by David Drake
“Thank you, Mon,” Daniel said as he banged up the righthand—upward—companionway, taking the steps two at a time. That was normal practice, and a rigger’s reflex kept his left hand gliding over the railing the whole time to catch him if he slipped. “Watchstanding officers report to the bridge and I’ll brief you on our course. Out.”
The ship’s machinery was live, a symphony of whirrs, whines, and the occasional flurry of clanking like a drum riff. Spacers waited at their action stations. The bow dorsal section of riggers, both watches, stood suited in the corridor. They flattened themselves against either bulkhead as Daniel passed, nodding with a stern smile.
He threw himself into his seat and rotated the command console to face his officers. A year ago Daniel would’ve radioed his plans ahead to the Princess Cecile, trusting RCN encryption to limit his message to its intended hearers if he even bothered to think about security. A few months of contact with Adele Mundy had showed him that an information specialist with a powerful computer at her command could read anything she got in electronic form.
There might be eavesdropping devices on the Princess Cecile’s bridge—and unlikely though that was, it was greater than the chance of there being another specialist of Adele’s skill on Sexburga. Even so, Daniel had ceased to say anything over the air that he didn’t want others to hear.
Mon and Pasternak—with a long cut on his forearm, covered with a sprayed binder/antiseptic; the Chief Engineer didn’t limit his duties to giving orders—came down the corridor behind Daniel. The other warrant officers (including Taley, who wasn’t a watchstander but was understandably curious about what was going on) were already on the bridge.
Daniel beamed. He had a great crew, a crew that other captains would give an arm for, and they’d every one of them volunteered to serve with Lt. Daniel Leary. By God! they had.
“As everybody in this compartment knows,” Daniel said, starting without preamble because he’d sound weak if he tried to articulate what he felt about the spacers he commanded, “we could better Commodore Pettin’s time to Strymon with the crew on half watches and me sleeping for the whole run.”
There was a general chorus of nods and murmurs. Woetjans slapped the bulkhead with her right hand and said, “Damned straight we will! They could sail the Winckelmann’s masts out and we’d still be waiting for ‘em laughing when they finally staggered in.”
Adele alone sat with the neutral expression Daniel knew by now was what her face wore when she was trying not to sneer. He was quite sure that Adele would make her opinion known if Daniel said he intended to humiliate his commanding officer in the most public fashion possible; but she wouldn’t go out of her way to insult fellow officers simply because their understanding differed from that of noblemen like herself and Daniel—and senior officers like Commodore Pettin.
“We’re going to do something much harder instead,” Daniel said. “I’m counting on your skill and professionalism and that of the spacers under you to make it possible.”
Faces grew shuttered; curious and, if not exactly concerned, then … Well, the crew of the Princess Cecile knew by now that if their captain said something would be difficult, they’d be sweating like pigs before they were through it.
“We’re going to rendezvous with the squadron en route instead of meeting it at its destination,” Daniel said. He thought about the ways his plan could go wrong and smiled. He’d worn a similar expression the day he made an offer to three women; and they whispered together, giggled, and all three followed him down the corridor.
It could go wrong, but it wouldn’t. Not with this crew to back him and recover from any miscalculations he made.
Several of the warrant officers looked blank; Mon scowled, his mouth working as though he were trying to swallow something ghastly, while Woetjans merely scratched herself and grinned. “That’ll teach him who’s a spacer, won’t it, sir?”
“But Captain … ?” said Pasternak. “The commodore didn’t transmit his solutions to the Sissie when we said we weren’t ready to lift. We don’t know where the squadron’ll be, except Strymon where they’ll end up.”
Pasternak was by the nature of his duties a highly educated man, though Daniel suspected that—besides Adele, of course—in raw intelligence the bosun may have been the smartest of the warrant officers. Working with a fusion bottle required a great deal of rote learning, but independent thought was a quick route to disaster. Pasternak could be depended on to know the accepted response to most standard shipboard problems, and to deny that any other response was possible.
“That may prove correct, Mr. Pasternak,” Daniel said, “but I hope that by modeling solutions on our astrogation computer, we can determine which one the commodore will have chosen and then rendezvous with him. The computers are identical, after all, so the only question is which chain of intermediate exits from the Matrix Commodore Pettin chooses.”
“He’ll push,” said Mon. “He’ll want to prove he can make as fast a run as ever a junior lieutenant did.”
“He’ll want to push,” Woetjans said, “but he’ll know the Winckelmann’s ready to pull her sticks out if he don’t treat her tender. And if he don’t know that, his bosun’ll tell him.”
Daniel said, “Commodore Pettin is an able officer and a careful—”
He’d swallowed the word “cautious” before it reached his tongue. Daniel had no desire to insult Pettin, and to this group of officers and the RCN more generally, “cautious” was indeed a word of insult.
“—one. I expect him to get the best out of his equipment, but he’ll also know that his equipment is old and ill-maintained. I’ll proceed according to those assumptions, with Mr. Mon’s help and the help of my chiefs of rig and ship.”
There were general nods and grins. Daniel’s officers assumed that because he said the task was possible, then they’d accomplish it under him. Which, after all, was the assumption their captain made as well.
“We’re going to need a great deal of luck,” Daniel said, “and we’ll be working through the whole run to tolerances as close as those of a battle which would be over quickly. It’s going to be a strain on everybody, perhaps equal to the seventeen days that brought us here from Cinnabar.”
Betts put his hands behind his neck and leaned back at his console. “I signed on with you, Captain,” the missileer said, “because I thought that was the best road there was to getting a name for myself and enough prize money to buy a rose nursery whenever I chose to retire. I guess the same’s true of every soul aboard the Sissie today, except maybe for the roses. You give us our orders. You don’t have to worry about us carrying them out, whatever they are.”
In the middle of the general approving chorus, Woetjans slammed her hand against the bulkhead again and bellowed, “Damned straight!”
That too was pretty much how Daniel felt.
*
Adele sat crosslegged in a cabinful of opened luggage while the Princess Cecile bustled about her. Liftoff wouldn’t be for hours, or so she’d surmised when she left Vesey to handle routine traffic at the signals console while she spent her own time more productively.
The door—the hatch—opened abruptly. Adele’s head came around quickly and her left hand spilled chips on the deck beside her as it dipped toward her pocket.
Lt. Mon stepped through and paused, looking as surprised to find someone else in the room as Adele had been an instant earlier.
“Sorry, mistress,” he said. He looked taut but not particularly alert. “I forgot this was your cabin.”
“Mine?” Adele said in surprise. The first lieutenant’s uniform looked as though he’d slept in it; in truth, he probably hadn’t slept at all.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mon said, more patient now in his exhaustion than she’d seen him at times he was in better shape. “Yours and the Medic, now that our passenger’s cut and run.”
He gestured toward the ship’s medical computer, a full-body case which could diagnose and treat anybody who fit within i
ts adaptive interior. “I came in to get my system flushed and another dose of Wideawake. But if you’re unpacking …”
“For God’s sake, use the, the—device,” Adele snapped, angry with herself. Yes, of course this was the room originally assigned her, which she’d completely forgotten; and of course the medical computer would be in regular use throughout the voyage. Why in heaven had she decided to review Vaughn’s documents here rather than in her half of the captain’s suite?
Looking thankful, Mon stripped off the jacket he’d already unsealed in the corridor. “I’m just about gone,” he said with a gray smile, gripping the pair of handholds and lifting himself feet-first into the cylinder with a grace that a professional acrobat might have envied. “Say, would you like somebody to help you with your gear?”
“This isn’t my gear,” Adele said. “Delos Vaughn abandoned his luggage when he left the ship. Presumably he felt that if he tried to retrieve it, even in Daniel’s absence, someone would’ve taken alarm. I’ve had it moved to this room from the places where it was stowed during the voyage. I’m examining it for items of information.”
On general principles she didn’t care to go on with her business while Mon was in the room with her—not that she’d turned up anything he shouldn’t know. Besides, a break to chat with another human being was probably a good idea.
The mesh and microtubing of the Medic’s interior settled over Mon’s body like fluid moving along a pipette; he gave a great sigh as the equipment began to sample his body chemistry through his bare skin. He hadn’t sunk his head in the tube, so he was able to watch and talk to Adele.
“Is Captain Leary going to be in trouble for letting Vaughn escape?” Mon asked. Bitterly he added, “For me letting the bastard escape, I mean.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Adele said. “Vaughn was using the Princess Cecile—and Daniel himself—to convince others that he had the support of Cinnabar for taking control of his home planet. That claim of support was probably false.”
She’d already read far enough in Vaughn’s secret correspondence to be sure that the Navy Office had no record of him boarding the Princess Cecile. Vaughn’s organization had bribed the real courier with enough money to make even a Mundy blink. You could rent a senator for a year for far less.
Lt. Mon gasped as though he’d been dropped into cold water. The Medic was cleansing his system of fatigue poisons and the breakdown products of the drugs he’d taken to stay alert over the past several days.
Mon’s face relaxed the way a wax mask would on low heat. Color—a healthier color than the previous sallow surface underlain by a metallic gray substrate—returned to his cheeks.
“Say, that’s good to hear,” he murmured, closing his eyes as his muscles luxuriated in chemical-induced relaxation. “What did you do with the bastard anyhow, the Captal I mean? I suppose you had him picked up so he doesn’t just wander South Land for the rest of his life.”
“As soon as the Princess Cecile lifts,” Adele said, “a message will go to Admiral Torgis informing him where the Captal is and also providing information about the admiral’s aide, Mr. Gerson. I expect the admiral will take care of both matters discreetly, for the sake of Cinnabar and more specifically the RCN. If it became public, it wouldn’t be hard to make our rescue operation look like an act of piracy, after all.”
Mon snorted. “It’d be damned hard to make it look any other way!” he said. “I sure wish I’d been along when you cleaned house on those bastards.”
“Ah, Mr. Mon …” Adele said. It might not be her place to say it, but it was as much her place—because she was Daniel’s personal friend—as it was anybody’s, and she was quite sure that it ought to be said. “I’d like to thank you for your support when I used illegal methods to free Daniel.”
She’d started to call them “improper methods,” but nothing would have been improper to achieve that end. There were things that would have turned Adele’s stomach even to consider, but Daniel Leary would have returned to the Princess Cecile, no matter what the result cost his friends.
“I’m well aware that in addition to the risk you ran in supporting us,” she continued as Mon writhed in the ecstasy of not being in pain, “that there would have been personal advantages to you in obeying Commodore Pettin’s orders.”
Mon started to laugh. For a moment Adele thought the Medic was tickling him; then she realized that the lining had withdrawn against the body of the cylinder, freeing the patient from its ministrations.
Mon crawled out of the Medic, his bare chest ruddy as if from a vigorous toweling. He started to speak but broke into chuckling for a further moment while he donned his utility jacket.
“I guess you mean that I’d have a command of my own,” he said at last. With a bitterness at shocking variance with his amusement of moments before, Mon added, “Quite a stroke of luck for a lieutenant who’s learned to be thankful for bad luck because it was the only luck he was going to get, right?”
Adele said nothing. She looked up at Mon; her face calm, her gaze steady.
Mon patted the Medic’s hood. “There’s nothing like one of these for making you feel good,” he said affectionately. “I tell you, if women were half so good, I wouldn’t mind how much time I spend on the ground without a ship.”
His face changed, though hardened wasn’t quite the word to describe his new expression. He squatted so that he faced Adele with his eyes on the same level as hers. His elbows rested on his knees.
“Mistress Mundy,” Mon said, “any religion I had to start out with, I lost before I was fifteen. I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife and I sure don’t believe in heaven. But Hell, that I believe in; only it doesn’t happen after you’re dead.”
Mon straightened with a grin and stepped to the door. “I’m not going to put myself in Hell for the whole rest of my life,” he added over his shoulder, “from remembering the way I sold out Lieutenant Leary after he gave me a break.”
Adele watched the door close behind the lieutenant. It struck her that she’d just, for the first time, heard a religious philosophy with which she could agree.
Chapter Twenty-one
As the Matrix rippled and pulsed beyond the tips of the Princess Cecile’s antennas, it struck Daniel that Adele’s saving grace wasn’t her immense competence at the things she did well. No, she survived because she didn’t claim competence where she had none.
And as the good Lord knew, Adele was even clumsier outside a ship than she was within the hull.
Daniel touched helmets with her. “Look up along the tips of the forward dorsal masts,” he said. “You see the ripples ahead of one, and between one and two; the patterns are the same.”
“I’m looking,” Adele said; obviously a placeholder to indicate she’d heard him rather than a claim of comprehension. She seemed to be looking in the right direction, at any rate. He’d learned by now not to take that for granted.
They stood at the first joint of Dorsal 4, a position Daniel had chosen because D4’s top and mid sails were furled on the present heading. If he were alone he’d be conning the Princess Cecile from an upper yard or even the mast truck, but with Adele … well, Daniel didn’t know of any case where a safety line had parted except when a whole antenna was breaking up; but riggers generally didn’t use safety lines, and those who did weren’t regularly snubbed up by theirs as they went drifting off toward some distant universe.
“Now look between two and three,” Daniel said. He didn’t point. All the crewmen in sight were watching him, and those on the peripheries were ready to relay his directions to their fellows stationed around the curve of the hull. “There’s a feathering of the light, do you see? A herringbone. If you look very carefully, it’s three separate patterns.”
“I see the light,” Adele said. That was along the lines of saying that she breathed air, but Daniel tried to keep from frowning. Adele was trying to understand, albeit trying to understand something that was obvious to him. “And I see what coul
d be herringbones. But I don’t see any difference from what it looks like between the other masts.”
The cold, no-colored light surrounding the Princess Cecile was the human eye’s response to the Casimir-Bohr Radiation that bathed the entire cosmos instead of being limited to individual bubble universes. The antennas and the sails of charged fabric they spread controlled the pressure of radiation on the vessel, driving it through and between universes whose physical constants differed from those of the sidereal universe.
Imbalances in Casimir radiation were the pragmatic reality of star travel. The light, pure as nothing in the human universe could be, was also beautiful beyond Daniel’s ability to say.
“Stay here for a moment, Adele,” Daniel said. “Ah, you might want to hold onto the mast with both hands. I won’t be a moment.”
He paused to make sure that she was taking hold of the mast—which she didn’t do until she realized that Daniel was waiting and watching until she obeyed what he’d meant for an order though he hadn’t been willing to phrase it that way to a Mundy of Chatsworth. Perhaps he was being overly cautious, but he’d twice caught Adele’s feet as they missed rungs on her climb up the antenna.
Sure that his friend was safe, Daniel strode out to the tip of the main yard. The magnetic strips in his bootsoles gave him a positive grip on the steel yard; rigger style, he duckwalked so that his insteps followed the curve of the yard and maximized the surface-to-surface contact. The added square inches greatly increased the grip of a spacer who might unexpectedly have a spar or a length of heavy tackle catch him between his shoulder blades. That extra could be the difference between life and a slow death in some universe not meant for Mankind.
Daniel could see four riggers; there might be more, all but an eyeslit concealed by the hull and rig. Beneath him, the half-furled mainsail quivered minusculely to the rhythm of his step. An expert eye—his eye—could see a reflection in the Matrix of even that infinitely small variation in the corvette’s balance of energy.