by David Drake
The riggers surged out of the lock, each one going to a predetermined post. Daniel followed, shuffling forward so that one electromagnetic boot was always flat against the steel hull. He kept his right hand on Adele’s equipment belt.
The Princess Cecile was spreading her antennas as quickly as the riggers could unlock them from their cradles along the hull. Hydraulic pressure extended and telescoped the masts and yards. Daniel noticed a dozen places where starlight blurred into iridescent fog. Some leakage was inevitable where new gaskets hadn’t worked in or old gaskets had worn, and the vacuum of space emphasized the flaws. A trained eye—and Daniel’s was—could tell the difference between a trivial seepage and a potential problem.
He leaned to touch his helmet to Adele’s. “Look at Port Two,” he said, pointing forward toward the second mast on the corvette’s port side. “If that leak doesn’t slow by tomorrow, we’ll have to do something about it. The main joint is new, and the seal may have been pinched when it was being replaced.”
Adele turned to follow the line of Daniel’s fingers, taking her helmet out of contact with his. Riggers’ suits weren’t normally fitted with radios. An accidental transmission in the Matrix could have incalculable—literally—effects on a ship’s velocity and location in regard to the sidereal universe.
The riggers didn’t adjust the sails: hydraulics controlled from the bridge did that. But the pumps, the joints, the parrels—even the gossamer fabric—were machines and worked the way good machines do: most of the time.
The riggers patched and stretched and replaced. If an antenna was beyond quick repair they signaled the problem through the hull, using a hydromechanical semaphore with a keyboard for unusually complex problems. The captain and navigation computer could then choose another solution to the astrogation task.
It wasn’t a handicap for a trained crew to operate by semaphore and hand signals even while the ship was in normal space. Riggers as experienced as those of the Princess Cecile’s present crew could put a ship through her paces with no direction at all. Stiction, leaks, breakage—all were as obvious to the crewmen as they were to Woetjans or Daniel, and they could do the repairs in their sleep.
The riggers didn’t need to talk. Daniel needed to be on the hull to talk to Adele without risk of being overheard. For this too the lack of a radio was an advantage, so long as both parties remembered they had to keep their helmets touching to hear one another.
Which Adele now did, a moment late, clanking her head back against Daniel’s. He winced, more at the thought than from the shock itself. Riggers’ gear had to be able to take a hammering, but the very violence of the environment meant spacers learned to be as gentle as a nurse handling infants.
“Sorry, Daniel,” she said contritely. Adele had the saving grace of knowing she was clumsy on shipboard. The dispatch vessel Aglaia from which most of the Princess Cecile’s crew were drawn had often carried high-ranking civilians. Some of them insisted on coming out on the hull but because of pride refused to wear a safety line like the one which joined Adele to Daniel. Woetjans told of leaping between masts to snag a treasury official who was on his way toward Canopus if she hadn’t caught him.
“Adele, I’d asked an acquaintance in Foreign Affairs about Delos Vaughn,” Daniel said, holding his friend tight so that she wouldn’t absentmindedly pull away. “I was told that for reasons of state Vaughn would never be allowed to leave Cinnabar. Ah, I don’t want to be privy to any matters that aren’t my business to know, but if there’s anything you can in good conscience tell me … ?”
Adele turned to face him, then caught herself and brought her helmet back in contact temple to temple. “My information was much the same as yours, Daniel,” she said. “Though I should emphasize that I wasn’t specifically told anything about Vaughn.”
There was a pause; Daniel knew his friend well enough to visualize her frowning as she chose words with her usual precision. “The thing is,” she said, her voice robbed of all overtones by the method of transmission, “I would have expected that I would be told, especially if Vaughn were to be travelling on the same vessel as me. Even though his affairs have no direct connection with mine or those of the RCN.”
Daniel didn’t know what other duties Adele had to the Republic, but he knew there had to be a connection well above that of the Personnel Bureau in the Navy Office. Her skills made her a marvelous addition to the Princess Cecile’s crew, but there was no way in Hell that a faceless clerk would have approved a signals warrant for someone with Adele’s deficiencies on paper.
Daniel had been prepared to use what influence he had. The “Hero of Kostroma” business didn’t gain him much ground in the RCN directly, but there were admirals’ wives to whom he might seem a romantic figure. All the more so, because young Leary was trying to get his ladyfriend aboard his ship despite a hard-hearted bureaucracy.
He might have succeeded, but he hadn’t had to try. Adele’s warrant whisked through the Navy Office like grass through a goose. It was delivered to the Princess Cecile before the port commander decided which bay the corvette would refit in.
Daniel grinned. Adele was his friend, and she was a lady in every sense of the word; but for romance, Daniel preferred something younger, rounder and, frankly, not so smart. Besides which, so far as Daniel had been able to tell, Adele had no interest in romance whatever.
The sails were stretching the length of the yards. The electrostatic fabric was so thin that bright stars were visible through it. For this initial deployment Mon was running everything out to its maximum extent. The antenna and sail mechanisms had been tested thoroughly on the ground, but vacuum and the vibration of liftoff could expose flaws that would only appear in real service.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Daniel said, speaking more to himself than his companion. A warship’s enormous suit of sails spreading to shadow the universe was a sight to move a dead man.
“What is, Daniel?” Adele said. “Cinnabar from up here, you mean?”
A dead man, but not necessarily a librarian. “Ah,” Daniel said aloud. “I was thinking of the arrangement of the sails fully set. Imposing their own order on the universe, so to speak.”
Cinnabar was “rising” beneath them as the Princess Cecile rotated slowly on her axis, though that wasn’t a sight Daniel would ever have called attention to. Planets were very interesting places—when you were on the ground. From low orbit, they were simply a difficult problem in shiphandling.
Before he left the bridge, Daniel had programmed a rotation to introduce a slight angular strain on the rig. The purpose of a shakedown cruise was to find anything that might have gone wrong during a refit. Daniel appreciated the compliment implied when Admiral Anston ordered the Princess Cecile into operational service immediately, but he still intended to wring out the corvette while he had the leisure of no one shooting at them.
“Ah,” said Adele in turn. She shifted slightly in an obvious attempt to feel what Daniel felt.
The rig had reached its fullest extent; now its elements began to retract to the setting programmed for entry into the Matrix. Masts and yards telescoped, rotating on their axes and occasionally tilting to bring the sails into precise alignment.
“Daniel,” Adele said. She’d lowered her voice reflexively so that Daniel could barely make out the words vibrating from her helmet to his. “Vaughn being sent back to Strymon means either that there are factions in the government working outside the knowledge of … the people who talk to me. Or that when they talk to me, they conceal as much as they tell. Unfortunately, both of those options are quite possible.”
“Yes,” Daniel said, pursing his lips in a look of frustration. He thought of his own interview with Admiral Anston: what he’d been told—virtually nothing—and what he hadn’t. “The same’s true within the RCN, of course. Well, we’ll make do, won’t we?”
The Princess Cecile was about to enter the Matrix: Daniel felt the charge building. He’d never been sure whether it was a real sensat
ion or something his soul recognized. Engineers had sworn to him that a rigger’s suit was completely insulated, even if the minute potentials being bled into the sails could be sensed at all.
It happened. The charged fabric of the sails formed a series of precisely calculated barriers against the Casimir radiation that flooded the cosmos. Pressures that could not be relieved in the sidereal universe built up, shifting the Princess Cecile—
Golden light suffused the corvette, throwing her rig and outside crew into silhouette as though against an angel’s wing. Daniel shivered with anticipation.
Palpable energy flared. The Princess Cecile slipped from the universe of her creation into the greater glowing infinity that would take her to Strymon … under the command of Lt. Daniel Leary.
Chapter Ten
Dasi and Barnes had collapsed the wall between the two rooms of the captain’s suite, then pegged it down as a central table. The bunks—Daniel’s and the one from what had become Adele’s cabin—became cushioned benches at the long sides of the table. The arrangement was tight, but not notably worse than any other portion of the corvette’s interior.
Daniel beamed at his guests from behind the data console, now reversed at the head of the table. Adele knew that this was the first operational command group meeting Daniel had called as captain, and he was correspondingly proud. Not that Daniel ever did anything with less than enthusiasm.
There was no formal seating order, but Mon sat at the captain’s right and the others had by silent consensus granted Adele the seat at Daniel’s left. In the middle places were the other watchstanding officers: Pasternak, Woetjans, Betts and the ship’s machinist, Taley.
The two midshipmen, Dorst and Vesey, sat in the end seats with big eyes and their lips clamped nervously shut. They were present to educate them, not by right, since they ranked only as petty officers. They’d reported aboard a few hours before the Princess Cecile lifted off: the grandson of an old shipmate of Stacey Bergen, and an intense young woman who’d brought Daniel a curtly phrased introduction from Klemsch, the Secretary to the Navy Board.
Adele had checked their backgrounds, of course. Chances were Vesey was the bastard of Senator Dryer; her record at the Academy was far superior to that of Dorst in any case.
Tovera had put glasses at the places, and Hogg held a tray with a carafe of a respectable Cinnabar sherry. The wine was too fruity for Adele’s taste, but she wouldn’t have to drink much of it. Open bottles didn’t last long, not in a company of naval officers.
“Pass the wine, Hogg,” Daniel said. “Fellow officers, you know our orders are to join the squadron under Commodore Pettin en route to Strymon. As Pettin lifted from Cinnabar ten days ahead of us, that means we’ll have to crack on a bit.”
“Too true,” said Taley, nodding solemnly—an expression that came naturally to her as she looked as cadaverous as a corpse buried three weeks. “And right after a refit, too. I’ll be busy in the repair shop, I can see that now.”
“I dare say we’ll all be busy, Taley,” Daniel said with a grin. “Because I propose to reach Sexburga with no intermediate planetfall. We’ll only make dips back into sidereal space to take star sights.”
“Holy Father of Grace!” Betts said. The missileer tossed off his sherry and would have retrieved the carafe if Hogg hadn’t interposed his hip so that little Vesey could serve herself. “That’s three weeks, Captain. They say that the devil himself walks the corridors if you’re that long in the Matrix.”
“If he does,” said Pasternak tartly, “then we’ve the first proof of religion that I’ve ever heard. We’ll be famous for bringing the comfort of faith to benighted skeptics of the sort I’ve been all these years.”
Adele’s eyes narrowed slightly. Both officers had gained their experience aboard large vessels operating as part of a fleet.
“The Aggie was under for twelve days, bringing the news of the Wroxter Fight back to Cinnabar,” Woetjans said, knuckling her scarred jaw. “I saw my mother on the bridge, all tarted up like she was when we buried her.”
“I think we can manage the leg in seventeen days, Betts,” Daniel said. “I’m using Commander Bergen’s logs, and I like the way the Matrix has been shaping thus far.”
He smiled, then shrugged. “And Pasternak? I’ve never experienced Immersion Phantoms myself—”
He nodded to the bosun.
“—as Woetjans has, but I’ve heard my uncle and his fellows talk about them often enough. They’re quite real and we’ll have to bear with them, I’m afraid. On the credit side, I’ve never heard that phantoms do any sort of harm.”
“There’s been ships that didn’t come back from the Matrix, though,” Betts said, his eyes following the carafe.
“So there have,” Daniel said with a sharpness that turned agreement into something just short of a rebuke. “But the Princess Cecile is going to reenter the sidereal universe, so that needn’t concern us here.”
Adele took her wine, and Hogg emptied the rest into Daniel’s glass. Tovera was filling another carafe; the label was identical, but the fluid within had a mauve undertone that the first bottle hadn’t. Daniel wouldn’t think of cutting the quality of what his guests drank after they’d had a first glassful to numb their taste, but Hogg wasn’t one to pour his master’s money down a rathole if he saw other options.
“I served with Pettin at Wixallia Base,” Mon said, frowning as though he’d just been told his legs had to be amputated. Mon had more experience than most with getting bad news, and he’d perfected a suitable expression. “Most Godforsaken place anybody thought to plant a Cinnabar flag. I started drinking.”
The lieutenant glared down the length of the table as if daring anyone to contradict him. There was small chance of that: Mon drank on Kostroma, on Cinnabar, and on shipboard, though Adele had never seen him unable to carry out his duties.
Mon grinned sourly. “Pettin prayed. Believe me, I’d rather have served under a drunk than a pulpit-pounder. And it didn’t help him with the Navy Office. He was promoted captain, all right, but he retired on half-pay four years ago. He’d still be retired if it wasn’t the war’s on again.”
He raised his glass, just refilled by Hogg. “God bless the war!” he said.
“God bless!” echoed other officers, the midshipmen the loudest. Daniel quirked a smile but didn’t drink that toast; Adele set the personal data unit before her on the table and picked up its wands.
“You say ‘squadron,’ ” Taley said. “Being we’re going to the back of beyond, all the way into the Sack, I suppose that means a couple crocks that should’ve been broken up thirty years back, does it?”
“The heavy cruiser Winckelmann,” Daniel answered mildly. “The Archaeologist Class was an innovative design, though she’s not new, of course. With the destroyers Petty and Active.”
“The Active?” Betts said. “She was broken up, I heard. Two thrusters blew out while she was landing and she hit a pier with her bow.”
“They cut the forward section off and mated her to what was left of the Plump when her Tokamak failed,” Pasternak said. “They kept the Active’s name, I guess because she hadn’t killed quite so many of her crew as the Plump did.”
Daniel glanced at Adele. “Mundy, do you have information on the complements of Commodore Pettin’s ships?” he said.
Adele hadn’t been expecting the question, but she’d absently brought up data on the three vessels as Daniel spoke their names. She increased the display’s saturation for easier reading, then said, “The destroyers are crewed at seventy percent of their organizational standard. The cruiser is at sixty-five percent.”
There were seventeen messages from Captain Pettin—Commodore when the squadron lifted off, under his command as senior captain in lieu of an admiral—demanding that the Bureau of Personnel provide him with more spacers. The only response he’d gotten was the message received notation that the bureau’s computer created without the intervention even of a junior clerk.
“Hide
our complement records, Ms. Mundy,” Woetjans said, looking across the table at Adele. “Pettin’ll take forty of our people if he learns we’re fully staffed, and with real spacers instead of the landsmen he’ll have in half his berths.”
“She can’t,” Mon said sadly. “The pay record can’t be changed till we reach home port again and link to Navy Office database. When our system handshakes with the Winckelmann, it’ll all be there for Pettin to see.”
“Of course I can change it,” Adele said. “Should I, or was that a joke, Woetjans?”
“Actually, that would be rather helpful,” Daniel said, pursing his lips in careful consideration. “That is, if it can be done without risking the pay or widow’s pension of any of the personnel, that is?”
“Of course,” Adele repeated. She didn’t see why the officers thought it was that complicated a procedure. Any navigational computer had sufficient power to defeat a payroll encryption, and the Princess Cecile—because of Adele’s secret assignment—had specialized software besides.
Daniel smiled like the sun rising. “Woetjans and Pasternak, after the meeting please give Officer Mundy a list of the personnel you’d like formally off the record.”
He put his left hand on Adele’s right and added, “I have a warrant from the Navy Office authorizing me to accept volunteers from RCN vessels. That might very well cover the situation, but it isn’t an argument a junior lieutenant cares to make to a senior captain.”
“Captain?” Lt. Mon said. “You’ll have us at weapons training throughout the cruise, we all know that who came from Kostroma with you. But is there a chance, do you think, of real action?”
There were murmurs of agreement around the table, and possibly an increased sharpness in Tovera’s expression also as she decanted more sherry. She felt Adele’s eyes and shrugged in embarrassment at showing interest.
