With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  On a normal day there were at least thirty ships in the Floating Harbor. Today there were forty-seven: Daniel had surveyed the layout from the quay and memorized it. If the boat landed him in the wrong location, he wanted to be able to find his way to the Aglaia without depending on the help of other vessels. Several of the latter were transports registered on Alliance worlds, and even the crewmen of a Cinnabar ship might think it funny to send a naval officer the wrong way around a harbor miles in circumference.

  Daniel grinned. He’d have thought it was funny himself back when he was a midshipman. Not so very long ago.

  The Aglaia was in the first rank, easily visible, but Daniel’s boat was angling to the north. If they reached the harbor at the point they were aiming at, he’d have a dozen pontoons to cross and the wire-mesh catwalks swinging between them besides. Daniel turned, rose to a high crouch that let him keep a hand on the gunwale—it was at best an even chance whether the boat would come back for him if he fell overboard—and cried, “This way!”

  His free arm stabbed in the direction of the Aglaia. “The navy ship! The Aglaia!”

  The boy at the tiller of the outboard motor looked to be eight years old or a little less. He stared at Daniel with worried eyes. The old woman beside him waggled the embroidery she was working on at Daniel. She screamed, “The harbor! The harbor! You walk!”

  “The Aglaia!” Daniel repeated. He took out the hundred-florin piece. Multilevel diffraction gratings within the transparent coin turned it into a rainbow between his thumb and forefinger. He dropped the coin back into his purse.

  The family argued shrilly among itself, the eight grown members shouting while the infant added its wordless cries. The boatmen of Kostroma harbor spoke their own patois. It was based on Universal, but Daniel caught no more than a third of the words. Some of the vocabulary no doubt came from local Kostroman dialects, but the languages of many other planets played a part as well.

  A middle-aged man stepped in front of the old woman and snarled an order to the steersman. The boy adjusted the tiller, pointing the bow toward the Aglaia after all.

  The old woman screamed at the man; the man slapped her, knocking her against the stern transom. She picked up her embroidery hoop and resumed work, muttering to herself.

  A sphere was the best shape for a vessel operating in the Matrix, but spherical ships were dangerously unstable on water unless they had long outriggers. Besides, though a sphere was the most efficient volume to enclose, it presented severe problems for loading and unloading on the surface of a planet. The only spherical ships were small ones and vessels purpose-built for exploration.

  All the ships in the Floating Harbor today were shaped like fat cigars. They floated a little above midpoint, and the hull proper was paralleled by an outrigger on either side. The antennae that drove the vessels through sponge space were either folded along the hull or extended for maintenance like the legs of a crushed insect.

  The Aglaia looked very similar to most of the transports docked nearby. She was 613 feet long with a 65-foot beam. The nominal weight of her hull and fittings was 10,000 tons, though the in-service weight including crew, consumables, and reaction mass was a good 4,000 tons more.

  She was built of steel. There were stronger metals and lighter metals, but none that really matched the corrosion and fatigue resistance of steel and its relative ease of machining and welding during repair. Weight was of no significance in sponge space and not very important even when the ship was using High Drive or her plasma motors.

  The harbor was formed of multicelled concrete pontoons, individually several hundred feet long. The pontoons were anchored to the sea bottom on cables that adjusted to the height of the tide, and tethered to one another by underwater cables. Pedestrian catwalks dangled just above the waves. Surface lighters were tied to the sides of pontoons opposite most of the docked starships, but the bumboats clung anywhere: to pontoons, to the starships themselves, or to one another. They clumped like duckweed on a pond. Easily moved shelters of multicolored fabric on light frames sprouted on many pontoons for a degree of privacy.

  The Aglaia was linked to a pontoon by three pivoting steel arms which allowed ship and float to ride the swells without rubbing. Many of the transports used fenders, but an RCN vessel—particularly one that carried the high and mighty of the Republic—had to be careful of its finish.

  Ports were open all over the Aglaia’s hull for ventilation and easy access to the bumboats. A docking platform extended from the center of the hull to the outrigger. Guards waited there, but only formal traffic passed by that route.

  Daniel ducked as his boat passed under the catwalk between two pontoons. The concrete was stained with three horizontal bands of algae—red, blue, and yellow closest to the water, stratified by the plants’ relative need to be kept damp. Visible as blisters on the yellow band were fixed invertebrates; filtering gills streamed like smoke whenever a wave dipped the animal’s shell back in the water.

  The steersman was heading for the power room port, big enough to allow the Tokamak to be removed. “No, no,” Daniel shouted, waving toward the landing stage on which three ratings under a petty officer watched his progress. “Put me there! Put me there!”

  The boy shrugged and nosed up to the stage. The old woman glared at Daniel and spit into the water.

  The boy threw the motor into reverse, killing their forward motion within an inch of the platform. Daniel hopped onto the steel deck without risk or need for the hand a rating was ready to offer. The boy handled his craft with the skill of someone born on the water. He was likely to live all his life there, too, as surely as the fish under the surface.

  “Lieutenant Daniel Leary,” Daniel said. “Requesting to see the duty officer.”

  “Welcome aboard, sir,” the armed petty officer said. He raised his belt radio. “I’ll tell Ms. Weisshampl you’re coming.”

  Formality ended with a broad smile. “You look a lot better than she does, sir. Sure you were at the same party?”

  Daniel laughed, glad of a way to break the tension. He sauntered across the wet decking, slippery for all its nonskid pattern. He wasn’t worried about seeing Weisshampl or really doubtful about getting her agreement.

  He was very nervous about what would come next. Well, the Republic of Cinnabar expected her naval officers to carry on no matter what the circumstances.

  The decks of a cylindrical starship ran the long way. The Aglaia had five decks, but the lowest two, Decks A and B, were under water when the ship floated normally. They contained bulk storage for consumables and reaction mass, plus the magazines of missiles and message cells.

  On the Aglaia, unusually for a ship of her size, the ratings’ quarters took up most of the volume of Deck B. Normally the crew would have been accommodated on Deck D, but that region on the Aglaia was given over to passenger suites.

  Daniel entered the central rotunda of Deck C. Armored staircases stood at the four ordinal points. Corridors fore and aft ran along both sides of the hull, but the regions immediately flanking the rotunda on this deck held the Aglaia’s two Tokamak generators. Their mass had to be kept close to the vessel’s center or the ship would be impossible to maneuver if the computer went down or control trunks were damaged in action.

  Naval computer systems were many-times redundant and almost never failed. The space officers who survived to hold high rank were those who planned for unlikely disasters, and they saw to it that naval architects were of the same cautious frame of mind. The Aglaia could dance on a pin under manual control.

  Deck C contained the machinery spaces and armament: the offensive missile systems and most of the antimissile plasma cannon. The Aglaia had a light cruiser’s normal defensive suite: six barbette turrets, each holding a pair of four-inch plasma cannon. The turrets were retracted and sealed beneath a hull fairing when the ship was under way, but here at rest on the surface five of the six were extended to increase the interior room. The exception was the turret on Deck A, twent
y feet under water.

  The Aglaia had four missile launchers and only three reloads per tube. That weakness was a nagging irritation to every fighting officer in her complement, but the communications vessel wasn’t meant to fight. Her missile battery was sufficient to see off any pirate she chanced into; and a commander who risked passengers’ lives in needless heroics would face a court-martial and certain conviction if he survived.

  By tradition the odd-numbered stairs were up and the even numbers down. Daniel strode across the rotunda and through the open hatch of Stair 1. A grizzled petty officer who looked twice her probable age of forty stood on the landing holding hands with a local girl with a demure expression and nothing on above the waist. They looked startled.

  “Carry on, Haynes,” Daniel called over his shoulder as he skipped up the stair tower two treads at a time.

  “Give up on high life and come back to the working navy, Mr. Leary?” Haynes replied with echoing laughter.

  The RCN was a disciplined force—and her enemies would be the last to deny it. Discipline didn’t mean spiritless, though, nor was there any attempt to instill the kind of top-down terror that the Alliance seemed to consider an ideal.

  An unpopular officer was the butt of “accidents” that made her look ridiculous. An unpopular captain found himself without a crew after his next landfall: the merchant service paid well and didn’t ask employment histories in wartime when there weren’t enough trained ratings by half.

  The crews followed officers they respected from ship to ship, and they didn’t respect weakness. By the same token, an officer who couldn’t be approached by ratings and wouldn’t share a laugh with them had no business and no future in the RCN.

  The hatch to Deck D was open. An accordion played music of a style that Daniel had heard at the supper club. There was laughter as well, and the clink of bottles. The delegation wasn’t using the fancy compartments at the moment, but that didn’t mean the suites were going to waste.

  Deck E was officers’ country and the Aglaia’s command and control area. The turret mounted over the rotunda was extended so Daniel didn’t have to walk around it as he’d done during the voyage. The turret hatches were raised as well; fresh air and a skirl of birdsong filled the corridor as he walked to the dayroom.

  The clerk’s desk was empty, but the door to the Officer of the Day’s office was open. Lt. Weisshampl sat upright behind the console, looking morose. Daniel grinned and threw her a sharp salute from the doorway.

  “Leary,” she said, “if you screw around saluting, I swear I’ll lock you in the lower turret and not let you out till we’re back on Cinnabar. How the hell do you look so fresh?”

  She frowned like a thunderhead. “And don’t tell me it’s youth!”

  “Not all of us spent the evening practicing assault drops onto concrete, Maisie,” Daniel said. Weisshampl was twenty-eight Terran years old, quite young to be XO of a parade ship like the Aglaia.

  Weisshampl laughed, then rubbed the back of her neck with a groan. “Yeah, you might have something there,” she admitted. “But for God’s sake sit, so I don’t have to look up at you.”

  Daniel took the indicated chair. The deck’s resilient surfacing was pierced in what looked to an untrained eye like a pattern of tucks. The holes were threaded into the plating beneath. Cinnabar naval furniture was built to multiples of the same pattern so that any piece could be bolted in place within a few inches of where the user wanted it. There were no large objects unsecured on a ship that was under way.

  “I came for a favor, Maisie,” Daniel said. “I’d like you to release a detail of twenty ratings to me under a solid petty officer. You can log it as building a positive relationship between the nations of Cinnabar and Kostroma. So far as you’re concerned, it’ll keep some people out of trouble while you’re on the surface and there isn’t enough to do.”

  Weisshampl looked at him with an appraising frown. They both knew that Daniel wasn’t one of the Aglaia’s officers and didn’t have command authority over her crew, so she didn’t bother to mention the fact.

  “You know,” she said, “that’ll look like some kind of fiddle, officers using ratings to make money on the side. And if it was plenty of other officers, that’s what it’d be.”

  She grinned in a combination of humor and cynicism. “I don’t say I wouldn’t agree, you understand. But that’s not what you’re after.”

  Daniel shrugged. He wasn’t sure how he could describe the situation, and he didn’t intend to try.

  “I served under your Uncle Stacey when I was a midshipman,” Weisshampl said as if changing the subject. She picked up the object she used for a paperknife. It was a feather whose vanes were fused into a sharp, glassy membrane. It came from a bird that spent its life swimming in a sea whose high salt content didn’t freeze above -4 degrees Celsius, but which nonetheless was frozen over for half the year.

  “He had a nose for shifts in the Matrix,” she went on, rolling the feather between her paired index fingers. “I was amazed at the time, and the more I see of other astrogators—”

  She smiled coldly at Daniel.

  “—the more amazed I am. You’re good, Leary. Better than me. But you’ll never be what your uncle was.”

  “No,” Daniel said, “I won’t.”

  Weisshampl touched a button on her console. “Chief of Rig to the dayroom,” she ordered. Her voice rang from the speakers in every compartment and corridor on the Aglaia.

  Domenico, the bosun, must have been in his quarters just down the corridor. He was at the door of Weisshampl’s office before the echoes of her voice had ceased. “Yes sir?” he said, his voice slightly muffled as he pulled his tunic on over his head while he was speaking.

  “I want you to round up a detail of twenty under … Woetjans, I think,” Weisshampl said. “They’ll be on detached duty under Mr. Leary, here. For choice pick them from people who’ve spent their pay advance already.”

  Domenico grinned like an earthquake in a rocky cliff. “That won’t be much of a cull,” he said. “Riggers, or …?”

  “Riggers if you’ve got them, but take them from the hullside if you need to,” Weisshampl said. “I’ll clear it with the Chief of Ship.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the bosun said. He tapped his forehead in salute and walked out of the office. His voice was booming names even before he reached the stairs.

  “I’ll lay on an aircar to ferry you to shore,” Weisshampl said to Daniel. “Any particular spot?”

  “We’ll pick up Hogg at my quarters,” Daniel said. “Then the Elector’s Palace. Before I forget, could you break this out of petty cash?”

  He brought out the hundred-florin piece and handed it to the duty officer.

  Weisshampl looked at the coin in surprise. “This is a special minting,” she said.

  “It’s legal tender,” Daniel said defensively. “It’s, well, it was minted the day of my birth. I was given it to, well, carry, you know. Right now I’m a little short of ready cash and—”

  “I’ll break it for you myself,” Weisshampl said, taking out her purse. “If it got into ship’s funds, it might be harder to find when you wanted it back.”

  She put the lucky piece in an inner pocket of the purse, then shoved ordinary coins across the desk in three neat stacks. “I really respect Commander Bergen,” Weisshampl said. “The only thing he needed was the willingness to go for the throat.”

  “I love my uncle,” Daniel said as he rose. “I really appreciate your help, Maisie.”

  He turned and started out the door. Domenico had probably assembled the detail by now.

  “You must have gotten the killer instinct from your father,” Lt. Weisshampl said to his back.

  * * *

  “For proper proportions over that span …” said Mistress Bozeman, looking at the sketch Adele had made, “the shelves have to be seven-eighths of an inch higher. Now, we could get the same effect by reducing the length by about four inches.”

  The l
ibrary bustled. It hadn’t been this busy since the day Adele arrived and half the palace staff had wandered in for a look at the foreign intellectual. At least half of the assistants assigned to her were here today and many of them seemed willing to work, at least in a desultory fashion.

  “Work” for the moment meant carrying boards up three flights of helical stairs that were architecturally breathtaking. They were also about as badly suited to transporting long shelves as any design Adele could imagine, so she was both pleased and surprised that so many of her staff stuck with the task.

  “Now you see …” the master carpenter said. She put the end of a fabric measuring tape against the masonry of the outer wall and handed the reel with its spring tensioner to the only journeyman present; the other was down in the cabinet shop, directing library assistants to the boards they were to carry.

  Ms. Bozeman wasn’t being obstructive. For perhaps the first time in a decade she wore a real working costume, a many-pocketed apron over sturdy clothing. The trouble was that she simply couldn’t understand that aesthetic design had to give way to efficient use of space in the present circumstances.

  Adele needed shelves that would hold the maximum number of logbooks, routing directions, and similar works in twenty-centimeter size that had been standard aboard starships since before the Hiatus. She didn’t need an inch and a half of clearance above the volumes, and she certainly didn’t want banks of shelves separated by a four-inch gap that would be absolutely useless for any purpose she could imagine.

  Mistress Bozeman didn’t understand. If Adele had been asking her to set the shelves without vertical supports, the words would have made equal sense to the master carpenter.

  Adele drew a deep breath as she considered which different words to use in what increasingly seemed to be a fruitless attempt to get her ideas across. “Excuse me, Ms. Mundy,” said a voice behind her. “I must request that you grant me a brief private interview.”