Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  Daniel chuckled as he entered the chosen course into the active file. The schematic of the corvette’s sails changed; potentials fluttered, spiking before dropping to zero as the Princess Cecile slid dimensionally sideways into another universe. The set of the sails immediately began to change for the second of the three legs of the approach.

  “Ship, this is the captain!” Daniel said. His voice sounded vaguely bored when he heard it over the PA system. “We will reenter normal space in three minutes thirty … five seconds. Prepare for action. All personnel don emergency suits.”

  He and Adele—she under protest—were still wearing their rigging suits. Sun had slipped on his emergency suit of thin fabric while Daniel was topside. Betts, looking at his display with anguish for the perfect solution he still couldn’t find, stood. He jerked open the drawer in the chair seat and pulled out his.

  Tovera had disappeared into the wardroom. There were emergency suits there, so she and Hogg—

  Almighty God, what about Delos Vaughn?

  “Wardroom!” Daniel said. The servants and their prisoner were probably the only ones present in the compartment, but Daniel needed to get the message to anyone who could possibly help. “Get President Vaughn into a suit soonest! Hogg, do you hear me? Cut him loose and suit him up!”

  The Princess Cecile made another transition, this the one that brought her onto the long final approach. On Daniel’s display the sail schematic changed again.

  The topsail of Ventral 6 rotated to 238 degrees instead of the programmed 257 degrees; abruptly it leaped another five degrees, then warped around the remainder of the way in tiny jerks. Daniel thought of riggers ignoring the transition and hauling around by main force the frozen tackle.

  The rig was aligned. Daniel checked the schematic again, then fed to the sails the charges that would cause them to react against the pressure of Casimir radiation. The Princess Cecile canted in space-time.

  Daniel pressed a dedicated signal button on his console: All Personnel Within the Hull. The six arms of every semaphore station on the hull now stuck out like the petals of a daisy, a clear sign to the riggers that they were to come in immediately. Those who couldn’t see a station themselves would be warned by hand-signals from their fellows, but veterans like the Princess Cecile’s crew knew without being told that the corvette was making her attack run.

  “Two minutes to reentry into normal space!” Dorst announced in a firm, normal-sounding voice. Daniel would be able to praise the lad to his grandfather without hesitation. Both midshipmen were assets to the Princess Cecile’s crew.

  The riggers weren’t coming in.

  Daniel cleared the semaphore control, then hammered it with his fist. That was waste effort, he knew, but he had to do it anyway.

  “Adele?” he said desperately. “Is there anything wrong with the topside signal apparatus?”

  If there was, he could send a man out—could go himself, he was wearing a rigging suit—and bring the crew down with hand-signals.

  Adele brought up a display, checked it, and quickly checked it against three columns of similar data—the recorded values from past occasions when the semaphores were known to be working properly. He’d known there wouldn’t be anything wrong.

  “No, Daniel,” she said without inflexion. “The equipment’s in order. Is there a problem?”

  “One minute to reentry into normal space!”

  “Woetjans’s keeping her crew topside,” Daniel said. He felt a sudden despair, though he knew he’d have done the same thing if he’d been the Sissie’s bosun. “She wants them ready to clear battle damage immediately so that we can maneuver as quickly as possible.”

  The survivors would be ready.

  “Thirty seconds to reentry!” said Lt. Mon. “God bless the RCN!”

  Transition.

  *

  The first missile released with a thump so quick that Adele thought it was part of the buffeting of the corvette’s return to sidereal space. The second, launched five seconds later so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the exhaust trail of the first, corrected her misapprehension.

  Not that Adele cared. She was in the sea of information which flooded from the ships of the Alliance squadron and Tanais Base. Admiral Chastelaine was organizing his force and simultaneously trying to learn what the Strymonian base personnel knew about the recently sighted warship.

  Reading between the lines of the queries, Chastelaine didn’t trust his new allies even though he’d left a force of Alliance personnel both on Tanais and in the orbital forts defending the base. She smiled grimly. The only certainty with traitors was that they’d stab you in the back also if they found it expedient.

  “God the mother of us all!” somebody screamed over the PA system.

  Adele flicked her left wand, a hair’s breadth from cutting access to the idiot who’d misused the system for babble at a time of crisis. She saw for the first time the image echoed from Daniel’s screen to the top of her display.

  It was still a misuse of the PA system, but this time she’d let it pass. She stared transfixed at the image.

  Der Grosser Karl’s mass hid all but an edge of Tanais because the corvette viewed her at such close vantage. Adele had seen the Aristotle from closer yet, but that had been in dry dock with the Aristotle’s sails removed and her antennas folded against the hull. The bulk of Der Grosser Karl’s seventy thousand deadweight tonnes was increased by fully extended eighty-meter antennas and enough hectares of electroconductive sails that a small city could hide beneath them.

  “Entering the Matrix in—” Dorst was announcing.

  Working forward along the battleship’s hull, a topsail, a midsail, and last the mainsail of three successive antennas bulged against their original stress and tore. Sparks of antimatter exhaust danced through them, devouring more of the fabric. The missile had grazed Der Grosser Karl, but without seriously affecting the target’s ability to sail and fight.

  “—thirty seconds,” Dorst said.

  The maincourse of an antenna near the battleship’s stern vanished in a rainbow fireball. The second missile, Adele thought, but then two more sails, amidships to port and starboard, ruptured. The battleship’s plasma cannon were clearing their own fields of fire, blasting away rigging that had been in the way. The Princess Cecile jolted sideways in a bath of flame.

  A deep, three-hundred-foot-long gouge opened along Der Grosser Karl’s bow in a roostertail of coruscance. Red, yellow, and white sparks erupted into vacuum. Metal burned where sufficient air escaped to support combustion; otherwise it merely radiated away the frictional heat that had ripped it apart.

  Alliance ships were signaling wildly. Adele noticed with a grim smile that two destroyers were sending in clear and that the heavy cruiser’s messages were encrypted according to two separate systems—apparently depending on whether they originated on the bridge or in the Battle Direction Center. She was quite certain that the Alliance vessels were having more trouble understanding their own communications than she was.

  “Entering the Matrix in fourteen seconds!” a voice said, Daniel’s. Adele cut in an image of his face, set and a little redder than usual. The recalculation to adjust for loss of sail area to the battleship’s plasma bolt must have been a strain both mental and—as Adele well knew—physical in the need for absolute precision in typing in the commands that alone could save the corvette.

  “Entering—”

  Der Grosser Karl fired another rippling volley, but the missile’s grazing impact and damage to several High Drive nozzles caused the great ship to slew. The bolts missed the Princess Cecile. An antenna in the battleship’s sternmost ring exploded, the uppermost ten meters shooting off as a projectile driven on a shockwave of the portion vaporized by plasma.

  Transition.

  People were shouting, perhaps everyone aboard the corvette except Adele herself. She sorted the data her equipment had gathered during the Princess Cecile’s seconds within normal space.

  Most were ord
inary communications, the ash and trash of the Alliance squadron leaving port for the first time after a difficult voyage, but there was also the series of messages dealing with the briefly spotted unknown warship. Then, like shouts of “Fire!” in a crowded theater, came the disbelieving reactions to the corvette’s reappearance in the middle of the squadron—

  And nothing, because the Princess Cecile was again within the Matrix, safe from attack and probably beyond pursuit by those aboard the Alliance ships. They weren’t Selma pirates.

  Adele gave a snort of laughter. They weren’t Daniel Leary, either.

  The alarm that had been pulsing cut off. Lt. Mon said on a dedicated channel between the Battle Direction Center and the bridge, “No hull penetration, I repeat, no penetration. Damage on Dorsal Three-Four-Five, the mainsails fucked and masts severed below the topsails. Minor damage on Starboard Two but the topsail is still eighty percent. Shall we start repairs immediately? Over.”

  “Negative,” Daniel said as he typed, his strokes as hard and exact as a hammer driving nails. “We’ll make our second run with the present rig. Mon, I want you to go out on the hull and tell Woetjans this time she’s to bring her crew in when I give the order. Break. Hogg?”

  “Standing at your side, master,” Hogg said, not shouting but speaking loudly enough to be heard over the sounds of a ship at war. Missiles rumbled on their loading tracks, making the whole vessel vibrate. The remaining rounds in the magazine added their thunder as well, each rolling into the space vacated by the one ahead of it.

  “Go with Mon, he won’t let you drift away,” Daniel said. His voice sounded like wind roaring through a long tube. “Go out with a pistol in your hand. Tell Woetjans that you’ll shoot her if she disobeys my order. I won’t ask that of Mon; but I will of you, Hogg, and Ellie knows that you’ll obey.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Hogg said. He turned to watch Mon coming up Corridor C, dressed in a rigging suit. “But I tell you, he better not let me float away.”

  Sun stared without expression at the servant’s back as he went to join the lieutenant. He felt Adele’s glance, nodded, and forced a smile to her. “She’ll bring ‘em in,” he said. “She knows the captain means business.”

  Adele looked at her friend. She didn’t remember ever having seen Daniel so bleak. It was as though she were again staring up the bores of the Aristotle’s great plasma cannon in Harbor Three.

  She hand-cued the intercom and said, “Daniel?”

  Daniel’s face changed in a way she couldn’t have described even though she watched as it happened. The planes of muscle over bone fractured into minuscule slivers, then reformed into the smiling young man she’d known—for months only, but the most important months of her life.

  “We’ll be making four shifts on this approach,” he said. “The last’ll be a long one, four minutes twelve seconds; we’ll be building velocity for our return to normal space. After we exit at the end of the run, we won’t need riggers topside, and I won’t throw them away.”

  As he spoke, the Princess Cecile trembled between universes. Within the bubble of space-time formed by the ship’s electric charge, nothing palpable changed; but the pressure of the universe beyond was different.

  “Daniel?” Adele asked. “I, I’m glad that you’re bringing the riggers in, I don’t mean that. But are you sure that you won’t need them on the hull?”

  They shifted again. The first three stages must be intended simply to align the corvette with its target. Adele no longer noticed the feeling of her body falling into four separate infinities.

  Daniel smiled again, though there was a rueful quality to it this time. “Chastelaine will be ready for us this time,” he said. “We won’t need riggers topside because after those eight-inch cannon hit us, we won’t have any sails left.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Daniel whistled “Been on the Job Too Long” as he computed tracks for the eighteen missiles remaining aboard the Princess Cecile. It was quite a cheerful tune, though the words were another matter. That was true of a lot of catchy songs, come to think.

  When the women all heard that King Brady was dead—

  The Princess Cecile would pass through the Alliance squadron at high velocity. That wouldn’t affect the plasma cannon, of course, except to minimize the corvette’s exposure to the bolts, but it did mean that Alliance missiles would have a long time catching up even at twelve-gee accelerations.

  They went back home and they dressed in red.

  The converse was that the Sissie’s own missiles, save for the pair already loaded in the tubes, would be fighting a great deal of negative inertia as they struggled back toward their target. Der Grosser Karl would be able to avoid them easily.

  All Daniel’s missiles were aimed at the battleship: if Der Grosser Karl were damaged, the powerful remainder of the squadron would be more concerned with defending the cripple than in chasing down Commodore Pettin’s force. A big “if,” of course.

  They come slippin’ and aslidin’ up and down the street—

  Light flickered as the Princess Cecile shifted onto the final leg of her approach. Daniel’s course calculation had taken fifteen minutes, three times as long as so short a voyage would require, because he’d added a fourth parameter to the mix.

  Usually an attack was made with a minimum of rig aloft so that the vessel could maneuver on High Drive without damaging its antennas. This time Daniel wanted every possible—every surviving—mast raised to its full height and all sails spread. That was a strikingly inefficient way to navigate the Matrix; but in a portion of normal space bathed with the point-blank output of eight-inch plasma cannon, it was the corvette’s only hope of survival.

  In their old Mother Hubbards and their stocking feet!

  Daniel paused in his calculations—for rounds fifteen and sixteen, and if the Sissie survived to launch them she and her crew would be very fortunate indeed—to watch the sail schematic change to reflect the new rig. Starboard Three and Four didn’t budge at the thrust of the jacks. Though undamaged at the quick glance which alone was possible after the initial attack, a splash of plasma had welded their base hinges.

  Woetjans must have expected that, because at least six mauls slammed rhythmically into the masts within seconds of the jam. Both began to lift. S3 continued normally, but the pump pressure driving S4 flatlined when the antenna had only elevated a few degrees. A hydraulic line—scored by plasma, fractured by an injudicious hammerblow, or simply filled with the cussed determination of machines to fail—had broken.

  Brady, Brady, Brady, don’t you know you done wrong?

  The mast resumed its rise, again within seconds of the initial failure. The bosun must already have rigged tackle to blocks at the head of adjacent, previously extended, masts.

  Daniel felt a rush of affection. By God! he wasn’t going to let Woetjans throw her life away. Not even if saving her required a sincerely offered threat to blow her head off if she didn’t obey.

  Antenna Starboard 4 locked into place and, without further hesitation, unfurled its suit of sails. The Princess Cecile was wearing nearly eighty percent of her rig, an unusual event made more remarkable by the battle damage that alone prevented the figure being even higher.

  Atoms stripped of electrons and accelerated by repulsion up the bore of a plasma cannon had velocities little short of light speed, but negligible mass. Their ravening touch would destroy the first layer of any matter they collided with, but they wouldn’t penetrate. Damage beyond the target’s outer layer was a result of transmitted impact—which in the case of sail fabric was almost zero.

  After the battleship’s initial volley had removed the sails, further bolts would scour the hull. At point-blank range, fluxes intended to change the course of missiles approaching at .6 C would make short work of a corvette.

  You bust into my bar when the game was on …

  The astrogation computer changed the sails’ potentials as programmed; Daniel checked the results against the plan and
his instinct. All was well.

  He grinned. If that was the phrase to use under the circumstances.

  “Three minutes to reentry to normal space!” Dorst said.

  The riggers, their job completed, were clanging back within the Sissie’s hull. The inner airlock opened outside the bridge. One figure stepped through, Lt. Mon lifting off the helmet of his rigging suit. He closed the hatch behind him.

  You sprung my latch and you broke my door …

  Catching Daniel’s eye, Mon shouted, “Hogg’s staying in the lock with Woetjans. Says it’s as good a place as the next, he figures.”

  Daniel thought of his short, dumpy servant and the rangy bosun. Under the circumstances the two were an ideal pair: they understood one another perfectly. Missed communications had killed more people than ever malice dreamed of doing.

  “Daniel?” Adele said. She’d waited until she saw his attention drawn away from the calculations on his display. “When we return to normal space, I intend to direct the other ships, the escort ships? Direct them to return to Tanais in the name of Admiral Chastelaine. I doubt they’ll obey, but I thought it might confuse them. Is that all right?”

  Daniel opened a window in his holographic display so that he could meet Adele’s eyes without a fog of light between them. She looked worried, concerned about having overstepped her proper authority.

  “Great heavens, yes!” Daniel said. “But won’t they—oh, I see. You will be sending it in the proper Alliance code.”

  Adele smiled faintly. “Yes, that’s my greatest question,” she said. “Less than half the flagship’s communications are encrypted properly, so it might be more believable if I introduced errors in my transmissions. Doing that offended my sense of rightness, however, so unless you require me to … ?”

  “Quite all right,” Daniel said. “I’d hate for your last act in this life to be one you found to smack of impropriety.”

  “One minute to reentry to normal space,” announced Mon. “Prepare for action.”

  “What do you mean, prepare for action?” shouted someone—shouted Delos Vaughn coming up the corridor toward the bridge. The helmet of his emergency suit was hinged open, bouncing on his chest. “We’ve escaped, I saw us escape! We’re safe now!”