What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  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.”

  He didn’t ask Sun and Rocker to acknowledge, because they were properly too busy to worry about that. They would obey, though, or they’d lose their ratings as soon as this was over.

  Daniel grinned. Adele would have added, “if we all survive.” He didn’t think in those terms. It wasn’t that he was optimistic; rather, it just didn’t occur to him that he and the Sissies were going to fail.

  The nearest anomaly congealed into the Z 46. Most of her antennas had been lowered, though her crew hadn’t had time to furl or replace the sails. They were a mare’s nest of tatters that would be the devil’s own job to police up afterwards, but at least the gun turrets had clear fields of fire.

  Daniel moved to lock out the Sissie’s dorsal turret, but Sun was already shifting his guns to target red two. He was a small man and very fit, with a wasp waist and close-cropped hair. Sweat beaded on his forehead and the backs of his hands, and he wore an expression of fierce delight.

  Sun liked what he did. Everybody Daniel knew who was really good at his job also liked that job. For the specialized gunnery required by the situations into which Daniel put the Princess Cecile, there was nobody in the RCN better than Sun.

  Four cutters shimmered into normal existence. The dorsal turret fired two shots; both into the Palmyrene’s stern, but the target was so frail that it didn’t matter that the bolts weren’t perfectly centered. The bow spun away like a paper lantern blown by the gases of its own destruction.

  The ventral guns whanged, punctuating the rumble from the forward turret as Sun shifted to the next target. Rocker tripped his guns early, but the second bolt grazed the target instead of crackling past as the first had. A grazing hit was good enough, gutting the cutter like a fish and killing everyone in or on her hull.

  The Z 42 came out of the Matrix at 1100 miles, broadside to the Sissie’s bow. That was very respectable astrogation, for all that her captain was a stiff-necked bigot.

  Daniel completed his computations. More—many more, at least thirty—anomalies were forming close by.

  It was beyond question that the Palmyrenes were keying on the Princess Cecile. The Autocrator had taken Captain Leary’s snub personally. She was reacting as an angry noble, not as a general or a head of state. In the longer term that was probably to the benefit of Zenobia’s defenders, but it meant short-term problems for the Sissie and her crew.

  “All Posy units,” Daniel said. “This is Posy Three-six, transmitting new course data for Posy Three, out.”

  He was dancing on a razor blade. Even if he succeeded, the damage was going to be terrible, terrible. The odds were just too long.

  Rocker fired; his target exploded violently. The cutter had been so close that fragments of it would probably hit the Sissie, though they wouldn’t do as much damage as the—

  Four rockets went off in quick succession along the corvette’s underside. The damage-control sidebar went thirty-percent amber with a scattering of red speckles: seals had strained or failed completely. Daniel heard internal hatches banging shut.

  “Cease fire!” he ordered, locking out the guns as he spoke. The gunners would be furious, but he was right and he was Six regardless of whether he was right or wrong. “Ship, prepare to insert ASAP. Inserting ASAP, out.”

  Six more rockets crashed along the Sissie’s spine. More seals and seams were leaking, and the buzz of the High Drive had risen to a ragged whine. Several motors had been knocked out by rockets which had hit the underside, and the outriggers—made of much thinner plating than the hull—would require extensive repairs before the Princess Cecile could make a water landing.

  The warheads weren’t intended to do serious hull damage, but a continued series of hammerblows would reduce the corvette to junk sooner rather than later. “As soon as possible” didn’t necessarily mean “soon enough.” Daniel kept his finger on the Execute button and under his breath prayed to the gods in whom he didn’t really believe at this instant.

  The Princess Cecile began to slide into the Matrix. The cutter which had fired the most recent salvo was inserting also, preparing to reload her rocket launchers and resume the attack in company with scores of her companions.

  Just before the Sissie reached the merciless safety of the Matrix, the Palmyrene cutter became a fireball. A 13-cm bolt from the Z 46 had caught it.

  Good luck to you and yours, Otto, Daniel thought as blazing needles entered his body with the transition. And good luck to us Sissies as well.

  The Zenobians didn’t need luck: they needed Force Posy. So far, so good.

  CHAPTER 25

  Zenobia System

  Adele continued to puzzle vainly about how the Palmyrenes communicated. Beyond question the cutters inserted and extracted in organized groups, though “squadrons” might be too formal a word; “schools” or “flocks” seemed more in keeping with Palmyrene society.

  Perhaps Daniel would know whether there was a collective noun for maggots. That would be even more suitable.

  Adele’s self-deprecating smile was too slight even to make her lips quiver. She was apparently still angry about the abysmal Palmyrene record-keeping.

  A voice somewhere on the fringes of Adele’s consciousness said, “Mistress?” She ignored it as she ignored the repeated cycling of the airlocks and the sharp but less identifiable sounds coming through the hull.

  The Palmyrenes did communicate. Unless they were psychic—which Adele wasn’t ruling out, though they hadn’t shown any signs of psychic abilities on Stahl’s World—the hypothesis that best explained the situation was that they were communicating passively.

  All that would take was a single low-power laser or even a UHF transmitter: the cutters were generally close enough together to make that possible. The cruiser could send such a signal to a key member of the swarm; that cutter’s maneuvers could then be copied by several other ships—clan members? peers who took a whim to follo
w?—whose crews had been watching the first.

  That wouldn’t communicate the details of the planned maneuver, but the Palmyrenes didn’t require anything more than the signal to insert. The cutter captains were doubtless as able to follow one another as they were to track their prey. They seemed to feel their way through the Matrix.

  Adele couldn’t see her screen. She froze—What’s happened?—and realized that Tovera had leaned into the holographic display.

  “Mistress,” Tovera said. She was wearing an air suit, the light-weight, flexible garment intended for ship’s side personnel who for one reason or another had to go out into vacuum. “Captain Leary has ordered everyone to put on their suits before we extract. Woetjans and I will help you into yours.”

  “No,” said Adele, frowning at both the request and the presumption of it. “I’m going to find a way to read Pal—”

  Hands gripped either side of her rib cage and lifted her away from the console. Her right heel kicked the couch as Woetjans set her upright beside it, then released her.

  Adele spun in cold fury. Tovera held Adele’s personal data unit so that it didn’t drop to the deck when the bosun lifted its owner away.

  Woetjans was wearing an air suit; her face was as gray as a corpse’s. Sunken cheeks and dilated pupils showed that she was on heavy medication even though she was no longer hooked to the Medicomp—as she obviously should be.

  “Woetjans, why are you in an air suit?” Adele said, the first thing that flashed into her mind after she realized the situation and her anger sluiced away. “I thought you always wore a rigging suit.”

  “I’m going out on the hull,” Woetjans said, turning toward the bridge hatchway. “They need me on the hull.”

  “Mistress, don’t let her,” Tovera hissed in what would have been an access of concern in someone who felt concern. Surely a sociopath couldn’t learn to feel emotion? That would be like a cripple growing a new leg.