In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  Forbes cackled in triumph. "I think I've shocked you, Mundy!" she said. "Haven't I? I'd heard that about you too."

  Mundy of Chatsworth raised an eyebrow. She put the data unit back in its pocket, though she only needed her left hand free.

  "Biology isn't one of my particular interests, Senator," she said in an upper-class drawl. "I wouldn't be shocked if a maggot crawled out of your eye socket, though I'd find it vaguely disgusting."

  Forbes stared. Her mouth opened, then closed, but she didn't speak. Her face settled into a stunned expression rather than anger.

  "I think the crowd has thinned, Tovera," said Adele. "We'll board now, because I have work to do."

  She glanced toward Forbes. "You're welcome to accompany us, Senator," she added. "We'll take care to keep you safe."

  Daniel settled himself into the command console of the RCS Milton for his first liftoff as her captain. He listened for a moment to the sounds which filled the cruiser.

  Starships were never quiet. The life-support system alone involved many hundreds of pumps, fans, and valves working through miles of ducts and piping. Add the electronics, the flows of reaction mass feeding plasma thrusters for use in an atmosphere and the High Drive which more efficiently combined matter and antimatter in vacuum, and the crew itself, there was a background that made it hard to talk across a compartment in a normal voice. Several hundred human beings breathing in a steel box stirred an echoing windstorm all by itself.

  Daniel touched the virtual keyboard, sequencing the holographic screen from a systems schematic, through an astrogation display, the Plot-Position Indicator, and an attack board. Finally he returned to the schematic.

  The keyboard was projected over a fascia plate which had a roughened surface; the Sissie's console had been smooth when new and by now was worn to minute dips and rises by the touch of Daniel's fingers. He grinned. Adele had told him that he typed as though he thought his fingers were pummeling the ship into obedience.

  Well, the technique had served him well thus far. If the fascia proved a real problem, one of Pasternak's technicians would either grind it smooth or fill the indentations with hull sealant. It wouldn't be a problem, though.

  "Command Group, this is Six," Daniel said, verbally directing his commo helmet's AI to open a channel to the cruiser's commissioned and warrant officers. "We'll be lifting off shortly. Chief of Ship, do you have anomalies to report, over?"

  A line of miniature heads, real-time images, appeared at the top of his display. If Daniel wanted, he could dispense with the images or have them float around the interstices of the schematics instead of squashing the main display down slightly. He liked having the faces in his peripheral vision, though he almost never looked directly at them.

  There were many more faces than he was used to. As with the fascia plate, that would become normal soon.

  "Sir, the flows are normal and all the hatches say they're sealed," said Pasternak. "I won't learn better till we're in vacuum and then I figure I'll learn, I've never taken a ship up first time after an overhaul that some bloody thing wasn't wrong. But not yet. Five out."

  "Chief of Rig, anything to report, over?" Daniel said.

  "Squared away, Six," Woetjans said. She sounded like she had a mouthful of gravel. "Rig out."

  Daniel smiled at the contrast between the two chiefs. It was almost a given that on a ship the size of the Milton, some clamp or joint of the new rigging would fracture under the vibration and stresses of the first liftoff. The bosun felt that she could fix whatever happened, though she knew there'd be failures; whereas the Chief Engineer felt there'd be failures, though he knew he'd be able to fix them.

  Daniel was convinced that they were both as good at their jobs as any other pair in the RCN. He had to admit that he preferred Woetjans' attitude, though.

  He glanced toward his left side, where Adele sat at the signals console with her back to him. She and Pasternak had a good deal in common; but in her case, Daniel knew there was nobody who could claim to be her equal.

  The bridge of the Milton was larger than that of the Princess Cecile, though the compartments were much closer in size than the ships were. The corvette needed the same consoles—command, astrogation, missiles, gunnery, and signals—as a heavy cruiser. Each of the Milton's stations was back-to-back with a full display for a striker rather than the Sissie's jumpseats with rudimentary controls, and there was more space between the cruiser's stations. Still, the volume was doubled rather than greater by an order of magnitude.

  Daniel had rotated the command console to face the stern. Sun and Adele, gunnery and signals, were to starboard. Sun was backed by a technician named Ragi Sekaly, who'd held the rating of gunner's mate on a destroyer. Sekaly had technically been senior to Sun on the Navy House books, but a ship's captain had authority to promote any qualified spacer into an empty slot.

  There were RCN officers—most officers, truth to tell—who expected a gift of the subordinate's first month's wages in exchange for the promotion, but Daniel didn't need the money. Indeed, he hadn't thought much about money even when he had needed it, a matter of some irritation to Hogg in past years.

  Sun was skilled, trustworthy, and a companion from Daniel's first cruise in command of the Princess Cecile. The Learys expected loyalty from their tenants, but they gave loyalty in return. A good principle on the Bantry estate continued to be a good one when applied to the company of an RCN warship.

  Nearest the command console on the port side was astrogation, where Lieutenant Vesey was working on a course projection. Daniel could've echoed it to see what course it was—or asked her, for that matter—but it didn't matter.

  He doubted that Vesey was plotting their route to Paton and Karst, since she would've done that days ago when she'd learned the cruiser's mission. More likely she was preparing in case Captain Leary decided abruptly to raid some base in the heart of the Alliance, perhaps even the Castle System itself. It had happened before; and Vesey, while not a fighting officer with an instinct for the enemy's weakness, could be counted on to do anything that allowed her time for prediction.

  Midshipman Cazelet sat on the mirror side of Vesey's station, observing her plot but not involved in it. He'd been Adele's, well, protégé, one would have to call him: a youth who'd fled to her from the Alliance because she owed a similar debt to his grandmother.

  Daniel hadn't hesitated when Adele asked him to give Cazelet a midshipman's slot. Daniel had been impressed by Cazelet's skills when the fellow had travelled as Adele's assistant on the previous voyage; and anyway, he'd have backed Adele's judgment even if he'd disagreed with it. Adele was a Leary, now, for all she was Mundy of Chatsworth. The Learys took care of their own.

  Vesey and Cazelet had spent some of their off-duty time together. Daniel didn't consider that any of his business—another way in which he differed from many RCN captains—unless it affected performance.

  That had been a problem with Vesey in the past, and not simply involving her personal relationships. Though a crackerjack officer in most respects, Vesey had a tendency to hammer herself when things didn't go to plan. Most matters involving human beings and the cosmos generally went off the rails at some point, and when they did they were likely to take Vesey along with them.

  Still, if Cazelet managed to avoid getting killed the way Vesey's fiancé had been, it ought to be all right. The trouble was, violent death was a common hazard of wearing an RCN uniform.

  Borries, the Chief Missileer, was one of a dozen Pellegrinians aboard. They'd been captured on Dunbar's World and had decided service in the RCN was a better alternative than going home to learn exactly how angry their dictator was that they'd survived a battle which had claimed the life of his only son.

  The missile station display showed a view of the dockyard, but Borries was looking past it toward the command console. He nodded when Daniel's eyes glanced onto him.

  He was Daniel's most doubtful appointment: he'd been a good choice for the Princess Cecile, bu
t many Cinnabar-born senior missileers had bid for transfer to the Milton. Captain Leary had the reputation of finding a battle, and battles were the only chance a missileer had to shine.

  Daniel had nevertheless brought Borries with him. The Pellegrinian was skilled, but he was also willing to defer to a captain who liked to set up his own attacks. The last thing Daniel needed was a power struggle with a member of his own command group in the middle of combat.

  The missileer's mate was Seth Chazanoff. He was new to Daniel's command, a Cinnabar native with a flair for the short-range computations that were in some ways more difficult than the long shots more typical of space battles. He'd been chief missileer on a destroyer at a higher base pay that he'd get as mate even on a heavy cruiser. The fact he'd been willing to take a pay cut to have a better chance of practicing his murderous specialty was enough to convince Daniel to take him aboard.

  Across the compartment from the missileers sat Adele at the signals station, using her personal data unit as a controller for the console. Daniel assumed that there was some coupling loss incurred by slaving the larger unit to a small one, but when Adele was the operator, nobody would notice it.

  She didn't look up, but Daniel was pretty sure that his was the face inset onto her display. Adele preferred imagery to a physical presence and preferred recorded data to the evidence of her own senses. It worked for her, and what Adele did worked very well for the Republic as well as for her friend Daniel Leary.

  Midshipman Cory had the rear couch of the signals console. He had always struck Daniel as somewhat slow-witted—which wasn't, of course, a barrier to advancement in the RCN. The odd thing about Cory was that he kept learning—not quickly or easily, but consistently. He made mistakes that almost nobody else would've made, but he only made them once. There were successful admirals who couldn't say that much.

  Adele would be listening to intercepted transmissions while Cory was handling the ship's normal flow of communications. Daniel didn't imagine that any useful information would appear in the chatter of a private shipyard on Cinnabar, but it was habit and practice for Adele.

  She would do the same thing whenever her vessel was on a planetary surface. Several times her electronic eavesdropping had saved their mission and not coincidentally their lives.

  "Lieutenant Robinson," said Daniel. "Any anomalies to report, over?"

  "Sir, the ship is ready to lift," Robinson replied from the BDC. "Would you like me to initiate liftoff sequence, over?"

  No, I bloody well would not like you to take my new command up the first time I'm aboard her, Daniel thought. Aloud he said, "Negative, Three. Break. Mister Pasternak, you may light your thrusters in sequence, out."

  "Roger, Six," said Pasternak with gloomy enthusiasm. "Lighting Group A . . . now! Lighting Group H."

  The ship rang as though a pipe somewhere in her bowels were hammering. Steam roaring up from the pool smothered the hollow boom of the thrusters themselves. They were running at low output with their nozzles flared to minimize impulse. The Milton was coming alive, but she couldn't yet be said to be straining against gravity.

  Thrusters ionized reaction mass, generally water, and expelled it as plasma, lifting ships through the troposphere to where they could safely switch to their High Drive motors. Ships could lift from—and land on—dry ground, but their exhausts scarred the surface and hurled chunks out like a fragmentation bomb.

  If the thrusters hit a harmonic, they could set up a standing wave between the hull and an unyielding surface. A captain who reacted quickly could still land by changing the frequency or nozzle angle, but an inexperienced or ham-handed officer might flip his ship on its side in a heartbeat.

  "Lighting Group B," Pasternak reported. The pattern of the cruiser's minute rocking changed, though not in a fashion that Daniel could've identified if he hadn't known what it was. "Lighting Group G."

  Most large warships grouped their thrusters. The Milton's thirty-two nozzles were controlled in lettered quartets, starting from the starboard bow. Daniel knew that even with sufficient technicians in the Power Room to keep track of thirty-two separate thrusters, coordination would've been impossible. He missed the feeling of flexibility that the Sissie's individual throttles had given him, though he supposed—

  He grinned.

  —if he pretended that the cruiser had eight thrusters instead of eight sets of thrusters, it was the same thing.

  "Lighting Group C, lighting Group F," Pasternak said. The ship trembled again.

  The band across the bottom of Daniel's display was set to a 360-degree real-time panorama of the Milton's surroundings. Though the pickup lenses were on the upper hull, high above the surface of the pool, a blanket of steam and sparkling ions hid the view. Occasionally they gave a glimpse of the roof of the shop building.

  Even at minimal thrust, the Milton was starting to feel greasy. The thunder of steam and plasma would've made it impossible to hold a conversation on the bridge without the intercom and the sound-canceling field of each console.

  "Lighting Group D, Lighting Group E," Pasternak said. "All thrusters lighted. All numbers are within parameters. Six, we're green to go. Five out."

  Daniel checked his schematic, not because he doubted the Chief Engineer but because he always checked his schematic. Each group was in the ninety-fifth percentile for flow, throttle response, and output. Furthermore, all four thrusters within each group were within two percent of their three fellows, which could be even more important.

  The pool was a roiling hell-storm as the sea rushed through a canal to replace the steam vaporized by the thrusters. In the cruiser's stern, two pumps sucked water up 40-inch tubes, continuing to top off the tanks of reaction mass till the very instant she lifted from Cinnabar.

  The Milton was bucking like a skiff in a riptide. It was time.

  "Ship, this is Six," Daniel said, raising the flow to the thrusters with the collective throttle. "Prepare to lift. I say again, prepare to lift."

  Often mass flow and nozzle aperture were handled by two officers on liftoff. At another time, Daniel might hand one or both tasks off to subordinates—but not now.

  With the flow at eighty percent, he smoothly rotated the vernier which caused the petals of the thruster nozzles to iris down, focusing the plasma which until then had been dissipated as widely as possible. The cruiser throbbed with intention.

  Thrust balanced gravity, then overcame it. The great ship surged upward on a pillow of steam and plasma.

  "We have liftoff!" cried the speakers in the voice of Lieutenant Robinson.

  The RCS Milton was headed to the stars on her first voyage under Cinnabar colors.

  CHAPTER 6

  En route to Paton

  Midshipman Else, holding the brass rod to her helmet with one hand, pointed the other gauntlet toward the blur of iridescence just to port of the A Ring topmast yard. Daniel stooped slightly while following the line of her arm with his eyes so that he kept his helmet in contact with the rod's other end.

  "C-6-7-9," Else said, using the four-digit terminator which the computer had assigned to that particular bubble universe. "C-6-7-3, then D-4-9-1 on this reach, sir. Is that right?"

  Her voice sounded thin but remarkably clear through the communications baton. On the hull of a starship in the Matrix, the only competing sounds were your own breath and your heartbeat.

  "I think you'll find that the computer solution will route us through 6-7-6, then 6-7-5 and into D Sector," Daniel said. He was amazed that Else—on her first real voyage out of the Academy—had correctly identified the visible stages of the Millie's course. "Why did you choose the route you did?"

  The batons were thirty-six-inch lengths of thin tubing, filled with a polymer gel that vibrated the way the column of air did in a stethoscope. An electronic signal, even a quarter-watt radio or the magnetic field generated by a charged wire, would distort the sail fabric. That in turn meant that the Casimir radiation which impinged on those sails would drive the ship in some u
ncertain—unguessable—direction through the Matrix.

  No electrical communication device was allowed on the hull of an RCN vessel, except by permission of both the signals officer and the captain, and that only in sidereal space. The RCN operated on the principle that if you eliminated all possible risks of mistake, then you reduced—not eliminated—mistakes.

  That didn't matter to the riggers who spent their watches on the hull and communicated with hand signals when they needed to. Experienced men didn't need to speak any more often than the elements of a gear train did. A rigger who needed regular instruction got it at the end of a bosun's starter of braided copper wire, heavy enough to sting even through the stiff fabric of a hard suit.

  The ordinary way to carry on a spoken conversation was by touching helmets. On most ships the need to do that was so rare as not to be considered. The astrogation computer determined the course and the sail plan which would best achieve it, the hydromechanical winches adjusted the rig, and the riggers corrected the inevitable malfunctions in the automatic systems.