rather Daniel’s, and she knew he would laugh it off. Even more to the point, it appeared unlikely that those aboard the Z 42 and the Princess Cecile would be in condition to discuss anything when the business was over, let alone carry on an affair of honor.
“Mistress?” said Cory. “What happens if von Gleuck is killed? Are we under Lavoissier’s command? Because from what Six said about this being Alliance space, we should be.”
Adele felt a suddenly jolt of cold fury. Then she caught herself and chipped out a tiny laugh.
“No, Cory,” she said to the excellent, earnest, young lieutenant, “not unless Captain Leary loses his mind as a result of another blow on the head. In which case his loyal officers will regretfully transfer command to an officer who isn’t incapacitated, not so?”
“Yes, mistress,” Cory said gratefully. “Thank you, mistress.”
All I did was tell him that Daniel has too much common sense to let protocol force him into a ridiculous situation, Adele thought. Surely Cory knew that without my saying so?
But the truth was that people tended to follow rules rigidly when they were frightened. The one disadvantage of a leader as strong and charismatic as Daniel Leary was that if he were removed, some of his subordinates—though exceptional officers in their own right—would be temporarily paralyzed.
Whereupon Lady Adele Mundy would sort things out. She would rather die than lose Daniel, but she would do her duty regardless of how she felt. She had been emotionally empty, dead, for the fifteen years immediately following the murder of her family. Meeting Daniel had resurrected her, but she would go on even if she lost him.
She would have a purpose, after all: the complete and ruthless destruction of everyone and everything responsible for Daniel’s death.
Smiling, though not everyone would have recognized the expression as a smile, Adele used one of the Sissie’s microwave heads to key the circuit she had built into Zenobia’s satellite communications system. A light-minute was well within her equipment’s capacity, though the satellites were intended to send and receive planetary transmissions only.
Adele began combing the reports from teams of the Founder’s Regiment. The arrests—and deaths resisting arrest—were consistent and gratifying. A smile started to spread across her face.
She got to a report filed by the militiamen guarding the palace. At first the significance escaped her.
The idiots!
She opened her mouth to report to Daniel, when the Z 46 finally dropped out of the Matrix nearby. Captain Leary had a battle to win; the other matter could wait.
But when the battle was over, Lady Mundy and her servant would take care of it.
Daniel bared his teeth in an instinctive grimace when he got a good look at the Z 46. Though he knew the appearance was worse than the reality, the reality was bad enough.
Because the destroyer was wearing a full suit of sails, the Palmyrene rockets had a large target. Their warheads were fused to detonate even on sailcloth, and as many as a dozen had done just that before von Gleuck managed to withdraw into the Matrix.
Plasma bolts would have vaporized the sails, blasting them off the hull. Fragments from the rocket casings had instead shredded the fabric with thousands of spinning knives. What was left trailed in strips like clothes rotting from a corpse.
The sails and occasional severed cables could be replaced easily enough. The antennas and yards had probably received very little damage, and the hull would only have been scratched.
The ship looked appalling, though, and the black, ripping storm of explosions which tore the sails would have done the same to anyone out on the hull. Most of the riggers on duty must have been killed, and the full rig would have required more than the minimal crew that Daniel had allowed.
The Sissie had lost one rigger of four, and Woetjans could no longer move about the hull, let alone climb. The Z 46 might well have lost forty people, leaving too few survivors to clear the damage as quickly as might be necessary. The work was already under way, though.
“Posy One to Force Posy,” signalled the Z 46. The voice wasn’t that of Captain von Gleuck; presumably it was his First Lieutenant, handling an administrative chore. “Report damage, over.”
Responding to that was Vesey’s job. Even if it hadn’t been, a nearly simultaneous signal from von Gleuck himself said, “Cinc to Three-Six. What do you think they’re up to, Leary? I mean, why aren’t they coming after us? Over.”
Von Gleuck was just out of transition, but he’d analyzed the Palmyrene dispositions and understood the basic problem regarding them. And instead of issuing orders, von Gleuck was discussing the situation with an experienced fighting captain. That showed good judgment as well as flattering Daniel’s ego.
Smiling—because it was flattering—more broadly than he might otherwise have done at the present juncture, Daniel said, “Cinc, this is Three-Six. The cutters can track us wherever we go, but we’ve done considerable damage to them every time they attacked unsupported.”
By “we’ve done considerable damage” Daniel meant that the Princess Cecile had done considerable damage, but he kept the statement neutral both by policy and for the sake of fairness. The Palmyrenes had been coming to the Sissie, giving Sun and Rocker most of the opportunities; and during Force Posy’s recent counterattack, the Alliance destroyers had kept their guns silent in order to escape more quickly into the Matrix.
“From the delay,” he continued, “I’d guess that Admiral Polowitz plans to bring the cruiser in with or just following the cutters the next time. She’s as dependent on her sensors as we are, and our personnel are a great deal more skilled in using electronics. I think that if we keep moving, inserting every time we see the enemy inserting, we’ll be able to remain a force in being until the Founder’s Regiment and the militia have captured the invasion force.”
Or massacred it, of course. The Zenobians were as surely barbarians as the Palmyrenes were, and Founder Hergo might decide it was simpler to blast two thousand enemy soldiers into oblivion than to imprison them. Hard lines for the Cinnabar captains and crews if that happened, but it would be a problem for another day.
“I recommend that course of action, over.”
A handful of Palmyrene cutters vanished into the Matrix. That meant they had been on the way for a minute already, but Daniel didn’t imagine that even the best of them would actually reach the allied squadron in less than two minutes more.
The bulk of the remaining cutters, nearly forty of them, inserted over a period of only a few seconds. Daniel didn’t see how the Palmyrenes managed such coordinated maneuvers; it was as though they were insects with some sort of hive mind.
“Posy, this is Posy Cinc,” von Gleuck said. Behind the Z 46 spread a cloud of metallized fabric, the remains of sails which desperate riggers had cut away while the destroyer’s High Drive pushed her along at a 1 g acceleration. New topsails had appeared on several antennas, but the vessel would be sluggish in the Matrix, scarcely as maneuverable as a freighter.
“Posy Two and Posy Three will proceed to Rally Points Four, Five and Six in succession,” von Gleuck continued. He sounded bored. “They will remain at Points Four and Five for thirty, repeat thirty, seconds only. At Point Six, they will rejoin Posy One. All Posy units will put themselves in a posture of mutual defense at Point Six. As the enemy appears, we will engage him. Acknowledge, over.”
“Sir, acknowledged, sir!” said Posy Two. “Two out!”
Daniel received the Z 42’s message as text at the bo
ttom of his display. The Alliance captain hadn’t copied his reply to the Princess Cecile, though that didn’t make a practical difference because Adele was the Sissie’s signals officer. She must have used reflection from the flagship’s hull to read the Z 42’s modulated laser signal.
“Three to Cinc,” Daniel said, feeling the rush of excitement again. Cory stood beside the astrogation console, donning his rigging suit against the chance that he would have to replace a casualty out on the hull shortly. “Acknowledged, out.”
He took a deep breath, then said, “Break. Lieutenant Vesey, execute the squadron commander’s orders at your earliest convenience, out.”
“Prepare to insert at once!” Vesey said. As expected, she had courses to all the rally points preset by now. “Inserting!”
As the lights within the compartment took on the glassy patina that preceded transition, Daniel’s PPI display changed. The Palmyrene cutters still hovering about Zenobia vanished into the Matrix, and with them inserted the Piri Reis. Autocrator Irene intended to make a final end to this business.
Daniel was smiling faintly. That suited him as well.
“Up Cinnabar!” he called over the Sissie’s intercom as they headed again for battle.
Rally Point Five appeared to Adele to be as uninteresting as any other featureless waste of vacuum. Location was important, however; because Point Five was only a light-minute from Zenobia, she could at least survey the political situation there.
Though that was, as she well knew, an electronic equivalent of twiddling her thumbs. The success or failure of the coup would be determined here above the planet where the warships battled. There were details below that mattered to Adele Mundy personally, but she would have to be on the ground to affect them.
She smiled wryly. Which in turn required that she survive. It all came back to the naval battle.
Cory sat heavily at his console; he’d extended the bench to accept the bulk of his hard suit. He looked wanly at Adele’s face on his display and said, “Mistress, these quick transitions stress the ship and they stress me. But the Sissie’ll be all right when it comes to cases, and so will I.”