What Distant Deeps (43 page)

Or massacred it, of course. The Zenobians were as surely barbarians as the Palmyrenes were, and Founder Hergo might decide it was simpler to blast two thousand enemy soldiers into oblivion than to imprison them. Hard lines for the Cinnabar captains and crews if that happened, but it would be a problem for another day.

“I recommend that course of action, over.”

A handful of Palmyrene cutters vanished into the Matrix. That meant they had been on the way for a minute already, but Daniel didn’t imagine that even the best of them would actually reach the allied squadron in less than two minutes more.

The bulk of the remaining cutters, nearly forty of them, inserted over a period of only a few seconds. Daniel didn’t see how the Palmyrenes managed such coordinated maneuvers; it was as though they were insects with some sort of hive mind.

“Posy, this is Posy Cinc,” von Gleuck said. Behind the Z 46 spread a cloud of metallized fabric, the remains of sails which desperate riggers had cut away while the destroyer’s High Drive pushed her along at a 1 g acceleration. New topsails had appeared on several antennas, but the vessel would be sluggish in the Matrix, scarcely as maneuverable as a freighter.

“Posy Two and Posy Three will proceed to Rally Points Four, Five and Six in succession,” von Gleuck continued. He sounded bored. “They will remain at Points Four and Five for thirty, repeat thirty, seconds only. At Point Six, they will rejoin Posy One. All Posy units will put themselves in a posture of mutual defense at Point Six. As the enemy appears, we will engage him. Acknowledge, over.”

“Sir, acknowledged, sir!” said Posy Two. “Two out!”

Daniel received the Z 42’s message as text at the bottom of his display. The Alliance captain hadn’t copied his reply to the Princess Cecile, though that didn’t make a practical difference because Adele was the Sissie’s signals officer. She must have used reflection from the flagship’s hull to read the Z 42’s modulated laser signal.

“Three to Cinc,” Daniel said, feeling the rush of excitement again. Cory stood beside the astrogation console, donning his rigging suit against the chance that he would have to replace a casualty out on the hull shortly. “Acknowledged, out.”

He took a deep breath, then said, “Break. Lieutenant Vesey, execute the squadron commander’s orders at your earliest convenience, out.”

“Prepare to insert at once!” Vesey said. As expected, she had courses to all the rally points preset by now. “Inserting!”

As the lights within the compartment took on the glassy patina that preceded transition, Daniel’s PPI display changed. The Palmyrene cutters still hovering about Zenobia vanished into the Matrix, and with them inserted the Piri Reis. Autocrator Irene intended to make a final end to this business.

Daniel was smiling faintly. That suited him as well.

“Up Cinnabar!” he called over the Sissie’s intercom as they headed again for battle.

Rally Point Five appeared to Adele to be as uninteresting as any other featureless waste of vacuum. Location was important, however; because Point Five was only a light-minute from Zenobia, she could at least survey the political situation there.
 

Though that was, as she well knew, an electronic equivalent of twiddling her thumbs. The success or failure of the coup would be determined here above the planet where the warships battled. There were details below that mattered to Adele Mundy personally, but she would have to be on the ground to affect them.

She smiled wryly. Which in turn required that she survive. It all came back to the naval battle.

Cory sat heavily at his console; he’d extended the bench to accept the bulk of his hard suit. He looked wanly at Adele’s face on his display and said, “Mistress, these quick transitions stress the ship and they stress me. But the Sissie’ll be all right when it comes to cases, and so will I.”

Adele’s grin sharpened. “As I recall, the hallucinations I had when we didn’t return to normal space for
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
what, something over twenty days’ ship’s time? That was at least as unpleasant.”

“That was during the Strymon Mission, mistress,” Cory said, smiling faintly as well. “That was before I joined the company, but everybody at the Academy was talking about it. I’ll bow to your expertise.”

“Though this has certainly been
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
unbalancing,” Adele said after a moment’s consideration. “I would say that perhaps human beings weren’t meant to travel between the stars; but if that were true, I would be unemployed.”

Cory laughed. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure that’s why we do it, you and me and all of us Sissies. The RCN pays us so well!”

That was a joke, of course, but the truth was that all members of the Princess Cecile’s crew were rich in their own terms, or anyway could have been rich if they hadn’t drunk or gambled or whored away their prize money. Captain Daniel Leary had been the luckiest RCN captain since Captain Anston had captured a convoy of fullerenes.

Anston had gone on to become the Chief of the Navy Board, the head of the RCN. Anston had been a brilliant Chief, a fact which became ever more evident when his performance was weighed against that of his successors. It appeared to Adele that, given time and a degree of maturity, Daniel might follow Anston in that respect as in others. If he did, he would fill the position to the great benefit of the RCN.

Adele’s smile didn’t quite reach the muscles of her lips. I wonder if the Chief of the Navy Board has a personal signals officer?

Being who she was, Adele brought up the Navy House Table of Organization and checked: no, there wasn’t a signals officer. The Chief had a broad degree of latitude regarding his staff, however. For example, Admiral Hartsfeld, who had replaced Admiral Vocaine during the change of senatorial leadership that preceded the Peace of Rheims, had a wine steward. Daniel didn’t need a wine steward.

Vesey said, “Prepare to insert!”

Another ship appeared on Adele’s display. She started to call up the particulars, but before she could highlight the newcomer, Vesey said, “Inserting!” and the Princess Cecile shivered out of normal space.

“Mistress,” said Cory, “it was the Z 42. She isn’t able to keep up with us even though she wasn’t damaged, but almost.”

In a grudging tone he added, “This pair isn’t bad at shiphandling, though, even if they’re Fleet. The Z 46 was chewed up and spit out, which is why Posy Six is going to meet us instead of following.”

For a moment Adele felt as though her legs had disappeared while her head and torso were encased in cold gelatin. She remained motionless for a time—a second? a heartbeat or less?—until the sensation went away.

She frowned slightly. The Princess Cecile had completed insertion, so the feeling shouldn’t have had any direct connection with that. It seemed rather to be a hallucination like those she had experienced during long immersion in the Matrix.
 

“Why is the Z 46 joining us at Point Six?” Adele said, working to get her head around the problem. “Will they have repaired—”

Surely not, not such a tangle as the explosions left!

“—their rigging in the interim?”

“Oh, no, mistress!” said Cory, in an amazing mixture of deference and incredulity. Adele teetered between laughter and fury at the tone; neither was appropriate, so she suppressed both responses.

“We’re going to ambush the cutters at Point Six, you see?” Cory said. “Some of them are going to follow us from point to point, extracting the way they do—they’re bloody good in the Matrix, bloody good—or just tracking us without extracting.”

“All right,” said Adele. “But why at Point Six instead of just waiting for them where we rallied after our attack, at Point Three?”

“Mistress,” Cory said, “the cruiser, the Piri Reis. She needs an astrogator, not a pilot, so she won’t be able to follow till somebody’s computed a course. That’s maybe ten, even fifteen minutes, I’d guess. It’d take us three or four, or for Six and maybe Vesey, well, less. You see? So the cruiser waits till we extract, and it waits till we extract again, and they’re getting tired and frustrated, you see? And the cutters expect us to run too, right? And then, blam, they catch us but we’re cleared for action and we hit ’em for Six before the cruiser can get under way!”

“Ah,” said Adele.

She faced Cory. He turned also, rotating the seat of his console because the hard suit didn’t allow him to twist his body sufficiently to look across the bridge otherwise. He looked surprised and more than a little concerned.

“Thank you, Cory,” she said, dipping her head. “I do understand now, because you’ve decoded the signals for me.”

Because that was what had happened. There hadn’t been any announcement as to the plan: just of the practical measures required to effect it. Cory had understood what was happening, because the training he’d received from Captain Leary and Officer Mundy had turned him into a fighting officer in the best traditions of the RCN.

If I were to have a tombstone, that wouldn’t be a bad epitaph to be carved on it.

There wouldn’t be a tombstone, of course. Perhaps she could concentrate her will to twist into letters the vapor that would be all her mortal remains, though a phrase of that length was probably unrealistic.

“Extracting!” said Vesey. Daniel was working on a course computation, leaving the immediate maneuvers in the capable hands of his First Lieutenant.

Adele felt as pleased as she ever did when she turned again to her display. The airlock whined open as the riggers withdrew into the shelter of the hull. They would only be in the way in the point-blank firefight that would be taking place any moment now.

Signals Officer Mundy didn’t have an obvious role for the immediate future either, but she would be ready if the situation changed. For now she began to review the interchanges she had recorded when she most recently entered Zenobia’s communications network. That might be useful, if she survived.

Daniel had inset visuals of the gunners’ faces onto his display. Sun looked bright and eager, ready for anything. He might not really be that cheerful, but he certainly seemed to have just climbed out of bed on a lovely morning.

Rocker wore a woozy, blinking expression; he massaged his temples with his fingertips. His eyes were focused on his gunnery board, however, and the worst you could say about him was that the rapid transitions had left him in no worse shape than Captain Leary. If either of the regular gunners had been incapacitated, Daniel would have had a reasonable—a not completely unreasonable—excuse for taking over the position, since he had a demonstrated flair for gunnery.

The flash of disappointment made Daniel chuckle at himself. Paradoxically, that made him feel better. He had more important things to deal with than potting individual Palmyrene cutters with plasma cannon. None of his real duties were as straightforward as running a gunnery console, however, nor as much fun.

Positions were reporting. Technicians slapped virtual buttons at their stations, indicating that they were alert following extraction, and the bosun’s mates were calling in the readiness of their watches. Whether manual or oral, each report became a green light down the left side of the command console and its equivalent in the BDC where Vesey presided.

The rapid transitions hadn’t crippled the Sissie or her crew, but Daniel could see a rigger collapsed in the corridor and there were doubtless other casualties. It didn’t matter how experienced you were; it was disconcerting at the level of nerve impulses to shift back and forth between sidereal space and infinite universes which had no place for human beings nor apparently for life as humans understood the word.

An anomaly began to coalesce into substance less than fifty miles from the Princess Cecile. It was at about eighty compass degrees to starboard and so almost perfectly aligned with the corvette’s horizontal axis.

“Dorsal target!” said Sun, using his whole right fist to slew the turret while his left hand depressed his guns. Both gunners had kept their weapons at a forty-five degree elevation from the hull as a resting position.

“I’m on it!” said Rocker simultaneously. The anomaly was almost squarely on the division point between the two gunners, and it might well be that, because an antenna was in the way, the dorsal guns didn’t have a clear shot despite the fact that the target was slightly above the midpoint. Most of the Sissie’s rig was stowed as though for landing, but sometimes your luck was exceptionally bad.

Even so, Daniel had opened his mouth to shout, “Rocker, give way—”

—when the anomaly became a Palmyrene cutter wobbling at a skewed angle, its stern as much as any part of the hull aligned with the corvette. The whang! of Sun’s plasma cannon, the left tube only, punctuated the low vibration of the rotating turrets.

The cutter’s starboard half spun like a flipped coin away from the fireball which had devoured the remainder of the vessel. Its High Drive hadn’t lighted in the seconds following extraction. Without power, the cutter couldn’t bring her armament to bear on the Sissie.

It wasn’t only the Sissies who found the quick transitions racking. The Palmyrenes may be bloody fine spacers, Daniel thought exultantly, but they aren’t supermen!

More of the telltales on his sidebar—amber until toggled by reporting spacers—were flashing green. The Sissie’s crew was recovering; if not completely, then almost completely.

“Incoming!” Cory announced, though everyone aboard the corvette with a live display must already have been aware of the six anomalies fluttering about them like flies above a corpse. Five were within a hundred-mile radius of the Princess Cecile, while the last was at eleven hundred miles, almost directly off the bow.

Both gunners were shouting. Daniel noted how the two turrets lay at present and which direction they were rotating, then split the potential targets between them with blue and red highlights.

“Gunners, this is Six,” he said sharply as he transmitted his assessment. “Red are dorsal targets, blue are ventral, out.”