In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  "I'm not going to push our luck on remaining unidentified," Daniel said. "Whether or not all our ships are in position, we'll launch no more than two minutes after the Milton extracts—and I may decide to launch even sooner on command."

  Adele had already programmed the commo clusters to handle that. The Milton would be transmitting by laser a time hack to each ship of the squadron as they extracted. That was the only way the later-arriving vessels could count down precisely.

  "Sir . . . ?" said Barrett. His forehead gleamed with sweat, but he kept his voice steady. "I notice you show the Arcona failing to arrive off Cacique. With the computer from the Lykewake and Commander Kiesche as Astrogator, her extractions have been within thirty seconds of the Milton's and within two thousand miles at both legs of this voyage. Sir."

  "I stand corrected, Barrett," Daniel said. By the end of the short sentence, his slight smile had spread much wider. "I'd been thinking of the cruiser's problems under Alliance command, but you're quite right: Fred Kiesche doesn't need a naval-grade computer to thread a ship through the Matrix. My uncle Stacey trained him, you know."

  Adele wasn't an astrogator, but all she was being asked to do here was to move data. Well, constructively she was being asked to do that though Daniel hadn't used the words; he might not realize that she could correct the . . . error was too strong a word. That she could modify the choice he'd made when he created the examples.

  Adele switched back to the previous screen, captured the blue bead slugged ARC441 and transferred it to the final demonstration. To make the point, she placed it slightly closer than any other ship to MIL101, also light blue but scintillant rather than a simple bead.

  "The Helgowelt is our primary target," Daniel said. "We should be able to overwhelm her, even with the hasty attack plans which the situation requires."

  Adele adjusted the display, adding the missile tracks. Rather than simply placing them on the existing screen, she created fine blue lines which spread progressively from the Direktor Friedrich and the four heavy cruisers to intersect the Alliance battleship and the cruisers accompanying her. They traced a complex net.

  "Sir?" said Vesey. "Please explain why the ships are all splitting their salvos instead of concentrating them. Ah, so that I'll know the next time."

  She isn't pretending that she's asking on behalf of the midshipmen, Adele noticed. Nor is she simply obeying orders without embarrassing herself by admitting ignorance. Vesey had all the virtues necessary for an RCN officer except, perhaps, killer instinct.

  "We don't really know what our formation will be at time of launch, Vesey," Daniel said. Adele, unasked—but when had she ever needed to be asked to do her job?—switched the display through alternate formations again, each time adding the missile tracks. "And we don't know how the equipment of our captured ships is going to behave, either. While I hope that the attack boards and the missiles themselves will perform up to specification, by splitting each ship's salvo between the Helgowelt and a cruiser, we vastly increase the likelihood that all three Alliance heavy vessels will take killing blows."

  "And incoming from all directions is going to make it harder to avoid, won't it, sir?" Blantyre said. She frowned. "Though programming two attacks is going to be a lot harder than programming one, especially with time short."

  "True on both counts, Blantyre," Daniel said. "It's all the same to the attack computers, of course, but the Chief Missileers themselves will have to hand off one target to a subordinate."

  He grinned again, lighting the room. "Of course on the vessels where one of the commissioned officers fancies himself as a missileer, that permits the warrant officer in the slot to do the job he's trained for anyway," he said. "I'm confident that Chief Borries here on the Milton will be pleased at the prospect."

  What would I do if Daniel tried to take over my communications duties? Adele wondered. It wouldn't happen, of course, but if it did?

  But there was a difference between that and the way Daniel regularly usurped the attack boards. Borries was a ship chandler's son who'd gone to space and, because he was a bright lad, had been apprenticed to a missileer in the Pellegrinian service. Adele was Mundy of Chatsworth.

  "And Alliance defense and maneuver will certainly be compromised, yes," Daniel went on, grinning even more broadly. "That's particularly true if we come out widely spread—"

  Adele switched screens to the loosest extraction yet, one which showed Anston scattered about the Alliance formation, rather like a handful of gravel tossed onto a tile floor. She was careful to place the Arcona close to the Milton, however.

  "—though I'd nonetheless prefer that we appear close enough that our targets have minimal time to react."

  The fictional missile tracks wove an attractive pattern, rather like glowing spider webs. There was a cleanliness to space battles, at least for the victors: a phosphor dot vanished, nothing more. Even the best optical sensors showed only expanding gas balls with at most a section of hull or a gun turret riding the shock wave.

  The truth was close to the image. Bodies vaporized instead of burning or were torn to shreds instead of dying in slow agony from belly wounds.

  Adele smiled without humor. That was Daniel's province. He'd killed far more people in his naval career than she had, but he'd never been drenched with blood from someone he'd shot in the throat nor stepped through feces which his victims had voided when they spasmed into death.

  If Adele wanted, she had sufficient connections now to become an assistant director at the Library of Celsus. She wouldn't have to carry a pistol, and her whole life would be surrounded by collected knowledge and by people who'd never imagined killing another person.

  But she'd have to give up her RCN family. That price was too high.

  "For the same reason, our destroyers will also launch at the heavy ships," Daniel said. "Even taken all together, the Alliance destroyers only equal the throw weight of a single cruiser, and they're too maneuverable to make hits probable if we attack them ship by ship with our own destroyers."

  Adele dutifully added pale blue threads from the destroyers, four apiece. That was a pious hope, but she knew as well as the commissioned officers that it was unlikely any of the captured ships from the Friedrich on down would manage a full salvo.

  "Ships which are in range will use their plasma cannon on the Alliance light craft," Daniel said, "but I want our destroyers to concentrate on the minesweepers if at all possible. Four-inch—well, ten-centimeter—guns aren't going to have much effect even on other destroyers, and if we aren't able to break the siege entirely, the minesweepers are more dangerous enemies anyway."

  "Sir?" said Cory. He cleared his throat. "I wonder if ships—destroyers, that is—who happen to extract in a suitable position might not fire on the Alliance base? On the antiship batteries there, I mean."

  "Well, I'll be buggered," Daniel said in a conversational tone. "You're right, there's no atmosphere to dissipate the plasma, and even a fairly dispersed charge will heat the missile bodies enough to deflagrate the fuel. Maybe even detonate it! Very well done, Lieutenant Cory!"

  Daniel looked around the bridge, beaming, then nodded toward Adele. Toward the back of her head, of course, but he knew she'd be watching on her display. No one else in the compartment might understand the gesture, but Adele did.

  Cory had been . . . not her protégé, precisely, but her project. The boy had barely graduated from the Academy and initially hadn't distinguished himself in active service either. He'd shown a real flair for communications, however. When she realized how much he was learning just by watching her, she began to actively train him in her field.

  From that start, Cory had blossomed to the point of noticing a tactical possibility that Captain Daniel Leary had missed. Granted, the close-in defenses of Admiral Petersen's temporary base weren't likely to be significant in this action, but it was still a clever piece of work.

  "One salvo and then we insert," Daniel said. "We regroup a light-day out, back where we m
ade our initial extraction to observe the situation. One destroyer, the Insidioso under Captain Robinson, will extract a light-hour out, observe the Alliance reaction, and then rejoin us with a report."

  He cleared his throat. "If the Insidioso is unable to carry out those duties, then they devolve on the Z31 under Captain Kenlon. I've briefed both officers on what information I'll want, though it's obvious enough."

  In a manner of speaking, Robinson—or Kenlon—didn't have to do anything except bring their ships back so that Adele and her team, Cazelet and Cory, could sift their sensor recordings. Daniel was probably right to personify the activity rather than to point out that brave, skilled RCN spacers were simply a means to allow machines to do the necessary work.

  "Any further questions, then?" said Daniel. "If not, return to your duty stations. We'll be extracting one light-hour from Cacique in ten minutes ship's time."

  "Sir?" said Fink. "What do we do after we've attacked and regrouped?"

  Daniel shrugged, but he was smiling. "Well, I could say that the answer to that depends on the situation, Fink," he said, "and so it does, of course. But I'll expect all ships to reload their missile tubes as quickly as possible, because I don't think we're going to sweep all the Alliance forces from the Cacique system with that one pass."

  "And we're not going to quit . . . ," said Adele, rotating her couch to look at the others for the first time since the council began. She was the only one present besides Daniel who'd really been in this place before, and she had a right to speak by virtue of who she was, not her rank. "Until we have run the Alliance out of the system."

  She gave her colleagues an icy grin.

  "Or we're dead."

  CHAPTER 24

  Above Cacique

  Adele was reviewing the notes Cory and Else made during the council ahead of the one light-hour observation when Daniel announced on the intercom, "Extracting in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds."

  She didn't have any particular concern with the notes, but it gave her something to focus on after she'd organized for Daniel the sensor data from the final preparatory dip into the sidereal universe. People—including Adele—sometimes had hallucinations in the Matrix. She'd found that if she was absorbed in something, that was less likely to happen . . . though once in the midst of a long voyage, she'd seen a slit-pupilled eye watching her from the other side of a display of RCN personnel records.

  Senator Forbes, wearing her formal robes, nodded her way past the Marine guards and walked across the bridge. She knew she didn't belong here, so she'd timed her arrival so that no one would have leisure to stop her.

  Adele thought of turning to grab Forbes. Shortly Signal Officer Mundy would be very busy, but for the next twenty seconds she had nothing to do but wait.

  Twenty seconds wouldn't be enough time. I could shoot her, of course, but that would be more disruptive than letting her stay on the bridge. Probably.

  Chief Missileer Borries was in the Battle Direction Center. At the missile console was his striker, Seth Chazanoff; the rear couch was empty.

  Instead of sitting at the missile console, Forbes walked to where Hogg and Tovera sat against the starboard bulkhead and flipped down the jumpseat they'd left vacant between them. She gave Adele a nod and a curt grin. It was just possible that the senator understood the options which had sequenced through Adele's mind.

  All the options, because Adele had no governor which said, "But of course we couldn't do that."

  Adele smiled faintly. Senator Forbes was unpleasant, but the woman had intelligence and an impressively pragmatic outlook.

  Lieutenant Cory was on the other side of the signals console, and Rene Cazelet backed Vesey on the astrogation console. Ordinarily Vesey as First Lieutenant would be in the BDC, but everyone accepted that Blantyre was the better tactician. If an Alliance missile tore off the Milton's bow, far better that Blantyre rather than Vesey be in the separate armored control station in the far stern.

  "Extracting!" said Blantyre from the BDC.

  For a moment Adele felt herself being cut apart at each joint. It wasn't painful, exactly; more like a hundred icy bands jerking tight around and through her body. Then the bridge lighting sharpened, her console display switched automatically to real-time sensor readouts, and Adele was back to work.

  Six RCN vessels had extracted ahead of the Milton, and as Adele's display brightened to life it highlighted a distortion in space-time which quickly resolved into the Direktor Friedrich. A microwave cone on the Helgowelt's bow was already rotating toward what the Alliance commander assumed was the flagship of Squadron Varnell.

  Adele alerted the command group by an icon on each officer's console or face-shield. She cued Cazelet electronically, but she also nodded toward his image inset on her display, knowing that he would watching her through her own console.

  This timing was perfect beyond anybody's ability to plan. If one believed in personified Luck, then it would shortly be balanced by a corresponding disaster—perhaps a missile striking the Friedrich or the Milton itself. If one were religious, then the Gods were fighting for the Republic as they had done so often in the past according to devout historians.

  Adele Mundy believed in doing her job as well as she could. On a vessel commanded by Daniel Leary, she could expect that her shipmates would have the same priority.

  "Alliance forces . . . ," Cazelet said, sending via directed microwave and on 15.5 megahertz. One pole of the Milton's 20-meter beam was directed toward the Helgowelt, some nine thousand miles distant while the other pole pointed to within 20 degrees of the Alliance base. There'd be sufficient dispersion across the much greater distance to Inner for the communications staff there to read it clearly even if something was wrong with their microwave pickups. "This is AFS Luetzow, flagship of Squadron Hill. Hold for orders from Admiral Hill, break."

  Rene Cazelet had been born on Blythe and raised on Pleasaunce. In the course of on-the-job training in his family's shipping firm, he'd acted both as ground controller at a spaceport and as signals officer on a starship. There was no pretense in his accent or delivery.

  Adele waited a beat of three. Ships continued to coalesce out of the Matrix. Predictably the later they appeared, the farther they were from their assigned locations . . . but none of them was very late or very far out.

  "All Alliance units receiving this signal," said Adele, broadcasting in clear. "This is Admiral of the Fleet Holly Hill."

  She'd decided to pronounce "units" as "oonits" in Pleasaunce fashion. She didn't have a voice recording of Hill, so she had to hope that a hint of the generalized accent of the admiral's home world would pass muster for at least a brief time.

  "By order of His Worshipful Majesty Guarantor Jorge Porra," she said, "I am superseding former Admiral Petersen with immediate effect. Admiral Petersen is to remain in his quarters—"

  Adele didn't know whether Petersen was aboard the Helgowelt or on Inner. The Heimdall had been his flagship at New Harmony, but a battleship under way at 1g acceleration would be more comfortable for most purposes than a moon base whose gravity was an eighth of that. He might well be with the patrol squadron on every other leg.

  "—until I arrive. All Alliance citizens are directed to enforce the Guarantor's orders on pain of summary court-martial. Over."

  The most interesting thing about what happened next was that for more than thirty seconds nothing happened. Then a hoarse male voice said, "Luetzow, this is Helgowelt. Will you repeat the last communication, please, we received a garbled signal. Over."

  He'd switched to a laser communicator, perhaps to suggest that the "missed message" really was an electronics failure. More likely, Captain Thomas Ridgway of the Helgowelt wanted the greater privacy of laser. He was using the squadron's one-day code also, no problem for Adele because the code generators of Varnell's ships had been synched with the rest of Petersen's command before they separated.

  Ridgway was probably as fearful of being accused by his fellow captains of questioni
ng the Guarantor's orders as he was of not making some effort to check if this were somehow a subtle provocation by Petersen—perhaps in concert with the Guarantor. There was almost nothing too paranoid and convoluted to have come from Porra's fevered brain.

  It's all right for a leader to be ruthless, Adele thought. He shouldn't be whimsical, though, and he especially shouldn't be whimsically ruthless.

  She smiled faintly. No one had ever accused her of being whimsical, though she would make an extremely bad leader for other reasons.

  "Helgowelt, this is Hill!" Adele said harshly. "If Petersen is aboard, confine him to quarters and land immediately at your base. Is former admiral Petersen aboard your ship, over?"

  Adele had chosen to impersonate Hill—it was her choice, of course—because the admiral had risen by virtue of being trustworthy rather than for her dashing ability. She was the only woman among those whom Porra might have sent on a political mission of this sort. An alternative would have been for Adele to act the part of an Alliance signals officer with Cazelet portraying a male admiral, but even with communication distortions his youth might be noticed. This seemed to be working.