Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  The Astrogator’s cutter was a half light-second distant, enough to create noticeable lags in conversation. There was no additional delay, however, before Kelburney’s sneering tenor voice replied, “Selma to RCN. Give us a time hack and execute in thirty seconds. You won’t have to wait for us the way you would for people who think a fancy uniform makes a spacer. Out!”

  On a whim, Adele inset a head-and-shoulders view of Daniel in a corner of her display. He was smiling faintly, perhaps remembering as Adele did that the Astrogator’s cloth-of-gold costume at the Assembly was even more ornate than Daniel’s Dress Whites.

  He touched a key and said over the PA system, “Prepare for entry, exit, and reentry to the Matrix in one minute.”

  The chimes and lights echoed his words. “Prepare for immediate action,” Daniel went on. “Captain out.”

  His eyes in the little inset seemed to meet Adele’s. Did he know that she was using the broad bandwidth required for visuals in this completely needless and un-naval fashion? He must, because he winked.

  “RCN to Selma Control,” Daniel said. “We’ll go into action in thirty seconds from … now! RCN out.”

  Adele’s display whirred; the Astrogator’s flagship was relaying the synchronization data to his whole fleet in a single multirecipient burst. Two more icons had joined the forty-three of a moment before, meaning that every ship which lifted from Dalbriggan had arrived within minutes of schedule at a point two light-years distant.

  “If they can fight the way they sail,” Daniel said on his secure link to Adele, “then this should go very well. Of course, their Falassan kin may be equally able. That’ll mean a real battle.”

  He sounded quite cheerful at the prospect.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Normally entry and exit from the Matrix made Daniel as queasy as they did any other spacer, no matter how experienced. This time he was aware of the sensations but couldn’t really be said to feel them. His body had become no more than the apparatus his mind used to effect his plans.

  “—reenter normal space!” Lt. Mon’s voice was saying as the lights pulsed.

  The Princess Cecile dropped into consensus reality, then fluttered back into the Matrix like a butterfly with a damaged wing. They’d appeared five light-seconds from Falassa, close enough to determine the guardship’s exact location.

  The attack console held a hundred preset launch patterns; the final choice depended on where the Hammer really was. Adele’s data showed a consistent pattern, but a pattern wasn’t a bull’s-eye—and nothing short of a bull’s-eye would suffice when the Princess Cecile was on the wrong end of such a disparity of force.

  Betts was running solutions, one for each of the two ready-launch missiles. Daniel did the same at his command console, not quite so quickly but with an assurance that surprised a dispassionate part of his mind.

  Daniel was no longer the Princess Cecile’s captain, giving orders to the crew and controlling the machinery which would execute his will. He’d become part of the vessel. His awareness of the rig, of the output from the fusion bottle—even of the hums and clings and whines of the parts working in concert—was subconscious. He no more thought about the commands his fingers typed than he thought about breathing. It was all one, and it was all Daniel Leary.

  The display plotted a missile track in red, another track in blue, and between them a streak of purple merging the solution which Daniel and the Chief Missileer had both picked. The attack computer would execute the chosen pair when the Princess Cecile next exited the Matrix. Daniel didn’t trust humans disoriented by the transition to launch missiles with the split-second timing this attack required.

  Without hesitation, Daniel entered his solutions instead of Betts’s.

  Betts turned from his console to look at his captain. Daniel was aware of the missileer as a portion of the composition Ship and Crew, but Betts no longer had a separate existence in which his thoughts and fears could have meaning.

  Mon had already set up the slight necessary adjustments to the sail plan. He and Daniel together had planned the Princess Cecile’s course from Dalbriggan to this point within the S2 system with the attack in mind. Modifications of the charge levels rather than the area and angle of the sails would take the corvette the final stage to her target.

  The external electrics of a well-maintained starship operated properly ninety-five times in a hundred. The hydromechanical gears and pumps that moved the masts and sails failed—froze, broke, or simply dragged—ten times as often. On an ordinary voyage the riggers would fix the trouble and the astrogator would compensate for the divergence during the next leg.

  Having riggers topside on this hop would condemn most of them to death, although that was a relatively minor concern. After all, an error in the location and vector of the corvette’s return to sidereal space this time was probably a death sentence for the whole crew.

  Daniel looked at Mon’s plan, then raised the charge on both sails of the starboard row by a few milliamps. That would give the Princess Cecile a slight axial torque as she exited the Matrix, spreading her missiles as they left their tubes. The dispassionate part of Daniel’s mind realized that this adjustment was why his launch solution had differed slightly from the missileer’s. For these few moments, the Princess Cecile was a creature of soul and body, not an object crewed by men.

  Daniel engaged the exit sequence on the astrogation computer. “Ship, prepare to exit the Matrix in thirty seconds,” he announced. “Reentry will follow immediately. S-s-s captain out.”

  His tongue had wanted to identify him as the Ship. The small part of Daniel’s brain that remained objective wouldn’t permit his muscles and subconscious to confuse his crew that way. He smiled, amused at himself and trembling with anticipation.

  The Princess Cecile began to shiver. Casimir energy squeezed the starship in three mutually exclusive directions, forcing it out of the interstices between bubble universes and back into the universe of men.

  Still smiling, Daniel switched from the navigational and attack screens to a simple real-time display. The other data were attempts to predict and modify the future. If he hadn’t done his job correctly, there was no future for the Princess Cecile.

  Entry into the sidereal universe: gut-wrenching, mind-wrenching. Adele looked across the bridge at him. Her face was that of a crucified saint.

  The Hammer filled Daniel’s display.

  The Umbrans had the reputation of building handsome vessels, but the guardship in its present form looked like a pair of hulks progressing through the breakers yard. The Hammer had been dismasted or nearly so: the lower sections of three forward antennas remained to support the communications gear, and those of the final ring sternward—when a heavy cruiser, the Hammer was an eight-row vessel—were stubbed out to attach a bladder holding additional reaction mass.

  As an Umbran heavy cruiser the Hammer had weighed 12,000 tons, but the cylindrical bladder the Falassans had added was nearly half the volume of the original hull. The parts were connected by eight tensioning cables around the rim as well as by fifty feet of rigid tubing, giving the whole the form of an unbalanced dumbbell.

  The Hammer was elevating the plasma cannon in her quadruple turrets; the shutters were sliding back from her rocket and missile tubes. Daniel had hoped the Princess Cecile’s initial in-and-out appearance would have passed unnoticed, but the Falassan crew was definitely alert.

  The corvette’s hull rang as jets of superheated steam ejected one and then the other loaded missile from her tubes. The missiles were thirty-foot spaceships containing an antimatter converter, reaction mass and twin High Drive units; exhaust would devour the launchers if they were lighted within the vessel itself.

  There was no warhead, though at burnout the missile would separate into four segments to increase the coverage area. When a missile exhausted its reaction mass, it was travelling at a significant fraction of light speed; a warhead, even a thermonuclear device, would add nothing to the effectiveness of
a kinetic energy weapon.

  The guardship was less than ten miles away from where the Princess Cecile reentered sidereal space. Uncle Stacey would be proud of me.

  “Prepare to reenter!” Daniel said, shouting in an unconscious attempt to speed a process that would take its own time regardless. A matter of seconds, no more, but lives end in a fraction of that… .

  The corvette had risen into sidereal space, launched her missiles, and now was dropping back into the Matrix like a fish straining to hide again below the surface. The Hammer’s turrets couldn’t slew on target in the moments available, but her rockets course-corrected by angling their thrusters in accordance with data supplied by the targeting computer. Gas puffed from ports all along the guardship’s flank as she fired a desperate salvo.

  The Princess Cecile’s missiles hit: one grazing the Hammer’s stern and then rupturing the tank of reaction mass into a gush of steam the size of a planetoid, the other taking the guardship squarely in the bow. The missiles weren’t anywhere close to their potential velocity when they struck the Hammer, but the impact of thirty tons accelerating at twelve gees was enough to smash through the cruiser’s hull and out the other side.

  The second missile’s exit plume was brightly coruscant. Particles of uncombined antimatter from the exhaust raged merrily in the Hammer’s interior. The ship’s bow canted at an angle to the remainder of the hull, on the verge of separating.

  Reentry, and never was the wrenching disorientation more welcome. The guardship’s rockets had become a flurry of sparks swelling in the final image on Daniel’s display as the corvette departed sidereal space.

  Spacers cheered. Betts blubbered with joy; beside him Sun pounded the gunnery console with both hands. Daniel hadn’t allowed the gunner’s mate to rake the target with his plasma cannon for fear the bolts would interfere with the Princess Cecile’s missiles, so he was wild with a combination of frustration and triumph.

  Daniel checked his status screen. Dorst was already shouting hoarsely over the intercom, “All green! All green! No damage!”

  “That,” said Daniel aloud, “was very close; but then, it had to be.”

  He wasn’t speaking to anyone except the part of his mind that analyzed his actions after the fact. It was with surprise that Daniel realized Adele was watching him through the curtain of his holographic display, and that she was nodding in agreement.

  He grinned and keyed the PA system. “Prepare to enter normal space in one minute,” he ordered, hearing the electronic echo of his voice filling the whole of the vessel. “Prepare for action. Captain out.”

  Daniel engaged the reentry sequence, set up like the previous two before the Princess Cecile left Dalbriggan. Their exit after launching missiles should have moved them ten thousand miles out from Falassa with zero motion proper to the planet. If they’d sustained damage during the attack, he and Mon would have had to modify the plan; but there’d been no damage.

  While the PA system chimed and the crew continued cheering, Daniel allowed himself for the first time to think about the maneuvers he’d just directed. He’d learned the art of precise astrogation from his uncle Stacey, true enough, but it hadn’t been Stacey Bergen who’d showed Daniel how to pick an opponent’s weak point and then to press home his attack regardless of consequences.

  It was possible that Corder Leary would also be proud of what his son had just achieved.

  *

  Adele grimaced as the Princess Cecile’s thunderous plasma thrusters cut in. The High Drive’s keening vibration was even more unpleasant in its way, but Adele had found that while working she could tune it out the way she did hunger pangs. The thrusters’ thumping bass and the atmospheric buffeting which inevitably accompanied the pulses were impossible to ignore.

  Besides, when the ions of the exhaust changed state and recombined, they created omniband interference. Even the commo suite’s sophisticated software couldn’t sharpen more than a fraction of the transmissions into intelligible form.

  Adele continued listening to intership signals, of course; it was just harder.

  The last of the riggers were stripping their suits off with cheerful animation. Twenty feet farther down the corridor, their quicker fellows were catching the impellers and submachine guns which Gansevoort tossed them from the arms room.

  Woetjans, with an impeller in her hand and a submachine gun slung across her chest, pushed her way onto the bridge and stood behind Adele’s console. “Mistress?” the bosun said. “Can you transmit the show of the cruiser getting it in the neck to the starboard watch’s helmets? We were in the airlock and couldn’t see squat.”

  Adele looked up, ready to snarl that she was busy. She looked at Woetjans, who’d spent the critical moments of the attack in a steel box tighter than a coffin—and a coffin indeed if anything had gone wrong. Woetjans, whose present concern was that her riggers get a taste of the Princess Cecile’s victory before they went out with small arms to further risk their lives.

  “Yes, of course,” Adele said. She blanked her display, then searched the current imagery files for the set in question. “Signals to Vesey!” she said as her wands flashed. “Take over communications duties immediately. Signals ov—no, signals out.”

  Either midshipman could handle the commo chores; in fact the suite’s routing software could probably manage unaided, little though Adele cared to admit the fact. She’d picked Vesey rather than Dorst for the duty because a marksman of Dorst’s ability had other uses during a battle on the ground.

  Hogg, wearing RCN utilities and a knapsack of munitions, stood close to the command console where Daniel continued to make course corrections and talk with his division chiefs. Hogg carried his own weapon, a stocked impeller. He held his master’s equipment belt, which included a holstered pistol, but nobody took Daniel’s job to be that of gunman.

  Which reminds me… . “Tovera,” Adele said, keying the intercom, “bring me my belt equipment now. Including the new pistol, if you please.”

  She’d forgotten to sign off, but with Tovera that wouldn’t—

  Woetjans crooked her finger in a tiny gesture. Adele jerked her head around. Wouldn’t matter, she’d been thinking, but in fact Tovera already stood behind the console, smiling faintly. Adele’s equipment belt was in her left hand.

  Tovera wore a smoke gray jumpsuit with crossed bandoliers of ammunition and grenades. She didn’t have the attaché case because today she carried her submachine gun openly. The weapon was subtly different from those being issued from the arms room: it was of Alliance manufacture, a relic—like the sociopath’s training—of the time she served a Fifth Bureau spymaster.

  Adele transmitted the guardship’s final moments, then called up the series showing the Dalbriggan assault on Homeland as recorded during the Princess Cecile’s run back to Falassa in sidereal space. The riggers were topside at the time, taking down the antennas, but they wouldn’t have been doing any sightseeing. Apart from informing her shipmates, the bosun might be able to explain details that puzzled Adele.

  The second sequence began to run on the display. The imagery had been gathered under high magnification and blown up further by the computer. Adele pointed with her index and middle fingers together at cutters looking like six bright sparks as they appeared from the Matrix in the upper reaches of Falassa’s atmosphere.

  “Here,” she said. “They came too close and tore themselves apart—but Daniel says the Dalbriggans are very able. What … ?”

  Woetjans bent to get the best viewing angle. “Bugger me!” she said. “The bastards are good!”

  Adele winced at the thought of somebody trying to sodomize the bosun. Just a figure of speech, but an unfortunate mental image nonetheless.

  The six Dalbriggan cutters had entered sidereal space with considerable motion relative to Falassa. The rigging that propelled them through the Matrix ripped away in long trails of fire: even the attenuated atmosphere forty miles above the surface was too dense for antennas and sails to withstand a
t transorbital velocities.

  “They’re hitting the port defenses, mistress,” Woetjans said. “If they came in normal they’d be sitting ducks, but—”

  When Adele first saw the puffs of half-burned gases envelop the Dalbriggan cutters, she’d thought all six of them had exploded. Now she realized that they’d instead launched their full magazines of chemical rockets. She was seeing the exhausts, not the debris of an explosion.

  “They’re trading their rigs for real surprise, you see?” Woetjans said. Adele did see, now that it was explained to her. “They can step new antennas after the fight, but if they don’t knock out the missile pits on the ground—”

  “The missiles, not the enemy ships?” Adele asked, her eyes narrowing.

  Woetjans sneered. “Not with this lot, mistress,” she said. “They ain’t enemies, they’re all on the same side—once they sort out who’s the top dog, you see? It’s not like it is with us.”

  Adele said nothing aloud. Actually, it’s quite a lot like the Three Circles Conspiracy and its aftermath. But of course Woetjans meant “not like the RCN.”

  The cutters which had attacked in the stratosphere skipped up from the denser layers of atmosphere instead of trying to land. One disintegrated in a fireball which continued on its previous course like a brief comet.

  “Ground defenses,” Woetjans explained; she wriggled her finger momentarily in the hologram, disrupting the five silvery streaks which slashed up and past the vanished cutter. “One of the missile crews was quick enough and lucky enough to get home.”

  She chuckled. “Not lucky enough to be home in bed when about a dozen rockets landed on their pit, though, I’ll wager,” she added.

  The remainder of the Dalbriggan fleet appeared in orbit with the suddenness of raindrops spattering a dry surface. Unlike the initial attackers, these cutters had used the Matrix to greatly reduce their relative motion. Plasma thrusters flared, braking them down to Falassa’s surface.