What Distant Deeps (40 page)

Daniel’s lips were dry, but he felt a leaping excitement that nothing but battle could give him. This was a terrible situation: the Sissie was facing opponents who could clearly beat her at her own game, precise maneuvers in the Matrix and point-blank engagements. But by the gods, if any ship could pull it off, it was this ship and this crew!

“If either of the heavy ships appears,” Daniel continued, “launch as soon as you have a solution. Chazanoff, I’m not usurping your authority as Chief Missileer, but if the target Fiducia is solving for turns out to be the Piri Reis or Turgut, he doesn’t need to ask your permission or mine either one. Acknowledge, over.”

“Roger, Six!” said Fiducia.

“Roger, Six,” said Chazanoff. The chief’s response wasn’t so much an echo as a dull counterfeit of his mate’s.

Daniel grinned. He knew exactly how Chazanoff felt. If Captain Leary hadn’t had more to do in the early seconds following extraction than any three people could manage, he would be computing missile attacks himself.

And directing the gun turrets also, of course, as Sun and Rocker well knew. Daniel handled the plasma cannon skillfully, but he couldn’t pretend he was actually better than the Sissie’s gunner or gunner’s mate: they practiced constantly while the corvette was in the Matrix, running imagery of past engagements as well as simulations. Even so, it would have required a real effort of will for Daniel not to lock out the gunnery consoles and lay the pippers on target himself.

The Z 46 arrived less than thirty seconds after the Princess Cecile. She was shaking out additional sails.

Daniel was running the corvette with a minimum rig: topsails on A and E rings only. If the Piri Reis did appear close alongside, he was going to regret not having a full suit of sails to absorb the initial wracking salvo of plasma bolts. A single hit from the cruiser’s 15-cm weapons could dish in the Sissie’s hull at five thousand miles, and the multiple hits likely if the Palmyrene gunner knew his business would finish the corvette at much greater range.

But the more probable danger came from cutters, and the best defense against them was the corvette’s gunfire. Daniel had decided to give his plasma cannon the best field of fire possible by limiting the arcs that sails would block.

Besides, fewer sails meant fewer riggers on the hull to handle their problems. Daniel would much rather have kept his entire crew inside, but the Sissie was going to have to maneuver with precision to survive. Woetjans was on the hull—it was the bosun’s job, and she wouldn’t obey orders to stay inside while some of her personnel were facing danger—with four of her most experienced riggers.

If something jammed, that team would clear it; and if they had known that a hail of rockets and plasma bolts would scour the hull clean, they would still be out there. It was their job, and among the Sissies, duty was more important than life.

It made absolutely no sense at all, except to other people who were or had been members of a crack combat unit. Then it made all the sense in the world.

The Piri Reis, then the Turgut, extracted within a hundred miles of one another and about thirteen thousand miles above Zenobia. Instants later, the Palmyrene cutters began to appear about their heavy vessels like ripples shimmering on a pond.

The Alliance flagship was only a thousand miles distant: Daniel had brought the Princess Cecile closer to the rendezvous point than he had the first time because he expected that the little squadron would be better off tight together to supply supporting fire. A single ship might be mobbed by a score of cutters and have her rig blown off by rockets.

Space-time dimpled between the Sissie and the Z 46. The second Alliance destroyer—

But it wasn’t.

“Target!” Daniel shouted, highlighting the cutter which crystallized out of the infinite possible.

“I’m on it! I’m on it!” Sun cried. That wasn’t quite true, but the rumble of the dorsal turret rotating the necessary thirty degrees was comforting proof that he would be shortly.

Another anomaly four hundred miles away made the stars beyond it quiver. “Targeting!” Rocker said as the ventral turret turned also. “Targeting, I’m on it!”

The first anomaly became a Palmyrene cutter, sharp and squarely broadside to the Princess Cecile but with her axis cocked up by fifteen degrees. The corvette was drawing ahead under 1 g acceleration in parallel with the Z 46, but the cutter’s rocket basket pivoted to lead her target expertly.

The Palmyrene captain stood in his pulpit in the far bow. If I boosted the magnification, his face would be as clear to me as the scratches on his visor allowed, Daniel thought.

The middle of the cutter’s hull went bright, then exploded outward. A single rocket spat out of the conflagration. It vanished from the image area and from the Sissie’s concern. Sun’s second plasma bolt stirred the luminous gas cloud, but its energy could add nothing to the holocaust.

The recoil of the two shots was echoing through the ship. Daniel hadn’t noticed the Whang/whang! when the guns fired.

His thumb mashed a key, locking Rocker’s firing circuit. “Ventral, hold your fire!” he ordered. “That’s the Z 42, over.”

Two more anomalies shimmered on the display. They were forward and aft of the cutter, each within two hundred miles. Sun and Rocker divided the targets, but only when the ventral guns had slid off the Z 42 did Daniel free Rocker’s console. The Sissie faced enough enemies already without accidentally putting a plasma bolt into an Alliance destroyer—particularly since Daniel was sure that the Alliance gunners were at least as jumpy and ready to shoot as Rocker was.

“Posy Cinc, this is Three-Six,” Daniel said. “Over.”

His gunners, and possibly his missileers—though the Princess Cecile would be reduced to glowing debris in a matter of seconds if the Piri Reis extracted alongside with her nine 15-cm guns cleared for action—would handle incoming attackers as well as human beings could. Tactics, or at least advice on tactics, was the job of Captain Daniel Leary.

“Cinc to Three-Six,” von Gleuck responded so promptly that Daniel suspected the Alliance commodore had been about to initiate the call. “Do you have an attack plan, over?”

The Sissie’s turrets fired in such close conjunction that Daniel wasn’t sure which gunner had gotten on target first. Two cutters bloomed into fireballs. The Palmyrenes were clearly keying on the corvette rather than on the Alliance destroyers.

“Sir!” said Daniel. He realized as the syllable came out that he was being artificially bright, much as he must have sounded when addressing instructors at the Academy. “So long as we remain within observation range, the Palmyrenes won’t be able to land on Zenobia. I therefore recommend that instead of attacking, we—”

A Palmyrene rocket detonated with a deafening crash. It must have hit squarely over the bridge. The air was suddenly hazy with dust and flocking shaken from the insulation. A bank of lights in the port-side ceiling went out, then flickered on again at half their usual output.

“Bloody hell!” Daniel said. “Ah, sorry, sir. That Force Posy shift location every time the Piri Reis inserts, but that we not initiate attacks un—”

A second rocket hit, this time in the Sissie’s ventral rigging from the sound of it. Shrapnel tinkled spitefully, ricocheting in the angles between the hull and the outriggers withdrawn against it.

How many riggers did that kill? But this was battle, and people die in battles. By the gods, the wogs will pay the score before this is over!

“Until one of the heavy ships tries to land and we can catch them in the atmosphere, over.”

Two plasma bolts from the Z 46 roiled the gas cloud to which Rocker had already reduced the cutter that had attacked from the Sissie’s underside. Daniel suspected that when von Gleuck had a moment, he would well and truly ream his gunner for shooting when he did. He hadn’t just been late, he’d been pointlessly late. He’d triggered his 13-cm guns in sheer frustration at not having a real target while the Princess Cecile was making excellent practice on the wogs. On the Monkeys, that is.

“Three, this is Cinc,” von Gleuck said. “From your reputation, Leary, I’d have expected you to suggest a headlong charge to destroy the cruiser and the Monkey Queen herself. If we kill her, then we’ve won, not so, over?”

Daniel grinned, though without the expression’s usual warmth. There was a sort of beauty to the idea, but—

“Cinc, this is Three,” he said aloud. “I’m not sure that a salvo of ten missiles—” the number of launch tubes in their small mixed squadron “—is enough to guarantee destroying a cruiser, let alone killing the Autocrator aboard her. I am sure that if we go down their throat while they’re waiting unhampered for us, there’ll be no one left between Zenobia and whatever remains of the Palmyrenes. Over.”

Nine of the dozen cutters which had sortied now reappeared close to the Piri Reis. The other three were debris clouds still dusted with sparkles of plasma.
 

Daniel wondered if he would have been willing to make that—perfectly accurate—assessment if he hadn’t had the reputation of being a hell-for-leather daredevil. How many officers over the millennia had been willing to die—and fail—because they were afraid to be called cowards?

His smile spread wider. Sure, I’d have said the same thing. It’s my duty, after all.

There was a pause of seconds, a chasm of silence in the present tension. Then von Gleuck said, “Roger, Three. Cinc out.”

The PPI highlighted movement in bright amber. Daniel moved his cursor quickly, certainly, and brought up a direct visual image: the destroyer Turgut was braking to enter Zenobia’s atmosphere while the cruiser stood guard in orbit.

Daniel had already roughed out an attack plan. He had begun putting the finishing touches on it when the Z 46 signalled, “All Posy elements, this is Posy Cinc. Prepare to attack in thirty seconds, over.”

“Ship, prepare to insert,” Daniel said, pressing the Execute button that sent his queued course computations to the corvette’s other consoles and to the separate computer which controlled the hydromechanical linkages to the rigging.

“Attack!” von Gleuck ordered.

Daniel pressed Execute a second time. His heart was filled with leaping excitement.

Still tingling from an insertion which had felt as though someone were tickling the inside of her skin, Adele shifted to the damage control system to get imagery of the A Level corridor. That seemed to her to be the best way to learn what the noise was about.
 

Rene Cazelet—Midshipman Cazelet—had come from the Battle Direction Center wearing a rigging suit, all but the gauntlets and helmet. As he ran—well, lumbered—he was shouting, “Hester and Blakeslee, you go out with me!”

There was movement among the riggers waiting in the forward rotunda. Adele’s wands brought up the crew list reflexively, but she didn’t need its prompting: Hester and Blakeslee were senior riggers, both on the list for promotion to bosun’s mate if there was an opening. Presumably they were among the eighteen suited-up spacers just outside the bridge.

Cory hunched disconsolately at his console, plotting missile launches on an attack board. Granted that the Princess Cecile was about to go into action, it seemed very unlikely that the young lieutenant would be required as a missileer, and it was just possible that Adele would need to understand what was going on.

Besides, she was curious—she was always curious—and she had no real duties, which was bad for her state of mind. Palmyrene communications were so chaotic and low-technology that she hadn’t been able to imagine a way to delude the enemy and cause confusion in their ranks.

All Adele’s ideas had foundered on the Palmyrenes’ simplicity. It was like trying to outthink an anvil.

“Cory,” she said on a two-way link to the man at the console kitty-corner behind hers across the bridge. “What’s going on out there? Over.”

“Ma’am, Rene’s taking two riggers out to replace casualties, over,” Cory said in a miserable tone. He hadn’t even bothered to inset her face on his display as he ordinarily would have done.

Adele frowned. The ship’s external sensors shut off when they entered the Matrix, but recorded imagery would show the hull as it had been in sidereal space. They’d been hit, by rockets she supposed.
 
.
 
.
 
.
 

She split her screen—dorsal left, ventral right—and then scrolled back from the moment of insertion. Almost immediately she found what she was looking for—what she wanted, in the informational sense: a ragged black puff swelling from the ventral B antenna, just below the furled topsail. Fingers of dark, dirty orange poked through the smoke.

The sail streamed from the yard in tatters. The two spacers at the base of the antenna slammed against the hull and bounced back. One suited figure caught the ratlines with a hand and then hugged them. The other figure continued to sail outward. Its torso scissored at a sharp angle from the legs and lower body, then separated completely.

Adele blanked the images, returning to a schematic of the enemy fleet. Her display started as the Horde had been at the moment the Sissie inserted; it then advanced with the ships’ individual courses extrapolated against elapsed time. Cory taught me to do that, she thought, looking at the young man’s sorrowful face.

“I ought to be out there!” Cory blurted. They hadn’t closed the two-way link, but Adele wasn’t sure that he knew he was speaking to her as well as to himself. “It was properly my duty, but Vesey sent Rene out instead!”

The inner airlock closed with its usual series of muted chings, the sound of the dogs seating. The airlocks were much smaller than the boarding hatch which was used while the Sissie was on the surface; it was thus less prone to twisting during maneuvers. They mated quietly, and their hydraulic dogs didn’t have to strain to bring the seams back into alignment.

Adele hadn’t been watching, but she supposed Cazelet and two additional riggers were going onto the hull. She started to check her assumption with stored imagery, but she caught herself. It doesn’t matter!

Aloud she said, “Cory, I don’t understand. What is the duty you’re talking about?”