What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  The Palmyrene was aiming a projector which rested on his right shoulder. The unit was deceptively simple: besides the laser emitter, it had a stabilizer and, built into the hardware of the objective lens, shape-recognition software optimized to pick out starships.

  The operator was using keypads in both handgrips with speed and aplomb, despite the awkward position and his heavy gauntlets. The projector was sending his message to a cutter thirty-seven miles away. That cutter’s captain was receiving the transmission on a spherical antenna no more than three feet in diameter; a processor converted the signal to voice and piped it down a length of flex plugged into his helmet.

  Adele could have given the distance in feet or for that matter angstroms. Everything was open to her.

  The Palmyrene system was crude but effective, so long as the parties were precise enough to make it work. Adele valued organization above all things and had little appreciation for craftsmanship: knowledge was knowledge, whether it was scratched on a potsherd with a sharp stone or illuminated in gold leaf and lapis lazuli on a sheet of choice vellum. Nonetheless, she found the Palmyrenes’ skill to be impressive.

  Part of Adele felt amusement, though she no longer had a body which could smile. Perhaps she devalued craftsmanship because she took it for granted. She was never in doubt as to where a pellet from her pistol was going to go, for example.

  What are the Alliance destroyers doing?

  It was the second question—the first was the location of the Palmyrene vessels—Adele would have set about determining when the Princess Cecile extracted. Now the thought was the answer: The Z 46 and the Z 42 were in the Matrix, struggling toward the point that Daniel had informed them was the Sissie’s next destination as he left von Gleuck and his consort behind.

  The destroyers had been punished by eight or ten rockets apiece, but neither was as badly damaged as the Sissie. In part that was a matter of size: each destroyer had twice the corvette’s tonnage and more than double its sail area to absorb a similar number of hits. Their sails were in tatters, but their antennas and yards were in relatively better shape than those of the Princess Cecile.

  The Palmyrenes seemed determined to cripple the Cinnabar vessel and were launching at the destroyers only as an afterthought. When Daniel had taken the Sissie back into the Matrix, most of the cutters followed.

  Some of them inserted, leaving behind the Alliance vessels at the rally point. The cutters which had volleyed their rockets were reloading their launching baskets. They would send fresh salvos into the corvette as soon as she returned to sidereal space.

  Some cutters had tracked the Princess Cecile but hadn’t managed to attack before their target reinserted. They simply shifted their courses within the Matrix. Their captains made hand gestures. In response crewmen hauled on cables, rotating antennas and spreading or furling sails.

  The rigs were worked manually. Not only were the cutters conned from the hull, they dispensed with the hydromechanical linkages on which the vessels of the civilized universe depended.

  Do the Palmyrenes think of themselves as a species different from civilized humans? Certainly they had skills that personnel of the RCN and Fleet could not imagine. Though the ability to dance about in the Matrix wasn’t nearly as important as being able to organize data, a skill in which the Palmyrenes were sadly lacking.

  The Z 46 extracted almost on top of a cutter which hadn’t yet reversed course to follow the Princess Cecile. The Alliance gunners were logy from transition. The turret in the middle of the destroyer’s belly began to traverse, but not quickly enough.

  The Palmyrene cutter was a large one, over five hundred tons; it mounted two launching baskets. Bright yellow exhaust flared from them; an instant later, rockets raked the destroyer’s underside.

  The Z 46’s starboard outrigger ripped in a series of red flashes punctuated by the blue-white scintillance of exploding High Drive motors. The destroyer heeled, pushed by the motors on the port outrigger. They too had been damaged, but not nearly so badly as the other set.

  Von Gleuck, as calm as a statue seated on his bridge, tapped keys at two-second intervals even as the rockets were hitting: right index finger, right ring finger, right middle finger, right little finger. At each tap, the Z 46 launched a missile. Like Daniel, the Alliance captain obviously preferred to carry out his own attacks.

  Missiles . . .

  The Princess Cecile had launched two in the moments before Daniel took the ship back into the Matrix. The range was very short—they hadn’t had time to burn out and separate—but both had missed: by a mile, and by a mile and a half, respectively. Daniel’s gamble had failed.

  Adele was aware of the relationship of the Sissie, the Palmyrene cutters chasing her, and the Piri Reis. Each would have been infinitely separated from all others in normal space-time. Viewed from Adele’s present unbounded perspective, they were converging on a single point.

  What Adele felt was beyond contentment: all knowledge was within her compass. Adele Mundy was happy, possibly for the first time in her life.

  Though she was not really alive now. That in itself might be why she was happy.

  Very slightly Adele regretted not having a body, or at least not having lips to smile with. She remembered that smiling had been a pleasant sensation, one she indulged in more often since she met Daniel Leary than she had in the previous decades.

  But now she had knowledge . . . and Daniel sat on the bridge of the Princess Cecile, where Adele Mundy would find him when she returned to being merely human. Besides, she’d found during the past five years that being human was bearable. Perhaps now it would be even better, because she could hope that when she died, there was a heaven in which she could believe.

  Again Adele’s lips would have smiled . . . and perhaps her psyche did.

  The turrets of the Palmyrene cruiser were rotating, their triple plasma cannon locking on anomalies as they coalesced close aboard the Piri Reis. The guns began to fire individually, jets of plasma ripping tracks through the sidereal universe.

  The heavy cannon had to cool for at least thirty seconds before they were reloaded. Nonetheless, the energy in a single bolt would have been sufficient to destroy the Princess Cecile as a combat unit, even though only a portion of the target was within the sidereal universe when the plasma ripped that point.

  The corvette wobbled. It was on the verge of breaking free but still not quite in the sidereal universe. Cutters plunged into the volume of normal space surrounding the point where the Sissie seemed to be extracting. They arrived from every apparent direction.

  Adele marveled. The little vessels vanished like thistledown in a bonfire, one and another and more, many more. Cutters touched by 15-cm bolts were destroyed completely, leaving only spars tumbling out of an expanding gas ball to prove that they had once been starships.

  Don’t they realize . . . ? Adele thought. But of course Admiral Polowitz and his gunner realized that they were destroying their own cutters. They were shooting at two and three anomalies at a time as they appeared, knowing that at most one—the Princess Cecile—could be an enemy: the Z 42 had extracted near her consort, the Z 46, ten light-seconds distant from the Piri Reis.

  Polowitz understood—and he understood that he didn’t have a choice. Half a dozen cutters had been destroyed before the Autocrator Irene realized what was going on, however. When she did—

  “Polowitz!” Irene said, standing like a golden statue in the center of the cruiser’s bridge. “Do you want to be whipped to death? You’re killing our own men!”

  The Autocrator’s acceleration couch was gimballed at the foot to lift upright and rotate while still in contact with the person in it. Irene didn’t have a console of her own, but she could echo any of the consoles to the adjustable display built into the left arm of her couch.

  “Excellency,” said the Admiral. His voice was firm, but there was sweat on his forehead. Whatever he had planned for his next words caught in his mouth. />
  Both dorsal turrets crashed; the left stern gun was still recoiling when the central bow gun spurted a thermonuclear explosion down the center of its bore.

  The cruiser’s bridge layout was circular with Polowitz’ station in the far bow beside the command console where the ship’s captain sat. All the Palmyrene officers were turned inward toward the Autocrator. On the Princess Cecile and most RCN—or Fleet—vessels, all but the command console were fixed to face the bulkhead, though the attached couches could be rotated away at need.

  “Have you gone mad?” Irene said. When she was in a good mood, her voice had the timbre of stones sliding; now she shrieked like an angry seabird. “Stop shooting our own men!”

  “Excellency, we can’t take a chance,” Polowitz said in a tone of desperate calm. “A chance with your life, Excellency. Leary is a demon, Your Excellency! We cannot—”

  Three plasma cannon fired, then a fourth. Moments later, a fifth bolt vaporized a cutter after it completed extraction only twenty miles from the cruiser. Instead of giving independent control to his turret captains, Bailey—the gunnery officer—had put the Piri Reis on automated response. A computer was directing the weapons: slewing the turrets, adjusting the tubes’ elevation, and tripping the laser array which compressed and detonated the pellet of tritium in the breech of each gun.

  The gunnery computer could have been programmed to ignore targets which had successfully extracted unless they were hostile. The cruiser’s gunnery officer—Adele had seen him; Bailey, ill-bred and ill-educated, the sort of man one expected to leave civilization to work for barbarians—hadn’t thought to do so or hadn’t been able to do so. He was ignorant and frightened and a fool.

  I wouldn’t have understood what was going on if I were human, Adele thought. Afterwards she would have asked Sun or Daniel for an explanation, which they would bubblingly have given. If there was an afterwards.

  But now Adele simply understood with the whole of her being. She knew anything she chose to know. Her human intellect—fine though it was—couldn’t encompass the Cosmos in its entirety, but any separate portion was hers when she considered it.

  “—let him attack again, he won’t miss the second time,” Polowitz was saying. “You can see—”

  The turret on the cruiser’s underside fired, shifted minusculely, and fired again. Two cutters had started to extract, a hundred miles apart but almost in line with one another to the cruiser’s guns.

  Adele wondered if the gunnery computer could feel satisfaction. Her new state didn’t give her subjective information like that; she could only look within herself.

  The computer felt satisfaction.

  “Polowitz!” the Autocrator said. She turned to the hatchway, where two guards stood. The now-vertical couch must be slaved to the motions of her body. “Shoot this madman before he kills more of our own men!”

  The turrets fired in a rippling salvo, one and two and three, then a fourth bolt.

  “Cease fire!” the admiral said. He rolled off his couch, trying to hide behind it while he drew his pistol; he hadn’t been strapped in. “Cease fire, Bailey, cease fire!”

  The guards raised their weapons—mob guns, again; flashy, messy, and a confession of incompetence in the person using it. Adele would have sneered at them when she was a human being; now her omniscient psyche felt a cold disgust.

  “Cease fire, Bailey!” the admiral repeated, pointing his pistol toward the gunnery console. Several other officers on the cruiser’s bridge were drawing guns, or in one case a long, curved knife.

  Bailey bolted from his console, trying to put the Autocrator between him and Admiral Polowitz. A guard stepped forward and clubbed the gunnery officer behind the ear with the stubby butt of his gun. Bailey flew forward, bounced off the arm supporting Irene’s display, and flopped back on the deck; his blank eyes were staring at the ceiling.

  The guns of the Piri Reis fired twice more: Bailey hadn’t had time to disengage the program he’d set to run them. Even so, there was silence after the second crashing shot.

  The computer had run out of targets. Nearly thirty balls of gas, cooling and expanding, drifted in the cruiser’s wake.

  Adele’s body sucked her psyche back into itself. The signals console was live again with real-world inputs. The Princess Cecile floated in vacuum some four hundred thousand miles from the Piri Reis. The game Daniel played with the Matrix had caused the corvette to drift significantly beyond the initial extraction point.

  Adele felt a profound sadness. Only human. Until I die.

  Zenobia System

  Captain Daniel Leary had a full if detached grasp of his surroundings, much as a mirror reflects what is before it. Reality touched only the surface of his awareness; he wasn’t a part of what he saw.

  The bridge of the Princess Cecile looked like the aftermath of a gas attack. Hogg had been sitting at the subordinate position on the back of the command console. It was intended for training or, during action, for a junior officer who could take over the duties if the captain were incapacitated.

  The Sissie had too few watch-standing officers ever to put one on the back of the command console, so Hogg regularly used the position when the ship was in action. A rustic with a stocked impeller had nothing useful to do during a naval action, but he wasn’t going to be separated from the young master when people were shooting at him.

  Hogg held his impeller, but he lay on the deck as stiff as if he’d been brain shot. He’d been raising his left hand toward his face at the moment he froze; now it hung in the air.

  So far as Daniel knew, no one in the past had ever held a ship in transition for—

  He’d noted the clock at the right center of his display as he started the extraction.

  —twenty-one seconds. Could it be fatal? But he hadn’t had any choice. Not if he, if the Princess Cecile, was to save Zenobia.

  Cory had rotated his couch away from the astrogation display. He sat upright, weeping uncontrollably. He appeared to be staring at Sun at the gunnery console, though that seemed unlikely on the face of it.

  Sun wore his rigging suit, though he’d removed his helmet and gauntlets in the airlock on returning from helping clear the dorsal turret. He was now working industriously to clamp the right gauntlet onto his left cuff. The edges wouldn’t mate, of course, but the gunner didn’t appear to be getting angry. His smile was quizzical and earnest.

  Fiducia had gotten up from the missile board and walked against the outer bulkhead. He usually buckled himself onto his couch, so he must have shown enough enterprise to release the harness. He continued to step forward with slow deliberation, seemingly convinced that eventually the hull would give way.

  Daniel was confident that if he switched to views of the Sissie’s other compartments, he would see similar disruption. Certainly the riggers in the forward rotunda had been stunned as thoroughly as the bridge crew, Daniel included. Barnes was trying with increasing frustration to open the airlock, but he was trying to find the latch on the left instead of the right edge; his perceptions had been mirrored.

  The exception to the general chaos was Adele. She was at work, her control wands flickering. She showed no sign of disorientation. Columns of text scrolled up both edges of her display, while the middle section echoed the command console: PPI above and a real-time image of the Piri Reis below.

  Daniel had intended to send the Princess Cecile back into the Matrix when he found that he could no longer bear the, well, insanity of transition. He had expected that he would be confused and that some or even many of the Sissie’s crew would also be confused. The ship could drift in safety, out of the sidereal universe and away from her enemies, until her captain and crew were functional again.

  That was a reasoned, intelligent plan. The emotional impact of reality was so much worse than what Daniel had expected that it bore almost no connection to that plan. He hadn’t been able to reverse his thumb pressure, so the corvette had completed her extraction. She now wallowed in easy missile r
ange of the cruiser.

  Daniel’s mind worked perfectly, or at any rate he thought it did. It unfortunately no longer had control of his body. He couldn’t even tap a key to bring up imagery from the cameras in other compartments.

  He didn’t need to do that, of course. The technicians in the Power Room and the riggers in the lower rotunda would be in the same wretched shape as the Sissies he could see: numb, babbling, unconscious . . . and perhaps one or two others like Adele, apparently normal except that she was going on with her normal duties in the middle of blind chaos.

  What Daniel did need to do—his mind told him this with perfect clarity—was to move the Princess Cecile out of the path of the missiles from the cruiser. The Piri Reis launched five missiles, then four, then five, and finally five more, allowing a reasonable five seconds between each salvo.

  That was a poor percentage out of what should have been a volley of twenty-eight missiles total, but it would certainly put paid to the Sissie unless she moved. Retreating into the Matrix—there was plenty of time—would be the simplest way to escape, but with 413,000 miles of breathing room, Daniel or any of the corvette’s officers could have maneuvered clear in normal space.

  If they had been conscious and functional. Which apparently they were not, none of them.

  Daniel strained to make his right index finger move. The system was set to toggle the most recent action. At the present moment, simply touching the Execute key would cause the Sissie to insert into the Matrix and avoid the incoming missiles.

  He might as well wish that Zenobia’s moons would fall into the planet: there was no connection between what he wished and the desired result. Vesey and Cazelet in the BDC were probably doing the same thing. If so, they were having as little success as he was.