What Distant Deeps (38 page)

Daniel and his bosun stood toward the stern of the Sissie’s underside, between the E and F mast rings. He’d left one rigging watch on the hull when he extracted to plead with Autocrator Irene. He’d been concerned about the cruiser’s 15-cm plasma cannon, but he’d considered the risk marginal at a light-second’s range.

If the negotiation went badly—as he had expected—he wanted to be able to maneuver in the Matrix with precision. He’d seen enough of Palmyrene skill to know that any obvious attempt at escape risked having the Piri Reis extract alongside later.

It hadn’t occurred to Daniel that cutters would close with the corvette the way they might have done with a merchant vessel. Attempting that with a crack ship like the Sissie, whose RCN gunners were using a warship’s equipment, would be obvious suicide.

But it hadn’t been obvious to the Palmyrene captains, because they hadn’t faced a warship from a major power before. With all respect to Admiral Mainwaring’s command, the patrol sloops of the Qaboosh Region weren’t in the same league as ships of the RCN’s main force squadrons.

The Alliance destroyers were first-rate combatants, especially with an officer like von Gleuck leading them, but the Horde hadn’t seen them in action. Daniel suspected that the Autocrator had a nasty surprise coming there, too.

But the fact remained that the cutters of the Horde, supported by the heavy Palmyrene vessels, would be able to crush Zenobia’s defenders unless Admiral Polowitz was completely incompetent. From what Daniel had seen of the admiral, that wasn’t the case. Regardless of his strategic ability, the way he’d extracted the cruiser alongside a comet after a considerable voyage proved that he was no more a slouch at ship handling than his cutter captains were.

The immediate result of the way the Palmyrenes underestimated the Princess Cecile was that warhead fragments had done moderate damage to the sails and rigging of the ventral antennas, and there was a serious dent in the starboard outrigger. Also, Rigger Griswold, a phlegmatic man of fifty—not quick in any sense, but steady—was now dead.

“The rocket hit the other side,” Woetjans said, pointing to the dimple in the three-inch hull plating.

Fragments of the warhead casing had scribed an asterisk around the point of impact, skewed slightly toward the half dome of the fairing. That too was scarred.

If Griswold was squatting, as he probably was, he would have been completely out of sight of the cutter. He should have been safe.

Both rigging watches were now repairing damage: reeving cables to replace those which had been severed and swapping fresh sails for those tattered by the blasts. A squad of technicians under Pasternak was adjustng a sheet of bright pink structural plastic broad enough to cover the seams started on the outrigger. When they had it in place, they would glue it down.

The bosun’s mates were in charge of the riggers, though the Sissie’s veterans didn’t need direction for work so cut and dried. Daniel wanted to know what had happened to Griswold; Woetjans was the best witness as well as the victim’s line supervisor.

“I hunched down behind E Ventral myself,” Woetjans said, ringing the knuckles of her glove against the antenna she referred to. “I heard the rocket hit—bloody hell, they could’ve heard it in Harbor Three it was so loud. The hull leaped up and swatted my ass, and I mean to say!—hard suit or not, it whapped me good. A chunk of shrapnel banged the antenna, and I thought, ‘Bloody good thing I was on the other side of this tube.’ That’s what I thought.”

Daniel turned to look sideways, keeping his end of the rod against his helmet. The dent was small but deep, visible as a bright gouge against the patina of corrosion. The fragment had hit where a band had been shrunk onto the tubing to support the deadeyes to which the lower stays were attached.

“And I didn’t give a thought to Griswold,” Woetjans said, “because he had the whole fairing between him and the bang. Good thing it didn’t hit the E tube instead, because it’d have cut him up for doll rags.”

She struck the antenna again, this time a slap that would have spun a man’s head around like a top. Her reinforced gauntlet rang against the steel tubing.

“So we finally insert,” Woetjans said, “and I take a deep breath because whatever you say about a miss being good as a mile, that hadn’t been any bloody mile and I was glad there wasn’t more wog rockets coming in. I steps around the antenna to see how much damage it’d done, and there’s Griswold looking surprised and floating away. And there’s a hole in his helmet where that little chunk of rocket casing bounced back and carved off the top of his skull.”

“I’m surprised you were able to catch him,” Daniel said in a neutral voice. He’d told Vesey to set a circuitous course back to Zenobia orbit, but even so they should be on the verge of extracting. He needed to be on commo when that happened.

He grinned. Adele would be able to handle it, even though he’d only given her a few cursory words as briefing before he rushed onto the hull. Even so, it was his job and he didn’t mean to leave it to others.

Woetjans lowered the communications rod for a moment to look straight at Daniel. Then she turned sideways again and brought it back to her helmet.

“Look, Six, I knew I could grab the F Ventral forestay after I got Griswold,” the bosun said defensively. “Bloody hell, I been hopping around in the rigging twenty-five years close enough, right? It wasn’t risky.”

Like hell it wasn’t risky. Woetjans had jumped from the Sissie’s hull, wrapped one arm around the rigger’s body—which had probably floated ten feet at least—and trusted that she would be able to seize the slanting cable which supported the sternmost antenna against strains from ahead rather than the usual sideways or rear.

Because of her experience, Woetjans automatically noted the position of all the rigging whenever she stood on a starship’s hull; she had leaped after Griswold in full awareness of the forestay. But that same experience would have warned her, as it did Daniel, that the stay might have been all but severed by the blast of moments before.

Then it would have parted, the ragged end dragging through Woetjans’ desperate grip. Bosun and corpse would have sailed out into a universe that had no place for humans; becoming two corpses whenever Woetjans choked out the last of her oxygen.

And because she was speaking to an experienced spacer rather than a civilian who wouldn’t know the truth, Woetjans blurted, “Six, he was my responsibility. I’m the Sissie’s bosun. We can send him off the hull as soon as we’re back in normal space if you want. Griswold never much liked the ground, so there’s no big deal like we ought to bury him in dirt. But I didn’t want him, you know—there. Nowhere. Hell, if there’s a Hell.”

“I understand,” said Daniel. Then—because he suddenly realized it was true—he said, “I’d have done the same thing, Woetjans. Carry on.”

He clasped her shoulder with his left hand, then returned the brass rod away in its sheath on his equipment belt. He started around the corvette’s hull in a diagonal, moving toward the dorsal airlock in the bow rather than using the lock within arm’s length. It was actually easier to get to the bridge this way than it would have been going up six levels of companionways and then striding down a corridor that might be blocked by men or equipment.

Besides, it kept Daniel longer in the light of the Matrix, which he loved. Though like Woetjans—and probably like Griswold, as with every other rigger Daniel had known—he wouldn’t want to float for eternity in a place so inhuman.

“Extracting in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds,” announced Cory from the console kitty-corner across the bridge.

Adele suspected that Vesey had handed the task off to Cory because the First Lieutenant was involved in complex course computations. Under other circumstances, Adele might have echoed Vesey’s console in the BDC to check her guess, but at the moment she was otherwise busy.

The inner airlock sighed. Daniel strode into the rotunda while the valve was barely open enough to pass his—slightly chubby—form wearing a rigging suit. He had already stripped off his helmet and gauntlets; the magnetic stickiness of his boot soles on the decking didn’t slow his movements discernibly. He threw himself onto his console, beaming in sudden surprise to find that Adele had already adjusted the seat to fit a user wearing a rigging suit.

He looked at her. She nodded crisply toward Daniel’s image, but her smile was satisfied and perhaps a trifle wider than usual. Her job was information, and using information to prepare at least one step into the future.

“Extracting!” Cory said.

Adele blanked her display to make room for the new inputs the Princess Cecile would receive in sidereal space. She had been viewing the personnel file of the late Leading Rigger Joshua Griswold.

She recognized Griswold’s image, but she hadn’t been able to attach it to his name without prompting from her databank. He had twenty years’ service in the RCN before he joined the crew of the communications vessel RCS Aglaia. Three years later, that ship landed on Kostroma and came to the attention of a librarian named Adele Mundy.

Griswold had been captured during the initial disaster on Kostroma, then freed through the actions of some of his shipmates commanded by young Lieutenant Daniel Leary
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
with the help of that same librarian. Griswold had joined the crew of the Princess Cecile on Kostroma and had followed Daniel from that point onward.

Until now, when he died.

Adele could no more bring Griswold back to life than she could revive her little sister, but she had felt that he at least deserved to have his face connected with the name in her memory. There was no logical reason to do that, but humans were frequently illogical. Perhaps she was trying to convince herself that she was human.

The Princess Cecile shuddered into normal space. The return reminded Adele that during transition she had felt as though she were an empty skin, collapsing in on itself. The illusion hadn’t been disturbing because she was completely given over to musing on Rigger Griswold, and on life, and on the pointlessness of life.

Her smile was wry, but real. That train of thought wasn’t disturbing; rather, it was the black pool into which her intellect often dived in the waking reverie during the small hours of the morning. Familiarity gave it a bleak hominess, like the bare stone cell of a prisoner who would never be released.

Adele’s console went from a pearly void to a Plot Position Indicator—she was echoing the command console in the center of her display—with communications inputs as flanking sidebars. The Sissie was in the same orbit as the Z 46, leading von Gleuck’s flagship around Zenobia by twenty-one thousand miles. The Z 42 was still—optimistically—in concealment behind the third moon, and the Palmyrene fleet—most of it, at least—appeared to be where it had been when Daniel approached it. Presumably that would change, probably very soon.

“Posy Cinc
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” said Daniel in the usual friendly, authoritative tone of his official conversations. “This is Sissie Six. Over.”

“Posy to RCN,” von Gleuck snapped back almost instantly. Both ships were using laser communicators, so there was no need for significant compression. The Alliance officer’s tone was sharp and, if not hostile, at least not obviously friendly. “Go ahead, over.”

“Posy Cinc,” Daniel said, as warmly as if he’d just been greeted as a long-lost brother. “I wish to place the Princess Cecile under your command for the duration of this action. I believe we’ll do better if our efforts are coordinated, over.”

There was no response for ten long beats. Adele was transmitting both sides of the conversation to the Z 42. Goodness only knew what the captain of the second destroyer thought of it—Z 42 continued to maintain communications silence—but Adele believed it was a better plan than trusting to a stranger’s good sense not to treat the Sissie as an enemy when the shooting started. If von Gleuck had a problem with Officer Mundy’s meddling, then he could call on her to discuss honor after this business was concluded.

Adele smiled, in a manner of speaking. She was joking with herself, mostly. But not entirely.

“Captain Leary,” said von Gleuck in a very different tone. “You are senior to me in rank, are you not, over?”

Yes, of course Daniel is of superior rank—but he’s not an idiot. Only an idiot would assume that the Honorable Otto von Gleuck would turn over defense of his mistress to a foreigner.

“Posy Cinc,” Daniel said easily, “we are in Alliance space. Do you accept the offer of our help, over?”

It was theoretically possible for an observer at the distance of the Palmyrene fleet to follow the track of the modulated laser beam which the Princess Cecile was sending to the Z 46. Adele wasn’t sure that she would have been able to manage that task herself, though, and she was quite sure that the Palmyrenes wouldn’t. The region above Zenobia was generally clear of light-scattering debris.

After another pause, von Gleuck said, “Leary, you’ve got enough experience to know that this isn’t likely to have a good result. Grateful as I would be of your help and advice, a Cinnabar warship has no duty to become involved in what is, as you point out, an Alliance matter, over.”

There’s more reason than you’ll know, Adele thought, until the inevitable Alliance investigators uncover Assistant Commissioner Gibbs’ role in the business.

But she knew that didn’t really make a difference. Daniel would almost certainly have made the same decision if the Republic’s hands had been completely clean.

“Otto,” said Daniel, “I believe that all civilized persons have a duty to stand against barbarians. Do you accept our offer, over?”

The Z 46 sent a packet of course information. Adele routed it to both the command console and the BDC.

“Roger, Posy Three,” von Gleuck said. “This section of space is about to become infested by Monkeys, I’m afraid, so we’ll vacate it for the time being. We’ll rendezvous ASAP a light-minute from here and discuss the next move. Posy Cinc out.”