In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  "Sir?" said Midshipman Barrett. "What if the other captains, the real captains, object when they learn what happened? I, well . . . Commander Kiesche of the Arcona is bound to feel insulted when he learns that I was pretending to be him."

  Adele's lip curled. Barrett's comment was based on a number of unstated assumptions, not least being that he and Commander Kiesche would survive the coming action. The reality of a space battle was that lives could vanish as quickly and utterly as the specks of light which indicated ships on a Plot-Position Indicator.

  "The answer to your question, Midshipman . . . ," Daniel said. He didn't raise his voice, and his tone was mild. "Is that Commander Kiesche is an RCN officer who accepts and obeys the orders of his superiors. You've raised a more serious question, however."

  Odd, thought the disengaged fragment of Adele's mind. His voice hasn't changed and he's still smiling, but it feels as though the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. His smile doesn't go very deep just now, but most people's smiles don't go very deep.

  "That question being," Daniel continued, "why an RCN officer would be concerned with social niceties instead of carrying out his assigned task? Perhaps you should consider a career as a social secretary instead, Barrett."

  He coughed. "Officer Mundy will now—"

  "Sir!" said Barrett, leaping to his feet. He'd been seated at the gunnery console, which Sun had vacated for this council. "I—"

  Cory and Blantyre sat adjacent to him, at the lead and backup couches of the missile console. Cory grabbed Barrett by the waist belt and slammed him back in his seat; Blantyre leaned closer and snarled, "Sit down and shut up!"

  "Officer Mundy," Daniel said, "please give an overview of the tactical situation."

  "Cacique's inner moon—which they call Inner—lacks an atmosphere," said Adele. She started her display with the planet in the center and tiny Outer, 600,000 miles away, at the edge of the image area. After a moment to establish scale, she shrank the image down to Inner alone. "There's fossil ice at both poles and gravity at a little over an eighth of a standard g. Inner isn't normally inhabited, but it makes a very suitable base for Admiral Petersen's fleet blockading the planet below."

  She was using the cruiser's large-scale astrogation display, placing the holographic imagery in the central area of the bridge. Ordinarily those who wanted to watch on their own consoles could have done so, but Daniel had directed Adele to lock everything but her own system. This was to be a group experience, centered on him.

  "That base is in a crater near the north pole," Adele said, shifting the imagery to what was really a computer's best approximation rather than a real picture. "The four missile batteries are mounted on the plain outside, however, with three reload trailers supporting each, or in one case four."

  The slant image from a light-day out had been pasted onto mapping data from the Sailing Directions, then sharpened by the software. In this case, "sharpening" really meant replacing blurred shadows with stock images of Alliance weaponry and inflatable domes. In the three light-hour data, the north pole was concealed behind Inner's curve; the more distant shot was the best view they would have until minutes before Daniel launched the attack.

  Because he was certainly going to attack.

  "The missile batteries are dug in and on full alert in both views," Adele said. She didn't magnify the imagery again, because it was already a work of fiction. "They use passive optical sensors until they go into launch targeting, but the batteries are linked by microwave repeaters on the crater rim. The signals traffic indicates the batteries' status."

  "Sir?" said Else, seated at the back of the astrogation console. A signals officer wouldn't normally rate "sir," from a midshipman, even though technically the middie didn't have a commission either. "Can you really decipher low-power microwave signals at this distance?"

  "Yes," said Adele, "I can."

  Vesey had rotated the couch of the astrogation console to face the central display. She looked over her shoulder at the midshipman behind her and said, "If Lady Mundy tells you she's reading your mind, Else, you'd best hope that you're not thinking anything that you didn't want her to know."

  "You'll notice that there are twenty-seven civilian vessels in the crater," Adele said as she tightened the focus slightly to concentrate on the interior of the crater instead of the batteries spaced around it. "Ten are prizes from New Harmony. There are seven more prizes in Cacique orbit in addition to the three dedicated minesweepers which have Fleet registrations. Petersen is using prizes as makeshift minesweepers. He loads their holds with crust material broken into coarse gravel and expells it in vectors toward individual mines."

  "Does that work, Officer Mundy?" asked Blantyre. She was probably being a little more formal than she would have been if she and Cory hadn't just reduced Barrett to a quivering jelly.

  "I can't tell," Adele said. "It appears to be dangerous work—there's outbound wreckage which could be a similar freighter which came too close to a mine about forty hours ago. But it may be that Petersen thinks the effort will dispirit the defenders and convince his own personnel that there will be a good result soon. Blockades are surprisingly hard on the morale of the blockading squadron, as I learned from Alliance prisoners taken from the fleet which was besieging Diamondia in the Jewel System."

  "Captain?" said Midshipman Fink. "That was you that freed Diamondia, wasn't it?"

  "It was all over the Academy last year when it happened," said Else.

  "It was all over Cinnabar," murmured Barrett, his crossed hands hiding his lips.

  "It was not me who broke the siege of Diamondia," said Daniel with deliberate harshness. "Many of your present shipmates were with me on the Princess Cecile, the smallest vessel in Admiral James' squadron when he sortied from Diamondia and defeated the Alliance forces with a masterful tactical display."

  He cleared his throat. "But that's not germane to the present discussion. Please continue, Officer Mundy."

  Many thousands of spacers had played a part in Cinnabar's victory in the Jewel System, Adele thought as she switched to imagery of the Alliance dispositions above Cacique. The vessels were dots with six-digit designators on the PPI, but a sidebar gave details on them. No one else had anything like the importance to the result as Captain Daniel Leary, and the ones who came closest were all aboard the Princess Cecile.

  But as Daniel said, that wasn't germane.

  "This is data from our one-light-day view of Cacique," Adele said, switching to the next image. "The red lines are the courses of the Alliance warships visible, with the dotted continuations at either end extrapolated from the sample. Since the sample was of thirty-seven seconds, those extrapolations should be treated with great caution."

  She smiled grimly. Though she used the words, she knew the assembled officers—most of them—wouldn't listen to her. Instead they would treat the dotted lines as real events, just because they could see them. Sometimes she considered not providing information which she knew could be misused, but it would be the next thing to a lie to censor what she told people whom she thought were fools.

  I think most people are fools. Daniel is the only one here who matters, and he won't misuse the information.

  Adele's smile spread a little wider. Anyone watching her would have thought she was pleased. Perhaps she was.

  "The two battleships," she continued, surrounding two of the dots with a white haze, "are the Heimdall and the Helgowelt. They're accompanied by these two heavy cruisers—"

  She highlighted two more dots, this time in pale pink.

  "—and four light cruisers."

  Indicated by gray cross-hatchings.

  "The other seventeen orbits are destroyers, which I'm not going to highlight for this purpose," she said. "You'll have noticed that the plotted courses don't group into any formation."

  The mass of lines looked more like a skein of yarn. This had disturbed Adele initially, since it implied that she was missing some crucial piece of data. If nothing else, traffi
c control required that the Alliance vessels keep to some formation; otherwise, that many ships maneuvering in a relatively small volume of space would create a serious risk of collision.

  "The later imagery demonstrates what was going on in the initial view," Adele said, displaying Cacique from three light-hours out. A single battleship—the Helgowelt—was accompanied by the heavy cruisers City of Hoboken and Kiaouchow and seven destroyers. They formed a loose chevron back from the battleship, sweeping in a plotted circle some 280,000 miles out from the planet. That put them safely clear of the minefield but still in position to crush sorties by the survivors of Admiral Ozawa's fleet.

  "This is consistent," she said, "with Admiral Petersen dividing his heavy ships into three patrol groups, each led by a battleship, and his eighteen destroyers into two groups, of ten and eight ships. A destroyer from the second group is still on the ground. If the patrol shifts overlap by a half hour, one shift would always be fully capable of facing an enemy. By good fortune, our first view of the situation coincided with a shift change."

  That was good luck. The division of the heavy ships into three groups and the destroyers into two would have been obvious from any two time slices—or even from one, since Adele knew the strength of the Alliance squadron. She couldn't have determined when they changed, however, and knowing that allowed Daniel to choose whether he wanted to attack one-third or two-thirds of Admiral Petersen's force.

  "Though there shouldn't be another scheduled patrol change for three or perhaps four hours after what Captain Leary gives me as our expected time of arrival," Adele said, "the remainder of the squadron is under orders to lift within ten minutes if the force on Cacique sorties again. That happened twice in the week before Admiral Petersen sent Commodore Varnell revised orders, directing him to rejoin the main force at Cacique as soon as possible. We won't ourselves have warning of another sortie either."

  The dispatches summoning Captain Varnell hadn't said anything about the aggressive stance which the besieged RCN ships were taking, but the aviso's own log had given full particulars. The first time, four cruisers had lifted but had broken off their ascent when the Alliance patrol put itself in position to launch missiles into the gravity well as soon as the cruisers were out of the shielding atmosphere.

  The second attempt had looked identical. This time when the patrol maneuvered to meet the cruisers, however, eight destroyers had lifted high enough to attack the flotilla of minesweepers. A missile had destroyed a converted transport, and the destroyers' plasma cannon had done significant damage to all three Fleet-registered minesweepers. 4-inch plasma bolts wouldn't have been effective on most warships, but the minesweepers were lightly built.

  Adele examined her notes, then nodded. She'd covered everything she reasonably could. "Captain Leary—" she said.

  It struck her that she ought to be facing Daniel instead of looking at the tiny image of his face inset onto her display. Turning, coldly furious with herself for forgetting the human courtesies which, like clothing, were absolutely necessary for those who lived and worked in civilized societies, Adele resumed, "Captain Leary, I have no further information which I think has immediate bearing on the situation."

  "Before I outline my plans," Daniel said, "are there any questions about what you've just heard?"

  "Sir?" said Barrett. Adele noted that almost all the interjections came from the new midshipmen, not the officers who'd served with Daniel in the past. "We're going to outnumber the Alliance, then? The ships that're up, I mean."

  "That's correct," said Daniel. "If our luck isn't bad, and if we get in and out quickly. More important, we'll arrive ready to launch, while the Helgowelt Squadron will identify us as the reinforcements which they expected."

  He looked around the circle of his subordinates. In a pointedly challenging voice he said, "Are there further questions?"

  And a heartbeat later, "Since there aren't, this—"

  Adele projected the Helgowelt leading its wedge of companions over Cacique, roughly opposite the calculated position of Inner.

  "—is where I expect the Alliance duty squadron to be when we extract," Daniel continued. "We'll be on a reciprocal course, roughly ten thousand miles distant from them and well clear of the planetary defense array. Our launch tubes will be open but we'll keep our gun turrets in their travel positions, aligned with the axes of the ships. Alliance observers would notice the position of the turrets immediately, but the fact the missile tubes are unshuttered is likely to pass as a shadow effect until we launch."

  The other officers watched in silence. Cory and Else had personal data units out and were making notations. Adele didn't watch over their electronic shoulders—she had enough on her plate—but she recorded the transactions to view later.

  Daniel might not be pleased that his subordinates were circumventing his intention if not disobeying his orders . . . but Adele would have done the same herself, and Cory and his friend Else were probably modeling their actions on what Officer Mundy would have done. If necessary Adele would say a word for the boy—for both officers; but Daniel could make the same analysis, so that probably wouldn't be necessary.

  "The squadron will extract together above Cacique," Daniel resumed. "The Helgowelt and her heavy cruisers will expect to be on duty for the next three hours, and the destroyers with them will have six hours to go before they're replaced. Neither they nor the off-duty vessels should be in a particularly high state of readiness."

  He paused and nodded. "Yes, Vesey?" he said.

  "Sir," said Vesey, making an effort to speak loudly enough to be heard. "The Alliance squadron will assume the Friedrich is the flagship. Unless you want Captain Pimental to handle communications between squadrons before we unmask, it might be better for the Milton to extract a few minutes early."

  Adele called up a crew list for the Friedrich, though she didn't need it. Ordinarily on a battleship—or for that matter, on a cruiser—significant communications were handled by a commissioned officer, with the signals officer dealing with only the mechanics of the business. Adele didn't know any of the Friedrich's officers well enough to judge whether they could handle the necessary deception, but she was quite certain that Signals Officer Snooks himself could not.

  "I decided against that," Daniel said, nodding twice in approval, "because I don't want them focusing on us immediately. We'll be claiming to be the Luetzow, but our antennas include provision for t'top-gallants, though we won't be flying them, and the turrets are ovoids instead of being true ovals like the Alliance ones they replaced."

  He chuckled. "It's one thing to fool an ensign on a mine tender," he said. "It's another to have the watch officers of an entire battle squadron staring at us. If we're part of the squadron that they're expecting, I think we'll get away with it for the short length of time we need. We—and by that I mean Officer Mundy—"

  Daniel nodded toward her. She dipped her head slightly, but she didn't turn to acknowledge the others. She had her duties, and they didn't include social niceties.

  "—will announce that we're Admiral Hill, sent to supersede Admiral Petersen who's being recalled to Pleasaunce with immediate effect."

  Cory barked a laugh, then smothered his mouth with his left hand.

  Daniel grinned at him. "Yes," he said, "I believe that will give Petersen a great deal to think about besides getting his forces in order to engage the RCN. And for that matter, his senior captains are likely to be thinking about their careers rather than their immediate duties also."

  Adele smiled coldly and threw onto the display a sidebar which listed general-grade officers in the Alliance Fleet and Army whose careers had been cut short by prison or execution under Guarantor Porra. Some of them had failed miserably in their duty, but half a dozen of the victims had been political. That included General Wayne Sumter, governor of Rickett's Hope, who'd put down a rebellion almost solely by his own charismatic leadership.

  Navy House was riddled with politics and the Navy Board was certainly cap
able of acting whimsically . . . but losing favor in the Republic meant forced retirement rather than being shot in the back of the neck. Except in circumstances as extreme as the Three Circles Conspiracy, of course, and the RCN had by and large remained aloof from that. Guarantor Porra's brutal vagaries had various bad effects on his military, though what was about to happen at Cacique wasn't one of the more easily predictable of those effects.

  On cue, Adele projected Force Anston, the code name Daniel had given his ships, onto the display with the Helgowelt Squadron. Anston was in a similar forward-pointing chevron but on a reciprocal course, ten thousand miles from the Alliance formation and closing.

  "While I hope we'll come out in good order after a one-light-hour hop . . . ," Daniel said, "we all know that things can go wrong. That would be true even with familiar ships which had worked up together properly."

  Adele began running various alternative sequences which Daniel had prepared. The chevron became a ragged globe, a greatly expanded globe, and finally a scatter from which a number of the vessels were missing.