In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  The ships rising from the surface might well have lifted with partial crews. If the missing personnel included the signals officer and code clerks, Adele wanted to be sure that her orders were nonetheless understood. They might be her last words, after all.

  "You will carry the attack to the enemy with all available means," Adele said. "Under no circumstances will you break off the engagement until the enemy base and all Alliance vessels in the system have surrendered or been destroyed. Do you copy, over?"

  "Chatsworth, this is Commodore Battenberg," replied a harsh female voice. She was transmitting from the first ship to lift. "We copy you. I think I speak for the entire New Harmony Squadron when I say that I've never received an order which will give me greater pleasure to execute. Cacique Six out."

  Several additional ships were laboring up from Cacique now. Judging from the example of the first six, Adele estimated that it would be at least half an hour before the newcomers could possibly join the action.

  "Sir!" said Lieutenant Cory on the command channel. "Two transports are lifting from the moon base! I suggest we send destroyers to capture the prizes, over."

  Adele thought of what Daniel would say, then quirked a smile. She didn't need Daniel's advice on the matter: their instincts were the same.

  "No, Cory," she said. "Nothing else matters until we've eliminated all the enemy warships. Out."

  During their conversation, Forbes had clung to the communications console and shouted into Adele's ear to be heard. No one else on the Milton's bridge had the faintest notion that the Plenipotentiary had raised Signals Officer Mundy to the brevet rank of admiral.

  Nonetheless, the Milton's officers accepted her orders as though she had the right to issue them. Adele suspected that was because they viewed her as Daniel's friend rather than anything she'd earned in her own right . . . though earning Daniel's friendship wasn't a small matter, when she came to think of it.

  Adele's smile was minuscule, but it had more warmth in it than she usually displayed. She would much rather be Daniel's friend than be an admiral in her own right.

  The beads on the PPI which indicated the four Alliance cruisers began to fade. The enemy destroyers blurred also as Commander Potts led the Blue element down on them.

  Adele frowned and switched from the console to the much less capable internal display of her personal data unit. There could be a delayed fault in the console from the missile impact. . . .

  The Alliance ships had vanished. Only wreckage and the two disabled battleships remained in the Cacique system.

  "Mistress!" Rene Cazelet said. "They're running! All of them that can get under way are running into the Matrix!"

  "We've won!" shouted Cory. "By the Gods, we've won!"

  Neither youth remembered to sign off properly. Perhaps they'd been infected by a signals officer who tended to be cavalier about such things herself.

  What do I do now? Hand the whole business over to Vesey, I suppose.

  "Mistress, Heimdall is signalling to you, over," said Cory. Communication from the enemy flagship seemed to have brought back his professional demeanor.

  Cory had been handling the ordinary signals traffic, but it continued to run as a text sidebar on Adele's display. Adele found the thread easily: Petersen calling Chatsworth, over. Petersen calling Chatsworth, over. . . .

  "All Anston elements, cease fire," Adele said, taking care of the main priority first. She couldn't be certain that the Alliance commander wanted to surrender, but if he didn't nothing would be lost by delaying the final salvos by a minute or two. "Break, Officer Chazanoff, cease fire. Break. All Cinnabar elements—"

  Cory would be directing the transmission to the destroyers and the ships rising from Cacique, though Adele's real concern was for the cruisers which had been attacking the heavy Alliance vessels.

  "—cease fire by order of Admiral Leary."

  The Alliance didn't provide proper missile targets any more, but Adele knew human beings too well to be sure no one would launch at the crippled battleships. Missileers on most warships had few opportunities to practice their craft. A battleship in freefall and without defensive armament would tempt even what passed in the RCN for a saint.

  "Break," Adele continued. "Petersen, this is Chatsworth. Go ahead, over."

  The Heimdall was sending by tight-beam microwave, but the transmission was badly broken. Damage to the battleship must be more extensive than Adele had assumed from the visuals.

  The vaporized projectiles had wiped everything less refractory than the gun turrets off the Heimdall's port and under sides, but the remainder of the hull appeared normal at a distance. Apparently redeposited steel had plated equipment on that side also and seriously degraded its performance.

  That also explained why the Heimdall was limping along on the power of seven thrusters, inadequate to impart more than a modicum of acceleration to 80,000 tonnes. A thruster nozzle was wide, and even a partial blockage would merely reduce power. If the minuscule throat of a High Drive were plated shut, the explosion which destroyed the motor would be only the start of the problem.

  "Lady Mundy," said Admiral Petersen, his voice breaking despite his painstaking formality. "Fortune has not favored the Alliance of Free Stars today. I ask that you accept the surrender of the forces under my command, over."

  "Admiral . . . ," said Adele. As she spoke, her wands expanded real-time imagery of the Alliance base and both battleships. "When you say 'the forces' do you include your base and any ships there, over?"

  "Yes of course, Lady Mundy," Petersen said. With a flash of miserable anger he went on, "Do you think I don't see they'd be bloody slaughtered if they tried to run? We surrender, over!"

  The transports that had been trying to escape were back on the ground, their thrusters cooling. When the Alliance warships fled, the unarmed vessels must have realized that their situation was hopeless. The base personnel were shooting up flares, white star clusters which burned out almost before they started drifting down in the low gravity.

  "Admiral, I have no authority to do so in my own right," Adele said. "However, my commanding officer, Admiral Daniel Leary, accepts your surrender on behalf of the Republic of Cinnabar. My colleague Commander Potts will coordinate salvage and rescue operations. Chatsworth out."

  She took a deep breath and sank back onto her couch. Hogg and Tovera were carrying Daniel out of the compartment on a cocooned stretcher; there was a Medicomp only fifty feet down the corridor. They hadn't been able to move him until Vesey reduced acceleration and brought the ship under control.

  Adele supposed she needed to give Potts a direct order, though he would have heard the entire exchange already. She would get to that in a moment.

  Adele closed her eyes. Be well, Daniel. The Republic needs you almost as much as I do.

  "He's coming around," said Daniel in a cold female voice.

  "I dunno," Daniel objected in a gruffly male voice. "He still looks pretty bad. I think it's going to be a while."

  "The readouts say he's awakening," Daniel said, her enunciation clipped and precise. "Therefore he's awakening. We don't know whether or not there's been brain damage, but he will awaken."

  Daniel opened his eyes and blinked. Adele and Hogg were watching down at him. They were talking, not me. Cory and an older, angry-looking woman—Senator Forbes, of course—were looking at him also, and Tovera was looking both ways down the corridor.

  Cory looked worried. Why is he wearing lieutenant's pips? But then Daniel remembered he'd promoted the boy himself . . . and when was that, a long time ago?

  "What happened to me?" Daniel said. He tried to lift his torso. Everything around him blurred to gray shadows against a lighter gray background.

  He relaxed. He was hooked to a Medicomp, as he should have guessed; and he would not be trying to get up again for a moment or two.

  "We were hit by a missile," said Adele. "A seat broke loose and the metal frame gave you a nasty crack on the head."

  She paused
, then said in the same flat tone, "If you hadn't recovered, I would have invented a more heroic story. Much as I dislike to lie."

  By the time Daniel managed to stop laughing, it didn't hurt much at all—which was a welcome change from the agony with which he'd started. He sobered, though he was careful to leave a smile on his lips.

  Adele lied expertly when carrying out her duties to the RCN and to her other master. Daniel didn't recall her ever lying about a personal matter, however. Her offer was a monument more impressive than the statue on the Pentacrest which a grieving Republic might well erect to his memory.

  Aloud he said, "What damage did the missile do, besides breaking the seat?"

  "Cory?" said Adele with a curt nod. She was holding her data unit, but she hadn't taken the control wands out of their conformal restraints.

  "Sir!" said Cory. "We've lost everything aft of Frame 260, but the bulkhead there held. Other than that, surprisingly little damage."

  He coughed. "Leaks everywhere from the whipping," he added. "Of course."

  "Of course," Daniel said. He closed his eyes, but that didn't help so he reopened them.

  "Even so the Millie's tighter than a lot of ships that never saw action, sir!" Cory said earnestly. "Ah, there's thirty-three casualties beyond bruises and such. Mostly they were in the aft section—"

  And therefore vaporized.

  "—but there were half a dozen broken bones and—"

  He actually smiled as he nodded.

  "—head injuries. Woetjans says she'll have the outriggers watertight in six hours so we can land. We'll ride low, but there's enough buoyancy. I estimate seventy percent of the rig is serviceable. We've got over half our High Drive motors now, and Pasternak figures he can raise that to eighty percent in a day or two when he's replaced feed lines. And the plasma thrusters, all but the aft eight, they're fine."

  "You haven't asked about the battle, Leary," said Senator Forbes in a rusty voice. "Don't you care?"

  Daniel looked up at her. It wasn't a silly question to a civilian, he supposed.

  "Your Excellency," he said aloud. "At the point I left duty—"

  Hogg guffawed. Adele and Cory smiled; hers cold, his startled. The senator didn't react.

  "—I already knew that we'd won. The fact that I'm alive and the Milton is functional if not healthy means that we've won at lower cost than I'd feared. I'll get to other matters in good time, but first I had to learn our status."

  He tensed to rise. That went well enough, so he began to lever himself up. Hogg put his broad hand beneath Daniel's shoulders to steady and carefully assist, though his frown showed that he didn't approve of the young master's decision.

  "We're still above Cacique," Adele said. "You've only been unconscious for three hours. Captain Battenberg of the Jervis is in operational command. She, ah, was commodore of the ships that escaped from New Harmony, and she appeared to be fully competent."

  "She is indeed," Daniel said. "She commanded one of the destroyer flotillas under Admiral Ozawa, I believe."

  He was puzzled to detect—he thought—a defensive note in Adele's voice, as though the command was something to do with her. Since Battenberg was the senior captain, she naturally took command after the—he grinned—admiral had been incapacitated.

  "Can this ship get to Cinnabar, Leary?" Forbes said. "Or do we have to transfer to another one? I want to get back with this news immediately."

  "Ah, Your Excellency . . . ," Daniel said. He wondered if he were hallucinating. "We've effectively captured the Montserrat Stars. Organizing the cluster will be an enormous job."

  "Yes, it bloody well will," snapped Forbes. "A job for a Senatorial Commission, whole shiploads of bureaucrats, and I shouldn't wonder if it required any number of people from Navy House and the Xenos Barracks as well. For now there's nothing here that Governor Flanagan on Cacique and Captain Battenberg can't handle as well as we could."

  "As you say, Your Excellency," Daniel said. "But I would have expected that you'd want to take charge of the reorganization yourself?"

  "What?" said the senator. "Bury myself here in the boondocks? I don't think so, Leary!"

  She tented her hands and grinned over them. "No, no," she said. "We'll go back to Xenos, where you will make a personal report to the Senate in open session."

  Forbes chuckled. Her expression was almost a parody of delight. "Let's see them keep me out of the cabinet now, when I've recovered the Montserrat Stars," she said. "At the side of the Navy's greatest hero!"

  I will be buggered, Daniel thought. He didn't speak.

  Adele turned to Forbes. There actually was humor in her smile, which made it all the more horrifying.

  "If we're to be the supporting players in your little drama, Senator," she said, "you should learn that the correct terminology is 'the RCN,' not 'the Navy.' But regardless, you can expect us to honorably accomplish the tasks assigned by our political masters."

  EPILOGUE

  Xenos on Cinnabar

  "The Senate has met here occasionally, you know," said Deirdre Leary, looking around the Main Lecture Hall of the Library of Celsus. "I've never been inside myself, though."

  Daniel shrugged and smiled. "History wasn't one of my strong suits, Deirdre," he said. "It's a suitable room for this affair; that's all that matters."

  Though thinking about it, he wasn't sure that Adele would have been in this hall before. She said she'd spent her youth largely in the Library, but to her that meant carrels in the stacks and the offices of individual librarians whom she respected.

  The dais was three steps up from the mosaic floor and behind a knee-high screen of carven stone. Adele stood in the center, wearing Dress Whites with a non-regulation thigh pocket. Today that did not—somewhat to Daniel's surprise—hold her personal data unit.

  Adele looked not so much uncomfortable as absent. She seemed to have shut down emotionally.

  Behind her were the chief dignitaries. On the left end of the line was Admiral Anston; as a concession to his health, he sat on the only chair in the hall. The remaining officials were members of the Senate in full regalia, with Speaker Bailey opposite Anston and Senator Forbes immediately to his right. Her robes had the dark blue stripe of the Defense Ministry.

  Daniel frowned in puzzlement. Unless he was badly mistaken, the remaining senators were leading members of four different—and mutually antagonistic—factions.

  "I, ah, appreciate the way you've handled this for me, Deirdre," he said in his sister's ear. Onlookers who shuffled and chatted before the start of the proceedings raised a curtain of white noise, but he didn't want to be overheard in a chance silence. "When I'd put the request through RCN channels on our return from Diamondia, I didn't expect a problem."

  He looked away, then back to Deirdre. "I wasn't willing to let it pass. Not . . . this."

  "No," said Deirdre. "A Leary can't ignore an obligation to a retainer."

  "I'm not sure," Daniel said, "that Adele would approve of being considered a member of the Leary household."

  The smile remained on his lips, but his mind was on the night when he, Hogg, and the Bantry retainers waited around the manor, armed with anything from hay forks to stocked impellers. His mother and her maids were inside. She'd thought that Daniel should be with her, but Hogg had been firm: "The young master's a good shot. We might need him."

  Daniel Leary had indeed been a good shot, for a seven-year-old. That was the night the Corder Leary crushed the Three Circles Conspiracy. Adele's parents had died then, and during the next few weeks hundreds of their friends and associates had died also during the Proscriptions.

  Adele was on Blythe at the time, so she wouldn't have personal memories of that night. She preferred to get information at second hand, however, from books and records. The Proscriptions were well documented in all their bloody horror.

  Deirdre sniffed. "When has a Leary ever cared about what somebody else thought was right?" she said.

  Daniel chuckled, but that was the truth
. He was a Leary and he would do what was right, regardless of what others thought about it.

  The body of the lecture hall was almost entirely filled with RCN uniforms, though they alternated between officers in Whites and common spacers in liberty suits. Daniel and his sister were in front, and Woetjans was a little farther down the row.

  Deirdre was the only person near the dais who wasn't one of the original Sissies . . . though that was stretching the point slightly for Tovera, standing primly at Deirdre's left with her hands folded on the handle of her attaché case. Rank today was determined by how close a person was to Adele Mundy, and no one was closer than the shipmates from Kostroma whose lives she'd saved and who had in turn saved hers.