What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  The situation clarified in Adele’s mind; she had finally understood. She snapped, “Woetjans, I need you! Help me with my suit or I won’t be able to get into it.”

  Woetjans was in an air suit because fragments of rocket warheads had damaged her rigging suit beyond quick repair. Many chunks of steel had continued on into Woetjans’ legs and torso.

  “Ma’am?” said the bosun, staggering as she changed direction. “Yes, ma’am, your suit. You got to be suited up, because the wogs’re gonna kick the crap out of us, you know? I got your suit. . . .”

  Woetjans’ face grew puzzled. Adele looked at the deck beyond her and saw an air suit, rolled and packed into its helmet. The bosun must have dropped it when she lifted Adele from the console.

  “Here it is,” Adele said, stretching to reach the packet. If Woetjans bent, the chances were that she would fall flat. She still had her strength, but the drugs managing her pain left her operating on reflex alone. “You can help me, Woetjans.”

  The bosun’s hands began unrolling the suit. Her blank, black eyes were turned toward the bow, but she didn’t appear to be looking at anything.

  Fiducia was seated at the missile console. The other bridge stations, including the command console, were empty. Adele blinked and said, “What’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”

  “All the riggers are on the hull clearing the damage,” Tovera said. “And the officers with training as riggers; all but Vesey in the BDC.”

  She smiled faintly, though Adele wasn’t sure what the expression meant. “Hogg’s out with the Captain, too,” Tovera added. “I doubt he’s any more use than I would be, but since you stayed on the bridge, I didn’t have to make a fool of myself.”

  I should have been aware of that, Adele thought. What was I doing? Examining imagery of the Palmyrene fleet, I suppose, but wouldn’t I have noticed the bridge emptying?

  “Where is Sun?” she said as took in the situation. “Shouldn’t he be at his position?”

  “B Dorsal folded over the turret, ma’am,” Woetjans said, stretching the air suit between her spread arms. Adele had almost forgotten the bosun’s presence. “A bloody rocket sheared the antenna off right at the base hinge, and the stays twisted over the gun barrels when the mess come down. Sun’s helping clear it.”

  Woetjans closed her eyes and swayed briefly, then opened them again. “You put your suit on so I can go out with them, ma’am,” she said. Her voice was as hollow and lifeless as an echo from a catacomb.

  Tovera whispered in Adele’s ear, “There’s nobody else aboard she’ll listen to, mistress. I asked her to help me, you see?”

  Yes, of course, Adele thought. Aloud she said, “Hold the legs of the suit open for me, Woetjans. I’ll put it on.”

  There were few enough people aboard the Sissie who would expect the bosun to take their orders anyway. Not even Daniel could be sure that Woetjans would obey if she thought her duty lay in a different direction.

  Adele smiled ruefully. She could sidetrack the barely conscious bosun not by force of authority, but because Woetjans knew at the core of her being that Officer Mundy was hopelessly inept. Adele needed to be helped with ship’s business which a fourteen-year-old apprentice could handle without supervision.

  “Are we seriously damaged?” Adele said as she stepped into the suit, resting her hand on Woetjans’ shoulder. She tried not to put any weight on it, but when her right toe caught on the fabric and she started to topple, the bosun caught and steadied her with careless ease.

  “The rig’s tore up,” Woetjans said with mechanical calm. “The one antenna is all, but some yards was hit and the sails is all tore to crap. Even furled, you know? Cut to crap. We’ll have to hang a whole new suit, pretty much.”

  She swayed again. Tovera stepped behind the bosun and leaned into her shoulder blade. For a moment Adele didn’t think that would be enough, but Woetjans recovered her balance.

  “And the hull?” Adele said, trying to sound brightly interested. Air pressure within the hull seemed to be down, and a damage control party of technicians was spraying bright pink sealant along seams in the corridor ceiling.

  “Not my duty,” Woetjans said. “They won’t have no trouble, though. They can use the scrap sails for the bad patches anyhow, stick them down on the plating. They’re not good for anything else, all tore to crap.”

  Adele had her arms into the sleeves of her suit. She faced the bosun to let her seal the center seam. Instead, Woetjans turned and said, “Got to get out and clear the rig. Tore to crap!”

  “Woetjans!” Adele said. “Help me!”

  The bosun faced around and swayed. Tovera stepped back, braced to catch but not to steady her. Better that Woetjans fall than that she go out on the hull in her current state.

  The airlock cycled open. A phalanx of spacers bulled through with Daniel and Sun in the lead. Hogg in an air suit and a grim expression followed close behind his master. Tovera guided Woetjans to the side, but reflex had already started the bosun moving out of the way of incoming personnel.

  “Ship, this is Six!” Daniel said, his words echoing from the PA system. He’d taken off his helmet but was shouting into it as he trotted toward the bridge. “Prepare to extract in ninety, that is—”

  He banged down onto the command console.

  “—nine zero seconds! We’re going to well and truly stick it to them, Sissies!”

  Daniel had helped the riggers in pitching Dorsal B over the side instead of strapping it to the hull to be broken down later. In theory Dasi was in charge of the team; but since Six was present, the bosun’s mate would probably have tried to salvage the upper two-thirds of the antenna and the attached yards.

  That would have been the wrong decision. It would have cost time, and that might have meant losing the whole ship. Daniel’s hand signals to the riggers might have been missed in the general haste, but he’d stepped close with his heavy loppers and cut away the shrouds binding the antenna to the hull.

  Whereupon the base of the mast rotated free and caught Daniel one hell of a crack on the right thigh. His rigging suit saved him from a broken bone, but he was pretty sure that he had—or anyway, would have—quite a bruise.

  That was cheap at the price. If he hadn’t gone out on the hull, he’d have been biting his nails at the command console, eaten up with misery that the Princess Cecile hadn’t reached her extraction point yet. Labor which was physically and mentally exacting was just what Captain Daniel Leary needed to keep sharp for what came next.

  Mind, it would have been a really bad time to have broken his thigh by pretending to be a rigger when he was actually an out-of-shape officer who spent so much time at a console that he was mostly a liability on the hull in a crisis. Still, it had worked out well enough.

  The airlock opened again. Even with both locks crammed full, it would require three cycles to bring in all the personnel on the hull. There wouldn’t be time to complete the process, but it would—barely—be possible to get the last group of spacers into the locks and therefore out of the hail of ions and shrapnel which might shortly rake the Sissie. That was good enough, because it had to be.

  The Princess Cecile was taking nearly eleven minutes of ship time to travel less than—slightly less than—one light-minute in sidereal space. Short transits were much less efficient than long ones, but the present ratio would have been embarrassing for a civilian vessel with a minimal crew.

  The problem was the sails. Their fabric, charged, blocked Casimir radiation and shifted the corvette among the infinite bubbles of the Matrix. The Palmyrene rockets had done such extensive damage that the Sissie wallowed between universes instead of slipping like a seabird in a stiff breeze.

  Riggers had hung new topsails on the four C antennas and topgallants on Port and Starboard F to provide leverage to the main driving sails. That wouldn’t allow the sort of delicacy which Daniel—and the Sissie’s whole company—made a matter of pride, but—nothing else appearing—it would have allowed a crisp, p
recise transit to where the corvette needed to extract.

  Precise it would be because it had to be; the sort of slop that freighters tolerated would mean death and—worse—failure for the Princess Cecile in the present situation. It wasn’t crisp, however, because the tags of sailcloth which dangled from the yards interfered with the set rig. The transit had been a series of mushy corrections and overcorrections.

  There hadn’t been enough time to completely clear the tatters or even the bulk of the tatters. The riggers—and at least a dozen technicians from the ship side, who had their own work cut out for them with repairing or at least assessing the damage to the thrusters and High Drive—had done what was humanly possible in the time available.

  Very shortly the Sissie would receive a further hammering, one which would undo most of the current repairs and very possibly blow the ship to oblivion. But—Daniel’s expression was a ruthless smile—if things worked out as he planned, there would be far fewer Palmyrenes present to gloat about it.

  The outer airlocks, both bow and stern, closed, sending muted temblors through the hull. A less experienced ear would have missed it.

  The sound might have passed beneath even Daniel’s auditory horizon if he hadn’t wanted so desperately to hear it: his spacers were in from the hull. They weren’t safe now, but they were as safe as the Princess Cecile herself was.

  “Ship, this is Six,” Daniel said. The cheerful lilt he heard in his own voice made him smile in amazement. “This is going to be a quick out and in, Sissies; we’ll launch missiles and off again. I hope we’re gone before the wogs react, but if they’re too quick then, well, we’re RCN and we came to fight, didn’t we? Up Cinnabar!”

  There were ragged cheers. Specialists in air suits were running for their action stations, and the riggers waiting in the rotunda were jockeying for position to be in the first lockful when Six ordered them out again. Over their raucous babble came Vesey’s voice on the PA system: “Extracting!”

  Daniel poised, feeling anticipation. His eagerness to try conclusions with Autocrator Irene overrode his subconscious flinch at the discomfort of transition.

  Subjective reality rose up and batted him in the stomach. He felt as though his body was being crushed down to a point; the pain made him gasp. He would have gasped if there’d been time, and if the sound could have fought its way up against the pressure squeezing his lungs from all sides.

  The Princess Cecile was in normal space, eighty-three miles from the Piri Reis. The cruiser had stripped to a minimum sail plan; two of her three triple 15-centimeter turrets could have borne on the corvette. Instead, all her plasma cannon were aimed in the direction of the pair of Alliance destroyers which were battling cutters a full light-minute away.

  “Launching one,” said Chazanoff. A jolt of high-voltage electricity vaporized a gallon of water. The soft violence of expanding steam shoved the missile out of the port launch tube.

  Daniel had set up the attacks before he’d finalized the course plan. It would have taken him or Chazanoff less than a minute of additional computation to correct the missile courses, but there wasn’t time for that or for even half that. If the cruiser’s big guns got on target at this short range, the Sissie would vanish like gossamer in a furnace. To save Zenobia, the corvette had to survive long enough to reenter the Matrix.

  The 4-inch turrets were traversing with penetrating hums, though Daniel had locked the firing circuits. He wasn’t really worried that either gunner would ignore his orders not to fire, but accidents could happen. Locking the guns from the command console was a way to prevent a mistake which would keep the Princess Cecile longer in sidereal space, with fatal results.

  “Launching one!” said Fiducia. The shock of her release was almost simultaneous with the Chazanoff’s. The launches were so close together that the second missile might have bound in its tube—it didn’t—or be damaged by the corrosive exhaust of the first. Under the circumstances, it was still the better way to proceed.

  Daniel had divided the launch between the Chief Missileer and his mate, not out of fairness but to be sure that the attack would go ahead even if rapid transitions had incapacitated one or the other man. In the event, both missileers had performed flawlessly. Perhaps the chance to practice their specialty against a cruiser had armored them against the hallucinatory misery.

  “Inserting!” Daniel said as he pressed the Execute button with his right index and middle fingers. If he had failed, Vesey was ready to back him up—just as the missileers had checked one another. Anybody could fail under the stress of these quick transitions. It wasn’t a matter of skill or courage, just the whim of fate.

  A rocket detonated on the point of the Sissie’s bow. Its ringing CRASH! made Daniel rock forward in surprise, though his fingers didn’t twitch from the virtual button. The transition was already taking place.

  Seams had started—he heard air leaking with a high whistle—but the second and third approaching rockets vanished when Daniel’s display went blank. They probably passed through the volume of sidereal space which the Princess Cecile had occupied until a second or two previously.

  Half a dozen cutters were still accompanying the Palmyrene flagship. Several of them had reacted more quickly than the cruiser’s gunners had done. One, even closer to the Sissie than the Piri Reis was, had launched before Daniel could return to the Matrix.

  The frozen moment released; the stress of transition dissipated. Daniel’s console showed status displays for the corvette’s power train and the less accurate—pointer-actuated—readouts for her rig. The hull vibrated as hydraulic motors turned the antennas in accordance with the astrogation plan; missiles rang and rumbled down the rollerways to reload the launch tubes.

  Daniel took a deep breath. What he was about to do was the hardest thing he’d ever faced in a short but eventful RCN career. It was going to be equally unpleasant for everyone else aboard the Princess Cecile, but he was the only person for whom it was optional: his finger—his thumb would be on the control.

  He barked a rueful laugh. It wasn’t optional for him either. This was the only way he could prevent the Palmyrene cutters from gnawing Zenobia’s defenders down to nubbins which the Piri Reis would devour at her leisure.

  “Sissies,” Daniel said. “This is going to be rough.”

  When the circumstances allowed, Daniel tried to keep his crew informed about what was happening. This time, however, he felt that he was apologizing—or confessing—rather than simply explaining. Nonetheless, if every other soul on the Princess Cecile rose to object, he was still going ahead with his plan. He was Six.

  “We’re going back to where we just inserted, off the starboard quarter of the wog cruiser,” he said. “Then we’re going to start to extract again.”

  The starboard missile clanked into its launch tube. Rollers continued to spin behind it with high-pitched whines, though they were barely audible until the port missile slid home also.

  “That’s what you all expect, I know,” Daniel said. “We’re RCN, we’re the Sissies, and we always go for the bastards’ throats regardless of what they’re going to throw at us.”

  There were cheers. Enthusiasm didn’t make a lot of sense, but Daniel expected it and he was sure it was sincere. Over the years, RCN ships had won half their battles because their enemies knew they wouldn’t back off, no matter what the odds. Recently the Princess Cecile had been the point of the RCN’s lance in several of those engagements.

  “But we’re not going to extract,” Daniel said. “I’m going to hold us in transition for as long as I can. Those cutters that have been following us like fleas on a dog. They’re going to extract when they see us extracting, so they think. And they’re going to come out right on top of their bloody cruiser which we’ve just sent two missiles at. I don’t think we hit her, but we sure got her attention—and she’s going to be spreading that attention around one bolt at a time to her own cutters.”

  The countdown clock on his display was nearing zero, t
he point at which Captain Daniel Leary would have to act or not act. He was RCN and a Sissie; he would act.

  “Are you with me, Sissies?”

  The cheers were real and full-throated; and there wasn’t a spacer aboard who didn’t know what it meant, but they were cheering anyway.

  “Up Cinnabar!” Daniel shouted. He rolled forward the switch beneath his right thumb, just the least hair of a motion.

  Daniel plunged into boiling lead. His mouth was open to scream, but pain burned his lips and tongue away—

  —and he was RCN. His thumb held the wobbling vernier control, and the pain went on.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Cosmos

  For the initial millisecond of extraction, Adele felt as though her body was being pulled apart, cell by cell, by tiny pincers. Then, suddenly, she became what for her was Paradise.

  Adele had many times been on the hull of starships in the Matrix. Daniel and officers whom Daniel had trained had repeatedly tried to show her what they themselves saw, the shadings of hue and intensity which allowed them to refine or even choose a course.

  It had never worked. Though intellectually Adele recognized that the Matrix was a code, her mind persisted in treating it as a splotch of color.

  She had never cared a great deal about graphic art. If she could recognize the subject of a painting, she liked it better than she did something described as Abstract. Either way, however, it was a way to cover an area of wall which didn’t have bookcases in front of it.

  To her, the Matrix had always been a very large wall which had been painted by an Abstractionist. Adele regretted her inability to see what Daniel did, not because she wanted to conn a starship but because there was a great deal of information which was closed to her.

  But no longer. Everything, everything, was clear and intelligible.

  As the Sissie extracted, Adele had been mulling the question of Palmyrene intership communications. Now she was—she wasn’t watching, she was part of the event—a spacer with long blond hair on the right side of his skull and the left side shaved. He stood on the hull of the Piri Reis. His hard suit had been cobbled together from pieces of at least three originals; the suit’s left arm and right forearm had been anodized in gleaming bronze.