In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  R11 signalled the Wartburg to wait while a path through the defense array was cleared. Adele had hoped that the tender would simply switch off the mines for the time required for the transport to pass through the swept area. That would be easier for the tender's crew, quicker for all concerned, and under ordinary circumstances would be perfectly safe.

  Ordinary circumstances didn't include an RCN cruiser waiting to swoop down on the base like an avenging angel. Well, after seeing the array's high state of readiness, Adele hadn't expected good news on the procedures either.

  The mines were small thermonuclear weapons. In the instant of dissolution they generated a magnetic lens which channeled the blast in much the way that a plasma cannon did the explosion of its smaller charge. Each mine had a propulsion system, here a simple reaction motor, which allowed it to shift orbit as required by circumstances.

  The R11 sent coded signals to create a dynamic gap in the array, allowing the transport to pass through on a precisely calculated course. If they did this often—and they probably did—the mines would have to be refueled regularly, but the practice eliminated the risk that an interloper would slip in while the array was shut down.

  Adele smiled as her equipment translated the tender's signals and passed them through to the astrogation computer for processing. She had to find or deduce the keys to 218 separate mines rather than that of the single signal which would shut down the array. If she made a mistake, she and everyone else aboard the Milton would die before they knew it.

  If they didn't die, Adele would ask to see the Alliance Defense Systems Officer after Bolton had been conquered. If that officer was alive, she supposed she'd shake his or her hand.

  But it would be perfectly all right with Adele Mundy if that careful bastard had died in the fighting.

  Above Bolton

  "Extracting in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," said Daniel, his right index and middle fingers poised over the virtual execute button. A light-hour's hop was short, even by the standards of merchant vessels with doubtful astrogators and crews too small to handle a suit of sails capable of real subtlety.

  Even so, it concentrated the mind to maneuver toward a planetary defense array which would infallibly destroy a ship that extracted too close to it. "Extracting—now!" Daniel said and hammered the button.

  The flip-flop from the Matrix to sidereal space was never pleasant and not infrequently nauseating. Experience didn't help: Daniel knew spacers with forty years experience who regularly emptied their stomachs of bile, though they'd learned long since not to eat before an extraction.

  Which left the question of why they hadn't found another line of work. Well, no spacer found that question easy to answer, as Daniel knew from looking into his own heart. Spacefaring was either in the blood or it wasn't, but those who'd caught the infection wasn't cured simply because they couldn't keep their breakfast down.

  In the present case, extraction meant that Daniel felt a red-hot knife flay his skin away in strips, starting at his scalp and working down. It can't have gone on for more than a second or so. His display flickered as each color switched to its complement, then switched back as the transition became complete.

  Instead of a pearly glow, the main screen was a Plot-Position Indicator centered on the Milton herself. Daniel had brought the ship out within three thousand miles of the planned extraction point, excellent work if he did say—well, think—so himself.

  "PDA Control, this is AFS Luetzow, requesting permission to land at St. James Harbor with dispatches from General Command," said Midshipman Cory. "Over."

  The boy's Florentine accent would pass for that of half a dozen Alliance worlds, especially through a single-sideband transmission. Daniel thought Cory's voice was a little higher than usual, but if anything he was drawling his words rather than rattling them out nervously.

  Adele usually oversaw the work of her subordinates, especially when they were handling commo. This afternoon—ship's time; it was six in the morning at St. James Harbor—she was wholly focused on manipulating the mines of the defense array. The wands danced in her hands, and a stranger would have taken her set expression as one of cold fury.

  It was really just the resting state of her face. Daniel was uncomfortably aware that his friend's resting state might really be cold fury, however.

  Daniel had left the bridge hatch open even though he expected the Milton to go into action shortly. There'd be plenty of time to seal the ship's internal divisions, unless they were caught in the pulse of a mine; and if that happened, the internal divisions would vaporize along with the hull and its whole contents.

  The A Level corridor and its bow rotunda were crammed with suited riggers; some had even locked down their helmets. If the cruiser had to reinsert into the Matrix, Woetjans wanted both watches on the hull as soon as possible to adjust the sails. That would be an emergency and no mistake.

  They had to remain aboard for now, though, because the sidescatter of the 8-inch cannon would be lethal to personnel anywhere forward of the muzzles. The bosun was willing to take the risk—and she'd have been there with her people, of course—but Daniel was not.

  "Luetzow, this is Bolton Defense," said the female handling the R11's signals said. "Transmit your identification codes, over."

  The signalman probably wanted to ask what the oddball cruiser was doing in the Montserrat Stars, but even a rating on a mine tender knew that such a vessel probably carried an admiral or a high-ranking political delegation. Smart people kept a low profile when folks of that sort showed up unexpectedly.

  The Milton, originally Scheer, had been the attempt of Alliance designers to get battleship performance out of a heavy cruiser hull. Like other something-for-nothing schemes, it was unsuccessful; only three ships had been built in the class. The other two were still in Fleet service, however, and it was no more unlikely that one of them would be arriving on Bolton than that it would be anywhere else.

  "Transmitting codes, over," said Cory. He'd been trying manfully to learn to manipulate control wands the way Adele did, but he was using a virtual keyboard now since the situation didn't permit any errors. His index finger stabbed, sending the queued message.

  Daniel nudged the Port 1 High Drive motor. The brief impulse would start the cruiser swinging to starboard with the slow inevitability of planetary precession. Three seconds after the initial touch on the throttle, he stroked an identical burp from Port 8. That would—if he'd judged correctly—cancel the swing without reversing the change in the vessel's attitude.

  "Bloody hell, Luetzow!" the mine tender said. "You've sent last week's codes! Send the current codes now, over."

  Cory had sent the most recent codes he had—those in use when Adele entered the Merkur's log on Paton. The code generator was separate on a Fleet—or RCN—warship, so not even she and the software from her other employer could predict the regular changes from past examples.

  "Wait one, Bolton," Cory said. "I'm checking to see what's the matter. Just bloody wait, over!"

  He sounded agitated, which was perfectly appropriate for a signals officer who's been told that he's transmitted the wrong information. It was so appropriate, though, and Cory's face appeared so calm by contrast, that Daniel suspected that the nervousness was acting. The boy had certainly blossomed under Adele's tutelage.

  The Wartburg was braking to enter the atmosphere; she'd be floating in a berth in St. James Harbor before long. I wonder if Robinson would be able to pull it off without the Milton? Probably not, but Daniel hoped that Robinson and the Brotherhood would at least try. It'd be nice to go out on a success, even if he weren't alive to know it.

  "Luetzow, what the bloody hell is going on?" R11 demanded. This time the voice was male and sounded to be on the edge of panic. The vessel's captain—on a net tender, that would be a junior lieutenant—had taken over from his signalman, though she was probably older and more experienced. "Either send the right codes or withdraw from the system until you can, over!"

&n
bsp; "Bolton, this is Luetzow!" Cory said. "Transmitting, transmitting! These are the only codes the bitch will give us! By all the Gods, man, let us land or at least send a systems specialist up from the base to work on this poxy bitch, over!"

  Normally a vessel's plasma cannon—and even merchant ships were armed if they expected to venture off the best-patrolled trade routes—were locked fore-and-aft unless they had been cleared for action. The Milton's guns were still at zero elevation, but Sun had rotated the turrets in opposition while the ship was still in the Matrix. The dorsal guns pointed at 30 degrees to the forward axis, while the ventral weapons were at 210 degrees.

  "Luetzow, you are not cleared!" Z11 said. "Get out of the system at once! You do not have the right codes, you are not cleared to land! Get out! Over!"

  "Daniel," said Adele, cool as spring water over a two-way link, "the array is opening. You may proceed on your planned course in thirty seconds."

  As she spoke, a countdown clock—starting at 27 seconds—appeared in the lower right corner of Daniel's display. He checked to be sure that the propulsion commands were queued to go. They were, of course, just as they had been before the cruiser extracted from the Matrix.

  Normally the mine tender would send a course through the array to the vessel wanting to land. It was necessary to work backward this time: Daniel had designed the entry course and Adele was, with the very powerful support of the Milton's astrogation computer, maneuvering the mines away from it.

  "Daniel, they've noticed the mines moving," Adele said with what for her was considerable urgency. "They're preparing to command detonate one of them in our direction. I don't know if I—"

  "Sun!" Daniel said over the command push. "Take out the tender now, over!"

  Daniel realized he was expecting the crash of the dorsal 8-inch guns; instead he heard the deep groan of the elevation screw. He'd tried to align the cruiser so that the forward guns, cocked to clear the dorsal antennas, would bear by apparent accident. He hadn't been quite successful, so the gunner had to make an adjustment before he could fire.

  The charged particles spewed from a mine explosion were dangerous even to a heavy cruiser at many times the range at which it would ordinarily detonate. The blast might not destroy the vessel, but it would shred rigging, weld the joints of yards and antennas, and strip away external communications gear. If the operator aboard R11 was able to command detonate one of the mines before Sun—

  Dorsal Right fired. For a heartbeat Daniel thought the CLANG! was a mine destroying the Milton; then Dorsal Left fired also. He was alive, and the Milton had a clear path to her goal.

  Daniel grinned. One thing about concentrating on what the enemy may do is that it prevents you from worrying about whether your own people were doing their jobs. In the present case, Sun certainly had been.

  "Cease fire!" Daniel ordered. "Ship, prepare for course change. Changing course . . . now!"

  The High Drive motors resumed their grating snarl. Daniel had gimballed them to send the cruiser through the minefield instead of skirting it as before.

  Both plasma bolts struck the mine tender squarely, though the second had really just roiled the expanding gas ball created by the first. Most of the vapor was hull metal, but some was the mortal remains of thirty-odd Alliance spacers who'd been doing their jobs rather well up to the instant of their deaths. Which had at least been instantaneous.

  "Woetjans, get the rigging in soonest so that we can land," Daniel ordered, using the general channel that fed through the PA system as well as to all commo helmets. "The Brotherhood of Amorgos is on the surface by now. The RCN can't let pongoes fight the battle all by themselves, can we? Six out!"

  "Cinnabar forever!" spacers shouted. Probably every spacer on the Milton, including the considerable number who weren't Cinnabar citizens.

  "Cinnabar forever!" Daniel shouted. Every spacer on the Milton . . .

  CHAPTER 18

  Above Bolton

  The bow dorsal airlocks opened as Adele found the electronic keys to the substation at Bahnson Peak, on Bolton's less-inhabited western continent. She wouldn't have noticed that any more than she did the rest of the cruiser's chaotic activities, except that Woetjans was bellowing, "Out out out, line up in the bloody corridor and count off now, you bloody turtles, now!"

  Watch commanders always counted their riggers before landing, making sure that nobody'd gotten tangled in a cable where they'd hang till the violence of reentry whipped them to a pulp and tossed the corpse away. This was a landing with the added urgency of a ship rushing into battle. When the bosun meant to be heard, you heard her no matter how busy you were.

  The Milton's snarling High Drive braked her into orbit, and Adele was awash in data. Her first task wasn't the information, however, but to keep the information flow open when the cruiser's descending course took her across the planet from St. James Harbor.

  Bolton had a very sophisticated communications system, as was to be expected on a world that had been an Alliance regional headquarters for two generations. Nobody on the ground had thought to shut down the communications satellites, but they might do so. Adele was creating a cable pathway as backup.

  It was possible the Alliance officials didn't realize how vulnerable their satellite communications were. More likely, though, they had other things on their mind at present. The fighting on the ground wasn't Adele's job, but she was using real-time imagery of St. James Harbor as the background to the columns of numbers which she manipulated to take over the landlines.

  The harbor was a natural embayment on the coast of East Continent. The jaws of the land were more than half a mile apart, but they were extended by artificial moles whose ends interleaved. There was a passage for surface ships at right angles to the harbor's axis.

  In addition to the planetary defense array, the harbor had a concrete-walled missile emplacement at the base of each mole. In an atmosphere, an anti-starship missile greatly outranged a warship's plasma cannon. No vessel could hope to land in the teeth of those batteries.

  A bubble of orange flame licked the face of the southern missile pit. Adele had set the imagery to highlight motion, so a white caret traced a speck wobbling several hundred yards before splashing into the sea: one of the armored leaves of the gate into the site. The current magnification couldn't pick out individual Brotherhood soldiers, but their actions identified them clearly.

  Relays flopped in the Bahnson Peak Substation. Adele didn't really know where the communications node was: all she had was a schematic with names which might be outdated or might not have had real geographical meaning in the first place.

  In one sense the answer mattered, because she wanted to know all there was about everything with which she came in contact. But for now Adele Mundy had complete control of Bolton's electronic communications systems. That would do.

  "Six, all watches reporting," Woetjans said over the command net. "All rigging is stowed for landing and all personnel are off the hull, over!"

  The southern margin of St. James Harbor was a military reservation surrounded by a fence with guard towers. Most of the latter were unmanned now, as generally according to the roster in Command Headquarters. Ranks of brick barracks capable of holding ten thousand troops in total marched along the western edge of the perimeter. On the other side of the fence were civilian subdivisions which had expanded to enclose the reservation.

  Barracks began to disintegrate in what looked like rusty smoke. Adele knew from experience that she was seeing the dust of bricks pulverized by bursts from automatic impellers.

  Great rips appeared in the roofs of civilian houses beyond; the swimming pools in their back yards scattered light as they danced in the rain of debris. Half-ounce osmium slugs accelerated by the phased coils of the impellers' barrels kept going a long distance after they'd shattered walls, and they carried along a great deal of what they'd destroyed.

  Adele began searching for a path into the northern missile pit. It was possible to isolate batteries so that
they couldn't be controlled by anyone outside the emplacement, but that meant leaving defense to a junior officer at the site. More often they were under control of director, generally in the Combat Operations Center.

  She couldn't find a connection here, though. That might mean there wasn't one, but equally it might be a closed circuit which she couldn't control without being physically present. The battery shouldn't launch on a starship which simply happened to be landing, but who knew what would happen in the middle of a firefight?

  "Ship, we're going in," Daniel said over the general channel, competing with the increased roar from the High Drive motors. "Keep her closed up till I tell you. Don't worry, Millies, I'll turn you loose! Six out."

  Adele's imagery took on a specious sharpness: the actual signals had degraded, so her computer was enhancing them to a clarity which the real thing never had.

  There had to be a way to control the missile pit! She'd switched off the sensor antennas feeding it, but a crew which knew what it was doing could launch using optical sights. A heavy cruiser hovering to provide fire support made a very big target. There had to—