The Road of Danger-ARC (43 page)

Vesey started to get up. Daniel said, “Sit right where you are, Captain Vesey! Start plotting us a course for Hester 27514CH.”

Daniel sat at the astrogation console—empty because Cory had been in the entry hold; not that Cory would have objected if Six ordered him out. He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. Then he grinned, fully himself again.

“
Ship
,” Daniel said, orally keying the general push. His voice echoed from the PA speakers and through the intercom. “
We’re safe in the Matrix instead of getting our butts toasted in normal space because Acting Captain Vesey dumped reaction mass back along our course and then kicked us out of it by kissing the thrusters. What I think
—”

His face split in a smile of boyish delight.

“—
is that we owe Captain Vesey a hearty cheer. Hurrah for Captain Vesey!
”

The ship rang with, “Hurrah!” and “Hurrah for Five.”

“
Up Cinnabar, fellow spacers!
” Daniel shouted, and the crew echoed him again.

CHAPTER 25: The Matrix

Adele continued to review internal ship discussions as text blocks, but in the Matrix she had no communications duties proper. Instead of going back to processing data from Madison, she decided instead to learn about Hester 27514CH, the planned watering stop.

The Sailing Directions for the Macotta Region
, published by Navy House, gave only a brief notation: Uninhabitable/Can provide reaction mass. She grimaced, then searched for information with more body.

That was readily available, because Adele always updated the
Princess Cecile
’s database with all the material she could find on the region to which the corvette would be travelling. They had paused only briefly on Cinnabar on their way from Zenobia to Kronstadt, but Adele had not stinted her information-gathering. She could sleep during the voyage, after all.

The log of a trader from Novy Sverdlovsk two centuries earlier provided the fullest account. The ship,
The Twelve Apostles
, had landed after a reaction mass tank had carried loose and ruptured. The crew had made repairs, then diverted to Hester 27514CH to refill the tank.

The Sverdlovians had found no land except for active volcanoes. Storm-lashed waves wore the cones down quickly if they ceased to erupt. The atmosphere was low on oxygen and poisonously full of sulfur—as was the sea, causing it to be extremely acid. Two crewmen had died when their suits failed, and a third had drowned. The ship itself had nearly sunk in the open sea when a squall swept in, and damage from the water and atmosphere had required extensive repairs when they got to their destination.

Surely there has to be a better choice for replenishment than this hellworld?

Sun and Rocker were rotating an image of the
Estremadura
on their gunnery screens, discussing aiming points and arguing whether concentrating or spreading plasma bolts across the target was the better idea. More accurately, Rocker was arguing in favor of separating the turret controls so that they could disable more of the cruiser’s individual gun mountings in a given interval; Sun was adamant that a single point of aim opened the possibility of punching a hole in the
Estremadura
’s hull and ending the fight quickly.

Adele followed the discussion as text. It interested her as an observer of human behavior. Sun and his assistant were capable specialists who knew their lives were at risk unless the
Princess Cecile
performed at top efficiency. Each argued to maximize his individual authority, but they couched their arguments in terms of the general good.

Rocker wanted to control a gun turret; Sun wanted to control both turrets. Sun was senior, so the argument in favor of concentrated fire would carry the day.

Adele wasn’t concerned about the question itself: the conflict would determine whether she lived or died, but she didn’t particularly care which so long as she had met the standards which she set for herself. Listening to that sort of discussion, however, convinced her that she herself was a member of a species which merely shared physical similarities with human beings.

By reflex, Adele checked the file’s history; she found that Cory had accessed the log of
The Twelve Apostles
shortly before she did herself. After checking Cory’s console to make sure he wasn’t in the midst of calculations which shouldn’t be interrupted—he was merely studying the log in question and had lined up several other references to Hester 27514CH, none of them more informative than the
Sailing Directions
—she said, “Cory?”

“
Ma’am?
” he said on a two-way link, turning to look at her.

“Is there no better place for us to water than Hester 27514CH?” she said. “It appears to me that at best we’ll be seriously damaged by landing there. Ah, over.”

“
What?
” said Cory. He laughed. “
Because a Sverdlovsk tramp had problems? You’ve seen how sloppy civilian freighters get, mistress, even when they’re Cinnabar flagged. And let me tell you, Sverdlovsk warships, they’re no better. You put them together and you’ve got a ship that leaks from all the seams and a crew in suits where just the big holes are taped closed. I’ve seen tramps sink in Harbor Two on Cinnabar—it’s the wogs, not the planet, where the trouble is, over
.”

Adele considered the matter. She discounted the notion a stranger might have had: that Cory was trying to cheer her up by putting a positive face on what he expected to be a disaster. In a crisis, RCN officers had a tendency to react with professional dispassion which left civilians petrified with horror.

Furthermore, Adele had the impression that the Sissies were no more likely to lie to her than to the ship’s steel hull. They didn’t regard Officer Mundy as human either, though they took a more positive of what she was than she did herself.

“I see,” she said. Daniel, Vesey, and now Cory all believed that Hester 27514CH was a suitable planet on which to replenish reaction mass. She knew of no one whose professional opinion she would support against those three officers. “Thank you, Cory.”

Tomas Grant stood in the rotunda adjacent to the bridge, surrounded by off-duty riggers. Adele could probably have seen him if she turned to look out through the hatchway, but she preferred to use imagery from the ceiling cameras.

The rebel leader wasn’t involved in the discussion except as a trophy for Barnes, Dasi, and Larkins to point to as they regaled their fellows with their description of stealing a ship from the center of an Alliance base and spiriting away the most wanted man on the planet. Hofnagel was probably telling similar stories in the Power Room, but the riggers had made off with the prize.

No one seemed to be formally looking after Grant. Daniel had gone to the Battle Direction Center, leaving Vesey in the command console.

Vesey really had earned the honor. Just as Tovera studied normal human beings so that she could appear to have a conscience, so Vesey seemed to have studied Daniel so that she could appear to make split-second decisions. That meant that by force of will she picked
a
possible course of action and executed it, instead of determining which of many possibilities was the optimal course.

Because Vesey was intelligent and extremely skilled, the first choice off the top of her head was likely to be the correct one. Whether or not it was the best possible choice, remaining frozen by indecision—her natural response—was certainly the worst choice in a crisis.

It had to be very hard for her, though. Adele had once allowing a brute to strip-search her so that she could carry out her mission. It had been necessary, so she had accepted it. She was, after all, an RCN officer.

As was Lieutenant Vesey. A very
good
officer, now seated at the command console of the most efficient ship in the RCN.

“
Ship, extracting in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds
,” Vesey announced. The riggers stepped to the edges of the rotunda, ready either to let the hull watch enter without congestion or to rush out to join them if the situation required.

“
We’re extracting three light minutes out from Sunbright
,” Cory said, continuing his conversation with Adele. “
This is just to get us away from the cruiser so that we can build up velocity in normal space. No matter how good Six is—or Vesey, of course—it’d take us a month to reach Hester with no more way on than we had when we inserted
.”

“
Extracting
,” Vesey said.

Because Adele wasn’t lost in the data on her display, the transition struck her with unexpected savagery: her left eye flared with rings of rosy light, and the right side of her body felt as though it were being shredded with garden cultivators. She gasped and dropped her right stylus.

The High Drive slammed on again, though this time without the thrusters added. Adele called up the system schematic to see how much reaction mass remained.

She became furious at her mistake. As soon as she had the answer—7%—she realized that she could not, and had
known
she could not, interpret the data.

“Master Cory,” Adele said, speaking formally because of her embarrassment. “How serious is our lack of reaction mass, if you please?”

“
Well, bad and not bad, mistress
,” Cory said. “
We’ve got plenty to get to get to Hester. Other than go back to Sunbright, though, that’s about the choice. Once we get to Hester we’ll be fine from there to Madison if that’s where we’re going. Or even Kronstadt, though we’ll only be filling the aft tank instead of both
.”

Adele frowned, but the only really foolish thing she could do at this point would be to fail to ask for clarification when she lacked the knowledge to answer her own question. “Why won’t we fill both tanks, please?”

“
Oh, well, because we’d contaminate what’s left in the bow tank
,” Cory said. He didn’t sound surprised, let alone exasperated, by the question, so perhaps it wasn’t as foolish as Adele had thought. “
The antimatter converters work on any fluid, but if we run sulfuric acid through the water purification system, it’ll eat the guts out
and then we’d have nothing to drink
.”

“Ah,” said Adele. “Thank you, Cory.”

She noticed the precursor effects of a ship extracting before the watch officers did; perhaps she had her console set to higher sensitivity, perhaps it was just that she was expecting this to happen.

“Daniel, there’s a ship coming,” she said sharply. With a heartbeat more to remember that Daniel wasn’t in the command console, she added, “Ship, another ship’s—”

The High Drive switched off.

“—appearing close by, over.”

In a moment she could read the scale and calculate the distance from the newcomer to the
Sissie
. It wasn’t second nature to her, though, as it would have been to one of the ship’s officers.

“
Inserting!
” Daniel said. The
Princess Cecile
shuddered out of normal space with what seemed to Adele to be a nasty corkscrew motion that only affected her lower legs. She wondered if that had something to do with the fact that Daniel hadn’t allowed as much time as usual between shutting down the High Drive and insertion.

“Daniel,” Adele said. Visual identification of the newcomer would not be certain at the point when the
Sissie
left sidereal space, but the electronic signature was. “The other ship is the
Estremadura.
She tracked us through the Matrix.”

“
Roger
,” said Daniel. “
Break. Ship, this is Six. I have the conn, out
.”

Lieutenant Vesey had done exceptionally well. Nevertheless, Adele was sure that Vesey breathed a sigh of relief at those words like everyone else on the corvette.

It was time for the first team to take over.

***

Daniel had the calculated courses of the
Estremadura
and the
Princess Cecile
on his display, but he shrank the hologram because he wasn’t watching it anyway. Within fifteen seconds of when the corvette had dropped into the Matrix, her enemy would have been close enough to anchor her in sidereal space if her gunners were good enough.

The
Estremadura
’s gunners were good enough.

The consoles in the Battle Direction Center faced inward in a five-pointed star. To Daniel’s left was Fiducia; then Rocker; and Blumelein, a Technician Third Class who would be in charge of the fusion bottle if something happened to the Power Room crew. The chance of there
being
a fusion bottle if the whole Power Room crew was incapacitated seemed to Daniel to be vanishingly unlikely, but he didn’t argue against what Chief Pasternak considered a reasonable precaution.

Midshipman Cazelet, backing up the astrogation officer, sat to Daniel’s right. He faced his display, but his hands didn’t move and he was watching Daniel out of the corners of his eyes.

Grinning, Daniel turned to him and said, “If you’re hoping I’ll turn into a beautiful woman and pledge you my undying devotion, Cazelet, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

The midshipman cringed. He still didn’t look directly at Daniel. “Sir,” he said, “I’m—”

He composed himself and faced Daniel with a shy smile. “I didn’t want to disturb you, sir,” he said. “I don’t see any alternative except proceeding to Hester 27514CH at our present rate, and I’m afraid that the
Estremadura
would be able to pursue us even there.”

Daniel chuckled. To put the midshipman at his ease, he said, “How long would the voyage take, Cazelet.”

“Seventeen days,” Cazelet answered without hesitation. “That is, I estimate seventeen days. But you can probably cut time from that, sir.”

“Though not enough to matter, I think,” Daniel said cheerfully. It cheered him up to learn—he’d expected it, but the confirmation was nice—that Cazelet had not only plotted the course to Hester but had already calculated the time it would take the
Princess Cecile
to arrive if she were not able to accelerate beyond her current modest sidereal velocity. Vesey, Cory, and Cazelet were all first-rate astrogators, and Daniel Leary could justly claim a portion of their skill for his own efforts.