Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  There was a display in the wardroom. Tovera must have set it to receive real-time data during the attack. She’d have known how, after all.

  Daniel frowned. He’d ordered Hogg to release the president, but it hadn’t occurred to him that Vaughn would then choose to interfere with the business of war.

  He noted with further irritation that Tovera walked just behind Vaughn. Her smile could easily be described as mocking, though one had to admit that Tovera’s expressions were pretty much a blank slate for the viewer to color with emotion.

  “Mister Vaughn—” Daniel began.

  Vaughn strode onto the bridge, either oblivious of Daniel’s orders or in defiance of them. He said, “I won’t let you kill us all!”

  “Secure the civilian!” Daniel said.

  He actually didn’t see Tovera’s hand move, gripping Vaughn by the left ear and twisting. Vaughn screamed, then stopped as he, turning his head to reduce the pain of his ear, brought his right eye into contact with the muzzle of Tovera’s submachine gun.

  They backed off the bridge. Adele nodded to Daniel and put her pistol away.

  “Reentry into—”

  Der Grosser Karl, broadside and apparently huge as a planet, filled the real-time display. Her sails were ragged, torn both by the missiles and by gouts of plasma from her own cannon. She was of the latest Alliance design, mounting thirty-two 21cm plasma cannon in quadruple turrets.

  Thump! First missile away.

  Hellfire vaporized the Princess Cecile’s sails and antennas, dressing her in a glowing ball of her own rig. Plasma continued to rip from at least eight yawning muzzles, but the vapor of destruction protected the corvette from worse.

  Thump!

  The Princess Cecile yawed with a world-filling crash. Her hull whipped, frames warping and plates in the double hull gaping apart. Cabin pressure dropped and Daniel reflexively closed his faceshield.

  There hadn’t been enough time for the battleship to plot trajectories for her own missiles, but at such short range the heavy cannon had virtually the impact of solid projectiles. As the corvette punched clear of the expanding cloud, one bolt or possibly two had struck her well forward on the underside.

  The first missile entered Der Grosser Karl amidships, like a pin through the thorax of a fat-bodied butterfly with tattered wings. Gas puffed from the point of impact; sparkling fire exploded where the remains of the missile, liquescent from friction, tore its exit. A gun turret, almost complete, lifted from the hull. Three of the heavy iridium gun-tubes spun away on separate trajectories.

  Daniel’s display flared, but the volley that overloaded the hull sensors didn’t actually strike the corvette. Close doesn’t count—

  The Princess Cecile’s second missile clipped the battleship’s stern and converted itself and a thousand tonnes of its target into white fire. The corvette had exited the Matrix at .1 C; her missiles added that to the kinetic energy of their own acceleration when they struck.

  The Princess Cecile was through the squadron, dismasted and with half her High Drive nozzles unserviceable. She was going nearly directly away from Der Grosser Karl and should have been an easy, low-deflection, target for the battleship’s cannon.

  Der Grosser Karl had stopped firing.

  And now you’re lyin’ dead on my barroom floor!

  Daniel switched his display to the Plot Position Indicator. The Princess Cecile was already off her programmed course. A glance at the systems sidebar showed why: red dots for nine of the sixteen High Drive nozzles, red circles for three more. The four nozzles which the sleet of ions had spared weren’t sufficient to warp the corvette around the curve of Getica and out of line with Der Grosser Karl.

  The rumbling of missiles within the corvette’s belly had stopped. Daniel knew unconsciously there was something wrong. His own mind hadn’t put a cause to it till a heartbeat later when Betts leaped up from his console and shouted over the general channel, “The fucking outer doors are fucking welded shut! All fucking missile personnel to the fucking tubes! We’ll draw the fucking ready rounds and blow the fucking doors open!”

  The Chief Missileer disappeared down the forward companionway. His lips were still moving, but his words no longer filled the general channel. Either he’d switched his helmet to his unit push or—more likely—Adele had switched it for him.

  Either way, both Missiles and Signals were in good shape; at any rate, as good as human effort could make them. As for the rig …

  The battleship hadn’t resumed firing, and the remainder of the Alliance squadron was too distant for plasma weapons to be a serious threat. There was still risk; but then, there was always risk.

  “Riggers topside!” Daniel ordered. “Woetjans, do what you can—I’m not expecting much. Break. Engineering, send as many techs topside as you can spare. I want the three nozzles with minor damage repaired soonest, and if it’s possible to replace any of the others, that too. Captain out!”

  Daniel doubted replacement would be possible. The rosette of nozzles must have taken a direct hit. Pasternak had shown himself to be a good man in milder conditions; now he’d have a chance to test his mettle against battle damage.

  Sun was twisted around in his chair, staring at Daniel in anguish. He said on the command channel, “Sir, I could’ve raped her sails, raped them! I can still hurt her bad, sir.”

  Daniel looked at his gunner. “Could you have done Der Grosser Karl a tenth the harm she did herself trying to claw us? You know you couldn’t. And I know that if we need your cannon, I won’t want their bores shot out from playing games.”

  More gently Daniel added, “We’ve almost got maneuvering way, Sun. Luck and your guns are the only things that’re going to keep us alive for the next hour.”

  Sun bit his lip and nodded. “Sir,” he muttered, turning back to his console.

  There was nothing fatal about Der Grosser Karl’s injuries, though she’d be a year in dock repairing them or Daniel hadn’t learned anything in the time he’d spent hanging around the premises of Bergen and Associates. He understood why the battleship’s crew was wholly concerned with its own problems instead of acting to finish off the crippled corvette. What he didn’t understand was why Chastelaine—or the acting squadron commander if Chastelaine was a casualty—hadn’t detailed a pair of destroyers to that task.

  Unless—

  Daniel shrank the scale of his PPI to encompass a sphere nearly a million miles in diameter. There should have been six ships in that volume besides the central pip of the Princess Cecile herself. Instead there were nine: the Alliance squadron, and three vessels more at the outer edge of the coverage area. They had their identification transponders switched off, but Daniel knew who they were as surely as the Alliance commander must.

  Commodore Pettin hadn’t fled in the breathing space the Princess Cecile had provided him. In the best tradition of the RCN, he was coming to fight.

  *

  Adele kept her face expressionless as she viewed the corvette’s outer hull through imagery provided by Woetjans’s suit. If she hadn’t known better she’d have guessed she was looking at a nickel-iron asteroid, pitted and half-melted by a pass through the upper reaches of an atmosphere.

  The internal air pressure was beginning to rise. Damage crews filled spaces with quick-setting foam, blocking leaks through torn plates and ruptured seams. It wasn’t up to eight pounds yet, and Adele had been repeatedly warned during drills that there could still be catastrophic hull failure at this stage of the proceedings.

  She unlatched her helmet anyway. It constricted her mind, and that was far more worrisome than the chance of death.

  “They’re launching!” Sun said. He’d opened his helmet also; his voice was squeaky but clear to Adele in the next station. “Look at those bastards! Well, we didn’t get their fire control, that’s for sure!”

  The Alliance ships exchanged course data on what they assumed were secure links. Adele intercepted and decrypted the signals, then forwarded them to Daniel. Presu
mably he was doing whatever could be done with it, his face intent as he typed furiously.

  Voice communications within the Alliance squadron were properly Adele’s own area of responsibility. They passed through her ears and she filtered them for content. Occasionally she summarized them for Daniel and the Battle Direction Center.

  Admiral Chastelaine hadn’t panicked, but he was in a fury—an equally disruptive state of affairs in respect to the good governance of his squadron. He’d announced he was proceeding by gig to the Yorck, the heavy cruiser, to transfer his flag; had cancelled that order and summoned a destroyer to carry him from the damaged battleship to the Yorck; and had finally, at least for now, determined to direct the battle from aboard Der Grosser Karl. Adele had no idea of what was going on inside the Alliance vessels, but she very much doubted that the moral atmosphere resembled the ordered enthusiasm aboard the Princess Cecile.

  Adele’s ears were given over to duty, but her eyes were her own. She echoed Sun’s display in a corner of hers, replacing the wasteland of the corvette’s hull.

  At once she felt her spirits lift—not for what she saw, but because she no longer viewed the Princess Cecile’s mutilated exterior. Adele wasn’t the sort of sentimentalist—the sort of fool!—who imagined machines have life, let alone personalities. Even so, there are tools which serve their users so well that it could be reasonable to feel regret when they break.

  Sun’s attack screen looked similar to Daniel’s PPI, save that it showed missiles as colored tracks rather than points. The computed courses were orange, with the portions already traversed in scarlet.

  Adele understood the gunner’s amazement. Der Grosser Karl had launched twenty-four missiles, more than the corvette’s capacity at full load; and as Adele watched, another dozen rippled from the battleship’s tubes.

  “Adele!” Daniel snapped as his eyes and hands continued their separate work. “Can you transmit the Alliance courses to Commodore Pettin. Soonest!”

  “Yes, Daniel,” Adele said mildly. “I’ve been doing that.”

  She didn’t add, “Of course.” This was no time to play foolish games.

  There were proper times for punctilio, of course. She was a Mundy of Chatsworth and had no intention of brooking a deliberate insult; but she’d have been equally curt with Daniel if she needed something from him and failure would be the price of delay.

  Daniel opened his helmet. Adele suspected the delay had been because he was busy, not that thin air or the risk concerned him. Internal pressure had risen to over ten psi, enough that Adele’s lungs no longer felt as though they couldn’t fill.

  “Admiral Chastelaine knows he’s not very maneuverable,” Daniel said. He spoke conversationally, but Adele noticed that his eyes were on the data, not her face. “He’s using his magazines to do what his High Drive can’t, keep our ships away from Der Grosser Karl while the rest of his squadron destroys them.”

  He smiled brilliantly and met Adele’s eyes for an instant. “And as your intercepts show, he’s mad enough to chew rocks.”

  The three Cinnabar vessels—points undifferentiated in size at this range—vanished from the display a few seconds apart. Instead of lowering their antennas to maneuver in normal space, they’d reentered the Matrix.

  The Princess Cecile’s missiles began to move on their trackways. A metallic screech quivered through the ship, bringing a violent curse from Sun. Adele had no idea of whether or not the sound had anything to do with the missiles.

  Daniel brought up real-time imagery of the Alliance ships. Adele hesitated a moment, then echoed the vessels in a line across the top of her display.

  When the Princess Cecile appeared, Admiral Chastelaine had been preparing to enter the Matrix on a short voyage from Getica to Strymon. Now the Yorck and two of the destroyers were taking down all their antennas to ready themselves for battle, and the remaining pair of destroyers were lowering all but the rings at their far bow and stern.

  “R Class destroyers,” Daniel said in a tone of professional approval. “Quite good ships. Their ordinary magazine capacity’s sixty rounds.”

  “They’re the Ihn and Steinbrinck,” Adele said, expanding a sidebar to check the names. “The other two are the Koellner and Giese; and yes, they reported magazines full at sixty missiles each.”

  The Alliance ships were reforming in a hollow globe thirty thousand miles in diameter. Each vessel was under power at a constant one-gee acceleration. The course schematic made it look as though they were in orbit, but in fact they circled a point in empty space. Tanais’s orbital motion was carrying the moon slowly away from the squadron, though the ships were already beyond range of support by the base defenses when the Princess Cecile attacked.

  “Chastelaine’s marking time, waiting to see what the RCN’s going to do,” Daniel said. “He’ll react then—you see that he’s ready to respond either to an attack or to dog us with two destroyers until the rest of the squadron can rejoin if Pettin tries to run. Though …”

  He pursed his lips judiciously, peering at the flagship’s image.

  “I don’t think the admiral would either leave his battleship without escort or engage with his force divided,” he said. “With Der Grosser Karl in its present condition, his squadron would have a very long chase to run down even a crock like the Winckelmann. But I really doubt that question’s going to arise, because Commodore Pettin will—”

  Three ships coalesced out of the Matrix, again within seconds of one another. They were driving toward the Alliance squadron, perpendicular to the plane of the Strymon system. Daniel had programmed his display to include them without further input: the Winckelmann, Active, and Petty, broadside to their axis of movement so that their missile tubes amidships were clear. They began lowering their antennas at the moment they reappeared in normal space.

  The ships were glossy with false precision. The Princess Cecile’s software was integrating real-time images with archival files to refine views of vessels which were more than 200,000 miles from the corvette.

  Slivers separated from first the Winckelmann, then the two destroyers. They were launching missiles.

  “Look what he’s done!” Daniel said. “Look, look where the Yorck is, Adele! That’s your doing, letting the commodore plan his attack like this!”

  Adele stared at the display. She didn’t understand. She wasn’t used to thinking spatially, so the fact that the Alliance heavy cruiser was near the axis of the Cinnabar squadron’s motion didn’t mean anything to her. Some vessel was bound to be, after all.

  Alliance ships were launching missiles also; some seconds behind the attackers but in greater numbers regardless. Der Grosser Karl alone spasmed a dozen, then a second dozen from her dorsal and ventral batteries respectively. Adele knew from the transmitted manifest that there were hundreds more rounds available behind a first salvo that by itself outdid the total output of Commodore Pettin’s force.

  Beside Adele, Sun shrieked in delight; both Mon and Vesey were crowing happily over the command channel. “Daniel, I don’t see!” she said.

  The ships were maneuvering, though their initial velocities—particularly those of the RCN vessels—were much higher than the increments added or subtracted by their High Drives. Missile tracks spread across the display like wisps of colored hair, the orange predictions changing to red as the seconds passed.

  Daniel hammered keys, adding the ships’ projected courses to the display. “Oh,” said Adele in sudden understanding. “Oh!”

  The Yorck was sailing into the junction of not only the RCN missiles but those from Der Grosser Karl’s capacious magazines. Commodore Pettin had maneuvered the Alliance heavy cruiser into an inferno of friendly fire.

  The Princess Cecile’s hull rang, a sound as sharp as that of the riggers’ mauls but much louder. Moments later a second blow made the frames clang.

  “Bridge, that’s Tube Alpha clear!” Betts’s breathless voice announced. The low-frequency grumble of missiles moving started again. “She’l
l be reloaded in a minute thirty, and by the Lord we’ll have Beta ready in five minutes more! Missiles out!”

  Daniel’s jubilant face suddenly shed all expression. He began again to type with grim determination.

  “Captain!” Lt. Mon reported from the Battle Direction Center. “The battleship just launched a round at us. Over.”

  Adele frowned. What does one missile matter against the scores they’ve already fired?

  She looked at the display and found it suddenly clear. The geometry was simple enough that even she could see the relationships.

  The Princess Cecile was heading directly away from the battleship it had slashed at point-blank range. By now the distance was very great due to the velocity the corvette had built up in the Matrix, but the two ships’ proper motion was nearly zero. The computed track of the missile and the corvette’s projected course were identical.

  And, with the damage to her High Drive, there was virtually nothing the Princess Cecile could do to change that relationship.

  *

  Pasternak was topside. Many chief engineers would have denied that it was their duty to clamber about the hull of a ship while it was under weigh; they weren’t riggers. If the thrusters or High Drive nozzles needed looking after, why then there were technicians to take the risk of drifting toward infinity while the ship accelerated away from them.

  If Pasternak had felt that way, he’d have been looking for a different berth at the end of this voyage, and he wouldn’t much like the character Daniel offered when discussing him with other captains.

  Daniel looked again at his course calculations. Mind, the Princess Cecile’s present voyage might end very abruptly and under such conditions that none of her crew need worry about the future. Still, there was hope.

  “Mister Pasternak?” Daniel said. Had the Chief Engineer thought to fit his suit with a radio before he went topside? Pray God he had, though needs must Daniel would use Hogg or a rigger to relay his message. “What’s the status of the damaged nozzles? Captain over.”