Lt. Leary, Commanding

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright (c) 2000 by David Drake

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-57875-8

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, July 2000

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Drake, David.

Lt. Leary, commanding / by David Drake.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original"—T.p. verso.

ISBN 0-671-57875-8

1. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. I. Title: Lieutenant Leary,

commanding. II. Title.

PS3554.R196 L78 2000

813'.54—dc21 00-031050

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

With the Lightnings

Lt. Leary, Commanding

BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

Hammer's Slammers

The Tank Lords

Caught in the Crossfire

The Butcher's Bill

The Sharp End

Independent Novels and Collections

The Dragon Lord

Birds of Prey

Northworld Trilogy

Redliners

Starliner

Mark II: The Military Dimension

All the Way to the Gallows

The Belisarius Series:
(with Eric Flint)

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness

Destiny's Shield

Fortune's Stroke

The General Series:
(with S.M. Stirling)

The Forge

The Hammer

The Anvil

The Steel

The Sword

The Chosen

The Reformer

The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny
(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light
(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Enemy of My Enemy:
Terra Nova
(with Ben Ohlander)

Armageddon
(edited with Billie Sue Mosiman)

To my webmaster, cybrarian Karen Zimmerman, who wasn't the model for Adele Mundy, but might have been if I'd met her sooner. (Of course, we'd have to work on her pistol shooting.)

I guess one could say "the usual suspects" by this point.
Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel took care of the series of computer events. (Did you know that files can become cross-linked on your hard drive? Well, at any rate, they could on mine.)
Dan Breen continues in curmudgeonly excellence as my first reader. There could be no better person for insights and scholarship.
When I'm working, I take up a lot of room and am frequently less than cheerful. I'm working most of the time. My wife, Jo, sticks with me; I really appreciate the fact.

I'm using English and Metric weights and measures throughout Lt. Leary, Commanding, as I did in With the Lightnings. I wouldn't bother mentioning this, but the decision seems to concern some people. I'm doing it for the same reason that I'm writing the novel in English instead of inventing a language for the characters of future millennia to speak.
I'd like to note for those who're interested that the orders in Chapter Nine are a close paraphrase of those which sent the frigate USS Congress to Hawaii in 1845. Here as elsewhere, I prefer to borrow from reality rather than invent it.

David Drake

When the skies are black above them,
and the decks ablaze beneath,
And the top-men clear the raffle with
their clasp-knives in their teeth.
—Rudyard Kipling

_L
ieutenant Daniel Leary rolled his uncle's wheelchair to the end
of the catwalk and paused, gazing back at the corvette
Princess Cecile
nestled in the center of the graving dock. He turned the wheelchair. "Now that you've inspected her, Uncle Stacey," he said, "wouldn't you agree there's no finer ship in the RCN?"

The battleship
Aristotle
in the next bay lowered over them: seventy thousand tons empty, with a crew of two thousand and missile magazines sufficient for a day-long engagement. The eight-inch plasma cannon of the
Aristotle
's defensive battery could not only divert incoming projectiles but also devour ships the corvette's size in rainbow cascades of stripped nuclei.

Daniel was as oblivious of the battleship as he was of the wisps of cirrus cloud in the high heavens. For him, the twelve-hundred ton
Princess Cecile
was the only ship in Harbor Three. He'd commanded her, after all. Commanded her and fought her and—by the grace of God and the best crew ever to come a captain's way—destroyed an Alliance cruiser of many times the corvette's strength.

"Didn't we, Adele?" Daniel said, forgetting how little of his previous thoughts had made it to his lips. He grinned over his shoulder at the severe-looking woman of thirty-one who'd joined him and Uncle Stacey on their excursion.

Adele Mundy smiled in response—it was hard not to smile when Daniel was full of happy enthusiasm, as he was at most times—but her expression gave no sign that she knew what he was talking about. Like Daniel she wore a 2nd Class RCN dress uniform, gray with black piping. Her collars bore the crossed lightning bolts of a signals officer, a senior warrant rank with pay and allowances equal to those of a bosun.

Adele's handheld data unit slipped into a fitted pocket on her right thigh. That modification to her uniform was absolutely nonstandard and the sort of thing that would send an inspecting officer ballistic if it were noticed.

Daniel didn't even bother to wince any more. Adele without her data unit would be like Adele without hands, personally miserable and of no value to the RCN. Whereas with the unit—and with the little pistol, also nonstandard, nestled in a side pocket—neither Daniel nor Cinnabar ever had a better bulwark.

Adele Mundy was an RCN officer by grace of the Republic's warrant. By training and inclination she was an archival librarian, a task she'd performed with skill amounting to genius before circumstances required her to accept other duties. By birth, she was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful houses in the Republic before the Three Circles Conspiracy had forfeited the money and cost the head of every adult Mundy but one.

Adele had been at school off Cinnabar when the cycle of treason and proscriptions played itself out in blood. Distance had preserved her life; not her fortune, but she wasn't the sort to whom money meant much one way or the other.

For that matter, Daniel sometimes suspected that life didn't mean much to Adele either; but duty did, and craftsmanship. Daniel didn't try to remake his friends.

"She's a trim craft," Uncle Stacey said, assessing the corvette with a mind no less sharp for being confined to a wheelchair-bound body. Commander Stacey Bergen, the finest astrogator of his day, had opened or resurveyed half the routes in the
Sailing Directions for Ships of the Republic
. "I've never seen a Kostroman-built ship that wasn't as pretty as anything of her class, though some of them use lighter scantlings than I'd have chosen for anything coming out of my yard."

The old man cocked his head over his shoulder to catch his nephew's eye with the implied question.

"The frames and hull plating are at RCN specifications, Uncle Stacey," Daniel said quickly. "The only problem we've had in the conversion was that all the astrogational equipment is calibrated in Kostroman AUs instead of Sol standard like us and the Alliance. Granted of course that the
Sissie
's a fighting corvette, not a dedicated survey ship built to accept stresses that'd turn a battleship inside out."

The
Princess Cecile
's hull was a rough cylinder two hundred and thirty feet long and fifty-five feet wide, with bluntly rounded ends. Here in the graving dock she was clamped bow and stern by collars like the chucks of a gigantic lathe. They could rotate her into any attitude, so that the antennas that lined her hull in four rows of six each could be extended and canted throughout their range of motion.

Two twin four-inch plasma cannon provided the corvette's defensive armament in turrets offset toward the starboard bow and sternwards to port. Their bolts of charged particles could deflect incoming missiles by vaporizing portions of the projectile and converting that mass into slewing thrust. Offensively, a practiced crew in the
Princess Cecile
could launch her twenty missiles in pairs at one minute intervals. The crew which Daniel had brought from Kostroma was trained very well in that and every other aspect of war.

As a boy, Daniel had listened to Uncle Stacey and the naval friends who came to chat with him in the shipyard he ran after retirement. They'd talked of shifts in the Matrix, of sheared antennas, torqued hulls; of days at a time spent in the glare of Casimir radiation, picking a course where none was known before.

It was those tales, told by master astrogators to other masters of the art, that had led Daniel to join the RCN at age sixteen after the flaming row he'd had with his father, Corder. The Learys weren't a naval family: they were politicians, movers and shakers of the Republic, and never a one of them had risen higher than Corder Leary, Speaker Leary, himself.

Daniel laughed, surprising Adele and his uncle both. Grinning apologetically at their surprise he explained, "I was just thinking that six years on, there's no decision I'm more glad of than that I joined the RCN, but it could be that my reasons for making that decision had more to do with spiting my father than they did with making a name for myself."

"I've never noticed that the reasons people do things have much connection with how well or badly matters turn out," Adele said. "For example, I'm confident that my parents entered the Three Circles Conspiracy with the full intention of saving the Republic from men who couldn't be trusted with power."

She smiled. Adele gave the impression of being dispassionate about everything except knowledge, and then only knowledge in the form of marks on paper or electronic potentials. That wasn't true—the passion was there, Daniel knew, as surely as it was in his own explosive outbursts—but Adele's analysis would always be as cold and clean as the blade of a scalpel.

That was true even at times like this one, when Adele was analyzing the factors that led to the severed heads of every member of her family, including her ten-year-old sister, being displayed from Speaker's Rock.

"Your Lieutenant Mon's a good man," Stacey said. "Who did the yard assign for a supervisor? Archbolt, I suppose? Or did they give you Berol?"

"Yes, Archbolt," said Daniel, watching members of the
Princess Cecile
's crew—the Sissies—clambering over the antennas with tool belts.

Harbor Three had a regular dockyard staff, but the strain of fitting out the fleet in anticipation of full-scale war with the Alliance had overstrained their capacity. There would have been jobs for three times the number of workmen, and there were no trained personnel to hire into the new slots.

One way around the problem was to use a vessel's own crewmen to perform all but the specialist yard work. Normally crews were paid off when their ship docked in its home port; now, a third of the
Princess Cecile
's crew was at work refitting the vessel under the command of a ship's officer who also was kept on full pay.

Daniel, as the corvette's captain, would normally have been that officer. He'd passed the posting down to his first lieutenant, Lt. Mon, who would otherwise have been trying to support his family on half pay and no other resources. Mon had been a prisoner during the capture of the
Princess Cecile
; therefore he had no share of the prize money which the Navy Office would eventually adjudge for the ship.

Daniel had two eighths of the prize money coming to him. That would be months or years in the future, but his bank was more than happy to advance him funds against the event. Daniel didn't have the expense of a wife, and he did have a great personal interest in meeting young women who might be impressed by a dashing naval officer. Leaving the full-time duties to Mon gave both officers what was best suited to their circumstances; an idyllic situation so far as Daniel was concerned.

"A trim ship," Uncle Stacey repeated, "and very well found."

In his present state of health, Stacey hadn't been able to walk the telescoping antennas and yards, so now he locked a pair of naval goggles down over his eyes to use their electronic enhancement to view them. They determined the position, attitude, and expanse of sails of charged dielectric fabric which created imbalances in Casimir radiation and drove the vessel through the Matrix.