What Distant Deeps (39 page)

“Posy Three out,” said Daniel with a broad smile of satisfaction.

“Six!” said Vesey. “This is Three. We are ready to execute the new course, over.”

Daniel, who had just opened the course packet, raised an eyebrow. Aloud he said, “Roger, Vesey. Make it so, out.”

“Inserting in ten, one-zero, seconds!” said Cazelet. The team in the BDC must have started the process even before Daniel had authorized them.

Adele wore a slight smile also. Von Gleuck commanded a pair of crack ships. Vesey was obviously at pains to prove that the Princess Cecile’s spacers were better still.

“Inserting!”

As we most certainly are.

Adele’s console received no external inputs while they were in the Matrix, but imagery of the Palmyrene fleet taken at thirty-second intervals, with the changes highlighted, demonstrated that the Autocrator had made up her mind. Over the last minute and a half before the Princess Cecile inserted, two—then four—then twelve—Palmyrene cutters left sidereal space also.

It irritated Adele that she couldn’t be certain how ships of the Horde communicated among themselves. She supposed they were passing the signals from ship to ship with handheld lasers which were too low-powered for her to read them by hull reflection, even with sensors of RCN standard. That should cause a great deal of confusion and garbling, but in fact the Horde appeared to operate with admirable coordination.

She considered the way collectives of hundreds and even thousands of individual birds and fish appeared to move as one. Perhaps she had been wrong about the Palmyrenes being barbarians: they might instead be animals.

Mother would not approve of the joke, Adele thought. But surely the fact she could joke under these circumstances was worthy of praise.

“Ship, this is Six,” Daniel said. “I know you’re all wondering about the ability of our new squadron commander—you’d be fools if you didn’t. Posy Cinc apparently noticed that our Palmyrene friends like to form on intrasystem debris when they extract from the Matrix. He’s set our rendezvous for a section of space which is completely empty. Thus far he has my fullest approval! Six out.”

Adele looked at her friend’s image. He glanced toward her and grinned.

How much of what Daniel just said was true, and how much was cheering up his subordinates by putting a good face on matters? Perhaps it was completely true; it certainly seemed to be. But he’d retailed it to his crew for morale reasons.

“Adele?” said Daniel on a two-way link. “I suspect that Otto won’t have any idea of the situation on the ground. I’d like you to brief him when we extract, all right?”

“Yes,” said Adele. “As the situation permits.”

She hadn’t explained to Daniel what she was doing when they first arrived above Zenobia. There hadn’t been a great deal of time
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
but she supposed that at the back of her mind was the knowledge that it wasn’t the sort of thing that Daniel would want to hear about. Odd to think that a man who had so often struck at the throat of an enemy would be squeamish about political necessities.

On the other hand, Daniel had obviously known what she was doing, and he hadn’t objected. And he was Speaker Leary’s son.

“Extracting,” said Vesey. This had been a very short transit, the sort of maneuver which vessels with less skillful astrogators performed regularly to close on their intended destination after an initial extraction well out in a planetary system.

Adele realized that she had been spoiled: she took for granted prodigies of astrogation, whether Daniel himself or one of the officers he’d trained was laying the course. Well, despite the fact that her father had led the Popular Party, the Mundys had always been clear in their awareness that they were of the elite. Adele’s frame of reference had changed in the past five years, but her status remained elite within that new reality.

In her mind, the air began to freeze into needles of ice. She thought about the men and women all over Calvary who were being jerked out of their homes and businesses by troops of the Founder’s Regiment. Some were traitors; some were Palmyrenes and though not traitors—their allegiance was properly to the Autocrator—were agents of the national enemy.

And some, doubtless, were quite innocent: victims of clerical error, mistaken identity, or simply a semiliterate sergeant who misread a house number or a street name. She assumed—because she had seen this sort of business before—that some would be shot where they stood instead of being arrested. That was particularly true in cases where the neighborhood was hostile and the troops involved didn’t want the delay of dragging prisoners through a gauntlet of jeers and bricks.

Adele sometimes wondered why the people whose deaths she caused in this fashion didn’t come to visit her in the bleak hours before dawn. She had never pretended that they were not as much her victims as the people she’d shot, some of them so close that their blood sprayed her.

The Princess Cecile returned to normal space with all systems alive and humming. The Alliance destroyers hadn’t arrived yet.

Adele’s smile was as terrible as the curve of a headsman’s axe. She was never short of company in the darkness, even without the faces of those she had murdered indirectly.

“Posy Cinc, this is Posy Three,” said Daniel a careful twenty seconds after the Z 46 extracted from the Matrix. Even though the Alliance systems would be fully live from the instant the ship dropped back into normal space, the crew—no matter how skilled and experienced—would take a little time to recover. “We have information as to the political situation on Zenobia, over.”

The Alliance flagship had already been a distortion when Daniel’s mind cleared enough from the fog to take in his console’s readouts. During transition he had been chatting with Stacey Bergen and three of his uncle’s old shipmates about Palmyrene skill in the Matrix.

The other old-timers ranged from amazed to incredulous at Daniel’s stories. Captain Reese—he’d left the RCN for the merchant service and retired when he lost his left arm to a collapsing antenna—said that if the Palmyrenes were really that good, they would have coursed all over human space instead of being stuck in a backwater like the Qaboosh.

Stacey’s judgment was that pilotage was an interesting skill and certainly impressive, but that a Palmyrene captain would take a month to sail a route that a proper astrogator could manage in a week. For all that, Stacey would have liked six months to spend on a Palmyrene cutter while he tried to pick up some of the tricks.

It was a perfectly reasonable conversation, one of the sort Daniel had listened to frequently before he went off to the Academy. But Uncle Stacey and all his friends were dead, dead for years. It had been a harmless illusion; but the next time Daniel reentered sidereal space, he thought he would prefer feeling that he was being flayed with hot knives.

“Posy Three, go ahead with your information,” said von Gleuck’s voice. He sounded tense, but there were many possible reasons for that—and it could simply be that his head was splitting from a bad transition. “Cinc over.”

Rather than speaking, Daniel pointed his right index finger toward Adele. She nodded to his image and said, “Commander, the Palmyrene Fifth Column within Calvary has by now been eliminated by the Founder’s Regiment. The Founder had a full list of traitors and their probable locations, so there shouldn’t have been any difficulty. The Founder’s Palace is being guarded by the best of the militia units. I don’t imagine they’ll even be attacked, but they should be able to shrug off any panicked attempt by somebody who eluded Major Flecker’s troops.”

Adele paused to gather data for the remainder of the briefing. Though the details of her display were a blur except to Adele’s own eyes, Daniel saw the field from the upper right corner shift into the center of the hologram to replace the previous one.
 

Von Gleuck seized the momentary silence to blurt, “Good God! Who are you, please? Is this Lady Mundy, over?”

Daniel called up the navigational packet which the Z 46 had transmitted when von Gleuck accepted—to give the thing its right name—the RCN offer of alliance. The information consisted of 36 points in space—literally points in vacuum, none of them close to heavenly bodies—each within a light-minute of Zenobia. In addition, there were six points some thirty light-minutes out. Force Posy could displace with no communication beyond a single numerical preset.

It was exactly the sort of preparation Daniel—and Vesey, and probably Cory as well—had separately computed on the run back to Zenobia from the waypoint where they had intercepted the convoy. It reinforced Daniel’s existing high opinion of von Gleuck as a fighting officer.

“Yes, this is Officer Mundy,” Adele said, frowning slightly—either irritated at being interrupted or more likely chiding herself because she hadn’t given proper identification before speaking. Her lack of ceremony hadn’t disturbed von Gleuck, but obviously the source of such information was important. “Now, as you will have guessed, the Palmyrenes intended an invasion with their own troops as well.”

Very likely von Gleuck had guessed that, at least after the Horde arrived. He would have noted that the transports were Cinnabar registry. For a politically astute officer—as von Gleuck was—it would be obvious why Daniel had been so close-mouthed about his plans.

The Z 42 extracted a careful twelve thousand miles from the Z 46. Daniel was sure that she would be signalling the flagship, but he was equally certain that von Gleuck would leave those communications to a subordinate while he was listening to Adele.

A few Palmyrene cutters—not nearly as many as had disappeared from the swarm about the Piri Reis—extracted in the region above Zenobia. Daniel frowned as he realized something. He touched his display, extending the course that the Princess Cecile had been following beyond the point he took her back into the Matrix. Five of the six cutters were within fifty miles of where the Sissie would have been if she hadn’t inserted. They had tracked her through the Matrix.

That was truly amazing. Uncle Stacey—Uncle Stacey’s ghost—might be right about the Palmyrene skills being inferior to real astrogation, but Daniel knew that they would be very effective in the close-range combat in which the Sissie had made a name for herself.

“The troop transports,” Adele was saying, “are on Diamond Cay, cut off from Calvary and the main continent. Their Cinnabar captains have been warned to remain where they are on penalty of being declared traitors to the Republic. While they may bow to threats from the Palmyrene troops, that won’t happen quickly, and by now the Founder’s troops should have overrun the Palmyrene base on Zenobia.”

“Lady Mundy
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” said von Gleuck. “You have done all this? A Palmyrene base? I have been on Zenobia for eighteen months, and all this comes from a clear blue sky. You are all I have heard, and more. Cinc over.”

Most of the cutters which had entered the Matrix were now back in close company with the Palmyrene cruiser. They must have realized their prey was gone, so they had returned to the Autocrator without extracting into sidereal space.

Daniel wished he had more knowledge of Palmyrene equipment. He realized for the first time that the cutters’ instrumentation must be extremely basic—a fact that his hallucination had put in the mouth of Uncle Stacey. Indeed, a captain conning his ship from the hull couldn’t use the sort of sensors that spacers from civilized regions took for granted.

It was quite wonderful that the cutters could track the Sissie to her orbit above Zenobia, but they probably wouldn’t have been able to locate her by any other means. Whereas Daniel had crisp, complete information regarding the Horde’s dispositions across the entire electrooptical band, accurate to one minute at this distance.

But if there was a battle, it was going to be a knife fight. The Sissie had been lucky thus far, but that could not possibly continue. Both the Piri Reis and the Turgut had good sensors; in particular, the cruiser’s Pantellarian optics were at least as good as those of the most modern RCN warship. The cutters may have returned to the flagship not only for orders but for information.

“Yes, well,” said Adele with a hint of irritation. “This was really a task for the Resident, not the Fleet, but I’m afraid Resident Tilton himself is much of the problem. As I was saying—the problem on the ground is contained for the time being. If the Palmyrenes are able to bring their heavy ships into the atmosphere to provide fire support and to land crews for the transports, they may still be able to bring off the coup. I don’t know how good Palmyrene infantry is, but I have very little confidence in the Zenobian militia. It would be much better if the infantry didn’t get off Diamond Cay.”

The Horde vanished into the Matrix like water soaking into cloth. Starting with the cruiser and destroyer, the displacement rolled across the assemblage. It was complete within thirty seconds.

Daniel started to say something; he didn’t have time to. Von Gleuck’s voice said, “Break. All Posy elements, this is Cinc. Execute Course Pack Two. Cinc out.”

“Prepare to insert!” Vesey said. “Inserting!”

The Princess Cecile shimmered into the Matrix, leaving Daniel’s mind hanging for a moment in sidereal space, under the hard separate gleams of the stars.

CHAPTER 23

Zenobia System

Daniel’s mind reentered, meshed with—the process reminded him of registering a transparency over another image—his body. His limbs felt cold, and his eyes didn’t focus for a moment.

“Ship, this is Six,” he said. The effort of speaking brought him fully back to himself. “I expect the wogs to come after us this time—probably just a few cutters, but maybe the whole fleet. Gunners, after the second destroyer appears, hit everything that extracts. Missileers, we may have a heavy cruiser close aboard in a few minutes. I won’t pretend I’m looking forward to that, but I want you plotting trajectories to each anomaly as it forms. If it’s a cutter, switch to the next.”