With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  Adele stared in horrified amazement. She’d had no idea that the rockets would penetrate so far. All she’d intended was to add to the confusion by destroying vehicles parked in the palace gardens.

  “It is very important that you preserve my life,” said Markos. “Your superiors will punish you severely if anything happens to the information I bring them about my nation’s intelligence operations.”

  Adele turned. Sailors stared in disbelief at the hostage, still bound, who sat upright in the middle of the compartment.

  “That woman is a spy,” Markos said, nodding toward Adele with a malevolent expression. “Her real name is Adele Mundy. She was recruited on Bryce.”

  “Why you lying bastard,” Woetjans said. She punched Markos in the face. He fell against Dasi. The sailor knocked him upright again with an elbow.

  “I do not lie,” Markos said, dripping blood from a cut lip. “There’s proof of what I say in the data unit that looks like a communicator on my belt. I’ll give your superiors the key to the information inside as soon as they guarantee my safety.”

  He turned his gaze on Adele again. “She’s a spy,” he repeated. “She provided the information that permitted us to capture the palace and your ship so easily.”

  Adele was detached. It was as though she were listening to the history of an alternate reality in which events transpired in a fashion slightly skewed from those in which she had participated.

  But only slightly skewed: the reality would be enough to hang her. She thought of the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Cinnabar traitors betrayed in turn by their Alliance paymaster.

  Adele Mundy didn’t belong in this world; or any, she supposed. She’d briefly thought otherwise, but she’d been wrong.

  She smiled. A sailor swore under his breath.

  “That’s a lie, right, sir?” Dasi said. He was pleading. “It’s all bullshit that he’s talking!”

  The APC was over water now. To the north behind them, fires burned in Kostroma City and weapons fired at nothing.

  Adele continued to smile. There was no way out. She could lie, but the sailors wouldn’t forget Markos’s words. She was quite certain evidence would be found to implicate her. Markos would have arranged that, so that if she balked at some demand he could threaten her with exposure to the Cinnabar authorities.

  As he was exposing her now, to save himself and punish her with the same stroke.

  The sailors stared at Adele in stricken horror. They’d seen her shoot. But she couldn’t fly an armored personnel carrier, and she couldn’t kill the sailors who’d risked their lives for her and with her in the past. The only family she’d known since the proscriptions; and in a real sense, the only family she’d ever known.

  “I’ll handle this,” said Hogg. He raised the flap of Markos’s jacket and unclipped the belt communicator.

  “Be careful,” the spy warned. “If you try to retrieve the data without the codes you’ll destroy it instead. But I will tell all to the proper authorities.”

  He sneered at Adele in bloodthirsty triumph. His lips and left cheek were swollen from Woetjans’s blow.

  Hogg weighed the false communicator in the hand that didn’t hold a submachine gun. “You know,” he said conversationally, “the master wouldn’t believe a word of this. He’s a honest sort himself, my master Daniel, and he thinks the whole world’s like him. But there’s a lot of people back on Cinnabar who would believe it.”

  He grinned at Adele. “Right, mistress?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Adele.

  Hogg shot Markos in the temple. The spy’s head jerked sideways, losing definition as hydrostatic shock violently expanded his brain tissue.

  Hogg thrust his right leg straight, shoving the corpse out the open side of the APC. He tossed the communicator after Markos. He fired a burst from his submachine gun as the little object spun off in the vehicle’s wake.

  “Missed,” Hogg said. “When my eyes was better I’d have blown it to shit in the air, but I guess we’ll have to trust salt water to do the job.”

  He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. “What the fuck’s going on?” Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.

  “It’s like this,” Hogg said to the sailors. “The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there.”

  He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.

  “Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they’re all the same sort, I don’t give a fuck what color uniform they wear,” Hogg continued. “That wouldn’t be doing my job. Besides, you can’t trust them even if they do happen to tell the truth.”

  “Too fucking right,” said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, “You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance.”

  Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.

  “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you’d do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel.”

  * * *

  “The APC’s approaching at speed!” Domenico said. The bosun’s console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.

  “Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico,” Daniel ordered without looking around. “Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we’re out of the system and in one piece.”

  A computer-generated model of the Aglaia was at the center of Daniel’s display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the Aglaia’s sensors and transmitted to the Princess Cecile.

  The Aglaia launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.

  The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it’d been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.

  The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the Aglaia’s flank; water pressure hadn’t had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun’s corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.

  Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.

  But the missile weighed thirty tons.

  It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.

  The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile’s own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.

  The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor’s surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you’d use to shim a bearing.

  The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.

  Daniel split his
main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the Aglaia was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.

  The Bremse orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma’s surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.

  Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, “Commonwealth ship Princess Cecile to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!”

  The Aglaia had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls …

  But humans do have souls, and humans who depended on Daniel Leary would die unless he focused on the next step of the road to safety. He opened his mouth to blurt another dollop of simulated panic to justify the Princess Cecile lifting. Before he could speak, a voice from the console demanded in a guttural accent, “AFS Bremse to Princess Cecile. What is going on down there? Over.”

  “Emergency!” Daniel repeated. He heard a bustle beside him, figures moving at the right-hand console. “Ships are blowing up, Bremse! We must lift to save ourselves. All ships on the surface must lift!”

  “Bremse to Princess,” the harsh voice spat back. “Negative on lifting, Princess Cecile. Stay where you are and provide a full imagery link on commo channel twelve, no encryption. Over.”

  “Emer—” Daniel said. An amber bar slashed across the green telltale on his display, indicating that the channel was locked to him. He turned his head in surprise.

  Adele sat at the console to his right. Her uniform was splotched with blood, brick dust, and substances Daniel couldn’t even hazard a guess at.

  He’d thought his own was the master unit and couldn’t be overridden. That wasn’t true, at least with Adele working in the same system.

  “Princess Cecile to Bremse,” Adele said. Her voice was perfectly calm. Anyone who’d had experience with people reacting to crises would assume she was in shock. “We are transmitting data now as we lift off. I repeat—”

  She pointed a bandaged left hand to Daniel. He nodded; he was already initiating take-off sequence. Domenico had sealed the Princess Cecile as soon as the palace detachment boarded, so it was just a matter of bringing up pressure to the plasma motor feeds and unlocking the outriggers so they could be brought in as soon as the vessel left the water.

  “—we are lifting off for safety. Princess Cecile out.”

  The motors rumbled beneath them. The Princess Cecile shuddered on a bubble of steam and plasma, then began to rise. She was shorter than the Aglaia and therefore wobbled at a higher frequency as she found her balance, but she was a lot steadier than Daniel had expected.

  He grinned at Adele, then settled into his seat. His fingers moved across the console’s keyboard as he set up the next step on the corvette’s targeting display.

  One step at a time, until they got home or went off the end of the final cliff.

  * * *

  Adele coughed wrackingly, doubling over in her seat to bring up orange phlegm. Her first thought was that she’d had a lung hemorrhage, but the color came from the brick dust she’d breathed as they shot their way out of the palace. It and the ozone generated by electromotive weapons were irritants, but she didn’t think either of them would kill her.

  She wiped the sputum on her sleeve and went back to work. The fabric couldn’t be much filthier than before anyway.

  Starships weren’t stressed for high acceleration. The Princess Cecile lifted at less than two gravities, making flesh a burden but nothing worse. Sailors moved about, albeit a little slower than they had in Adele’s library; and as for Adele, she noted with a cold smirk that many of her plumper contemporaries carried as much weight every day of their lives.

  Daniel, instead of using the ship’s communication system, turned his head to say, “Adele? The Bremse up there’s laying a defensive array. Can you find the command node so we can destroy it?”

  Adele put down her wands. “The constellation hasn’t yet been activated, but I’m changing our identification codes to mimic those of the Goetz von Berlichingen. That way we’ll be safe if they switch it on.”

  “Yes, but can you spot the command node?” Daniel said. “We can destroy it with cannon or even a missile if you can just locate it.”

  Adele heard in his tone the ingrained irritation of a male trying to get information from a female too dense to understand a simple question. She didn’t say: “Yes, if you’re stupid enough to want to commit suicide that way I can help you do it.”

  Instead Adele said, “If the command node is destroyed each unit of the constellation will react to any ship within range except the Bremse. The command node is—”

  She twitched a control wand without taking her eyes away from Daniel. An object on Daniel’s visual display changed from an icon distinguished only by number to a pulsing ball as red as murder.

  “—here.”

  “Ah,” said Daniel. His face was blank as he assimilated what he’d been told: all the things he’d just been told, including the fact that he’d acted like a fool. “Adele—Ms. Mundy. My concern isn’t so much for our own safety from the defenses, as for the safety of the Cinnabar force that retakes Kostroma.”

  His expression was momentarily that of an older man and a very hard one. “As one most certainly will.”

  He swallowed, settling into a calmer state. “Is there a way we can disable the constellation before we leave the system? Even if it means risk for us. Though not suicide, if you please, not at this point.”

  Adele’s subconscious responded with a surge of pleasure to Daniel’s engaging grin. She’d frequently called people fools to their faces. She didn’t recall ever before meeting someone who analyzed the criticism, then accepted it because it was valid. Certainly no men had done so in the past.

  “If you can put me aboard the node,” Adele said, “I can disable it. I can make it change sides, if I’ve the time.”

  “Bremse to Kostroman vessel Princess Cecile,” growled the communicator. “Orbit at thirty thousand kilometers. Do not leave that assigned level or we’ll destroy you. Over.”

  A different officer was handling the Bremse’s communications now. This one was female and had an upper-class Pleasaunce accent. Senior personnel had been recalled to duty when chaos broke out in Kostroma City.

  Daniel bobbed his head as he considered. “Tell them we acknowledge but we’re having trouble with our reaction mass shutoffs,” he said.

  He waggled a finger toward his console. The four quadrants of the main display were now split into separate screens which he kept in the corner of his eye. “Actually, the fuel feed’s about the only part of the drive system that seems to be working to spec. Three of the plasma nozzles should have been replaced a couple maintenance cycles ago.”

  “Princess Cecile to Bremse,” Adele said. “We acknowledge your orders. We’ll orbit at thirty thousand kilometers as soon as we’ve repaired the reaction mass shutoffs. Princess Cecile over.”

  The Bremse was laying a defensive array at 44K kilometers above Kostroma’s surface, geosynchronous level. Adele didn’t doubt that the cruiser was willing to destroy a Kostroman vessel that disobeyed its orders, but there were other things going on that might well seem more pressing to the Alliance officers.

  Killing a ship was a complicated business. Very different from squeezing a trigger and seeing a face swell, eyes bulging and the first spray of blood from the nostrils …

  “Bremse to Princess Cecile!” the communicator said. “You’d better stabilize where we tell you, you wog morons, or you’ll be lucky if enough of you gets home that your families can breathe you! Bremse out.”

  Daniel’s expression was one that Adele wouldn’t have liked to
see had she thought it was directed at her. “The node is big enough to board?” he asked. His left hand on the keyboard was making corrections to the targeting display.

  “Big enough for a dozen technicians at once,” Adele said. “I’ve checked the design drawings. There’ll be a programming crew aboard it at least until the whole array is deployed. A boat can take me there using the codes that the shuttles for the work crews use.”

  “How big a party do you want?” Daniel asked. “We don’t have combat suits, though.”

  Adele sniffed. “There’ll be three or four Alliance programmers,” she said. “Give me somebody to drive the boat and another sailor or two to keep the programmers out of my way.”

  Daniel nodded. His finger touched the general call button. “Woetjans, Barnes, Dasi, and Lamsoe to the bridge,” he said, his voice syncopating itself through speakers in every compartment.

  Adele noticed distortion. The Princess Cecile, though clean and fit-looking, wasn’t as tight a collection of systems as it might have been if its present crew—communications officer included—had longer to work on the vessel.

  “And the Bremse?” Daniel asked. “Can you …?”

  “I doubt it,” Adele said. “As a safety feature there’s a lockout chip common to the Bremse and every mine of the constellation. It’s an infinite nonrepeating sequence, not a code I can break. The system won’t even permit me in the node to command a mine to attack the Bremse so long as the lockout’s in place.”

  The four sailors came at a shambling run. The weight of continued acceleration showed in the taut lines of their faces, but not in the speed of their arrival. Woetjans didn’t even look strained.

  “You’re to take Ms. Mundy in the cutter to track Kay-Kay One-Four-Three-Oh,” Daniel said with perfect enunciation and economy. “That’s the command node of the defensive constellation under construction. There’ll be Alliance personnel aboard, but they shouldn’t expect trouble. In any case, you’ll protect Ms. Mundy and provide her with any assistance she requires. Do you understand?”