Lt. Leary, Commanding (59 page)

Daniel shrugged and pursed his lips. There was no reason she shouldn't know, after all.

"We're going to be too close for the missiles to course-correct after they're launched," he said. "The ship's vector and attitude are going to determine whether the rounds hit or miss, not whatever we program into the attack console. But Betts
is
very good at his job, and he'll be more comfortable if he's able to focus on it."

Adele gave him an odd smile. "Yes," she said. "And I dare say I'll be more comfortable trying not to fall off the hull than I would staring at the fact I completely failed to gather useful information."

Daniel chuckled. He closed her helmet, closed his—ordinarily a pair of spacers going topside would check each other's fittings, but that wasn't going to work here—and opened the outer hatch onto the hull.

Daniel paused a step from the coaming. As always, the beauty of the Matrix brought a lump to his throat.

The
Princess Cecile
trembled through veils of light more delicate than spiderweb, bathed in colors that had no name in the world of landsmen, and formed patterns that reproduced themselves all the way to an infinity not of one universe but all universes. Daniel Oliver Leary was a part of this splendor!

He handed Adele onto the hull and touched helmets with her. He said, "What do you see when you look out, Adele?"

Daniel felt her suit stir against his; she'd probably shrugged. "The light, you mean?" she said. "It seems gray where I look, but at the corners of my eyes it seems . . . pastel? I couldn't put it more clearly than that."

Ah, well; she found an excitement in databases that seemed likely to continue eluding him.

Daniel hooked Adele's safety line to a staple, then closed the hatch behind them. The
Princess Cecile
's twenty-four masts were at their full extension; topsails shimmered on all of them, and the huge lower courses were set on the dorsals as well.

He and Adele stood silent—he entranced, she . . . well, polite and docile might be the correct description of her feelings, but in the shrouded anonymity of the suits he could at least imagine that some of the wonder reached her below the level of awareness. The riggers were scarcely noticeable even when they were in direct view. The sails were huge and alive with the energy of the cosmos pressing them, while the humans who walked the yards to make final adjustments in the spread and lay were mere shadows against the effulgence.

The mainsails on rings C and D shifted clockwise. The
Princess Cecile
trembled, then sank from one bubble universe to another. The astrogation computer had chosen the latter's physical constants as most suitable for this stage of the voyage. To Daniel it was as if the heart of a sun had opened momentarily, blinding in its beauty.

Whatever Adele felt or saw caused her to snatch at him so violently that her boots lost their magnetic grip on the hull. Daniel's arm encircled her and guided her back to firm footing.

"We'll make three more shifts before we exit for a look at our colleagues from the Alliance," Daniel said. "We'll be three light-seconds sunward of Tanais; a quick in-and-out, the way we set up for the Falassan guardship."

Daniel cleared his throat, lifting his helmet away from Adele's momentarily so that the sound wouldn't pass. "I want to get the feel of the region we're sailing in before I set up the attack," he went on. "The most precise calculations in the world will leave you fifty miles out if the Matrix is slow. . . ."

He frowned, thinking about the way Adele had tried to describe the sensation of Casimir radiation on human retinas as gray or pastel. "Slow" was a word whose normal meaning had nothing to do with the interplay of forces between the universes; but Daniel had no better word, so he used what there was to give false meaning to a concept that even many astrogators wouldn't have understood. There were things that you could only explain to someone who already knew.

"Fifty miles isn't important if you're making planetfall," Daniel went on with a sigh. "You start your braking effort a little sooner, a little later. But for our present purposes . . ."

The topsails of E Ring furled forty percent. On Dorsal, the sail fluttered but jammed well short of the programmed amount. Daniel took a step forward—and caught himself, feeling silly, because with both watches on duty there was someone at the antenna already.

He watched the rigger climb stays hand over hand, throw a leg over the yard, and then kick the parrel with his other foot. The sail's taut fabric fluttered loose, then drew tight again as the jack hauled it into position.

"Beautiful," Daniel whispered. "Just beautiful. Any captain would give an arm to have a crew like mine."

"Daniel," Adele said, all expression squeezed out of her voice by the helmet-to-helmet contact. "Thank you for making me a part of your crew, part of your family. Regardless of what happens next."

By reflex Daniel opened his mouth to say, "Now, don't count us out yet . . ." but that wasn't the right response for a friend.

"Yes, well," he said. "I expect the
Sissie
to give a good account of herself. Beyond that, the future's rather in the lap of the Gods. There's some reason to hope that Chastelaine's crews won't be in the best condition after what must have been an unusually difficult voyage."

He stepped slightly apart to stare at the Matrix between the sails of the corvette's A and B rings. All time and space danced in that shimmering wonder.

Helmet to helmet again with Adele but speaking as much to himself, Daniel said, "I suppose I came out here for a . . . for
another
, let's not say last, look at the Matrix before I set up the next series of maneuvers. Quite wonderful, don't you think?"

"I too think my present situation is wonderful, Daniel," Adele said with the understated precision that was even more a part of her than the personal data unit.

Daniel laughed and hugged her through the rigid bracing of their suits. "Let's go below," he said. "We'll have business with the Alliance very shortly. And by
God
, the Alliance has business with us!"

Lt. Mon came up Corridor C from the Battle Direction Center, moving like an angry boxer. Somebody called to him from a compartment—Hoagland, the technician who was going over the Medic again before it might have to be used. Mon ignored him and glared at Adele when she looked up to watch his approach.

"Permission to enter the bridge!" Mon said loudly. He didn't use his knuckles but slapped the hatch flange twice with his fingertips to make it ring.

"Granted, Lieutenant," Daniel said, muting his holographic display to only a shimmer like dust motes between him and Mon. Daniel's face showed very little, but to Adele he appeared as puzzled about what Mon was doing here as she was herself.

"Captain," Mon said. Even Betts turned briefly from his console before going back to his fantasy of missile tracks. "We won't have much time after we exit for observations so I thought I'd say this now. Goddam little in my life went the way I'd have liked it to, not till I met you. I guess on average I've come out ahead."

Mon thrust his hand through the display area of the command console. Daniel leaned forward and lifted slightly from his seat to clasp arms with his second in command.

"It's a mutual pleasure, Mon," he said. A familiar smile lit his eyes and made the right corner of his mouth quirk upward. "I hope, however, that the association won't continue on the atomic level after today."

Mon looked blank, then guffawed. He slapped his left hand over Daniel's right, sandwiching it against his biceps muscle, then unclasped and stepped away.

"Sun, all of you?" Mon said. "I always figured I'd die in bed with my wife. Thanks to God and the RCN, I may be spared that. Good luck to all of you!"

He turned and strode back the way he'd come; an angry little man who always saw the worst in a situation and who never did less than his duty. Adele felt a surge of, well, friendship for him.

Daniel started to bring up his display, then grinned more broadly at Adele and activated the PA system instead. "
Fellow spacers!
" he said. "
We've shown the RCN how to sail and the Selma pirates how to navigate the Matrix. Now we're going to show the Alliance how to fight. Three cheers for the
Princess Cecile
!
Hip-hip—
"

"
Hooray!
" the ship answered. Unaided voices, several shouting on the intercom, and Midshipman Dorst using the PA system itself from the Battle Direction Center.

"
Hip-hip—
"

"
Hooray
!"

"
Hip-hip
—"

Everyone aboard the
Princess Cecile
was cheering. Illiterate engine-wipers, women whose families had been RCN for every generation in living memory, men whose idea of patriotism was that anyone not from Cinnabar was a wog with no honor and no rights.

All those people cheered; and so did Mistress Adele Mundy, the scion of Chatsworth, a woman whose culture was as broad and deep as all human history.

"
Hooray!
"

Lt. Mon, returned to the Battle Direction Center, announced, "
One minute to reentry to normal space
!"

_T
ransition.
Daniel's display came live with imagery; he adjusted
the scale so that the edge of the frame encompassed without waste volume the Alliance squadron forming above the huge disk of Getica. In Daniel's present state, the discomfort of being slowly disemboweled wouldn't have prevented him from functioning.

"Reentering the Matrix!" he said, personally decreasing the charge levels of the
Princess Cecile
's current set of thirty-six sails. In Daniel's mind, negative images of the bridge and his companions were projected in infinite series "up" and "down" through a nongeometric dimension.

Mon, the midshipmen, and an artificial intelligence within the astrogation computer were all working on an attack solution. If Daniel dropped dead in the next ten minutes or so, perhaps one of those courses would be chosen. Otherwise, Lt. Daniel Leary would be trusting his own instincts with only the barest regard for other opinions. A warship wasn't a democracy, and a captain who didn't lead was a fool and a disaster for those whom he commanded.

A red-lit sidebar appeared at the top of his display. He glanced at it in furious annoyance, thinking,
What a bloody time for the screen to malfunction—
 

And noticed to his amazement that the six tiny images there were the ships of the Alliance squadron, rotating to show what appeared to be their current sail plans rather than the maximum theoretical rig. Optical data gathered at three light-seconds distance wasn't good enough to provide such detail.

Daniel enlarged the images, looking through the haze of coherent light toward Adele. Through the intercom her voice said, "
Admiral Chastelaine believes in keeping tight control of his formation. The flagship,
Der Grosser Karl
, microwaved full rigging instructions to the other vessels, and I've copied them to you. Do they help?
"

"Well, dear one, they may just save our lives," Daniel said. He felt an odd elation. He'd expected to die in the next few minutes . . . and it might still happen, of course; there were no guarantees in life. But now that Daniel knew the angles from which the battleship's secondary batteries would be screened by the expanse of her sails, he would give his command opportunities for survival that couldn't be expected from pure chance.

Oh, yes. The sail plans helped.

"Attack officers," Daniel said, cuing the message to Betts, Sun, and the Battle Direction Center; and Adele of course, but not by
his
determination. "The attachment is the rig the Alliance squadron will be wearing. Adjust your solutions accordingly. Our desired reentry to sidereal space continues to be one mile, plus or minus one half mile, from the Alliance battleship. Out."

Betts nodded without looking away from his console and continued working. Sun looked around in amazement, however. Sun had been a rigger in the merchant service before enlisting in the RCN and finding a new focus in gunnery. He knew, though not as well as Daniel himself, how difficult it was to navigate through the Matrix with that degree of precision.

The
Princess Cecile
shifted again between universes. A vessel couldn't remain at rest within the Matrix, so to hold position it moved from one bubble to another, balancing flow against time to return to its original position.

The Alliance squadron had almost certainly noticed the
Princess Cecile
's brief return to normal space. A merchant vessel wouldn't have been able to transition so quickly, so even though Daniel had turned off the corvette's identification transponder Admiral Chastelaine would know that a warship had spotted his ships.

Whose warship remained an open question: Strymonian frigate, Selma pirate, or just possibly an RCN ship like the one which the Tanais defenses had mauled or destroyed a week previous? Chastelaine would pause to make sure his ships were in full fighting trim before he set off for Strymon to put down the rebellion there.

Daniel grinned as he started a new set of course calculations. The Alliance admiral wasn't the only one wondering about the future.

Tovera stood at the wardroom hatch, looking in all directions without appearing either nervous or furtive. She and Hogg must have moved Delos Vaughn from the suit locker to there. Knowing Hogg, Vaughn was trussed to the clamps that held the table legs during meals.

Daniel smiled as he calculated potentials—on the astrogation display, not the attack screen. If he'd had time, he'd have had to order a more polite form of confinement for their guest and ally. Fortunately, Daniel was very busy.

Maroon a Leary of Bantry in the desert, would he?
 

The attack involved three aspects of the
Princess Cecile
's course: velocity, vector, and location in sidereal space. Velocity was a mere mathematical conversion of force applied through the physical constants of the universes which the corvette had traversed after entry to the Matrix. Vector was more difficult, the real business of astrogation; but there were thousands of astrogators who could achieve an approximation that would be adequate to the needs of the present attack.