Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 27: Above Dunbar's World

The sun of Dunbar's World was a moderately bright star forty light minutes from where Daniel stood on the Sibyl's bow. The sun of Bennaria was a less bright star above the Princess Cecile which hung a quarter mile away, parallel to the destroyer. Starlight gave the hulls a ghostly presence, as if they were mirrored in polished ice.

He and Woetjans were working on the stump of Antenna Dorsal 1. He held a safety line belayed around the bitt at his feet. Its tension braced the bosun on the other end as she leaned into a prybar longer than she was tall.

The base joint, welded by the sleet of ions, released with a clang! Everything close by on the hull quivered. The bosun's boots flew up when the strain came off her bar, but Daniel's firm grip on the line allowed her to right herself easily.

Woetjans had recovered from more dangerous situations than the present one without needing either help or a safety line, though. Worst case she could've thrown the heavy bar as reaction mass, but that probably wouldn't have been required. Daniel'd seen the bosun's long arms snag lines that an arboreal monkey couldn't have reached.

With her magnetic boots firmly on the hull again, Woetjans bent forward slightly to ease her breathing. Freeing the mast had been a strain even for her, but it'd speeded the process of clearing the Sibyl for action by hours. The tangle of lines and melted sail tacked to the stub could be dumped into space as a single mass instead of having to be cut loose individually.

Normally crews would use a hydraulic jack on that sort of problem, but the Sibyl's tools had gone the way off every other fitment that could be removed from the destroyer and sold. If the jack wasn't in the maintenance shops on a Councilor's estate, it was lifting vehicles in a service garage run by some spacer's cousin. Daniel knew too much about government to believe that any social class had a monopoly on corruption.

As soon as Vesey'd maneuvered the Sissie alongside the destroyer, she'd sent across riggers and equipment to help clear the damage. Getting the jacks and power clamps across took time, though, and that was in short supply. Woetjans wasn't the sort to wait for somebody else to help with a job she thought her own brute strength could handle, which was most things. In Daniel's experience, her judgment was generally correct.

Quite a lot had been accomplished; already a mixed party was heaving the clot of top-hamper off at an angle from the destroyer where it wouldn't be a danger when they got under way again. The Sissies and Infantans worked well together, if only because neither group wanted to anger Woetjans.

Nonetheless Daniel shook his head minusculy as he viewed the damage, careful not to rap his brow or nose on the interior of his rigid helmet. It was such a bloody mess.

Going into action with all sails set—most of them aligned to cancel one another in the Matrix—had been the correct tactical decision: the 15-cm bolt would almost certainly've penetrated the hull otherwise, and heaven only knew what internal damage the plasma-lighted fireball would've done in the ship's interior. As it was, the plates were pitted and icicles of steel hung down from the bitt Daniel'd used to belay the line. They'd melted from the bitt itself as well as being redeposited from the mast and yards.

So of course it'd been the right decision, but the ruin the bolt'd smeared across the Sibyl's bow was enough to make any spacer weep. Four antennas and their yards were completely destroyed; two more were usable for the time being but would certainly be replaced when the ship reached a repair dock. The steel exploding from Dorsal 1 had damaged sails all the way back to Dorsal 6, though to Port and Starboard the hull had protected all but the topgallants, and the ventral rig was unharmed.

It wasn't really that bad: with a good crew and himself plotting the course, Daniel'd venture to better the time over any distance that the Bennarians could've accomplished when the Sibyl was new. It looked terrible, though, and besides what was visible, the hull's torquing might've done worse than collapse one missile tube.

The other three tubes were clear, though. For the time being, the destroyer's ability to fight was more important than the possibility she'd taken structural damage.

Woetjans had straightened, but she was surveying the work in general rather than diving directly into another specific job. She was Chief of Rig, so the damage was hers to correct. Though technically she was acting under the Captain's direction, Daniel knew he had nothing to teach his bosun about the task in hand. He'd joined her as a moderately skilled helper, not to oversee her work.

Wrist-thick hawsers of braided monocrystal held the ships together at bow and stern. That way the vessels damped one another's slight moment, and the cables kept all strain off the thin transit line amidships.

Three figures were crossing from the Princess Cecile. The two on the ends carried the third between them in a basket of safety lines. Adele was the only person who was so valuable—and so frequently clumsy in free-fall—that Vesey would've provided such an escort from the few spacers still aboard the corvette.

Daniel signaled to Woetjans, then started for where the line was clamped to a stanchion on the Sibyl's hull. He moved in a rigger's long, loping stride, closer to skating than walking. It kept the lifted boot near the hull, the experienced spacer's alternative to a safety line.

There were times that you simply leaped for a cable because speed was more important than anything else; people who sailed the Matrix for a living didn't put a high premium on personal safety. That was true in spades of riggers and of successful RCN officers.

Butterick, a Sissie from the Power Room, was the first of those crossing; she unhooked a line from her belt and clipped it to Daniel's. Adele was on the other end. Between them, Butterick and the Infantan at the end of the procession slapped the soles of Adele's boots down firmly.

Daniel dismissed the spacers with a wave; they started back to the corvette. The Infantan would've given Daniel the second safety line also, but that was simply absurd. If not precisely humorless the Landholder's people were at least a deeply serious lot, so the offer probably hadn't been meant as a joke.

Daniel leaned to touch helmets with Adele. To his surprise, she backed a step and held out a half-watt radio intercom. His face blanked, but he locked the unit into the slot on his helmet.

"I know one doesn't normally use radio on the hull, Daniel," Adele said calmly. "I have things to discuss that I can't do where the Infantans might overhear, and I'm too awkward out here to do so while contorting myself to speak."

Daniel chuckled. "Intercoms can be issued for suit use only by order of the captain and the signals officer both," he said. "This is perfectly proper."

He still didn't like it: no rigger would. It'd take an unlikely series of things going wrong before one of these radios was used catastrophically in the Matrix, but things did go wrong. A smart spacer—a spacer who survived—avoided situations where he might screw up, because sure as hell he was going to screw up sooner or later if he had the opportunity.

But Adele wasn't out here on the hull without a bloody good reason.

"According to Vesey," Adele said, "you'll probably attack the Pellegrinians next time with both ships in company. Is that correct?"

Daniel shrugged invisibly. He hadn't had time to discuss the plan in detail, but Vesey'd served with him long enough to be able to figure it out on her own. It was the best use of his slight available resources.

"Yes," he said, "though at longer range than I'd expected to engage before I saw how alert the Duilio's gun crews are."

He licked his lips, then added, "That means the Sissie will simply be distracting the Pellegrinians. It's possible that she'll be sacrificed without any chance of doing actual harm to them."

"Daniel," Adele said, "I think I can convince the Pellegrinians that the Princess Cecile is actually the Sibyl. If we—if the Sissie—insert alone and at some distance from the Duilio, we'll draw her whole attention, won't we? And then you can attack with the Sibyl while they're not expecting you."

Daniel touched his lips again. "They'll be expecting two ships," he said.

"Will they?" said Adele. "Daniel, do you think a Pellegrinian officer would fake an attack in a ship which doesn't have missiles? And they know the Sissie doesn't have missiles."

So they did, from the inspection when the Sissie landed at Central Haven as well as from the fact that Daniel hadn't replied to the salvoes ap Glynn launched when the corvette escaped from Dunbar's World. But there was a basic flaw with the plan nonetheless.

"Adele, if we're close enough to threaten the Duilio, they'll have us in sight," Daniel said. "Sure, her optics are monkey models, not first-line gear built to Fleet specs, but nothing comes out of the Pleasaunce Arsenal that can't tell the difference between a corvette and a damaged destroyer within five light minutes."

He grinned, wondering if Adele could see him through the faceplates of their helmets. "The Sibyl's optics are the same quality, you know," he said. Regardless, she knew him well enough to hear the smile in his voice. "They're not the first thing I'd upgrade if I had the choice."

Another mare's nest of tubes and rigging spun slowly away from the destroyer, this time most of Starboard 2. Woetjans and her crew would have the damage cleared in another hour. Handling a ship with a badly unbalanced rig could be tricky, but Daniel'd sailed a jury-rigged heavy cruiser to Cinnabar in seventeen days. He wasn't worried about that aspect of the coming action.

"Yes, but Vesey says that if we remain end-on to the Pellegrinians and four or five light-seconds away," Adele said, "they'll have to depend on their computer to complete the identification. They won't have anybody skilled enough to be certain without the software."

Daniel pursed his lips, wondering why Adele was discussing this. Aloud he said, "I suppose that's true. But in fairness to our Pellegrinian friends, Adele, I don't know that I could tell a destroyer from a corvette under those conditions. In any case, they certainly do have the software to complete the identification."

"Yes," said Adele, "but I have all the communications codes from the Rainha. That gives me access to the Duilio's computer. If I'm quick enough, I believe I can enter a different—a corrected, if I may call it that—result."

"Oh!" said Daniel. The stars were a cold scatter in all directions; nowhere especially dense, but nowhere completely absent. To Daniel sidereal space seemed static and cold compared to the roiling excitement of the Matrix, a cut-glass vase instead of a cat quivering as it makes up its mind whether to pounce.

He looked at his friend again. His heart was leaden after its sudden thrill of hope. "I'm afraid that won't work, Adele," he said. "You have their commo, but that'll be completely separate from the battle computer which they use for identification."

"My mother would have hated the term 'monkey model,'" Adele said with apparent irrelevance. "She was strongly against the practice of demeaning less technologically sophisticated peoples. Still, I don't suppose her views on the matter are controlling any more."

"Pardon?" Daniel said. It was Adele speaking, so the words meant something.

"Daniel, any ship built for us or the Alliance Fleet would handle communications, astrogation, and attack in physically separate computers," she said. "But the Duilio was built for export. All her functions are in a single unit, and I'll have access to it as soon as I'm close enough to the Pellegrinians to feed a signal through their secure network. Let us go in first and only follow when we've gotten their full attention."

"This is going to be very dangerous," Daniel said, thinking aloud rather than objecting. "The timing will be critical."

He understood why Adele hadn't wanted the Infantans to overhear. The plan was only possible because the Alliance had commo teams on all the ships supporting the Pellegrinian operation.

He clapped Adele on the shoulder, his gauntlet clacking against the glass-filled plate covering the joint of her suit. "By God, Adele, this doesn't do much for our chances of survival, but it certainly does make it more likely that we'll be able to put paid to that wog cruiser! By God it does!"

"My mother particularly disliked the term 'wog,'" said Adele austerely. "But as I said, I don't suppose her views are controlling."

* * *

"Counting down to extraction!" announced Pleshkov, the Infantan executive officer now in the Sissie's BDC. "Ten seconds, nine seconds—"

Adele grimaced and blocked her input from the general channel for the next eight seconds. The Infantans had their own procedures, and there hadn't been time to harmonize them with those of the RCN.

To correct them to RCN standard, she thought. She didn't need somebody yammering while she concentrated on a problem.

Adele sank back into the silence of her familiar display, a simulation of what she expected when they extracted from the Matrix: Dunbar's World, the Duilio in close orbit, and the Princess Cecile herself appearing 600,000 miles out, twenty seconds before the cruiser passed into the planetary shadow. The image gave the events a specious reality, but Adele knew they were as evanescent as the light beams interfering to create the holograms.

The Princess Cecile shifted out of the Matrix. For an instant Adele's bones were replaced by simulacra of frozen steel; they seared and shrank her muscles from the inside. The pain would've been disabling if—

Well, if she'd been a different person and not completely focused on the task in hand.

The Princess Cecile completed its transition back into the sidereal universe. Adele's body returned to normal, her flesh trembling slightly with remembered pain. The High Drive pushed her hard against her couch.

The enemy was in sight.

An icon on the top of the display informed Adele that the Sissie's antennas were adjusting automatically, as they were programmed to do. She'd chosen the laser communicator to enter the cruiser, since ap Glynn wasn't using it himself and also because the corvette's sending unit was of low mass and could be quickly slewed.

The latter turned out to be important, because the Duilio would cross behind the planet in seven seconds, not twenty. It'd take over three seconds for Adele's impulse to reach the cruiser.

She had the commands preset. When her laser communicator locked on to the destroyer, the queued data fed in a burst to a suspense file aboard the cruiser. The steps had to be executed in sequence, and she wasn't confident that the Pellegrinian computer would respond promptly enough to cycle through the instructions before the planetary shadow broke the transmission.

"—known vessel, lie to immediately or—" the Duilio ordered, the same demand it'd directed at the Sibyl when Daniel'd attempted his abortive attack. This time there was a difference, not in the formal hail which dissolved in static as Dunbar's World intervened but instead in the cruiser's general RF signature.

"Captain, both of the cruiser's turrets are rotating," Adele said, half-stumbling over the first word. She'd almost said Six. That would've keyed Vesey as intended, but it would've made both of them uncomfortable. "One was tracking us from the moment we extracted. Over!"

The last word sharply, because she'd almost forgotten it. Again.

Vesey didn't reply; there was no need for her to and she doubtless had other business. Adele felt the direction of down change, the result of the thrusters gimbaling to adjust the Sissie's course. The approximation Daniel and Vesey had created was remarkably close to what the corvette actually found when it returned to normal space, a comment on the high quality of planning and execution. Vesey had extracted within a few hundred miles of the intended point.

There was also a great deal of luck in the business. The Duilio had lifted into a marginally higher orbit since the Cinnabar officers made their calculations on the basis of data that was an hour old. That increased the orbital period, so only chance made the cruiser's location so nearly coincide with the prediction.

Adele wasn't sure what Vesey was trying to accomplish now. Accelerating a 1300-ton vessel was a slow process even with the High Drive operating at maximum output. The ship groaned under the strain, though, and Pleshkov shouted on the general channel, "Back off, you fool! The rig is set and—"

Adele disabled the Infantan's ability to transmit. That was no doubt very wrong: it was insubordinate, it was potentially dangerous since Pleshkov might have something useful to say at some later point, and it carried the risk of a serious incident as soon as the fellow realized what'd happened. Besides which, Adele's mother would've objected strongly to the discourtesy.

It's what Daniel would've wanted her to do. If Vesey felt otherwise, that was only because she put a higher value on protocol than Daniel or Adele either one.

If Pleshkov challenged Adele to a duel because of the insult, he wouldn't be the first person she'd shot; if he simply came storming onto the bridge to complain, Tovera would kill him without bothering about a challenge. And Evadne Rolfe Mundy had been dead for seventeen years. Some of her opinions still existed within her surviving daughter, but not to the degree that they'd affect Adele's willingness to do what Commander Leary would expect of her.

The Duilio swung back into sight; she'd stopped transmitting the challenge. Adele assumed that meant she'd decided the Princess Cecile was the destroyer returned to the attack. When the cruiser fired her plasma cannon, both guns from the dorsal turret but only one from the ventral, the assumption became a certainty.

"Hoo, that's right, laddies!" Sun crowed on the general channel. "Burn your bloody barrels out for nothing, why don't you! You couldn't raise a sunburn at this range!"

The gunner shouldn't have been chattering that way, but Adele didn't cut him off because what he was saying was good for morale. Adele's morale included, since Sun had expert knowledge of the bolt's potential effectiveness.

The cruiser fired the same three guns again. One of the tubes must not be working. Had it failed recently, or could Adle have learned about it previously if she'd done a better job of sifting data gleaned from Pellegrinian files?

The Princess Cecile continued to brake hard. Her rigging creaked and muttered as thrust bent the antennas and their full array of sails. The hull twisted also, enough that Adele heard the keen of air leaking through spreading seams. She even thought she felt the internal pressure drop, but she knew that might be imagination.

It didn't matter. Adele wore a flexible atmosphere suit, as did all the other crew members save for those who'd chosen the even greater safety of rigging suits.

A slash of ions arrived simultaneously with the instrument readings indicating the Duilio had fired another salvo. Adele's display blurred and every light in the ceiling of the A Level corridor went out; a circuit breaker tripping from an overload, she supposed.

The damage wasn't serious: her display came back as sharp as a knife-edge a moment later, and in seconds somebody reset the lighting circuit as well. Sun was stretching the point when he explained how harmless 15-cm bolts were at this range. . . .

Adele lifted against her seat restraints; loose gear flew about the compartment as though gravity had been abolished. In effect it had: the High Drive motors had shut down. Her first thought was that the bolt had crippled them, but after an instant's reflection she realized that Vesey was trying to throw off the cruiser's gunnery officer by the cutting the Sissie's acceleration. They could hope it'd work, at least for long enough.

Given that the corvette's mission was to draw the attention of the Pellegrinians, the question of how much damage the cruiser did to them wasn't significant. Adele smiled. For the sake of the friends she'd made in the Sissie's crew, though, she'd regret it if they were all killed. Most of them took a more serious view of oblivion than she did.

A new signal spiked on her display; the software matched it against a standard template.

"Captain, the Duilio's launched a missile," Adele said. "It's an Alliance Type 12A3, a single-converter type."

She was aware as she spoke that her voice sounded dry. That didn't change the content of the message, of course, but Adele'd learned the hard way that people were more likely to listen to tone than they were to words. So far as she was concerned, that was utterly wrong; but the analytical part of her mind realized that it was her job to communicate. She should work harder at sounding excited.

The cruiser's three operational cannon fired again, this time without hitting the corvette. The High Drive kicked in again, though the renewed acceleration appeared to be the 1 g that starships maintained to counterfeit gravity. On Adele's display—

"Captain, the Duilio has fired two more missiles," she announced. "And five more missiles, a total of eight. Over."

That was a full salvo for the cruiser. Adele wondered how long it'd take the Pellegrinians to reload their tubes. She recalled 45 seconds to a minute being normal on the warships she'd sailed on, but she'd never been aboard a cruiser in action.

"I'm tracking!" announced Sun. The upper 4-inch turret fired half a dozen rounds, rattling loose fittings. The lower turret joined in for another three or four, then both fell silent.

"Bloody sails!" the gunner said. "Cap'n, rotate us fifteen degrees clockwise so I have a clear shot, on my bloody soul!"

"Bridge, we must reenter the Matrix!" Officer Pleshkov said over the command channel. "There is time, please, but not much time. We must!"

Adele's wands twitched, but she didn't cut the Infantan out of the command loop after all. He was no doubt correct in his assessment of the danger, and it was his job to inform the captain in case she hadn't noticed it herself.

Which of course Vesey had, but Pleshkov wasn't speaking out of turn until Vesey told him to shut up. In which case Adele would instantly silence him. It didn't matter what happened to the Princess Cecile so long as they held the Pellegrinians' attention until—

Sudden activity lighted up the radio frequency band. It was as meaningful to Adele as close-range optical images would be to most RCN officers.

"The Sibyl's arrived!" Adele said. "The Sibyl's launching missiles, three missiles! Daniel's here!"

Apparently I'm capable of enthusiasm under the correct stimulus.

"Ship, we're inserting into the Matrix in fifteen seconds," Vesey said. "Gunner, cease fire to avoid disturbing our surface charge."

She paused there. Adele expected her to sign out—Vesey was punctilious about that—but instead she continued, "I think we have enough time, spacers. Commander Leary will be proud of us. Captain out."

Perhaps Vesey was putting a positive gloss on reality the way Sun had. Adele didn't have the equipment or the expertise either one to determine whether the Sissie could leave normal space before the Pellegrinian missiles intersected with their computed course.

Regardless, "Commander Leary was proud of them," wouldn't make a bad epitaph.

* * *

At the instant the destroyer inserted into the Matrix, the bridge rippled like a scene projected on a windblown curtain. Daniel barely noticed it. Generally short insertions didn't have the gut-wrenching effects you could face when you extracted after a long voyage without a break, and this'd been just a quick dip.

Many astrogators made touch-and-gos to get star sights to check their location. Not only did Daniel pride himself on his dead reckoning in the Matrix, the most cack-handed officer the RCN had ever commissioned could manage a hop of fifty-five light minutes without missing his extraction by a significant degree.

What Daniel needed was a recent fix on the Pellegrinian cruiser. Five light minutes out from Dunbar's World was the compromise he'd decided on, reasonably current imagery of the Duilio without putting the Sibyl so close in that the Pellegrinians might become aware of her before she arrived.

By making two insertion/extraction sequences while the Sissie covered the same short distance in one, Daniel also built in the delay he needed for the plan to work. He couldn't launch his attack on the Duilio too quickly this way—

And being too quick meant failure. If the choice were purely Daniel's to make, he knew full well that he'd shave thirty seconds or even a minute off the calculated interval. The Princess Cecile was his ship, many of her crewmen had been his shipmates throughout the past two years; and of course Adele had become even more important as a friend than as a colleague.

But the Sissie had to be alone long enough in the vicinity of Dunbar's World to completely concentrate the attention of the Duilio's crew. Otherwise they all might as well've stayed in Charlestown and partied the way Councilor Waddell had suggested in the beginning.

"We will extract in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," Cory announced from the BDC with careful formality. Daniel's display was as it'd been on the previous attack: Plot-Position Indicator above, attack board beneath.

He hadn't carried a Chief Missileer on this mission, since it would've been a wasted slot when the Sissie had no missiles. Besides, it was a task for which Daniel himself had both a flair and experience. His fingers poised.

The emptiness which Daniel's screens maintained in the Matrix now filled with data. The PPI showed the Duilio orbiting forty-six miles above Dunbar's World and over four thousand miles—4173 and closing—from where the Sibyl had returned to normal space.

The real-time optical image inset in the upper right-hand corner of the display showed the cruiser as it emerged from the planetary shadow. Ap Glynn had taken in his rig since the destroyer's previous attack. The sails were furled and the yards rotated parallel to the masts before the masts themselves were folded against the hull. That gave the heavy guns full traverse and elevation.

The two ships were on nearly parallel courses for the moment, but the Sibyl viewed the cruiser from thirty degrees below the center of her long axis. Both 15-cm turrets were rotated to track the Princess Cecile at a nearly reciprocal angle to the destroyer.

Landholder Krychek had been waiting for this chance. He adjusted the Sibyl's four turrets with a momentary squeal; then the 10-cm guns began to hammer.

Either Krychek or the destroyer's gunnery program blocked a weapon's discharge if anything was within 100 meters of the muzzle. The Sibyl's sails, those which remained after the previous attack, were set, so initially only six and after a few seconds four guns fired.

Flashes lit the Duilio's hull, patches of plating subliming under the lash of deuterium ions. The destroyer's weapons didn't deliver nearly the impact of 15-cm guns—the relation of bore to charge was logarithmic, not linear—and the cruiser's hull was much thicker besides, but the light weapons cycled much quicker also. Krychek was at least as accurate as Sun would've been at this short range, and Daniel knew from experience that the bolts would do serious if not incapacitating damage.

But that was the gunner's business; Daniel was picking the first of his new preset attack orders. The calculated spread of his salvo—only three missiles this time, but that was still one more than the Sissie herself could've managed—showed in green lines which flared as each missile separated after burnout. That didn't spread the footprint significantly in the present instance because the target was so close; without adjustment none of the missiles would pass within ten miles of the Duilio on her predicted course.

It felt like an unconscionable length of time before Daniel got the corrections entered into his attack board, but in all truth it was a matter of seconds. It would've taken a minute or more if he'd had to plan the attack from scratch instead of tweaking a preset order.

He was pretty sure they didn't have a minute. Until the moment Daniel twisted and depressed the execute key, it was a toss-up in his mind as to whether they had the seconds the present reality had required.

Whang!

"Ship, launching three!" he shouted over the general push. He wasn't so much reporting to the crew—they'd already heard the first missile launching, followed at five-second intervals by the Whang! Whang! of the other two—as he was crowing with pride at having executed a difficult operation in a timely fashion.

The Princess Cecile was a speck on the PPI, driving slowly off at a tangent from Dunbar's World. The salvo of missiles the cruiser'd launched were closing at .07 C. They'd divided at burnout and were now a spreading straggle of chunks, each weighing a tonne or more.

"May the God of Battles aid you!" Daniel muttered under his breath, but his present duties were to the Sibyl and her crew. Blantyre had the conn, but he'd ordered her to hold course at 1 g acceleration unless the bridge took a direct hit; in that case she could use her discretion. Daniel's concern was his attack board.

Missiles rumbled on their tracks, shaking the destroyer like freight cars shifting in her belly. The fore and aft tubes had separate magazines to keep the feed run short; jerks and clanking indicated to Daniel's experienced ear that the launchers were reloaded even before green ready lights flashed along the side of his display.

An iridescent cloud blurred the Duilio's real-time image. On the sidebar of the attack board, a legend under the cruiser's icon indicated she was braking hard. Captain ap Glynn had reacted to the oncoming missiles by lighting both High Drive and plasma thrusters. He must be running them up to overload output.

Plasma flared with molecules of antimatter which hadn't combined in the High Drive. Though ionized, the thrusters' exhaust was nonetheless ordinary matter. It converted completely to energy along with antimatter when they mixed.

If the Duilio's antennas had been stepped, the strain of deceleration would've sheared them at the base hinges. Even as it was, the cruiser's hull must've been flexing like a rubber toy. Daniel'd commanded ships in similar straits. He knew how terrifying the groans of plates against the ribs and the squeal of escaping air would be to the crew, particularly those who didn't have immediate duties.

Daniel knew, but he had no sympathy at all. The Pellegrinians were The Enemy, the people who'd chosen to fight the RCN. He'd grind them into the dust, by God he would!

The Duilio had been firing at the Sissie when Daniel's display locked into sidereal space; the bolts of heavy hydrogen, detonated by laser arrays in the breaches of the cannon, showed as tracks on his attack board. The cruiser's turrets began slewing as soon as the Pellegrinian gunnery officer realized he had a much more pressing target, but her heavy acceleration made both aiming and traverse more difficult.

Daniel recalculated for his second salvo. Ap Glynn was fighting the inertia that carried his ship into the Sibyl's initial spread of missiles. Allowing for that—

Whang!

"Launching three!" Daniel said as the crew cheered over the continued hammering of Krychek's guns.

Whang! Whang!

The attack board covered too small a region to show the fleeing Princess Cecile, but on the PPI the missiles were red beads nearing the blue dot of the corvette. God of Battles, aid them!

Daniel saw almost as soon as his missiles released that he'd misjudged. Though the board predicted that the yellow tracks of his second salvo would cross the orange bead of the cruiser, Daniel—and the battle computer, but a computer can't feel embarrassment when it screws up—had failed to factor in the gravity of Dunbar's World. This salvo would miss ahead of the Duilio just as the first had. The cruiser, wrapped in a cloud of fire-shot radiance, was slipping into the planet's shadow as it continued to plunge toward the surface.

Ap Glynn wasn't as certain as Daniel that the Sibyl's salvo was misaimed, or at any rate he'd decided not to take chances. The single working tube in the cruiser's ventral turret fired, catching a missile just before it separated. Half a tonne of solid metal swelled into a fireball, thrusting the remainder of the projectile away at an angle that increased the Duilio's margin of safety.

The next trio of missiles shook the destroyer on their way to the launching tubes. Daniel had to hope that they'd continue to feed smoothly, because he didn't have trained missile crewmen aboard to correct problems. That was why he was holding a straight course at 1 g acceleration, ideal conditions for the conveyors. There was always a chance of something breaking on a ship that'd sat idle for several years, however, and the missile-handling equipment provided more opportunities for failure than most installations.

As the remaining missiles of the salvo slanted into the atmosphere, they corkscrewed before breaking up in a tumbling light show. Daniel regretted the danger to people on the ground, but even a civilian can slip getting out of the bathtub. . . .

For a moment Landholder Krychek had all four turrets clear. The simultaneous rapid fire of his 10-cm guns made the destroyer shake like a dog come in from the wet. Daniel clenched as his fingers computed the next salvo, knowing that if Krychek could shoot then there were at least four points at which the Sibyl's spreading sails didn't protect the hull from the cruiser's bolts.

The Princess Cecile vanished from the PPI as the swarm of Pellegrinian missiles crossed her computed track. At this range, the Sibyl's electronics couldn't determine whether the corvette had slipped into the Matrix or had been reduced to a cloud of gas and debris.

The cruiser'd been maneuvering too hard to launch missiles at the destroyer, a bloody good thing. From the evidence of her first salvo, her Chief Missileer knew his business.

The Duilio's dorsal turret fired at the destroyer. Red telltales on the command display quickly switched back to green. A circuit breaker astern had tripped, but neither bolt struck squarely.

The shroud of plasma and pure energy bathing the Duilio suddenly streamed a sparkling curlicue. That stream pinched off, but two more—one bow and one stern—blazed out in the wake as the cruiser continued to descend.

Daniel was poised on the execute button and his mouth was open to shout, "Launching three!" Instead he jerked his hand up, allowing the button to twist back into its safety position.

"Cease fire!" he said. "All personnel, cease fire!"

The Sibyl's guns were still firing; only four of them now, but that was a result of the angle rather than because Krychek was taking a gradual approach to obeying orders. Daniel'd expected that. It took him a moment longer to find the gunnery lockout on this command console than it would've done on the Sissie's familiar display, but only a moment.

The guns fell silent. At the gunnery console, the Landholder shouted curses as he furiously fault-checked his equipment. Eventually he'd figure out what'd happened, at which point he and Daniel would discuss the matter in whatever fashion he chose.

Or Hogg chose, if Daniel didn't watch his servant carefully. Still, that was a problem for a later time.

The cruiser's guns had missed because three of her High Drive motors had destroyed themselves violently. Captain ap Glynn's complete focus on the oncoming missiles had dropped his ship too deep into the atmosphere for the High Drive to operate safely. When the motors began to fail, they shook the Duilio like a rat in a terrier's jaws.

"Ship, we've done it!" Daniel said. He made what would've been the correct series of keystrokes on the Princess Cecile but he got a transaction failed legend. "Break, Cory, damn this bloody thing to hell! Can you echo the cruiser's image on all the ship's displays, over?"

The Duilio continued to fall toward the surface, braked by plasma thrusters alone. She'd stopped being a threat. Indeed, given the sort of damage chronic High Drive failure did to the ship mounting the motors, ap Glynn'd be lucky if he managed a controlled crash rather than simply augering in. Acute failure—lighting the High Drive with the throat of the motor full of normal matter—destroyed the unit itself in a shattering explosion, but antimatter leaked into a thin atmosphere was a cancer. It ate the external hull until the converter finally managed to destroy itself and stop the process.

"Ship," Daniel said, "we've crippled the Pellegrinian cruiser and—"

An image of the Duilio filled his display. Cory'd found the instruction set that'd eluded Daniel a moment previously, but he'd applied it a touch too generally.

Daniel opened his mouth to bellow a protest, but the midshipman caught himself before the words came out. The cruiser shrank back to a small inset on the command display, but the gunnery and navigation consoles still showed a full-screen image.

"Right!" said Daniel. "Crippled them, knocked them right out of the fight, Sibyls! We hold the space around Dunbar's World in the name of the Federal Republic, and our allies on the ground hold what'd been the invaders' base."

He hoped that was still true; he didn't actually know what'd happened on Mandelfarne Island since the Sissie'd lifted under fire. Still, ap Glynn wouldn't have been enforcing his blockade so fiercely if the Bennarian Volunteers had surrendered to Nataniel Arruns.

"As soon as we see what happens to Pellegrinian cruiser—"

The Duilio curved onto the hidden side of the planet in a cometary blaze. Daniel knew it was possible to import satellite imagery, but he didn't care that much. The cruiser was certainly out of the fight. Adele would've had the pictures for him, though, without him needing to ask.

"—we'll make further plans. At present I expect to contact our allies and provide support from orbit while Councilor Corius arranges the surrender of the invading forces. Fellow Sibyls, we've shown everybody what it means to fight the finest professionals in the galaxy!"

It'd been on the tip of his tongue to say, "fight the RCN." That would've been a bad mistake when most of his crew claimed allegiance to the Alliance.

The image of the Duilio reappeared, blurred because the optics weren't really up to the corrections necessary to look deeply through the atmosphere. It was details like that which reminded Daniel he was in a ship built on the cheap for the export market. Though the she'd done the job, you couldn't argue with that.

"Sir?" said Midshipman Cory.

Daniel's face blanked. How's Cory gotten into a channel that should've allowed only me to speak? Then, Because he's my signals officer, that's how!

"What's happened to the Princess Cecile, sir? Are they all right?"

"I don't—" Daniel said. If he'd had Cory in front of him, he'd have throttled the boy, put his hands around his throat and squeezed till his eyes popped out.

"—know at this moment—"

Because Daniel was always watching his display, no matter what was on his mind or how angry he might be, he saw the blue bead wink onto the PPI screen. Even before the icon with the legend pri appeared beside it, he knew what it was.

"Fellow spacers," Daniel said, "I was incorrect. The Princess Cecile has just extracted from the Matrix at a distance of 41,000 miles from Dunbar's World. I expect her signals officer will be contacting us very—"

And as he spoke, a familiar voice on his helmet earphones said, "Daniel, are you all right?"

"Yes, Adele," Daniel said. It wasn't proper protocol, but protocol be hanged. "Now everything is all right."

Back | Next
Framed

Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 27: Above Dunbar's World

The sun of Dunbar's World was a moderately bright star forty light minutes from where Daniel stood on the Sibyl's bow. The sun of Bennaria was a less bright star above the Princess Cecile which hung a quarter mile away, parallel to the destroyer. Starlight gave the hulls a ghostly presence, as if they were mirrored in polished ice.

He and Woetjans were working on the stump of Antenna Dorsal 1. He held a safety line belayed around the bitt at his feet. Its tension braced the bosun on the other end as she leaned into a prybar longer than she was tall.

The base joint, welded by the sleet of ions, released with a clang! Everything close by on the hull quivered. The bosun's boots flew up when the strain came off her bar, but Daniel's firm grip on the line allowed her to right herself easily.

Woetjans had recovered from more dangerous situations than the present one without needing either help or a safety line, though. Worst case she could've thrown the heavy bar as reaction mass, but that probably wouldn't have been required. Daniel'd seen the bosun's long arms snag lines that an arboreal monkey couldn't have reached.

With her magnetic boots firmly on the hull again, Woetjans bent forward slightly to ease her breathing. Freeing the mast had been a strain even for her, but it'd speeded the process of clearing the Sibyl for action by hours. The tangle of lines and melted sail tacked to the stub could be dumped into space as a single mass instead of having to be cut loose individually.

Normally crews would use a hydraulic jack on that sort of problem, but the Sibyl's tools had gone the way off every other fitment that could be removed from the destroyer and sold. If the jack wasn't in the maintenance shops on a Councilor's estate, it was lifting vehicles in a service garage run by some spacer's cousin. Daniel knew too much about government to believe that any social class had a monopoly on corruption.

As soon as Vesey'd maneuvered the Sissie alongside the destroyer, she'd sent across riggers and equipment to help clear the damage. Getting the jacks and power clamps across took time, though, and that was in short supply. Woetjans wasn't the sort to wait for somebody else to help with a job she thought her own brute strength could handle, which was most things. In Daniel's experience, her judgment was generally correct.

Quite a lot had been accomplished; already a mixed party was heaving the clot of top-hamper off at an angle from the destroyer where it wouldn't be a danger when they got under way again. The Sissies and Infantans worked well together, if only because neither group wanted to anger Woetjans.

Nonetheless Daniel shook his head minusculy as he viewed the damage, careful not to rap his brow or nose on the interior of his rigid helmet. It was such a bloody mess.

Going into action with all sails set—most of them aligned to cancel one another in the Matrix—had been the correct tactical decision: the 15-cm bolt would almost certainly've penetrated the hull otherwise, and heaven only knew what internal damage the plasma-lighted fireball would've done in the ship's interior. As it was, the plates were pitted and icicles of steel hung down from the bitt Daniel'd used to belay the line. They'd melted from the bitt itself as well as being redeposited from the mast and yards.

So of course it'd been the right decision, but the ruin the bolt'd smeared across the Sibyl's bow was enough to make any spacer weep. Four antennas and their yards were completely destroyed; two more were usable for the time being but would certainly be replaced when the ship reached a repair dock. The steel exploding from Dorsal 1 had damaged sails all the way back to Dorsal 6, though to Port and Starboard the hull had protected all but the topgallants, and the ventral rig was unharmed.

It wasn't really that bad: with a good crew and himself plotting the course, Daniel'd venture to better the time over any distance that the Bennarians could've accomplished when the Sibyl was new. It looked terrible, though, and besides what was visible, the hull's torquing might've done worse than collapse one missile tube.

The other three tubes were clear, though. For the time being, the destroyer's ability to fight was more important than the possibility she'd taken structural damage.

Woetjans had straightened, but she was surveying the work in general rather than diving directly into another specific job. She was Chief of Rig, so the damage was hers to correct. Though technically she was acting under the Captain's direction, Daniel knew he had nothing to teach his bosun about the task in hand. He'd joined her as a moderately skilled helper, not to oversee her work.

Wrist-thick hawsers of braided monocrystal held the ships together at bow and stern. That way the vessels damped one another's slight moment, and the cables kept all strain off the thin transit line amidships.

Three figures were crossing from the Princess Cecile. The two on the ends carried the third between them in a basket of safety lines. Adele was the only person who was so valuable—and so frequently clumsy in free-fall—that Vesey would've provided such an escort from the few spacers still aboard the corvette.

Daniel signaled to Woetjans, then started for where the line was clamped to a stanchion on the Sibyl's hull. He moved in a rigger's long, loping stride, closer to skating than walking. It kept the lifted boot near the hull, the experienced spacer's alternative to a safety line.

There were times that you simply leaped for a cable because speed was more important than anything else; people who sailed the Matrix for a living didn't put a high premium on personal safety. That was true in spades of riggers and of successful RCN officers.

Butterick, a Sissie from the Power Room, was the first of those crossing; she unhooked a line from her belt and clipped it to Daniel's. Adele was on the other end. Between them, Butterick and the Infantan at the end of the procession slapped the soles of Adele's boots down firmly.

Daniel dismissed the spacers with a wave; they started back to the corvette. The Infantan would've given Daniel the second safety line also, but that was simply absurd. If not precisely humorless the Landholder's people were at least a deeply serious lot, so the offer probably hadn't been meant as a joke.

Daniel leaned to touch helmets with Adele. To his surprise, she backed a step and held out a half-watt radio intercom. His face blanked, but he locked the unit into the slot on his helmet.

"I know one doesn't normally use radio on the hull, Daniel," Adele said calmly. "I have things to discuss that I can't do where the Infantans might overhear, and I'm too awkward out here to do so while contorting myself to speak."

Daniel chuckled. "Intercoms can be issued for suit use only by order of the captain and the signals officer both," he said. "This is perfectly proper."

He still didn't like it: no rigger would. It'd take an unlikely series of things going wrong before one of these radios was used catastrophically in the Matrix, but things did go wrong. A smart spacer—a spacer who survived—avoided situations where he might screw up, because sure as hell he was going to screw up sooner or later if he had the opportunity.

But Adele wasn't out here on the hull without a bloody good reason.

"According to Vesey," Adele said, "you'll probably attack the Pellegrinians next time with both ships in company. Is that correct?"

Daniel shrugged invisibly. He hadn't had time to discuss the plan in detail, but Vesey'd served with him long enough to be able to figure it out on her own. It was the best use of his slight available resources.

"Yes," he said, "though at longer range than I'd expected to engage before I saw how alert the Duilio's gun crews are."

He licked his lips, then added, "That means the Sissie will simply be distracting the Pellegrinians. It's possible that she'll be sacrificed without any chance of doing actual harm to them."

"Daniel," Adele said, "I think I can convince the Pellegrinians that the Princess Cecile is actually the Sibyl. If we—if the Sissie—insert alone and at some distance from the Duilio, we'll draw her whole attention, won't we? And then you can attack with the Sibyl while they're not expecting you."

Daniel touched his lips again. "They'll be expecting two ships," he said.

"Will they?" said Adele. "Daniel, do you think a Pellegrinian officer would fake an attack in a ship which doesn't have missiles? And they know the Sissie doesn't have missiles."

So they did, from the inspection when the Sissie landed at Central Haven as well as from the fact that Daniel hadn't replied to the salvoes ap Glynn launched when the corvette escaped from Dunbar's World. But there was a basic flaw with the plan nonetheless.

"Adele, if we're close enough to threaten the Duilio, they'll have us in sight," Daniel said. "Sure, her optics are monkey models, not first-line gear built to Fleet specs, but nothing comes out of the Pleasaunce Arsenal that can't tell the difference between a corvette and a damaged destroyer within five light minutes."

He grinned, wondering if Adele could see him through the faceplates of their helmets. "The Sibyl's optics are the same quality, you know," he said. Regardless, she knew him well enough to hear the smile in his voice. "They're not the first thing I'd upgrade if I had the choice."

Another mare's nest of tubes and rigging spun slowly away from the destroyer, this time most of Starboard 2. Woetjans and her crew would have the damage cleared in another hour. Handling a ship with a badly unbalanced rig could be tricky, but Daniel'd sailed a jury-rigged heavy cruiser to Cinnabar in seventeen days. He wasn't worried about that aspect of the coming action.

"Yes, but Vesey says that if we remain end-on to the Pellegrinians and four or five light-seconds away," Adele said, "they'll have to depend on their computer to complete the identification. They won't have anybody skilled enough to be certain without the software."

Daniel pursed his lips, wondering why Adele was discussing this. Aloud he said, "I suppose that's true. But in fairness to our Pellegrinian friends, Adele, I don't know that I could tell a destroyer from a corvette under those conditions. In any case, they certainly do have the software to complete the identification."

"Yes," said Adele, "but I have all the communications codes from the Rainha. That gives me access to the Duilio's computer. If I'm quick enough, I believe I can enter a different—a corrected, if I may call it that—result."

"Oh!" said Daniel. The stars were a cold scatter in all directions; nowhere especially dense, but nowhere completely absent. To Daniel sidereal space seemed static and cold compared to the roiling excitement of the Matrix, a cut-glass vase instead of a cat quivering as it makes up its mind whether to pounce.

He looked at his friend again. His heart was leaden after its sudden thrill of hope. "I'm afraid that won't work, Adele," he said. "You have their commo, but that'll be completely separate from the battle computer which they use for identification."

"My mother would have hated the term 'monkey model,'" Adele said with apparent irrelevance. "She was strongly against the practice of demeaning less technologically sophisticated peoples. Still, I don't suppose her views on the matter are controlling any more."

"Pardon?" Daniel said. It was Adele speaking, so the words meant something.

"Daniel, any ship built for us or the Alliance Fleet would handle communications, astrogation, and attack in physically separate computers," she said. "But the Duilio was built for export. All her functions are in a single unit, and I'll have access to it as soon as I'm close enough to the Pellegrinians to feed a signal through their secure network. Let us go in first and only follow when we've gotten their full attention."

"This is going to be very dangerous," Daniel said, thinking aloud rather than objecting. "The timing will be critical."

He understood why Adele hadn't wanted the Infantans to overhear. The plan was only possible because the Alliance had commo teams on all the ships supporting the Pellegrinian operation.

He clapped Adele on the shoulder, his gauntlet clacking against the glass-filled plate covering the joint of her suit. "By God, Adele, this doesn't do much for our chances of survival, but it certainly does make it more likely that we'll be able to put paid to that wog cruiser! By God it does!"

"My mother particularly disliked the term 'wog,'" said Adele austerely. "But as I said, I don't suppose her views are controlling."

* * *

"Counting down to extraction!" announced Pleshkov, the Infantan executive officer now in the Sissie's BDC. "Ten seconds, nine seconds—"

Adele grimaced and blocked her input from the general channel for the next eight seconds. The Infantans had their own procedures, and there hadn't been time to harmonize them with those of the RCN.

To correct them to RCN standard, she thought. She didn't need somebody yammering while she concentrated on a problem.

Adele sank back into the silence of her familiar display, a simulation of what she expected when they extracted from the Matrix: Dunbar's World, the Duilio in close orbit, and the Princess Cecile herself appearing 600,000 miles out, twenty seconds before the cruiser passed into the planetary shadow. The image gave the events a specious reality, but Adele knew they were as evanescent as the light beams interfering to create the holograms.

The Princess Cecile shifted out of the Matrix. For an instant Adele's bones were replaced by simulacra of frozen steel; they seared and shrank her muscles from the inside. The pain would've been disabling if—

Well, if she'd been a different person and not completely focused on the task in hand.

The Princess Cecile completed its transition back into the sidereal universe. Adele's body returned to normal, her flesh trembling slightly with remembered pain. The High Drive pushed her hard against her couch.

The enemy was in sight.

An icon on the top of the display informed Adele that the Sissie's antennas were adjusting automatically, as they were programmed to do. She'd chosen the laser communicator to enter the cruiser, since ap Glynn wasn't using it himself and also because the corvette's sending unit was of low mass and could be quickly slewed.

The latter turned out to be important, because the Duilio would cross behind the planet in seven seconds, not twenty. It'd take over three seconds for Adele's impulse to reach the cruiser.

She had the commands preset. When her laser communicator locked on to the destroyer, the queued data fed in a burst to a suspense file aboard the cruiser. The steps had to be executed in sequence, and she wasn't confident that the Pellegrinian computer would respond promptly enough to cycle through the instructions before the planetary shadow broke the transmission.

"—known vessel, lie to immediately or—" the Duilio ordered, the same demand it'd directed at the Sibyl when Daniel'd attempted his abortive attack. This time there was a difference, not in the formal hail which dissolved in static as Dunbar's World intervened but instead in the cruiser's general RF signature.

"Captain, both of the cruiser's turrets are rotating," Adele said, half-stumbling over the first word. She'd almost said Six. That would've keyed Vesey as intended, but it would've made both of them uncomfortable. "One was tracking us from the moment we extracted. Over!"

The last word sharply, because she'd almost forgotten it. Again.

Vesey didn't reply; there was no need for her to and she doubtless had other business. Adele felt the direction of down change, the result of the thrusters gimbaling to adjust the Sissie's course. The approximation Daniel and Vesey had created was remarkably close to what the corvette actually found when it returned to normal space, a comment on the high quality of planning and execution. Vesey had extracted within a few hundred miles of the intended point.

There was also a great deal of luck in the business. The Duilio had lifted into a marginally higher orbit since the Cinnabar officers made their calculations on the basis of data that was an hour old. That increased the orbital period, so only chance made the cruiser's location so nearly coincide with the prediction.

Adele wasn't sure what Vesey was trying to accomplish now. Accelerating a 1300-ton vessel was a slow process even with the High Drive operating at maximum output. The ship groaned under the strain, though, and Pleshkov shouted on the general channel, "Back off, you fool! The rig is set and—"

Adele disabled the Infantan's ability to transmit. That was no doubt very wrong: it was insubordinate, it was potentially dangerous since Pleshkov might have something useful to say at some later point, and it carried the risk of a serious incident as soon as the fellow realized what'd happened. Besides which, Adele's mother would've objected strongly to the discourtesy.

It's what Daniel would've wanted her to do. If Vesey felt otherwise, that was only because she put a higher value on protocol than Daniel or Adele either one.

If Pleshkov challenged Adele to a duel because of the insult, he wouldn't be the first person she'd shot; if he simply came storming onto the bridge to complain, Tovera would kill him without bothering about a challenge. And Evadne Rolfe Mundy had been dead for seventeen years. Some of her opinions still existed within her surviving daughter, but not to the degree that they'd affect Adele's willingness to do what Commander Leary would expect of her.

The Duilio swung back into sight; she'd stopped transmitting the challenge. Adele assumed that meant she'd decided the Princess Cecile was the destroyer returned to the attack. When the cruiser fired her plasma cannon, both guns from the dorsal turret but only one from the ventral, the assumption became a certainty.

"Hoo, that's right, laddies!" Sun crowed on the general channel. "Burn your bloody barrels out for nothing, why don't you! You couldn't raise a sunburn at this range!"

The gunner shouldn't have been chattering that way, but Adele didn't cut him off because what he was saying was good for morale. Adele's morale included, since Sun had expert knowledge of the bolt's potential effectiveness.

The cruiser fired the same three guns again. One of the tubes must not be working. Had it failed recently, or could Adle have learned about it previously if she'd done a better job of sifting data gleaned from Pellegrinian files?

The Princess Cecile continued to brake hard. Her rigging creaked and muttered as thrust bent the antennas and their full array of sails. The hull twisted also, enough that Adele heard the keen of air leaking through spreading seams. She even thought she felt the internal pressure drop, but she knew that might be imagination.

It didn't matter. Adele wore a flexible atmosphere suit, as did all the other crew members save for those who'd chosen the even greater safety of rigging suits.

A slash of ions arrived simultaneously with the instrument readings indicating the Duilio had fired another salvo. Adele's display blurred and every light in the ceiling of the A Level corridor went out; a circuit breaker tripping from an overload, she supposed.

The damage wasn't serious: her display came back as sharp as a knife-edge a moment later, and in seconds somebody reset the lighting circuit as well. Sun was stretching the point when he explained how harmless 15-cm bolts were at this range. . . .

Adele lifted against her seat restraints; loose gear flew about the compartment as though gravity had been abolished. In effect it had: the High Drive motors had shut down. Her first thought was that the bolt had crippled them, but after an instant's reflection she realized that Vesey was trying to throw off the cruiser's gunnery officer by the cutting the Sissie's acceleration. They could hope it'd work, at least for long enough.

Given that the corvette's mission was to draw the attention of the Pellegrinians, the question of how much damage the cruiser did to them wasn't significant. Adele smiled. For the sake of the friends she'd made in the Sissie's crew, though, she'd regret it if they were all killed. Most of them took a more serious view of oblivion than she did.

A new signal spiked on her display; the software matched it against a standard template.

"Captain, the Duilio's launched a missile," Adele said. "It's an Alliance Type 12A3, a single-converter type."

She was aware as she spoke that her voice sounded dry. That didn't change the content of the message, of course, but Adele'd learned the hard way that people were more likely to listen to tone than they were to words. So far as she was concerned, that was utterly wrong; but the analytical part of her mind realized that it was her job to communicate. She should work harder at sounding excited.

The cruiser's three operational cannon fired again, this time without hitting the corvette. The High Drive kicked in again, though the renewed acceleration appeared to be the 1 g that starships maintained to counterfeit gravity. On Adele's display—

"Captain, the Duilio has fired two more missiles," she announced. "And five more missiles, a total of eight. Over."

That was a full salvo for the cruiser. Adele wondered how long it'd take the Pellegrinians to reload their tubes. She recalled 45 seconds to a minute being normal on the warships she'd sailed on, but she'd never been aboard a cruiser in action.

"I'm tracking!" announced Sun. The upper 4-inch turret fired half a dozen rounds, rattling loose fittings. The lower turret joined in for another three or four, then both fell silent.

"Bloody sails!" the gunner said. "Cap'n, rotate us fifteen degrees clockwise so I have a clear shot, on my bloody soul!"

"Bridge, we must reenter the Matrix!" Officer Pleshkov said over the command channel. "There is time, please, but not much time. We must!"

Adele's wands twitched, but she didn't cut the Infantan out of the command loop after all. He was no doubt correct in his assessment of the danger, and it was his job to inform the captain in case she hadn't noticed it herself.

Which of course Vesey had, but Pleshkov wasn't speaking out of turn until Vesey told him to shut up. In which case Adele would instantly silence him. It didn't matter what happened to the Princess Cecile so long as they held the Pellegrinians' attention until—

Sudden activity lighted up the radio frequency band. It was as meaningful to Adele as close-range optical images would be to most RCN officers.

"The Sibyl's arrived!" Adele said. "The Sibyl's launching missiles, three missiles! Daniel's here!"

Apparently I'm capable of enthusiasm under the correct stimulus.

"Ship, we're inserting into the Matrix in fifteen seconds," Vesey said. "Gunner, cease fire to avoid disturbing our surface charge."

She paused there. Adele expected her to sign out—Vesey was punctilious about that—but instead she continued, "I think we have enough time, spacers. Commander Leary will be proud of us. Captain out."

Perhaps Vesey was putting a positive gloss on reality the way Sun had. Adele didn't have the equipment or the expertise either one to determine whether the Sissie could leave normal space before the Pellegrinian missiles intersected with their computed course.

Regardless, "Commander Leary was proud of them," wouldn't make a bad epitaph.

* * *

At the instant the destroyer inserted into the Matrix, the bridge rippled like a scene projected on a windblown curtain. Daniel barely noticed it. Generally short insertions didn't have the gut-wrenching effects you could face when you extracted after a long voyage without a break, and this'd been just a quick dip.

Many astrogators made touch-and-gos to get star sights to check their location. Not only did Daniel pride himself on his dead reckoning in the Matrix, the most cack-handed officer the RCN had ever commissioned could manage a hop of fifty-five light minutes without missing his extraction by a significant degree.

What Daniel needed was a recent fix on the Pellegrinian cruiser. Five light minutes out from Dunbar's World was the compromise he'd decided on, reasonably current imagery of the Duilio without putting the Sibyl so close in that the Pellegrinians might become aware of her before she arrived.

By making two insertion/extraction sequences while the Sissie covered the same short distance in one, Daniel also built in the delay he needed for the plan to work. He couldn't launch his attack on the Duilio too quickly this way—

And being too quick meant failure. If the choice were purely Daniel's to make, he knew full well that he'd shave thirty seconds or even a minute off the calculated interval. The Princess Cecile was his ship, many of her crewmen had been his shipmates throughout the past two years; and of course Adele had become even more important as a friend than as a colleague.

But the Sissie had to be alone long enough in the vicinity of Dunbar's World to completely concentrate the attention of the Duilio's crew. Otherwise they all might as well've stayed in Charlestown and partied the way Councilor Waddell had suggested in the beginning.

"We will extract in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds," Cory announced from the BDC with careful formality. Daniel's display was as it'd been on the previous attack: Plot-Position Indicator above, attack board beneath.

He hadn't carried a Chief Missileer on this mission, since it would've been a wasted slot when the Sissie had no missiles. Besides, it was a task for which Daniel himself had both a flair and experience. His fingers poised.

The emptiness which Daniel's screens maintained in the Matrix now filled with data. The PPI showed the Duilio orbiting forty-six miles above Dunbar's World and over four thousand miles—4173 and closing—from where the Sibyl had returned to normal space.

The real-time optical image inset in the upper right-hand corner of the display showed the cruiser as it emerged from the planetary shadow. Ap Glynn had taken in his rig since the destroyer's previous attack. The sails were furled and the yards rotated parallel to the masts before the masts themselves were folded against the hull. That gave the heavy guns full traverse and elevation.

The two ships were on nearly parallel courses for the moment, but the Sibyl viewed the cruiser from thirty degrees below the center of her long axis. Both 15-cm turrets were rotated to track the Princess Cecile at a nearly reciprocal angle to the destroyer.

Landholder Krychek had been waiting for this chance. He adjusted the Sibyl's four turrets with a momentary squeal; then the 10-cm guns began to hammer.

Either Krychek or the destroyer's gunnery program blocked a weapon's discharge if anything was within 100 meters of the muzzle. The Sibyl's sails, those which remained after the previous attack, were set, so initially only six and after a few seconds four guns fired.

Flashes lit the Duilio's hull, patches of plating subliming under the lash of deuterium ions. The destroyer's weapons didn't deliver nearly the impact of 15-cm guns—the relation of bore to charge was logarithmic, not linear—and the cruiser's hull was much thicker besides, but the light weapons cycled much quicker also. Krychek was at least as accurate as Sun would've been at this short range, and Daniel knew from experience that the bolts would do serious if not incapacitating damage.

But that was the gunner's business; Daniel was picking the first of his new preset attack orders. The calculated spread of his salvo—only three missiles this time, but that was still one more than the Sissie herself could've managed—showed in green lines which flared as each missile separated after burnout. That didn't spread the footprint significantly in the present instance because the target was so close; without adjustment none of the missiles would pass within ten miles of the Duilio on her predicted course.

It felt like an unconscionable length of time before Daniel got the corrections entered into his attack board, but in all truth it was a matter of seconds. It would've taken a minute or more if he'd had to plan the attack from scratch instead of tweaking a preset order.

He was pretty sure they didn't have a minute. Until the moment Daniel twisted and depressed the execute key, it was a toss-up in his mind as to whether they had the seconds the present reality had required.

Whang!

"Ship, launching three!" he shouted over the general push. He wasn't so much reporting to the crew—they'd already heard the first missile launching, followed at five-second intervals by the Whang! Whang! of the other two—as he was crowing with pride at having executed a difficult operation in a timely fashion.

The Princess Cecile was a speck on the PPI, driving slowly off at a tangent from Dunbar's World. The salvo of missiles the cruiser'd launched were closing at .07 C. They'd divided at burnout and were now a spreading straggle of chunks, each weighing a tonne or more.

"May the God of Battles aid you!" Daniel muttered under his breath, but his present duties were to the Sibyl and her crew. Blantyre had the conn, but he'd ordered her to hold course at 1 g acceleration unless the bridge took a direct hit; in that case she could use her discretion. Daniel's concern was his attack board.

Missiles rumbled on their tracks, shaking the destroyer like freight cars shifting in her belly. The fore and aft tubes had separate magazines to keep the feed run short; jerks and clanking indicated to Daniel's experienced ear that the launchers were reloaded even before green ready lights flashed along the side of his display.

An iridescent cloud blurred the Duilio's real-time image. On the sidebar of the attack board, a legend under the cruiser's icon indicated she was braking hard. Captain ap Glynn had reacted to the oncoming missiles by lighting both High Drive and plasma thrusters. He must be running them up to overload output.

Plasma flared with molecules of antimatter which hadn't combined in the High Drive. Though ionized, the thrusters' exhaust was nonetheless ordinary matter. It converted completely to energy along with antimatter when they mixed.

If the Duilio's antennas had been stepped, the strain of deceleration would've sheared them at the base hinges. Even as it was, the cruiser's hull must've been flexing like a rubber toy. Daniel'd commanded ships in similar straits. He knew how terrifying the groans of plates against the ribs and the squeal of escaping air would be to the crew, particularly those who didn't have immediate duties.

Daniel knew, but he had no sympathy at all. The Pellegrinians were The Enemy, the people who'd chosen to fight the RCN. He'd grind them into the dust, by God he would!

The Duilio had been firing at the Sissie when Daniel's display locked into sidereal space; the bolts of heavy hydrogen, detonated by laser arrays in the breaches of the cannon, showed as tracks on his attack board. The cruiser's turrets began slewing as soon as the Pellegrinian gunnery officer realized he had a much more pressing target, but her heavy acceleration made both aiming and traverse more difficult.

Daniel recalculated for his second salvo. Ap Glynn was fighting the inertia that carried his ship into the Sibyl's initial spread of missiles. Allowing for that—

Whang!

"Launching three!" Daniel said as the crew cheered over the continued hammering of Krychek's guns.

Whang! Whang!

The attack board covered too small a region to show the fleeing Princess Cecile, but on the PPI the missiles were red beads nearing the blue dot of the corvette. God of Battles, aid them!

Daniel saw almost as soon as his missiles released that he'd misjudged. Though the board predicted that the yellow tracks of his second salvo would cross the orange bead of the cruiser, Daniel—and the battle computer, but a computer can't feel embarrassment when it screws up—had failed to factor in the gravity of Dunbar's World. This salvo would miss ahead of the Duilio just as the first had. The cruiser, wrapped in a cloud of fire-shot radiance, was slipping into the planet's shadow as it continued to plunge toward the surface.

Ap Glynn wasn't as certain as Daniel that the Sibyl's salvo was misaimed, or at any rate he'd decided not to take chances. The single working tube in the cruiser's ventral turret fired, catching a missile just before it separated. Half a tonne of solid metal swelled into a fireball, thrusting the remainder of the projectile away at an angle that increased the Duilio's margin of safety.

The next trio of missiles shook the destroyer on their way to the launching tubes. Daniel had to hope that they'd continue to feed smoothly, because he didn't have trained missile crewmen aboard to correct problems. That was why he was holding a straight course at 1 g acceleration, ideal conditions for the conveyors. There was always a chance of something breaking on a ship that'd sat idle for several years, however, and the missile-handling equipment provided more opportunities for failure than most installations.

As the remaining missiles of the salvo slanted into the atmosphere, they corkscrewed before breaking up in a tumbling light show. Daniel regretted the danger to people on the ground, but even a civilian can slip getting out of the bathtub. . . .

For a moment Landholder Krychek had all four turrets clear. The simultaneous rapid fire of his 10-cm guns made the destroyer shake like a dog come in from the wet. Daniel clenched as his fingers computed the next salvo, knowing that if Krychek could shoot then there were at least four points at which the Sibyl's spreading sails didn't protect the hull from the cruiser's bolts.

The Princess Cecile vanished from the PPI as the swarm of Pellegrinian missiles crossed her computed track. At this range, the Sibyl's electronics couldn't determine whether the corvette had slipped into the Matrix or had been reduced to a cloud of gas and debris.

The cruiser'd been maneuvering too hard to launch missiles at the destroyer, a bloody good thing. From the evidence of her first salvo, her Chief Missileer knew his business.

The Duilio's dorsal turret fired at the destroyer. Red telltales on the command display quickly switched back to green. A circuit breaker astern had tripped, but neither bolt struck squarely.

The shroud of plasma and pure energy bathing the Duilio suddenly streamed a sparkling curlicue. That stream pinched off, but two more—one bow and one stern—blazed out in the wake as the cruiser continued to descend.

Daniel was poised on the execute button and his mouth was open to shout, "Launching three!" Instead he jerked his hand up, allowing the button to twist back into its safety position.

"Cease fire!" he said. "All personnel, cease fire!"

The Sibyl's guns were still firing; only four of them now, but that was a result of the angle rather than because Krychek was taking a gradual approach to obeying orders. Daniel'd expected that. It took him a moment longer to find the gunnery lockout on this command console than it would've done on the Sissie's familiar display, but only a moment.

The guns fell silent. At the gunnery console, the Landholder shouted curses as he furiously fault-checked his equipment. Eventually he'd figure out what'd happened, at which point he and Daniel would discuss the matter in whatever fashion he chose.

Or Hogg chose, if Daniel didn't watch his servant carefully. Still, that was a problem for a later time.

The cruiser's guns had missed because three of her High Drive motors had destroyed themselves violently. Captain ap Glynn's complete focus on the oncoming missiles had dropped his ship too deep into the atmosphere for the High Drive to operate safely. When the motors began to fail, they shook the Duilio like a rat in a terrier's jaws.

"Ship, we've done it!" Daniel said. He made what would've been the correct series of keystrokes on the Princess Cecile but he got a transaction failed legend. "Break, Cory, damn this bloody thing to hell! Can you echo the cruiser's image on all the ship's displays, over?"

The Duilio continued to fall toward the surface, braked by plasma thrusters alone. She'd stopped being a threat. Indeed, given the sort of damage chronic High Drive failure did to the ship mounting the motors, ap Glynn'd be lucky if he managed a controlled crash rather than simply augering in. Acute failure—lighting the High Drive with the throat of the motor full of normal matter—destroyed the unit itself in a shattering explosion, but antimatter leaked into a thin atmosphere was a cancer. It ate the external hull until the converter finally managed to destroy itself and stop the process.

"Ship," Daniel said, "we've crippled the Pellegrinian cruiser and—"

An image of the Duilio filled his display. Cory'd found the instruction set that'd eluded Daniel a moment previously, but he'd applied it a touch too generally.

Daniel opened his mouth to bellow a protest, but the midshipman caught himself before the words came out. The cruiser shrank back to a small inset on the command display, but the gunnery and navigation consoles still showed a full-screen image.

"Right!" said Daniel. "Crippled them, knocked them right out of the fight, Sibyls! We hold the space around Dunbar's World in the name of the Federal Republic, and our allies on the ground hold what'd been the invaders' base."

He hoped that was still true; he didn't actually know what'd happened on Mandelfarne Island since the Sissie'd lifted under fire. Still, ap Glynn wouldn't have been enforcing his blockade so fiercely if the Bennarian Volunteers had surrendered to Nataniel Arruns.

"As soon as we see what happens to Pellegrinian cruiser—"

The Duilio curved onto the hidden side of the planet in a cometary blaze. Daniel knew it was possible to import satellite imagery, but he didn't care that much. The cruiser was certainly out of the fight. Adele would've had the pictures for him, though, without him needing to ask.

"—we'll make further plans. At present I expect to contact our allies and provide support from orbit while Councilor Corius arranges the surrender of the invading forces. Fellow Sibyls, we've shown everybody what it means to fight the finest professionals in the galaxy!"

It'd been on the tip of his tongue to say, "fight the RCN." That would've been a bad mistake when most of his crew claimed allegiance to the Alliance.

The image of the Duilio reappeared, blurred because the optics weren't really up to the corrections necessary to look deeply through the atmosphere. It was details like that which reminded Daniel he was in a ship built on the cheap for the export market. Though the she'd done the job, you couldn't argue with that.

"Sir?" said Midshipman Cory.

Daniel's face blanked. How's Cory gotten into a channel that should've allowed only me to speak? Then, Because he's my signals officer, that's how!

"What's happened to the Princess Cecile, sir? Are they all right?"

"I don't—" Daniel said. If he'd had Cory in front of him, he'd have throttled the boy, put his hands around his throat and squeezed till his eyes popped out.

"—know at this moment—"

Because Daniel was always watching his display, no matter what was on his mind or how angry he might be, he saw the blue bead wink onto the PPI screen. Even before the icon with the legend pri appeared beside it, he knew what it was.

"Fellow spacers," Daniel said, "I was incorrect. The Princess Cecile has just extracted from the Matrix at a distance of 41,000 miles from Dunbar's World. I expect her signals officer will be contacting us very—"

And as he spoke, a familiar voice on his helmet earphones said, "Daniel, are you all right?"

"Yes, Adele," Daniel said. It wasn't proper protocol, but protocol be hanged. "Now everything is all right."

Back | Next
Framed