What Distant Deeps-ARC

by David Drake

  "Three, this is Cinc," von Gleuck said. "From your reputation, Leary, I'd have expected you to suggest a headlong charge to destroy the cruiser and the Monkey Queen herself. If we kill her, then we've won, not so, over?"

  Daniel grinned, though without the expression's usual warmth. There was a sort of beauty to the idea, but—

  "Cinc, this is Three," he said aloud. "I'm not sure that a salvo of ten missiles—" the number of launch tubes in their small mixed squadron "—is enough to guarantee destroying a cruiser, let alone killing the Autocrator aboard her. I am sure that if we go down their throat while they're waiting unhampered for us, there'll be no one left between Zenobia and whatever remains of the Palmyrenes. Over."

  Nine of the dozen cutters which had sortied now reappeared close to the Piri Reis. The other three were debris clouds still dusted with sparkles of plasma.

  Daniel wondered if he would have been willing to make that—perfectly accurate—assessment if he hadn't had the reputation of being a hell-for-leather daredevil. How many officers over the millennia had been willing to die—and fail—because they were afraid to be called cowards?

  His smile spread wider. Sure, I'd have said the same thing. It's my duty, after all.

  There was a pause of seconds, a chasm of silence in the present tension. Then von Gleuck said, "Roger, Three. Cinc out."

  The PPI highlighted movement in bright amber. Daniel moved his cursor quickly, certainly, and brought up a direct visual image: the destroyer Turgut was braking to enter Zenobia's atmosphere while the cruiser stood guard in orbit.

  Daniel had already roughed out an attack plan. He had begun putting the finishing touches on it when the Z 46 signalled, "All Posy elements, this is Posy Cinc. Prepare to attack in thirty seconds, over."

  "Ship, prepare to insert," Daniel said, pressing the Execute button that sent his queued course computations to the corvette's other consoles and to the separate computer which controlled the hydromechanical linkages to the rigging.

  "Attack!" von Gleuck ordered.

  Daniel pressed Execute a second time. His heart was filled with leaping excitement.

  * * *

  Still tingling from an insertion which had felt as though someone were tickling the inside of her skin, Adele shifted to the damage control system to get imagery of the A Level corridor. That seemed to her to be the best way to learn what the noise was about.

  Rene Cazelet—Midshipman Cazelet—had come from the Battle Direction Center wearing a rigging suit, all but the gauntlets and helmet. As he ran—well, lumbered—he was shouting, "Hester and Blakeslee, you go out with me!"

  There was movement among the riggers waiting in the forward rotunda. Adele's wands brought up the crew list reflexively, but she didn't need its prompting: Hester and Blakeslee were senior riggers, both on the list for promotion to bosun's mate if there was an opening. Presumably they were among the eighteen suited-up spacers just outside the bridge.

  Cory hunched disconsolately at his console, plotting missile launches on an attack board. Granted that the Princess Cecile was about to go into action, it seemed very unlikely that the young lieutenant would be required as a missileer, and it was just possible that Adele would need to understand what was going on.

  Besides, she was curious—she was always curious—and she had no real duties, which was bad for her state of mind. Palmyrene communications were so chaotic and low-technology that she hadn't been able to imagine a way to delude the enemy and cause confusion in their ranks.

  All Adele's ideas had foundered on the Palmyrenes' simplicity. It was like trying to outthink an anvil.

  "Cory," she said on a two-way link to the man at the console kitty-corner behind hers across the bridge. "What's going on out there? Over."

  "Ma'am, Rene's taking two riggers out to replace casualties, over," Cory said in a miserable tone. He hadn't even bothered to inset her face on his display as he ordinarily would have done.

  Adele frowned. The ship's external sensors shut off when they entered the Matrix, but recorded imagery would show the hull as it had been in sidereal space. They'd been hit, by rockets she supposed . . . .

  She split her screen—dorsal left, ventral right—and then scrolled back from the moment of insertion. Almost immediately she found what she was looking for—what she wanted, in the informational sense: a ragged black puff swelling from the ventral B antenna, just below the furled topsail. Fingers of dark, dirty orange poked through the smoke.

  The sail streamed from the yard in tatters. The two spacers at the base of the antenna slammed against the hull and bounced back. One suited figure caught the ratlines with a hand and then hugged them. The other figure continued to sail outward. Its torso scissored at a sharp angle from the legs and lower body, then separated completely.

  Adele blanked the images, returning to a schematic of the enemy fleet. Her display started as the Horde had been at the moment the Sissie inserted; it then advanced with the ships' individual courses extrapolated against elapsed time. Cory taught me to do that, she thought, looking at the young man's sorrowful face.

  "I ought to be out there!" Cory blurted. They hadn't closed the two-way link, but Adele wasn't sure that he knew he was speaking to her as well as to himself. "It was properly my duty, but Vesey sent Rene out instead!"

  The inner airlock closed with its usual series of muted chings, the sound of the dogs seating. The airlocks were much smaller than the boarding hatch which was used while the Sissie was on the surface; it was thus less prone to twisting during maneuvers. They mated quietly, and their hydraulic dogs didn't have to strain to bring the seams back into alignment.

  Adele hadn't been watching, but she supposed Cazelet and two additional riggers were going onto the hull. She started to check her assumption with stored imagery, but she caught herself. It doesn't matter!

  Aloud she said, "Cory, I don't understand. What is the duty you're talking about?"

  "Chief Woetjans was wounded," Cory said. "You saw that, right? Belachik killed and the chief got maybe a dozen holes in her legs. Her suit sealed the punctures and they must've all been little, but she's not going to be jumping around. There needs to be an officer out there and it should've been me!"

  Woetjans was wounded? Yes, of course: the arms of her suit have blue chevrons.

  "Shouldn't—" Adele said before she caught herself. "Oh, I'm sorry, yes."

  Of course Woetjans should have been brought inside and hooked to the Medicomp immediately: rigging suits were self-sealing, but human bodies were not. The bosun might very well be bleeding to death right now.

  But there was no chance that Woetjans would leave her post of duty so long as she was conscious. Only if she fainted would it be possible to deal with her injuries—assuming she didn't simply drift off into the Matrix, unnoticed until her body was lost forever.

  "Six would've sent me," Cory said bitterly. "You know that. But Six gave maneuver control to Vesey, and she sent Rene out instead of me."

  Adele didn't know that Daniel would have sent Cory instead of Cazelet, and she had even less notion of why Cory thought that Vesey would keep him in a place of safety and instead send her close friend—

  Adele grimaced. Give a thing its right name:

  Send her lover, Rene Cazelet, into a place of obvious danger. But Cory did believe both those things, and he was wretched because he wasn't being allowed to risk his life on the hull.

  She smiled faintly, because she'd long-since learned that human behavior didn't make any sense at all. "Well, Lieutenant," she said. "Given what we're about to do, there's an excellent chance that you won't survive Midshipman Cazelet by even a fraction of a second. Think positively, my good man."

  "Extracting!" Vesey warned. The Princess Cecile began sliding into normal space—and into the midst of her enemies.

  * * *

  Daniel's system was so charged with adrenalin that the confusion of extracting from the Matrix didn't bother him—except that he had to pause for a moment while
the right and left halves of his body realigned. When they locked together, he was able to view the Palmyrene vessels and to adjust the attack plan based on the locations he'd predicted for them.

  There hadn't been a great deal of difference, but a tiny error multiplied by 89,000 miles would mean the Princess Cecile's two missiles—a pitiful salvo to begin with—wouldn't come anywhere close to the target. In all likelihood, no amount of tweaking the missile courses would bring them close at this range. The Turgut would be deep in Zenobia's atmosphere by the time they arrived, so the missiles' High Drive motors would be devouring themselves.

  "Missiles, you are clear to launch!" Daniel said. Not so very long ago, he would have taken over the attack himself. That he didn't do so now was partly maturity and the realization that other people really might be as good as he was, especially if they'd had longer to plan.

  Besides that, Daniel had a great deal on his plate as captain of an RCN ship going into action as the junior member of a Fleet squadron. He was nearly as concerned about what the Alliance vessels were going to do as he was about the Palmyrenes.

  "Launching two!" Chazanoff said. The Whang! of steam driving out a five-ton missile truncated his final syllable. The second Whang! came a minimal two seconds later, so close that there was a risk that the hull's whipping might bind the later missile in its tube.

  Reloads began rumbling along the rollerways carrying them from the missile magazines to the launch tubes. Daniel had given strict orders that Chazanoff not start the reloads moving until the initial salvo was out of its tubes. That delayed the second salvo considerably, but it avoided the ratfuck which was certain if one or more missiles didn't launch and several reloads were already in motion.

  Besides, this was a hit-and-run attack. The Princess Cecile wasn't making a sustained effort involving multiple launches.

  The target was Daniel's first priority, but the Horde's defensive response was a close second. He had extracted the Princess Cecile not only beyond the effective range of the cruiser's plasma cannon but with the bulk of the planet between them. Even at 93,000 miles—the distance between the Piri Reis and the Sissie—a 15-centimeter bolt could charge the corvette's hull sufficiently to prevent her from reentering the Matrix. If that happened, the cutters would have as long as they needed to chew the Sissie apart.

  It was unlikely that the Palmyrenes had enough big-ship experience to attempt such a move: they were used to dealing in free-flight rockets, not plasma cannon. But underestimating your enemy's skill was about as good a way to get killed in battle as Daniel could think of.

  Because the cutters were grouped closely on the Piri Reis, the Sissie had a comfortable margin of separation from them as well. The closest was at 33,000 miles, too far to be dangerous or for the corvette's 4-inch guns to do any dam—

  Whang Whang Whang Whang

  "Gunners, cease fire!" Daniel shouted. "Acknowledge my orders, you bloody fools, over!"

  They're wasting ammunition—which didn't matter—and burning out their barrels—which did. Had watching Z 46's trigger-happy gunner caused Sun and Rocker to lose the fire discipline he'd spent years trying to teach them?

  "Sorry, Six," Sun said, glancing sideways toward the command console. He looked and sounded contrite. "Won't happen—"

  Bloody hell! A dimensional anomaly began to form so close ahead of the Princess Cecile that Daniel thought he could hit it with a shotgun if he'd been standing on the hull.

  "Target target target!" Rocker shouted, but his ventral turret didn't have an angle on the cutter, if it was a cutter and not one of the Alliance destroyers extracting in just about the worst place possi—

  It was a Palmyrene cutter, congealing into empty space like a poisonous insect. Its rocket pod was already aligned with the Princess Cecile. Its salvo would rake—

  Whang!

  The cutter disintegrated. It was a perfect shot, so centered that the four antennas flew out from the gas cloud in precise symmetry. Perhaps to prove that he wasn't an out-of-control wacko, Sun didn't spend the usual—but here unnecessary—second round on the target.

  "Cease fire!" Daniel ordered. "Ship, prepare to insert presently, over."

  He pressed the Execute button, leaving his right index and middle fingers in place. The Sissie would transition as soon as the bath of ions which sprayed from her own gun muzzles had dissipated sufficiently. That wouldn't be as soon as Daniel wanted, but almost nothing happened as soon as he wanted it to.

  He grinned despite the present situation. Almost nothing. He'd met a few girls who were nearly as eager as he was.

  Daniel had hoped the Alliance destroyers would extract at the same moment as the Princess Cecile, splitting the Palmyrenes' attention and defensive efforts. He hadn't expected that to happen, of course. Synchronized maneuvers in the Matrix were difficult, and it would have taken incredibly good luck for three ships which hadn't operated together before to launch an unplanned attack with perfect precision.

  The Princess Cecile hadn't been unlucky during this engagement—the fact that she'd survived proved that. But neither had things worked out quite that well.

  The Alliance destroyers extracted within seconds of one another, however, though they were widely separated in space. Z 42 appeared 38,000 miles from Zenobia and over 50,000 miles from the Palmyrene cruiser. She had four missile tubes. She launched a missile from each pair simultaneously, then launched the two remaining missiles after a textbook five-second interval.

  Pursued by rockets fired from hopelessly too far out, the destroyer faded back into the Matrix. She was able to make the immediate transition because she hadn't used her plasma cannon, even though several cutters had been within the effective range of the 13-centimeter weapons.

  Von Gleuck brought his Z 46 in close—within a hundred miles of the Turgut and as a result close above Zenobia, deeper into the atmosphere than Daniel thought it was safe to extract. Mind, sometimes you have to do things that aren't safe, but this struck him as being pointlessly risky.

  To protect the planet, Force Posy had to survive. Scarring the throats of your High Drive motors could lead to very bad results when battle required full power.

  The Palmyrene destroyer didn't launch when its sensors registered the disruption of a ship extracting from the Matrix. That made sense when Daniel thought about it: the Palmyrene captain would expect the anomaly to be a friendly cutter, not an Alliance destroyer.

  Even so, the Turgut's guns shouldn't have remained locked in landing position. The buffeting a ship endured on entering an atmosphere from orbit stressed everything which projected from the hull. The Palmyrenes should nonetheless have trained on the anomaly and accepted the strain on their turret mechanisms and elevation screws, just in case it was hostile.

  The Z 46 rippled her four missiles with little more than a heartbeat separating one from the next. The third missile came out tumbling and didn't ignite. Daniel suspected that the destroyer's hull had twisted during ejection so that the mouth of the launch tube had nipped the High Drive motors.

  More haste, less speed . . . but Daniel understood better than most the balancing act that any combat maneuver entailed. Von Gleuck had made a series of reasoned decisions which were different from those Daniel Leary had made, but that didn't mean either captain was wrong.

  Four cutters had been keeping close company with the Turgut. One Palmyrene, then two more, fired their rockets as the Z 46 was launching her missiles.

  The last image Daniel saw before the Princess Cecile finally inserted into the Matrix was the destroyer's rigging flying apart. Warheads were bursting into puffs of filthy smoke, shot through with orange fangs.

  CHAPTER 25: Zenobia System

  Adele could see clearly again, though her eyes continued to switch between purple and orange as a result of the Sissie's insertion. That would pass, she was sure. More worrisome was the realization that she faced a gap in coverage.

  "Master Cory!" she said.

  She should have called him Lieutena
nt Cory or perhaps Six-One, but neither of those naval titles felt proper to her. Simply saying, "Cory" would have adequate to cue a two-way link and wouldn't have bothered Cory himself, but it seemed to Adele to be discourteous. She was punctilious about her honor and would not hesitate to kill someone who treated her with disrespect. It therefore behooved her to be polite to others.

  "Mistress?" said Cory, speaking to her image on the astrogation display. He'd begun doing that recently, just as Adele always had.

  "When we return to normal space," Adele said, "we'll be one light-minute from where we inserted, won't we?"

  "Yes, mistress," said Cory. He didn't ask why she wanted to know or even imply a question in his tone. "We'll be at Rally Point Three, according to the Course Pack."

  "But the time elapsed in the Matrix will be longer than a minute, won't it?" she said. "That means that we won't actually be able to see what happened immediately after we inserted. Unless we go farther out later and pick it up then . . . ."

  As Adele spoke, she considered trying again to access the video log of the Piri Reis. It hadn't been working when she tried to enter it before, but perhaps the cruiser's technicians had repaired the problem by now.

  And perhaps pigs will fly.

  It infuriated Adele when she was balked because other people were incompetent. If the Palmyrenes had demonstrated foolproof security, she would have been rather pleased: it would have given her a goal to strive for, possibly unattainable but worthy of her effort nonetheless.

  Instead the Palmyrenes, the wogs, were unable to perform basic maintenance. She couldn't read their records because they weren't capable of keeping records!