What Distant Deeps-ARC

by David Drake

  Sun was beaming. Adele let her data unit continue to mine information—she had found the claimed inventories of the twenty-seven ships which had landed at the Farm since its purchase by "Commissioner Brassey". Instead of turning her head, she expanded the real-time image of what was going on in the main hall.

  "All right, Six!" the gunner said exuberantly. "This is a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Captain Farouk here—"

  He jerked his thumb toward the Palmyrene who'd been escorting him. Farouk, young and noticeably sharper than his fellows—even though they all wore the same loose work clothes—flushed with pleasure.

  "—went to the Sector Academy on Knollys—"

  Knollys was Cinnabar's administrative and naval headquarters for the Thirty Suns, the region closest to the Qaboosh which one could describe as "developed" or "civilized," depending on your frame of reference.

  "—and they're using an RCN gunnery console for the director. Okay, it's older than any of us here—"

  The console had been built on Cinnabar fifty-seven standard years before and had been partially gutted, though Sun probably didn't know that.

  "—but it'll handle ground-to-orbit missiles with no trouble. I wouldn't worry one bit about the missiles on director control."

  Adele always worried about deadly weapons which someone else might be pointing at her, because she—based on experience—doubted the competence and judgment of all but a few of the people she had met over the years. With that general proviso accepted, she agreed with the gunner's assessment.

  Colonel Nasrullah wiped his forehead with a sleeve. "All right," he said, "all right. You will bring the troops here and all is well. There is no need to inform the Autocrator of our visit, that is so?"

  "Not so fast, fellow!" Sun said. "Don't get ahead of yourself."

  He was obviously relishing he opportunity to lord it over a foreign officer. His terminology would probably have been "stick it to a jumped-up wog," however.

  "Sir," he continued to Daniel, "they got individual controls on each battery and a two-man crew. Farouk took me around to three of them, but the fourth was way the hell out and anyway, I didn't need to see it after I'd seen the others."

  He took a deep breath and made a theatrical gesture back the way he'd come. Farouk looked worried; Nasrullah got to his feet and snatched up half the hat that he'd torn.

  "Sir," Sun said forcefully, "those site crews, I wouldn't trust them to pour piss out of a boot! Not that they'd bother to. You know what they're doing, sir? They're crapping right there in the battery pits, and from the number of empty wine bottles all around they're mostly drunk besides."

  "That's not true!" said Farouk. "Not nearly so much do we drink!"

  "You're a bloody liar!" Nasrullah bellowed. He stepped toward Sun and cocked his fist.

  Adele shifted on the stool for the first time. She'd set down the wand in her left hand. She sensed Tovera moving behind her.

  Daniel caught Nasrullah's wrist. The Palmyrene tried to jerk loose—but couldn't.

  "Careful, Colonel," Daniel drawled. His voice perfectly mimicked that of a well-born twit to anyone familiar with Cinnabar accents. "You wouldn't want your clumsiness to be mistaken for an attack on one of my officers, would you?"

  "He's a liar," Nasrullah repeated, but this time he muttered it as he stepped back.

  "And it's not a problem anyway," Daniel said in a cheerful tone. "Mundy, lock the batteries onto director control, if you'll be so good. That takes care of the matter."

  "Yes," said Adele, picking up the wand again. She had already deleted the firing command from both the director and individual instruction sets. All she was doing now was preventing the battery crews from slewing the missiles.

  "Wait," said Nasrullah. "Can't you let us use them against surface targets? The director can't observe all the ground that the individual batteries can."

  Of course I could, Adele thought. Aloud she said, "No, that's impossible."

  It amused her—grimly—to realize that she felt more uncomfortable about lying to the man than she would have been if she'd shot him in the head. On the other hand, his face wasn't likely to reappear at 3 am, muttering, "You lied to me."

  "Very good, Mundy," Daniel said. "When you're ready, we can return to Calvary and lift to meet the convoy."

  "I'm ready," said Adele, putting away the data unit before she got to her feet. She joined Daniel and they strode, side by side, out the front door. Tovera and Sun followed.

  "And we can join the convoy," she said very quietly to Daniel as they arrived at the aircar. "Because I now have its course and its expected time of arrival on Zenobia."

  CHAPTER 19: The Matrix, between Zenobia and Palmyra

  Daniel lived with enthusiasm and liked most of what life had brought him. What he felt on the hull of a ship in the Matrix was on an even higher plane than sex or a perfect piece of ship handling, however. It was—

  Well, Daniel believed in the gods—of course. One just did; and the fact that he was pretty sure that Adele did not—it wasn't a matter they discussed, of course—was more disturbing to him than if she occasionally turned green and grew horns. He wasn't what anyone would call a religious man, however, and he shared the normal RCN disquiet about the occasional captain who really was a temple-haunting zealot.

  But when he stood here on the hull, watching the infinity of separate universes dusted across his field of view, he truly felt that there were gods. And in the back of his mind was a thought that he had never spoken: that any human who saw and felt what Daniel Leary did in this moment was a god.

  But that wasn't accomplishing the mission nor train Cory either one. We can hold a prayer service later, he thought with a rueful grin, though he half suspected that the lieutenant would join him if he suggested it.

  Daniel put the communications rod to the waiting Cory's helmet and pointed with his left arm. "Follow the line R386, R377, P915. Got that?"

  Cory lifted his own left arm; he had reached around his helmet to hold the rod with his right hand, allowing him to mimic Daniel's gesture. After a moment that proved he wasn't just chattering, he said, "Yes, I have it."

  "Now, do you see the distortion across the first two?"

  The bubble universes which Daniel had described by their four terminal digits were blotches of yellow-green in a fainter wash of the same color. An Academy scientist had told Daniel that the colors and relative brightness were artifacts of the viewer's mind; they were tricks his consciousness played on itself to impose order on what was really chaos.

  And perhaps that was true, but Uncle Stacey had taught his nephew to see those variations, and Daniel in turn had taught others. Not, he had to admit, all others: apparently to Adele, "glowing chaos" was a sufficient description of what she saw from the hull.

  But what Daniel saw was real enough to refine his astrogation beyond what was possible for those who had only the Academy's training. And in the present instance, it had permitted him to find the track of what he hoped was the Palmyrene convoy.

  "Yes, sir," said Cory. "I do."

  "The disruption is someone moving through the Matrix," Daniel said, "and on the same course as we are."

  He lowered his arm, but it was a moment before Cory mirrored the movement. He was desperately eager to succeed. The thing that amazed Daniel was that Cory was succeeding, to a degree that very few astrogators could equal.

  "Being on the correct course doesn't prove that they're the convoy we're looking for," Daniel said, "but it isn't unlikely. There's very little direct traffic between Palmyra and Zenobia."

  They stood just astern of one of the hydro-mechanical semaphores by which the bridge transmitted orders to the hull when the ship was in the Matrix. Now the six arms clacked upright in an attention signal; then four vanished in line with the support pillar and the remaining two flared to starboard, informing the rigging crew of the new sail plan.

  A moment later the port and starboard antennas shook out their topgallants
in a coordinated shudder. When Daniel was seven, Uncle Stacey had shown him the Matrix for the first time, from the hull of a freighter being rerigged by Bergen and Associates.

  Uncle Stacey could tell what the masts and yards were doing simply from the vibration through the soles of his magnetic boots. That had seemed like magic to the young Daniel . . . and maybe it was. But it was second nature to him as well by now.

  "Now, what I think . . . ," Daniel said. "Is that the track is too diffuse to be that of a single ship. But I can't swear to that. I may be inventing the, the blurriness, because that's what I want it to be."

  A Palmyrene cutter captain would know for sure, he thought. The Palmyrenes might be barbarians—blazes, they were barbarians!—but they were spacers also, like none in Daniel's previous acquaintance.

  "Yessir," said Cory, though if Daniel read his tone correctly through the vibrating brass rod, the lieutenant wasn't really agreeing. "But sir? I don't think you're wrong."

  Daniel frowned, though his companion couldn't see the expression since they stood side by side. He expected a great deal from his officers—but he didn't expect flattery, and he wouldn't have it.

  "Sir," Cory continued, "My dad paves roads. It's what he's done all his life."

  "I'd been told that, yes," said Daniel guardedly. According to Adele, Cory's father was the largest paving contractor on Florentine. That made the boy's decision to join the RCN rather than, say, getting a suite in Xenos and chasing women, to be both puzzling and honorable.

  "Dad can look at a stretch of concrete once it's had a little while to wear and tell you to a cupful how much cement was in the batch."

  Daniel was still frowning. He pursed his lips, then said, "All right, I accept your word on that."

  "And that's you out here in the Matrix, sir," Cory said earnestly. "I've watched you, believe me I have, ever since I was assigned to the Hermes when you were First Lieutenant. And I've never known you to be wrong about the Matrix. Maybe you can't say how you know, and maybe you don't even know how yourself—but you do know. Sir."

  Daniel thought for a moment. At last he said, "Cory, I appreciate your confidence, but I think we'll change the subject."

  He coughed and continued, "We won't know for certain whether we're on the convoy's track until it drops into normal space and we can join it. Or them, whatever we're following. It would be quite possible to make the run from Palmyra to Zenobia in one stage, but I don't expect freighters that're saving on the pay bill by sailing short-crewed to do that. Especially not in convoy. But—"

  "Sir, the track stops in P915," Cory interrupted, and a bloody good thing he had. "They've extracted into normal space."

  Daniel snapped, "Good man, Cory!" He thrust the communication rod back into its belt sheath, then he lifted the cover from the head of the semaphore pillar, exposing the keyboard. There had to be a way to send messages from the hull to the ship's interior, but Daniel didn't recall having seen the apparatus used more than a half dozen times in his RCN career.

  Cory watched in awe as Daniel hammered the pad with his gauntleted fingers. The keys were stiff, as there couldn't be any boost for the strokes for the same reason radios couldn't be used on the hull: an electrical discharge would be trapped by the sails and induce oscillations from the intended course.

  That didn't matter. Daniel always pounded when he typed. The fascia plate onto which his console projected its virtual keyboard sounded like a drum set when he was inputting data.

  Daniel closed the cover and started for the airlock, gesturing Cory to accompany him. With luck, Vesey would already have extracted the Sissie into sidereal space before he reached the bridge. Daniel usually found transition to be an unpleasant or occasionally very unpleasant process, but he didn't think he would notice it this time.

  He would be far too busy.

  * * *

  Adele was going over inventories of material unloaded at the Farm when, without warning, Cazelet said, "Ship, prepare to extract in thirty, repeat three-zero, seconds," over both the PA system and the general push.

  Adele straightened in surprise. There must have been a—

  She checked: yes, Daniel had used the keypad on the hull to order Vesey to enter normal space to intercept another ship or ships. The hydraulic signal was converted into electrical impulses in the Sissie's interior, but it had bypassed her normal oversight.

  Adele felt as though she had been slapped. She immediately bent to correcting her error.

  "Signals, this is Three," said Vesey. "We'll be extracting into what we believe to be the convoy we're hunting. They may be hostile. Officer Mundy, I want you to handle the communications at your own discretion until Six returns to the bridge, over."

  "Yes," said Adele. "Out."

  Well, Vesey's orders gave her something to do other than to worry about getting instant awareness of messages sent through the hydraulic keypad. The first order of business would be to determine the structure of the convoy. If it was simply five freighters—or however many of the original five had navigated well enough to keep station—then there was no problem. If they were accompanied by Palmyrene warships, it became a question of deception or force depending on the strength of the escort.

  Adele suddenly understood why Vesey had passed the duty to her. No one could doubt Vesey's competence as an astrogator or shiphandler, and when she inspected the stores you could trust her inventory to the last pulley.

  Violence seemed to blind her. Vesey wasn't in any sense a coward: she faced dangers without hesitation, and so long as she could consider battle a matter of moving electronic elements on a display, her attack plans were unexceptionable. Vesey would hesitate before opening fire, however, and her stomach would turn if she had to shout threats at a barbarian who understood no other language.

  Adele didn't have that problem. She might balk if duty required her to destroy a Pre-Hiatus book, but as yet that situation hadn't arisen.

  While Adele made her preparations, Vesey was alerting Sun and Chazanoff. Not that the Gunner and Chief Missileer wouldn't have been alert: both men regularly set up attacks even when the Sissie transitioned into Xenos orbit, just in case.

  This time, however, Vesey had cleared Chazanoff to open the doors to the missile launching tubes and told Sun to unlock his guns. Though she would never be a "fighting captain" in the traditional sense, she was working hard to act the part.

  "Extracting . . . now!" a voice said. It was probably Cazelet, but Adele was busy checking her equipment. The Sissie had multi-lens laser communicators bow and stern. She made sure that the heads were set to target multiple ships . . . as of course they were, but she checked anyway.

  The Sissie dropped into sidereal space. The discomfort affected Adele only in that for a moment her right and left sides seemed reversed. She froze her hands on the wands: better to wait a fraction of a second than to make a mistake that her excellent mind couldn't avoid because it was that mind which was being distorted.

  Adele's smile was minute, but real. For an instant she'd felt a flash of resentment that the cosmos would do that to her. She had known Cinnabar nobles who generally reacted that way when things went wrong, but she preferred not to be one herself.

  Then the Princess Cecile was back in the sidereal universe, and Adele Mundy had new data to collect and collate. If the ship was vaporized in the next instant, she would die content. She told herself that her "content" was what other people meant when they said they were happy. Sometimes she was able to believe herself.

  Five transports with Cinnabar registry were grouped closely, the nearest about twelve thousand miles from where the corvette had extracted. The convoy was surprisingly tight for civilian vessels. Either they had been proceeding by very short stages with frequent positioning sights in normal space, or the skill of the Palmyrene astrogators had brought out the best in the Cinnabar officers who competed with them in the Qaboosh. And speaking of Palmyrenes—

  Two cutters flanked the convoy like dogs working a herd. In
all likelihood both were units of the Horde, but Adele couldn't see anything distinctively naval in their electronic signatures. The sloppiness of the data she'd gathered at the Farm was repeated in spades on vessels whose personnel had no reason even to pretend to be interested in recordkeeping.

  The visual imagery showed them to be more or less the same as the cutters Adele had seen in harbor on Stahl's World. Both had an exterior pulpit from which to conn the ship; she knew to look for that because Daniel had spoken of the fittings with such enthusiasm.

  And each cutter had a basket of free-flight rockets on the dorsal hull, well ahead of the single ring of antennas. That wasn't ominous in itself—ships were always armed, unless they sailed fixed routes between the most settled stars—but the bundles of external cargo these cutters carried on the after portions of their hulls appeared to be reloads for their launchers.

  Still, it would have been surprising if the transports didn't have a Palmyrene escort, and a pair of cutters was a negligible concern. Apparently the Autocrator intended to keep her presence to the background until the troops were on the ground.

  What Adele hadn't expected was the last ship present, the armed yacht RCS Philante. Because she was an RCN vessel, her particulars flashed onto the display unbidden: 1600 tons, armed with two four-inch plasma cannon on the dorsal bow and two organ guns on the stern quarters. The latter were aggregations of eight 1-inch plasma cannon, directed energy equivalents of the rockets which vessels on the fringes used against pirates—and for piracy.

  The Philante was configured for cruising at moderate speeds, escorting merchantmen against pirates. She had a crew of forty and only two mast rings, sufficient to keep up with her charges. She didn't mount missiles and would be only a target if she tried to fight even small a true combat vessel like the Sissie.

  The problem was that the Sissie couldn't fight the yacht. The Philante was a Cinnabar naval vessel like the Sissie, and to engage it would be treason.