In the Stormy Red Sky-ARC

by David Drake

  The heavy ships of Force Anston, now the Green element, had extracted as planned on the opposite side of Cacique from the Alliance squadron. The dispersion was much greater than Daniel had intended, though. The Treasurer Johann in particular was 17,000 miles out of position, which was absurd in a one light-hour transit.

  The Arcona had taken three minutes above calculation to arrive, but that was understandable given the unbalanced state of her rigging. She was echeloned neatly off the Milton's starboard quarter.

  Daniel ran his time projection, superimposing missile tracks on the courses of the ships of the two squadrons. It would be tight, but it would work. If a few of the RCN ships were late, that would usefully add to Petersen's uncertainty. At least I can tell myself that.

  "Anston, this is Anston Six," he said. Adele would see to it that the signal was encrypted and transmitted in whatever fashion would most reduce the chance of interception. "One hundred and five seconds after the time hack, all ships will launch one salvo at their assigned targets. Prepare—now, out."

  The only way to certainly avoid interception was to maintain communications silence. That would mean giving up control of a squadron whose crews were unfamiliar with their ships and whose captains had never worked together. Daniel was too proud of his own tactical skills to do that, and anyway Admiral Petersen wouldn't gain anything from the signal that he couldn't deduce from the salvo itself.

  The Milton's rig was coming down in a range of sounds from creaks to clangs with a general background of shudders. Everything loose on and in the hull rattled in sympathy. Occasionally Daniel heard the bang-bang-bang of an impact wrench, and once there was even the brief scream of a rotary saw's diamond teeth biting steel: Woetjans was cutting a stuck cable instead of taking the time to clear it.

  There wasn't time. The greatest advantage Admiral Petersen had in a long-range engagement like this was that his ships already had their antennas and yards stowed.

  That didn't affect the ease of launching missiles because the tubes ejected straight out from a few fixed locations, but the turrets rotated 360 degrees. The plasma cannon—nothing else appearing—swept the whole area upward from a plane balanced on the ship's hull. If the rigging was stowed it didn't get in the way, but any stick of antenna raised above the hull could block the angle from which a projectile was screaming down on the vessel.

  In a short-range combat where plasma cannon were themselves offensive weapons, spread sails could protect the hull from charges of ions which could otherwise damage hulls; Daniel had used that technique himself. Against incoming missiles, though, the rigging was a blindfold rather than a shield.

  Admiral Petersen would have been aware of the RCN squadron even before the ships extracted fully into the sidereal universe. A starship was a micro-universe while it was in the Matrix. Precursor effects as it began to penetrate normal space distorted the electromagnetic spectrum and were noticeable at several light-minutes distance by a warship's sensors.

  Despite that, the Alliance squadron hadn't adjusted its course from the calculations Daniel had made using the time slices of Alliance patrols as Force Anston approached Cacique and from Captain Robinson's after-action visuals. Petersen apparently believed that the RCN ships were extracting too far out for an immediate attack to be worthwhile.

  Daniel grinned. Petersen's record showed him to be more of a politician than a tactician. That had stood him in good stead at New Harmony, but now he had a space battle to fight and he didn't have the skills for it.

  He had the weight of numbers, though.

  "Launching four," announced Borries.

  "Launching—" said Chazanoff, but his "four" was lost in the bang! of a missile launching from the first of Borries' B Level tube sets. Chazanoff's own rounds syncopated those of his Chief.

  Daniel brought up the Milton's dorsal and ventral visuals as horizontal bars to frame his screen. He caught sight of one missile lighting, a blue glitter against the background of stars. The missile's body was a shadow, unnoticed at the scale of the display.

  Missiles continued to eject and light. The quick cycle made the cruiser's hull ring like a giant jackhammer. A jumpseat against the starboard bulkhead cocked sideways; one of the bolts holding it had cracked.

  Daniel hadn't liked to launch while the riggers were out; loose atoms of antimatter could splotch a face-shield or possibly puncture a suit. There hadn't been any choice, though, because the rig wasn't coming down as quickly as it needed to.

  There had been a dust cloud in the volume of space where Force Anston reformed after the initial attack; it was uncharted and ordinarily of no real concern. Joints and bearings of ships which swept through it were a little more likely to stick the next time they were used, however; and if those ships were plunging straight into a battle, the slight delay of clearing the jammed rigging could be serious.

  The Milton's missiles were all away, or anyway the launches had ceased. A stutter within a sequence would've been subliminally obvious, but Daniel might not have noticed if the first or last round of eight hadn't launched.

  The other heavy RCN ships were improving their alignment on the PPI, though the Johann was hopelessly out of position. Daniel's plan had been to keep his battleship and cruisers as the Green element; in the event, they were a smaller element accompanied at a distance by a lone heavy cruiser.

  Meanwhile the destroyers, the Blue element, had extracted on the other side of Inner, complicating Alliance maneuvers and forcing them to split their defensive fires. There was at least some chance that Petersen would detach cruisers to deal with Blue, since it outnumbered the remaining Alliance destroyers. Putting the Alliance squadon in a pincers more than made up for the disadvantage of Force Anston arriving fully rigged.

  Petersen must finally have projected the tracks of the initial RCN salvo. At the time of launch, Green was on a reciprocal course with where the Alliance squadron would emerge from a further circuit of Inner when the projectiles would arrive.

  The Alliance column broke apart, each ship dodging to avoid a concentration of massive projectiles. The Alliance vessels weren't taking time to calculate their individual courses, much less trying to keep their formation intact. Admiral Petersen had lost control of his squadron at the very start of the battle.

  Alliance ships began launching. The process was ragged enough that Daniel wondered if Admiral Petersen had ordered a salvo or if the captain of the Sedan had acted on his own and other captains had followed suit. The light cruiser Agadir was even aiming at the Blue element.

  The rumble of reloading ceased. There was a distant cling as the inner lock of an F Level launching tube closed over its missile. Borries and Chazanoff were recalculating courses, preparing for the moment Daniel would order a second salvo.

  He took a deep breath. He'd thought that commanding a squadron in battle would be a larger version of a single-ship command. It wasn't. When he gave orders to separate ships, he might be sending their crews to their deaths and sparing himself.

  Realistically, taking a corvette like the Princess Cecile into action meant that the captain and crew would live or die together. Though the Milton's risk today was the same as that of, say, the Arcona, its fate might not be. That would only matter if the Milton did in fact survive, of course.

  "Green, this is Anston Six," he said. The Blue element was under the maneuvering control of Commander Potts in the Z44, though the destroyers were not to launch save on Daniel's orders. "On command, turn 15 degrees starboard—"

  Toward the enemy.

  "—and increase thrust by point two, I repeat point two, g. Prepare, execute! Six out."

  The added acceleration would strain antennas which hadn't yet been folded. There were two still up on the Milton and the Gods only knew how many on the recently captured ships. That couldn't be helped.

  The eight-inch turrets rumbled, this time with the separate whine of elevating screws adjusting the guns to meet incoming projectiles. It was time.

  Daniel thrus
t the execute button, sending the queued recall signal to the hull. Each semaphore would extend its six arms equidistant, then collapse them all to the post. The riggers should begin coming in within less than a minute. They would all be safe inside the hull before the plasma cannon began to fire.

  If Woetjans or any of her crew disobeyed, the side-scatter from the big guns would very probably fry them despite their rigging suits. Daniel very much hoped the bosun would obey.

  But it couldn't be helped. This was war.

  Adele's equipment read bolts from Alliance plasma cannon as radio signals. She could have filtered them, of course, but instead she was recording the bursts with the intention of later synching them to the visual imagery to determine rates of fire for individual Alliance ships.

  It didn't appear to her that the information had any practical utility, but one can never be sure of the future. Adele was of the opinion—she believed, as a religious fanatic believes in her God—that one couldn't have too much information.

  The twin forward airlocks on the Milton's spine were placed on the rotunda not far aft of the bridge. They opened almost together, the dogs ringing as they withdrew and sticky hisses as the valve seals broke. Riggers clashed into the rotunda, bringing with them the chill of a hostile environment.

  "Clear the lock, you bloody fools!" snarled a bosun's mate in an urgent voice. "D'ye want to leave your buddies out there to fry?"

  The inner valves sucked closed; the sound of the dogs sliding home was subtly different from that of the same bolts withdrawing. The remainder of the rigging watches would be able to get off the hull now.

  Adele smiled faintly as she worked. "To get to safety," she'd thought momentarily, but there was no safety aboard the Milton today. The cruiser was second in line of a squadron which was closing with an enemy of twice its strength.

  Cory handled normal communications while Adele attempted to read the enemy traffic. Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, even for her. All ships of the Alliance squadron were exercising proper communications security, running their messages through a generator which converted them to the squadron's own separate day code.

  Cracking the day code in real-time became a theoretical possibility because the Milton had Alliance equipment and the captured ships of Squadron Varnell had been part of the same unit as the present enemy only a few weeks before. That provided Adele with a seven-month record of the squadron's code transformations as a base. The increasing number of messages from the present engagement were the goal of her calculations.

  The information she had didn't allow Adele to predict the sequence of changes in Petersen' day code, but a computer capable of calculating courses within the Matrix could bring a great deal of brute force to the problem. Adele was simply running alternative solutions in hopes of finding one which turned the current Alliance messages from gibberish to—

  The alphanumeric string at the top of her display became enemy in sight. one bb four ca.

  The airlocks opened again. Shoulders and boots clacked as the airlock emptied its human cargo into the hull. The preceding watch had remained in the rotunda; they might at any moment be ordered back out. Along with the new arrivals—and all wearing bulky rigging suits—even that large compartment became crowded.

  Until the moment she succeeded, Adele hadn't had any thought beyond that potential success. When it happened, though, an opportunity flared like the sun burning through the fog over her mind. She couldn't hand the Alliance interceptions off to Cory and expect him to keep on top of Force Anston's traffic as well, though. The Milton was the squadron's flagship, and its signals had to have top priority.

  Midshipman Cazelet stamped onto the bridge, still wearing his rigging suit. Condensate crusted the joints where metal bearing surfaces underlay the structural plastic skin.

  He seated himself at the rear display of the communications console and opened the couch wider. Naval workstations were designed to accommodate personnel in any sort of dress an emergency might require. That included a crew working in suits because the ship's hull was no longer airtight.

  "Rene, I'm glad you're back," Adele said, verbally keying a two-way link. She'd trained Cazelet in her duties even before he'd been allowed to join the RCN, and she'd modified her software to reflect that reality. "I want you to take over these Alliance interceptions. Send Daniel and Blantyre what's useful, converted to text. Can you do that, over?"

  "Yes, certainly," Cazelet said. "You broke their day code? Adele, that's . . . even for you, I mean, ah . . . Over."

  He'd brought up his display, but the suit's stiff arms made him clumsy. His expression became briefly savage, then settled again as he regained control of both the equipment and his temper.

  "Ah," Cazelet added as his fingers caught the rhythm of the keyboard, "Captain Leary put all of us midshipmen on the hull to make sure the riggers, ah, obeyed the recall signal. He didn't say quite that, but that's what he meant. Over."

  Adele remembered that Daniel had once sent Hogg out onto the hull to shoot Woetjans if she didn't bring her riggers in when he ordered her to. But what could Rene—who'd never fired a gun and didn't carry one—have done if the bosun ignored him?

  That was the point, though. The bosun might ignore the semaphore, even knowing that Six himself was on the other end of the hydromechanical linkage. She wouldn't ignore an officer standing in front of her and making peremptory gestures.

  Woetjans was a disciplined spacer. She would take orders from a midshipman half her age and strength, because it was her duty to do so.

  Woetjans didn't react to Daniel as she would to a superior officer, however; the relationship of this captain and this bosun was much more complex than RCN regulations could deal with. On Woetjans' side, it was something between a mother protecting her son and a worshipper ready to sacrifice everything to her God.

  Adele adjusted a tight-beam microwave cone; she thought she had the answer. Neither the Signals Officer nor the lieutenant in charge of communications aboard the Heimdall, the Alliance flagship, was a woman, but Admiral Petersen's aide-de-camp was his niece. It might not work, but it was certainly worth a try.

  "Oldenburg, this is Command Three for Squadron Command!" Adele said in what she hoped was a tone of furious denunciation. "Cease fire, cease fire! You're launching at friendly vessels. The admiral says, I quote, 'Hallahan, you're an idiot and I'll relieve you if you launch again,' unquote. Command Three over."

  Adele wasn't very good at denouncing. When she became very angry, she spoke even more slowly and precisely than usual. That was a problem, because people tended not to listen to her words even when she was warning that she would kill them if they persisted in their course of action.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg," said a male voice. Adele felt a smile twitch the corners of her mouth upward. "Hold one, please, over."

  If the Oldenburg's signals officer responded to the Heimdall, there would be a degree of confusion on the bridges of both battleships. That would useful to the RCN certainly, but not earthshaking.

  Instead the fellow responded to the message without checking to see which ship had transmitted the microwave. A transceiver aboard the Oldenburg automatically turned to a reciprocal of the incoming signal. This was much better than random confusion.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg Command!" said an angry voice. Captain Edmond Hallahan was probably shouting, but Adele's console smoothed the volume to where she'd set it. "What's this bloody nonsense about shooting at friendlies? We're shooting at the bloody Cinnabar battleship, over!"

  "Oldenburg, my uncle says, 'You bloody fool, Hallahan, the Director Friedrich is friendly,' " Adele said. She was smiling about as broadly as she ever did. "Cease fire, cease fire, over."

  The Milton's dorsal turret, then the ventral, fired in quick succession. Adele was used to the four-inch guns on the Princess Cecile hammering at a round every two seconds, but the bores and chambers of the cruiser's big guns took far longer to cool between discharges
. During the lull between the first four shots, the continuing snarl of the High Drive seemed muted by contrast.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg Command," Captain Hallahan said. "I'm ceasing fire, but why are they bloody shooting at us, over?"

  The RF spectrum was hash now: the ships of the RCN Green element were firing plasma cannon as quickly as they could. Alliance missiles were on their way toward the heavy RCN vessels, whose guns were straining to nudge the dangerous ones to one side or another.

  "Oldenburg, Admiral Petersen is working on that," Adele said sharply. "Your orders are to stop making it worse. Do not fire without direct orders from Squadron Command. Out."

  The Milton's plasma cannon slammed stunningly again. The eight-inch guns were causing strains. An audible hiss of outgoing air and a stutter in the environmental system followed each quadruple discharge: plates were starting as the ship twisted.

  The Milton might take a direct hit at any moment, and everybody aboard her might die. Adele didn't care about that or anything else which was out of her hands. If it happened, however, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her last act on behalf of Cinnabar and her shipmates had been carried through very skillfully.

  She smiled even wider. If I do say so myself.

  CHAPTER 27

  Above Cacique

  "Green element," ordered Daniel, "launch at maximum rate. Squadron out."

  He hadn't spoken the last words before Borries and Chazanoff had stabbed their execute buttons. The Milton's hull began to twist to the rhythm of her missile launches while the sharper, heavier slamming of the four plasma cannon punctuated the tubes.

  Daniel had launched the first salvo at long range to break up Petersen's formation, but continuing to fling missiles while the targets scattered wildly would have been wasteful. Now that the Alliance ships had settled—onto individual courses, not into a formation—it was possible to launch with some purpose.

  Space battles involved a great deal of nothingness. A missileer who thought random launches would have a good result was either a cretin or in a blind panic. The Alliance missileers who'd been launching at Force Anston while their own ships gyrated had probably been panicked.