What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  Daniel’s muscles quivered. Though the blazing pain of insertion had been entirely mental, his brain had transferred the impulses to the portions of his body which had seemed to be affected, and they in turn had responded.

  The ship creaked as her antennas rotated, sliding the corvette along her programmed course. Daniel couldn’t be out on the hull to finesse the transit, but over such a short distance even the captain of a tramp freighter should be able to arrive within a thousand miles of his intention.

  When the Sissie extracted, Daniel would try to prevent a war. He didn’t expect to succeed, but he had to try.

  And he very much hoped that he and the Princess Cecile would survive the attempt.

  Daniel was saying—or perhaps he had said it and the word was echoing in her mind?—“Extracting,” but Adele felt as though she were slipping into a vat of ointment. Her thoughts seemed greasy and faintly astringent, and they smelled of crushed aloes.

  Then the Princess Cecile was in normal space again. Adele’s console was alive with fresh inputs, and her momentary bout of synesthesia was over.

  It felt different every time she entered or left the Matrix. Adele sometimes thought of entering the particulars of each transition so that she could correlate them at leisure and see whether there was a pattern. She had never done so, because she didn’t remember the details if she waited even as much as a few minutes after an extraction. As a general rule she had something extremely important to do in those initial minutes.

  Certainly she had important duties now.

  The Princess Cecile had returned to sidereal space some two hundred and ninety-one thousand miles—effectively one light-second—insystem from the Palmyrene flagship Piri Reis. The destroyer Turgut trailed by another eighty thousand miles.

  Cutters hung about the cruiser in a ragged cloud, spreading and slowly falling behind. Though the Piri Reis was accelerating at 1 g to maintain the semblance of gravity, many of the cutters were either in freefall or accelerating under lesser impulse to conserve reaction mass. Regardless of how skilled the Palmyrene spacers were, their little vessels really weren’t intended for long voyages.

  Adele didn’t see any signals pass among the Palmyrene ships, but four of the cutters slid into the Matrix with the smooth grace of fish curving to the surface of a calm sea and submerging again.

  “Palmyrene vessel Piri Reis . . . ,” Daniel said. “This is RCS Princess Cecile, Captain Leary commanding. I wish to speak with the Autocrator, as representative of the Cinnabar Republic, over.”

  His voice, though calm and matter of fact, hinted at friendliness. Adele wasn’t sure how Daniel managed that. Perhaps it was because he was so naturally engaging that he projected warmth even when it wasn’t in the words or even his tone.

  Adele hadn’t been certain that the Autocrator was aboard the Piri Reis, but a quick view of the cruiser’s logs showed that Irene hadn’t seen any reason to confuse possible enemies by remaining at a distance from her fleet, in a cutter or even at a ground base somewhere. As before in viewing Palmyrene files, the problem was clutter rather than security precautions.

  Indeed, the clutter was so general that Adele wondered why the Palmyrenes even bothered to keep records. After all this was over, perhaps she would have the opportunity to meet a Palmyrene librarian. Or at least to enquire as to whether such a person existed.

  “You are the Captain Leary who insulted me on Stahl’s World, then?” said the distinctive voice of Autocrator Irene. “You have turned traitor as well as being a fool, Leary?”

  Daniel waited three long beats to be certain that Irene was through speaking. He didn’t want to interrupt her in the middle of a diatribe by assuming that she wasn’t bothering with communications protocol. This was a bad enough situation as it was.

  Adele, who had gone over logged conversations between the Autocrator and cutter captains, many of whom were Palmyrene nobles as well as being officers in the Horde, knew that Irene ignored protocol—indeed, that the Palmyrenes in general did. That didn’t mean that Daniel might not have interrupted her, however—nor that the Autocrator wouldn’t have reacted in fury to an interruption.

  Adele felt a faint smile touch her lips. For the first time in her life she actually appreciated the usefulness of the protocol which she was prone to ignore.

  “Your Excellency,” Daniel said, “nothing I have said or done was meant as an insult to you, who are by far the greatest figure in the region.”

  Adele frowned as she heard that. Hogg would have said that no Palmyrene was fit to scrub the latrine of a Cinnabar citizen . . . and despite the upbringing Esme Rolfe Mundy had given her, Adele found her thoughts turning in similar directions.

  I must be extremely angry about the poor state of Palmyrene record-keeping. Which isn’t fair. Entirely fair, at least.

  “And it’s because of the friendship between our two nations,” Daniel continued, “that I’ve come to beg you to let this present business drop while it’s still possible to ignore. My Republic is bound by treaty and would be forced to support the Alliance if open war broke out.”

  Adele was echoing Daniel’s display. Three carets appeared on it, close around the point that was the Princess Cecile. Vesey had lighted them pulsing red this time.

  “At present nothing has happened, and we can all go our separate ways without involving anyone on Cinnabar or Pleasaunce. Please—”

  Adele, listening on the internal circuits of the Piri Reis, caught the signal to the cruiser’s missile stations before there was any external sign of what was happening.

  “Ship!” she said as the fastest way to get word to anyone who might need the information—which was everybody aboard the Sissie, come to think. “Cruiser is launching four missiles! Out!”

  “Break!” said Daniel, reflexively proper in his commo protocol. “Gunners, take out the incoming cutters! Vesey, insert us as soon as the plasma charges dissipate! Six out!”

  Even as he spoke, the Sissie’s guns began hammering. Sun must have turned the stern ventral turret over to Rocker because with four targets—another caret had appeared on the PPI—the turrets had to operate separately to hit all the enemy vessels as quickly as possible.

  There wasn’t any need for the corvette to concentrate its fire anyway. The Sissie’s 4-inch guns were the minimum size that could potentially nudge incoming missiles away from a target vessel. At point-blank ranges against ships as light as the cutters, however, they could be devastating—the more so because the cutters’ captains were on the hull, with no protection against plasma bolts unless a sail chanced to get in the way.

  The gunners had laid their weapons on before the cutters reentered sidereal space. The precursor effects, the twisting of normal space-time as something forced itself through from other dimensions, were as easily identified as real matter or energy.

  Sun and Rocker could only guess at what the incoming vessels were, but they were obviously willing to kill on the basis of that guess. If the Birdsong 312, still missing, happened to appear close by the Princess Cecile at this moment, then it was the transport’s very bad luck.

  Adele continued to monitor Palmyrene communications; that was her duty, after all. She echoed the insets Daniel ran on the top of his PPI, however: the four ships entering sidereal space around the Sissie. None of them was as much as three hundred miles away from the corvette, and the closest was within thirty.

  That one escaped the first bolt because Sun opened fire before his target entered normal space. Turret guns were linked so that one of a pair fired a full second after its mate; otherwise the charged path of the first bolt would distort the line of the second.

  Sun’s second bolt struck the cutter squarely amidships. The hammerblow of charged particles blew in the thin plating, then ignited the interior in the vessel’s own atmosphere.

  Three masts shook from their steps and flew out from the fireball. The fourth mast spiraled, snapped around by half the cutter’s belly and the attached outrig
ger.

  Rocker’s target was almost as close, but through bad luck—like Sun, he was firing before the target was more than a blur—his first pair of bolts struck the cutter’s dorsal mainsail and its starboard mast near the base. Most of the sail vanished with little harm to the ship proper. The mast step breached the hull, driven downward by the vaporized section of tubing just above it.

  The cutter tumbled. Anyone on the hull was either dead from the bubble of gaseous steel or had been shaken into the void. Palmyrenes were probably less likely even than spacers in civilized navies to wear safety lines. In the event some had, they were pirouetting in vacuum like so many tetherballs.

  The dorsal guns cycled and hit the cutter again. Shreds of the hull and rigging spun out like sparks from a fireworks display. Rockets on the hull had probably exploded, but that could not add anything to the effect.

  The upper turret was slewing. Sun hadn’t bothered to fire a second burst into his initial target and instead was bringing his guns to bear on one of the remaining threats. For a moment the last cutter to arrive was only a distortion against the starscape beyond; then it became as sharp in the corvette’s excellent optics as it would have been if Adele had been looking across the quay at a ship floating in the next slip.

  The cutters were carrying topsails and topgallants on both flanks, but topsails alone on the dorsal and ventral antennas. The rig was intended solely to direct the cutters through the Matrix, not to protect the vessels’ hulls from plasma bolts.

  If the captains had been thinking of combat, they would have spread a full suit of sails. The sheets of metalized film would stop a plasma bolt—though only once. Replacing a sail was much easier than repairing damaged hull plates, and steel boiling outward from the hull when a jet of ions struck it would ruin furled sails anyway.

  The Palmyrenes hadn’t expected combat—or rather, they hadn’t expected to fight gunners who had a great deal of experience in using their plasma cannon offensively. Most gunners trained to defend against missiles, a delicate art but suitable for rote learning: all incoming missiles had the same characteristics, and they generally approached from a great distance.

  Bringing the guns to bear on a vessel in space or on a ground target were completely different skills which demanded speed rather than subtlety. Freighters not infrequently carried a single four-inch gun as defense against pirates, but they rarely had a specialist gunner. No civilian vessel would have a gunner with the skill and experience of the Sissie’s. The Palmyrenes had underrated their enemy, and they were dying as a result.

  Which didn’t make them any less dangerous, however. The four cutters probably hadn’t come—or hadn’t been sent, though Adele hadn’t seen any form of signal—to attack the Princess Cecile. They merely wanted to be on hand to attack if the corvette proved hostile.

  The Piri Reis was now signalling, “Attack them! Destroy the Cinnabar scum!” in clear on the 10-meter band. The cruiser’s beam was directed toward the Sissie and the cutters extracting around her, though other vessels of the Horde were close enough to pick up the signal also.

  At least a dozen of the cutters which were trailing the cruiser now slid into the Matrix. Several attempted the pointless exercise of launching their free-flight rockets while they were still a light-second away from their target.

  Those rockets would arrive somewhere, eventually; but the corvette’s crew would have died of old age before that happened. Besides that, normal dispersion over such a distance made it unlikely that any of the volley would pass through the ship’s present location.

  But the cutters which were inserting would become a problem in a few minutes. And the pair which were already alongside—

  Sun locked his pipper on the last cutter to extract. The target had a ragged look: one topsail was thirty percent smaller than the other three and was cocked at a sharper angle to the ship’s axis; tags of cordage dangled from several of the yards, and the hull had either been painted in motley or been patched with plates taken from ships with different decorative schemes.

  Two crewmen were cranking handwheels to swing the rocket basket toward the Princess Cecile. Another at the pillar nearby was entering data into a computer designed to be used by people wearing rigging gauntlets.

  Adele had seen similar rocket launchers often in the past, but this was the first one she’d seen that was aimed from the exterior of the hull. The ship was very small, even by the standards of Palmyrene cutters, and this installation may simply have been a response to the lack of interior volume.

  WHANG!

  Sun’s first bolt stove in a hull plate some ten or fifteen feet back of the prow. Gas swelled in a light-scattering haze, but the charge didn’t have enough energy to convert the interior of the cutter into an inferno.

  WHANG!

  The second bolt hit the basket of eight rockets end-on. The warheads went off simultaneously, though the crew had already been cooked and shredded by the whiplash of ions.

  An orange fireball of high explosive enveloped the vessel: there was no atmospheric pressure to contain the bubble of hot gas. It continued to expand, thinning to a faint haze through which Adele could see the cutter’s bow and stern tumbling in opposite directions. Amidships, the hull had been reduced to scraps spreading away from the blast.

  The remaining cutter was very close and bow-on to the belly of the Princess Cecile. The dorsal turret couldn’t bear on the Palmyrene, and the ventral guns had been delayed when Rocker needed to fire a second pair of bolts at his initial target.

  Daniel was superposing targeting displays over the high-resolution imagery of the cutters. Adele saw the pipper slide onto the nose of the cutter. As it did so, the target blurred with the wreathing exhaust of its own rockets.

  WHANG!

  “Cease fire!” Daniel ordered. “Cease fire so we can—”

  WHANG!

  “Cease fire, Rocker, or I swear you’ll never again sail in the RCN!” Daniel shouted. Adele saw that he’d engaged the gunnery override on the command console, but a fraction of a second too late to prevent the second bolt.

  Which might be unfair to Rocker. The turret guns were intended to fire as a pair in quick sequence. It was possible to fire one tube at a time—Sun had done it, and she remembered Daniel doing it also—but it wasn’t easy.

  And until the instant that the first bolt struck the cutter’s bow and shoved the vessel’s whole axis outward in a starburst, Rocker had intended to fire both tubes. The second packet of plasma created a sudden fluorescence in the gas ball where the cutter had been, unnecessary but harmless in itself. The charged track and the side-scatter of ions clinging to the Sissie’s rigging prevented her from entering the Matrix until it had dissipated, however.

  Readouts from the BDC told Adele that Vesey was thrusting at her display’s Execute button with both thumbs. That was pointless—the button was virtual, not something that could stick and be forced to respond by greater effort—but a natural enough response to desperation.

  The cutter’s rockets were racing toward the corvette, on ballistic courses now that their propellant had burned out. The warheads were just as deadly as ever.

  “For what we are about to receive . . . ,” murmured someone over the command net. “May the gods make us thankful.”

  It was Daniel. Adele wasn’t sure he knew that he’d been speaking aloud.

  The hull rang to a heavy blow, then a spiteful tinkle like that of glass breaking on a tile floor. It sounded like a gong, not an explosion, because the warhead had detonated in vacuum.

  “Inserting!” Vesey said.

  Adele felt a familiar prickly queasiness. She thought, I never imagined I’d be pleased to be entering the Matrix.

  There was another deafening clang. Adele’s console became a pearly glow as the Princess Cecile left behind all external inputs. They were in the Matrix, safe from all the troubles of the sidereal universe.

  Adele smiled wryly. Unfortunately they had to return to normal space at some p
oint. She very much doubted that trouble would have vanished while she was absent, but she supposed it wouldn’t do any harm to hope otherwise.

  CHAPTER 22

  Zenobia System

  “Everybody got out of the way when we saw them launching,” Woetjans said, gripping her end of the communications rod so fiercely that Daniel wondered if she subconsciously believed she was squeezing the words through the brass tube. “As much as we could, you know. We had a good twenty seconds—not enough to get all the way to the other side, but there could’ve been wogs shooting there too. But to get behind a mast, you know, or Griswold behind the fairing for the belly airlock.”

  Daniel and his bosun stood toward the stern of the Sissie’s underside, between the E and F mast rings. He’d left one rigging watch on the hull when he extracted to plead with Autocrator Irene. He’d been concerned about the cruiser’s 15-cm plasma cannon, but he’d considered the risk marginal at a light-second’s range.

  If the negotiation went badly—as he had expected—he wanted to be able to maneuver in the Matrix with precision. He’d seen enough of Palmyrene skill to know that any obvious attempt at escape risked having the Piri Reis extract alongside later.

  It hadn’t occurred to Daniel that cutters would close with the corvette the way they might have done with a merchant vessel. Attempting that with a crack ship like the Sissie, whose RCN gunners were using a warship’s equipment, would be obvious suicide.

  But it hadn’t been obvious to the Palmyrene captains, because they hadn’t faced a warship from a major power before. With all respect to Admiral Mainwaring’s command, the patrol sloops of the Qaboosh Region weren’t in the same league as ships of the RCN’s main force squadrons.

  The Alliance destroyers were first-rate combatants, especially with an officer like von Gleuck leading them, but the Horde hadn’t seen them in action. Daniel suspected that the Autocrator had a nasty surprise coming there, too.