What Distant Deeps (36 page)

A voice that was male but not von Gleuck’s replied almost immediately, “Princess Cecile, this is Z 46. How do you come to use this code, over?”

Adele smiled with chilly pleasure. Competence pleased her, even competence in an enemy; and she supposed she shouldn’t think of the Alliance as “the enemy” for at least the time being.

“Z 46,” she said, “I cannot vouch for the security procedures of RCN vessels based at Palmyra; therefore I must assume that the Horde can read any signals passed using RCN codes. I suggest that signals between the Princess Cecile and Alliance vessels be sent using this obsolete Alliance code. Even though it’s outdated, I believe it will be safe from Palmyrene interception, over.”

“Hold one, Princess Cecile,” said the Alliance signals officer. He sounded as though he’d been kicked in the stomach.

Adele’s smile quirked slightly wider at the thought. As well he might.

She had been careful to refer to the code as obsolete, but it had in fact been the Fleet’s active code three months before. Though it had been superseded, the signals officer of the Z 46—and his superiors in Pleasaunce—probably thought it was still good.

The Alliance battleship Oldenburg had been so badly hammered in the Battle of Cacique that the automatic systems which were supposed to destroy the code generator had failed, and the entire bridge crew was killed. RCN technicians sifting through the wreckage had found the generator, and Mistress Sand’s specialists were able to bring it back on line.

The information remained closely held, even in Mistress Sand’s organization. Adele was using it now because secure communications among the three warships was absolutely necessary if any of them were to survive. Even so, she knew that some—perhaps including Mistress Sand—would fault her for disclosing it.

The saving grace of Adele’s action was that in all likelihood, the Princess Cecile and the Alliance ships would be destroyed anyway. In that case, the secret would remain safe.

“Princess Cecile, this is von Gleuck,” said a different male voice. “Am I speaking to Lady Mundy, over?”

Adele grimaced. “This is Officer Mundy, Lieutenant Commander,” she said in a consciously withdrawn voice. “Over.”

“I’ve directed my command to use the code set which you recommend, Lady Mundy,” von Gleuck said. “I felt it necessary to assure myself that the Princess Cecile’s operator would be able to handle the non-standard procedure. Your presence, which I was not willing to assume, of course convinces me. Von Gleuck out.”

Lady Mundy indeed. He’s determined to make his point—stiff-necked aristocrat that he is. Adele’s frown bent into a wry smile. And it takes one to know one, I believe the phrase is.

She went back to work, analyzing the internal communications of the Alliance destroyers. They were friends and indeed allies at present, but circumstances change.

And anyway, Adele didn’t want to die with the regret of having twiddled her thumbs while there was information she could have gathered and collated.

CHAPTER 21

Above Zenobia

Daniel’s lips pursed: the first Palmyrene cutter appeared some hundred and ten thousand miles from Zenobia, though on the opposite side of the planet from where the Sissie was orbiting. That would be very good astrogation for an initial extraction after a voyage of probably fifty light-years or more.

Except that it probably wasn’t astrogation but rather pilotage. The Palmyrene captain had sailed to the Zenobia system—a planetary system was a large target, even using what was by Cinnabar standards a very rudimentary computer—and then felt his way inward to Zenobia itself.

It was no accident that the cutter extracted only two thousand miles above Zenobia’s second moon, an irregular lump of rock no more than fifty miles in diameter on any axis. Slight as it was, the moon cast its shadow into the Matrix. The cutter’s captain had used that as his target.

Even a judge friendly to the Palmyrenes would have admitted that a single vessel appearing in that fashion could be chance. Three more cutters followed almost immediately, none of them more than a hundred miles out from any of her fellows. That was beyond chance, and far beyond the skill of any spacers whom Daniel had ever heard of.

Von Gleuck repeated his challenge. The Z 42 was holding station against the third moon silently, but Daniel no longer thought that the destroyer might go unnoticed. The Palmyrenes were barbarous, certainly, but the forces of civilization had nothing to teach them about sidereal space or the Matrix, either one.

“They’re signalling to one another with handheld laser communicators,” Adele said on the command channel. “I can’t read the messages—they appear to be in clear, but I’m only able to pick up fragments because the power is so low; the beams don’t scatter from the hulls brightly enough for even our optics to pick up. They appear to be discussing a rendezvous—”

The first cutter slipped back into the Matrix. Her three companions withdrew moments later, in perfect unison as they had appeared.

“Yes,” said Adele in satisfaction. “I believe they’re meeting the Autocrator.”

As an obvious afterthought, she added, “Over.”

“Gleuck to Leary,” said the command console. Cory—or had Adele resumed commo duties?—was passing the signal directly through instead of querying Daniel or converting it to text. “How do you interpret the Monkeys’ withdrawal, over?”

“Leary to Gleuck,” Daniel replied, grinning. Should I refer to our Cinnabar allies as “Palmyrenes,” or should I say “Wogs” to demonstrate solidarity with an officer who will shortly be my brother in arms? “My staff informs me that the leading cutters discussed joining the Autocrator Irene, who will make the decision about further proceedings. You know the Palmyrenes and the Autocrator better than I do, but I personally doubt that the lady will choose to withdraw at this stage, over.”

“Roger, Leary,” von Gleuck said. “Break. All Force Posy elements—”

Finessing the question of what elements those were and where they were located.

“—you are free to engage interloping Palmyrene warships at will with gunfire, but do not, repeat, do not, launch missiles until I give specific orders. Cinc Posy out.”

Daniel grinned again. Does Lady Belisande know that her gallant is going into battle waving her name like a banner? Well, with luck, there would be someone around to tell her about it after things quieted down.

The frame of Daniel’s PPI pulsed orange, then settled to a thin haze that brightened to the upper right of the display. He expanded the image volume, letting it find its own boundaries which would include the ships that had just appeared.

The Piri Reis with seven, then twenty, and finally thirty-one cutters had extracted forty light-minutes out from Zenobia’s sun. The cruiser was about the same distance from Zenobia itself. Daniel frowned, wondering why in heaven the Palmyrene fleet was appearing there.

When he switched the region to a cartouche in the lower right corner of his display, then increased the scale, he understood. A large comet was inbound from the cloud of debris orbiting a light-year out from the sun. The Piri Reis had extracted near the comet, and the cutters had formed on the cruiser.

Text at the bottom of the display told Daniel that von Gleuck was ordering the Z 42 to clear for action, stripping the ship to a minimum sail plan to give the guns better fields of fire. Missiles could be launched regardless of the rig: they were kicked straight out by a jet of steam and didn’t light their High Drives until they were well clear of the vessel, whereupon their internal computer guided them on a preset course.

A plasma cannon, however, firing at maximum rate as it followed an incoming missile, could easily traverse into a sail or even an antenna which the bolt would destroy in a fireball. Worse than the direct damage was the risk that the missile would proceed unhindered into the ship which had wasted her defensive efforts on her own rigging.

Daniel wondered briefly that the Alliance signals were appearing in real time on his console. He had expected von Gleuck to be somewhat more circumspect in his dealings with an RCN corvette.

Regardless of the implied comradeship, Daniel didn’t intend to step on Alliance toes in a situation as fraught as this one. “Leary to von Gleuck,” he said, making it clear that he was speaking man to man. “Commodore, I ask your leave to approach the Palmyrene squadron in an effort to calm this business down, over.”

“Posy Cinc to Princess Cecile,” von Gleuck said after a moment. “As Alliance commander in the system, I will not interfere with the movements of neutral vessels sailing under civilian registry.”

He cleared his throat and added, “Speaking as a friend, however, Leary—it’s not worth getting yourself killed trying to deal with Monkeys. I recommend that you take yourself to Stahl’s World as quickly as possible and inform your superiors of the situation. Gleuck out.”

“Leary out,” Daniel said, letting his brief pique melt under the realization that Otto didn’t really expect him to run away from a fight. It was just the proper thing to say under the circumstances, so—being a gentleman in all senses of the term—Otto had said it. “Break. Ship, prepare to insert in thirty seconds, out.”

He’d already programmed a course to the Palmyrene fleet. Another handful of cutters had joined those already around the Piri Reis. A second large vessel, the destroyer Turgut, had appeared about 80,000 miles outsystem of the cruiser.

Relative to the cutters, the Turgut had the same disadvantage as the Princess Cecile did: it couldn’t be conned from the hull. Even so, Daniel hoped he could maneuver more accurately than the destroyer had done. Furthermore, he was pretty sure that Admiral Polowitz would have something to say to the Turgut’s captain. Palmyra being the sort of place it was, the word “beheading” might appear in the conversation.

“Inserting,” Daniel said as he sent the Sissie into the Matrix by rolling a vernier beneath his thumb. Light crinkled, faded, and briefly broke into polarized sheets across which Daniel tried to look sideways. Then the corvette was a universe of her own again, sailing past and through an infinity of other bubble universes.

Most captains simply pressed the Execute button after they had set up the insertion. The console then brought the ship’s charge into balance with the Matrix, squeezing the vessel out of sidereal space. Extraction involved the same process, in reverse.

Daniel had begun to believe that entering and leaving the Matrix were as capable of refinement as astrogation itself: that the right human touch could make the process smoother and impose less strain on the vessel as well as those aboard her. For the past year he’d been experimenting with a dial control instead of letting the computer drop the ship like the trap door beneath a gallows.

He chuckled as he advanced the vernier against a pressure which might be only in his mind. He felt a white-hot microtome slice from his scalp toward his heels at precisely the same rate as the dial moved.

Daniel knew that in his heart he wanted control of every aspect of the Sissie’s movements among the stars. Not because he could do it better than the computer could—not entirely, at least. He wanted to own the stars rather than merely traverse them like other spacers.

Which was silly and arrogant and various other reprehensible things, he supposed, but by the gods! he loved what he did, and he loved what he felt when he rode the cosmos aboard a ship of his own. RCN officers and indeed spacers generally were expected to be eccentric. Captain Daniel Leary’s eccentricity made him better at his job, so nobody was going to complain.

Daniel’s muscles quivered. Though the blazing pain of insertion had been entirely mental, his brain had transferred the impulses to the portions of his body which had seemed to be affected, and they in turn had responded.

The ship creaked as her antennas rotated, sliding the corvette along her programmed course. Daniel couldn’t be out on the hull to finesse the transit, but over such a short distance even the captain of a tramp freighter should be able to arrive within a thousand miles of his intention.

When the Sissie extracted, Daniel would try to prevent a war. He didn’t expect to succeed, but he had to try.

And he very much hoped that he and the Princess Cecile would survive the attempt.

Daniel was saying—or perhaps he had said it and the word was echoing in her mind?—“Extracting,” but Adele felt as though she were slipping into a vat of ointment. Her thoughts seemed greasy and faintly astringent, and they smelled of crushed aloes.

Then the Princess Cecile was in normal space again. Adele’s console was alive with fresh inputs, and her momentary bout of synesthesia was over.

It felt different every time she entered or left the Matrix. Adele sometimes thought of entering the particulars of each transition so that she could correlate them at leisure and see whether there was a pattern. She had never done so, because she didn’t remember the details if she waited even as much as a few minutes after an extraction. As a general rule she had something extremely important to do in those initial minutes.

Certainly she had important duties now.

The Princess Cecile had returned to sidereal space some two hundred and ninety-one thousand miles—effectively one light-second—insystem from the Palmyrene flagship Piri Reis. The destroyer Turgut trailed by another eighty thousand miles.

Cutters hung about the cruiser in a ragged cloud, spreading and slowly falling behind. Though the Piri Reis was accelerating at 1 g to maintain the semblance of gravity, many of the cutters were either in freefall or accelerating under lesser impulse to conserve reaction mass. Regardless of how skilled the Palmyrene spacers were, their little vessels really weren’t intended for long voyages.

Adele didn’t see any signals pass among the Palmyrene ships, but four of the cutters slid into the Matrix with the smooth grace of fish curving to the surface of a calm sea and submerging again.

“Palmyrene vessel Piri Reis
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” Daniel said. “This is RCS Princess Cecile, Captain Leary commanding. I wish to speak with the Autocrator, as representative of the Cinnabar Republic, over.”