Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  Adele had reconfigured the communications console to use wand control as its default. This wasn’t ideal, as a computer capable of missile launches and astrogation had a much broader range of options than a civilian database. Adele preferred to layer command sets within her wands’ existing software rather than use the virtual keyboard created for the console. It was still much faster, and for her there was less risk of an error.

  Her hands moved, sending the core of the message from Condor Control—the station that handled starship traffic for all Sexburga—to Daniel’s display in visual form. The course plot, the time parameters, and the two smaller harbors with their approach cones were instantly visible; if Daniel for some reason wanted the audio message as well, he had only to key an icon to get it.

  That was the open part of Adele’s duties. At the same time she’d entered the Condor database covertly and copied from it the complete records of landings and departures from the planet in the past thirty days. Her real concern—Daniel’s real concern—was to see when and whether Commodore Pettin had arrived, but for safety’s sake Adele had given her search broader parameters.

  RCS Tampico, arrived four days previous. From … Adele’s wands moved … Holtsmark, berthed at Slip Thirty-two, Flood Harbor. She accessed another file, this one internal RCN records held in the Princess Cecile’s database. RCS Tampico, communications vessel, 1700 tons empty; defensive armament only.

  “Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one,” the controller on Sexburga said. “You’re to put down in slip thirty. I’m transmitting a plot of Flood Harbor. Condor over.”

  The speaker was male, probably in his forties, and sounded alertly professional. He hissed his esses and more generally spoke with a soft lilt; Adele decided to class the peculiarities as a Sexburga accent until she learned otherwise.

  A schematic appeared in gold light on the left side of Adele’s display. It was offset from but identical to the harbor plan from the Princess Cecile’s database. The local transmission also showed cigar-shaped vessels settled in roughly half the fifty-seven slips. Sexburga was clearly a major port, though most of the ships berthed here were of moderate size.

  Adele framed the plan and retransmitted it to a suspense file serving the command console while Daniel set up his final approach. It was received, becoming a sidebar on the upper left corner of a screen almost completely filled by numerical data.

  “Gee-Are one-seven-five-one acknowledges receipt of the Flood Harbor berthing plan,” Adele said. “Gee-Are one-seven-five-one out.”

  Nothing went to the command console until it had been cleared through Adele’s filters and then requested by the captain. The captain could set up categories for immediate update—this harbor schematic, for example—but even so the data didn’t appear on Daniel’s display until he called for it. The priorities were determined by a human being.

  Adele returned her attention to the right half of her display, another RCN internal file: current deployment orders for RCN vessels. The Tampico was on a triangular run from Sexburga to the Cinnabar outpost at Fort Hill Station and finally to Langerhut, an allied system with a Resident Commissioner but almost no direct contact with Cinnabar. The Tampico carried dispatches, supplies, and personnel who were being transferred. The vessel wasn’t connected with Commodore Pettin’s squadron.

  The Princess Cecile braked under one-gee acceleration. Even to the naked eye, the image of Sexburga swelled on the real-time display at the margin of Adele’s screen. Speaking loudly to be heard over the whine of antimatter annihilation, Sun said to Betts, “Did you see that? Mr. Leary didn’t quite kill our momentum with the last shift in the Matrix. He was so sure he’d drop us just short of the planet that he left us with a way on to save time. Ain’t he a wonder?”

  Betts nodded solemnly. He was clearing his display of the targeting fantasies that had preserved him in the Matrix, moving methodically through a checklist. “A wonder …” he breathed.

  A wonder indeed.

  There were no other RCN vessels on Sexburga or in the PCT-3301 system of which Sexburga was the fourth planet. Adele moved to checking grouped arrivals.

  Three ships had arrived in hailing range of Condor Control within minutes of one another a week ago, but they were freighters from three separate systems linked only by chance. Adele called up visuals from the Flood Harbor security cameras and proved beyond doubt that the ships weren’t warships, let alone Commodore Pettin’s squadron with disguised identities.

  She thought a smile that eventually touched her lips. She was obviously being obsessive. In that, at least, she’d make a good spacer.

  Adele had tapped into the automated stream of Sexburgan meteorological data as soon as the Princess Cecile emerged from the Matrix. The first and last twenty thousand feet of a voyage were statistically the most dangerous, because starships weren’t streamlined for operations in an atmosphere.

  The corvette’s hull was a cylinder with rounded ends, a stable enough shape initially. The antennas and rigging on the exterior, however, created turbulence as well as twisting the vessel off-line when they caught gusts of wind. Even though ships in an atmosphere moved with the deliberation of belles making their entrances, they were fitted with sensor suites to make their own observations from space to be compared with whatever the planetary controller supplied.

  Daniel let out his breath in a long sigh and flopped back in his seat. Almost at once he straightened and resumed keying commands, now with a look of eager attention. He caught Adele’s glance and grinned at her through the haze of his new task. Moments before, as he’d been setting up the approach, he’d had the rapt focus of a cat watching potential prey.

  Adele echoed the navigation display in a corner of her own screen, just to see what Daniel was working on now. It was a plan of the Princess Cecile’s antennas and sails, which were being collapsed for storage. Daniel would be able to understand the process by a glance at the schematic, but to Adele it was merely bumps and lines.

  She would have cut away, but a red arrow suddenly careted a point on the white outline. Daniel’s voice said through her communications helmet, “See here? Port Three hasn’t fully retracted. These three hollow triangles—”

  It was hard to see details of the sail plan when it was shrunk down to a sidebar; Adele raised the schematic to three quarters of the display. She looked up to meet Daniel’s eyes; he was grinning as he moved a light pen to mark the image she was importing to her console.

  “—are the riggers working on it. They’ve shut off the hydraulics so they can crank the mast down manually. Now here—”

  The caret jumped. Adele gave Daniel’s explanation half her attention while she sorted the shipping log for vessels which had lifted from Cinnabar within thirty days of their arrival on Sexburga. No ship but the Princess Cecile herself would have made the voyage direct.

  “—you see the dorsal mainsail we’ve been using for a rudder during our last leg of the Matrix,” Daniel continued. “It kinked on its track, so these riggers and the topside officer—”

  Who appeared to be a solid pink triangle close to the six hollow ones.

  “—that’s Woetjans on this watch, they just finished furling it by hand.”

  On the right of Adele’s display, itself now a sidebar, a single name appeared: the Achilles, a private yacht of three hundred tons. It had landed on Sexburga six hours ahead of the Princess Cecile.

  “The other problem’s here on Ventral Five,” Daniel continued, moving his pointer. “There’s a jammed yard—see how she sticks out like a broken finger instead of lying along the mast. Woetjans has a rigger on that, using a wrench if he can and a cutting torch if the wrench doesn’t work. We can’t have that if we’re going to land on our belly.”

  “Ah,” said Adele, but she was frowning at the data on the right of her screen. The Achilles was fleet-footed indeed to have reached Sexburga only twenty-three days out from Cinnabar.

  An attention signal whistled as the track lights pulsed gr
een. “Hull reports the antennas are stowed and locked,” a voice from the BDC reported. Dorst was speaking rather than Mon; the lieutenant was giving the midshipmen actual experience as officers, albeit in small ways.

  “Acknowledged,” said Daniel, captain of the Princess Cecile again instead of a friend explaining details of his expertise. He touched the command bar on the separate semaphore panel to his left, then keyed the intercom.

  “Captain to ship!” Daniel announced, his voice in Adele’s helmet preceding by a hair’s breadth its analogue through the ceiling speakers. His fingers continued to type commands as he spoke. “The riggers are coming aboard. All hands prepare for entry into the atmosphere. Captain out.”

  Icons on the far left of Adele’s display shifted. The whine of the High Drive ceased, and the braking thrust Adele’s body perceived as gravity lessened for a heartbeat or so before the plasma thrusters roared to full life. Adele must have looked startled, because Sun glanced over at her and shouted, “We can’t chance double thrust, mistress. The masts wouldn’t take it, even brought in and locked.”

  Adele nodded understanding. She’d known that, of course. This wasn’t the first time she’d landed in a starship, for heaven’s sake, nor even the first time she’d done so as an officer on the bridge with full access to the details of what was going on.

  But—her intellect had known what to expect. The lizard brain deep within Adele had known only that it had suddenly dropped into nothingness.

  The riggers were coming through the airlock, unlatching their helmets and congratulating themselves with enthusiasm. Riggers even more than other spacers loved the void, but this had been a hard run. In the future the crew would brag to others about how Mr. Leary had brought the Princess Cecile from Cinnabar to Sexburga in seventeen days … but for the moment, they were glad to know they’d be walking on solid ground in an hour.

  Daniel switched his display to the harbor plot. Adele, still watching her echo of the navigational console, saw pennant numbers blink into life beside each cylindrical hull. She smiled wryly. That was a much simpler route into the problem than those she’d taken.

  “Commodore Pettin isn’t on Sexburga now,” Daniel said through her helmet. “Has the squadron already landed and lifted for Strymon?”

  “We’re the only RCN vessel to arrive from Cinnabar in the past thirty days, Daniel,” Adele said. “Pettin had a ten-day start and you’ve beaten him.”

  The upper atmosphere began to buffet the corvette. Over the windroar came a bang and a momentary fluttering rattle outside the hull. Woetjans snatched the handset from beside the suit locker and shouted into it.

  Daniel focused on his screen, then looked unperturbedly through the hologram toward Adele again. “A furling clamp on the Starboard Three topsail gave way,” he said. “Rule of thumb is you’ll lose a sail on every leg of a cruise. If we’d made five or six intermediate landings as the squadron probably did, we’d have a much higher damage bill than this one.”

  He frowned. “Commodore Pettin had no reason to push the way we were doing,” he continued in a careful tone. “I couldn’t be more proud of the ship, the crew, and the—and my astrogation that brought us to Sexburga in a record run. But I do hope the commodore doesn’t feel, ah, challenged. That would add complexity to a situation that’s already less simple than it could be.”

  Woetjans and the riggers still wore their suits as they waited in the corridor. Delos Vaughn stood in the doorway of the wardroom, looking into the bridge past them. The hard voyage had worn him as badly as it had anybody else aboard the Princess Cecile; his face looked like a mummy’s skull.

  But he was smiling.

  *

  The echoes of the corvette’s landing had stopped reverberating around the high cliffs of Flood Harbor, but when Daniel switched to a panoramic view he saw that a vast doughnut of steam still hung in the sky. The Harbormaster’s office was a blockhouse built out from the natural rock wall at the base of the broad embayment. A vehicle pulled away from it and turned up the quay that would bring it to the Princess Cecile. That was greater efficiency than Daniel had expected on so distant a world.

  He keyed the intercom and said, “Captain to crew. After the ship has been opened, spacers, there’s a twenty-four hour liberty for everybody but the designated anchor watch. I’ll remain aboard as officer of the watch.”

  He paused, then added, “Good work, Sissies. God grant this won’t be the only record you and I will set! Captain out.”

  Daniel sighed and stretched his arms back, then forward to where they muddied portions of the display. The panorama provided a holographic image of what he would see were he standing on the Princess Cecile’s spine and if the rigging weren’t in the way. Like quite a lot of things—Daniel’s fingers idly called up a file; women’s faces, little mementos, cascaded across his display—the image was more attractive than the reality.

  He grinned. Adele got up shakily from her console and said, “Daniel? I’d have thought you’d want to go ashore yourself.”

  “And so I do,” he said, grinning even wider. “In fact I was just thinking that I’d always take the living, breathing reality over however pretty an image.”

  Daniel got up also. Riggers opened both doors of the forward dorsal airlock, letting in a gulp of air with touches of steam and ozone. Down the length of the ship clanks and squeals announced the undogging of hatches, both ordinary ports and the access panels used for major overhauls. Some of them would be closed again after the corvette had aired out, but for the moment everyone wanted the maximum ventilation.

  The makeup of Sexburga’s atmosphere differed by a few percentage points from Cinnabar’s or Earth’s. All that mattered just now was that it hadn’t been lived in for seventeen days by over a hundred and twenty people, plus a wide variety of machinery and electronics. The corvette’s filters scrubbed the carbon dioxide down to safe levels and removed actual toxins, while hydrolyzed reaction mass kept the oxygen constant; the stench was a permanent companion regardless.

  After a time you no longer noticed the smell at a conscious level, but it still did damage to morale and efficiency. Like a mild toothache, the omnipresent discomfort of bad air robbed spacers of those top few points of intellect which could mean life or death in a dangerous environment. Flushing the ship’s atmosphere was the first and most longed-for reward of landing after a long voyage.

  “On the other hand,” Daniel continued, quirking Adele his grin, “I’m going to be just as glad to be ashore come tomorrow, and I can relax better if I’ve already taken care of the ship’s administrative business.”

  Feeling a little embarrassed, he added, “Besides, though it isn’t exactly traditional for the captain to take the first shore-side watch, it’s … traditional among the captains that I’d choose to serve under myself. So in a way I don’t really have a choice, you see.”

  “I see,” said Adele, with a smile that looked suspiciously like a smirk. “Well, I wasn’t in a hurry to go ashore myself. I have a new series of databases to pry into, after all. I can do that best from my console here as soon as I’ve linked us to the local net.”

  The corridor was filling with spacers who’d changed into their shoregoing clothes. For Betts, Taley, and the midshipmen, that meant dress grays. The same was probably true of Pasternak, though Daniel didn’t see him. The chief bunked in the office attached to the power room on A Level rather than in the warrant-officer accommodations here on C.

  The lower-ranking crewmen and the officers who’d first shipped as common spacers wore liberty dress. These had started out as sets of utilities, but the owners had decorated them during off-duty periods in space.

  Woetjans’s liberty suit was the highest state of the art Daniel had seen. What with appliques, cutwork, embroidery, studs, and the ribbons fluttering from the seams, there wasn’t a thread of the wave-pattern fatigues visible.

  “Actually, Adele, you could do me a favor,” Daniel said, feeling a touch of embarrassment. He should ha
ve broached this sooner. It was going to sound like he wanted to be shut of her company on the ground, which was far from the truth. “The midshipmen will be going ashore, as you know. Now, as you know, I’m not a moralist—”

  “Actually, I believe you are a moralist, Daniel,” Adele said. She grinned, reminding him that she must have been a child once upon a time. “But not in the fashion you mean, no.”

  On B Level, the accommodations deck, at least a dozen spacers were singing, “When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure …”

  Daniel cleared his throat. “As I say …” he said. “Dorst and Vesey are young, though, and this is the first landfall of their first cruise. Normally the first lieutenant would shepherd them about, but Lieutenant Mon won’t get farther than the first tavern beyond the docks.”

  He shrugged. “Not that I’m complaining,” he added. “Mon does his job a hundred and twenty percent; it wouldn’t be fair to deny him downtime he’s so richly earned. But I was wondering … ?”

  “You want me to chaperone the midshipmen?” Adele said carefully. She didn’t seem hostile to the idea, though “cool” would be a fair description of her attitude. Well, “cool” would generally describe Adele’s attitude.

  “Not that, not controlling their behavior,” Daniel said, trying to explain a concept that was more subtle than words could really express. His words, at any rate. “Dorst and Vesey are adults with the rights and responsibilities of officers of the RCN. And God knows, when I was their age …”

  His voice trailed off. He wasn’t much beyond their age now, not in years. Had his first commanding officer, Commander Gray, felt this way about him?