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 questioning 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.
"Admiral Hill, this is Captain Ridgway," said the hoarse voice from the battleship, confirming Adele's presumption. "Admiral Petersen is not aboard the Helgowelt. To the best of my knowledge—"
"Prepare to launch," said Daniel. He spoke over the intercom, but as planned Cory copied the warning through the communicators feeding a time synch to the other RCN ships.
"—he's in his quarters at Liberty Base. The Helgowelt will continue patrolling to prevent the enemy from making a sortie, another sortie that is, from—"
"Launching four," Daniel said, his tone calm but bright with emotion.
The Milton rocked with multiple hammer blows. The cruiser's size and stiff frame permitted her to launch four missiles at a time without fear that they would interfere with one another because of exhaust and the shock of launching.
Captain Ridgway was still chattering, making excuses to stay as distant as possible from the arrest of his commanding officer and its political repercussions. Adele ignored him as she transmitted full particulars on what was happening to the RCN forces on Cacique. She used RCN codes, though by now there wasn't much to conceal from the enemy beyond what multiple missile salvos were making abundantly clear.
The miniature clock inset in the center of Daniel's display clicked from 59 to 60, then 61 and onward in red block letters. It was counting out the seconds since the Milton extracted into sidereal space.
He had the Plot-Position Indicator on the top half of his screen and two attack boards splitting the lower display. The Treasurer Johann had finally arrived, three thousand miles out of position but with a fortunately good angle to sweep the Alliance formation—if the cruiser's Chief Missileer were better at his job than Commander Kevin Rowland was as an astrogator. Rowland would not be confirmed in command of the Johann if Daniel had anything to say about it.
Daniel grinned. For his opinion on the subject to matter, he and Commander Rowland had to survive the next few hours. Daniel never bet against himself, but he was intellectually aware that both were significant variables.
The right-hand board echoed Borries's display. He was setting up the attack on the Helgowelt in the BDC. Borries had control of two four-tube sets on both the Milton's upper and lower belts. Daniel wouldn't step in unless he saw something critically and obviously wrong with the Chief Missileer's proposal. That wouldn't happen unless Borries had a stroke in the middle of the process, and even then his deputy Chazanoff would doubtless complete it properly. Daniel glanced over the proposed attack anyway.
Senator Forbes sat against the bulkhead. She as calm as she'd been when seated across a dinner table from Commander, as he then was, Leary in Xenos less than two years before. Forbes hadn't been wearing her senatorial robes then and she shouldn't be wearing them now—this wasn't a civil function by any stretch of the imagination—but it would look good in her campaign presentations.
Forbes hadn't attempted to bring a flunky to record her presence on the bridge, but she obviously knew that the ship's internal systems did so automatically. No doubt she believed that for the right incentive some member of the Milton's technical staff would arrange for her to get a copy of what was intended to provide evidence for a court-martial or an accident inquiry.
Irritated as he'd been when Forbes breezed in, Daniel might give her the copy himself. She'd seated herself between two servants who had no more proper business on the bridge than she did . . . and who would without the least hesitation kill her if they decided that was a good idea. That meant she was smart and also that she had guts, virtues that the Senate could do with more of.
Daniel's own target was the heavy cruiser City of Hoboken, on her first commission and far more modern than the cruisers which Captain Varnell had surrendered above Bolton. The saving grace was that new Alliance ships were likely to be crewed largely by drafted landsmen with only a leavening of experienced personnel released from hospital—or prison. The draftees wouldn't have had time to work down into real spacers, not without a better cadre than the Fleet could provide.
A warship's computer could launch missile attacks with no human oversight beyond identifying a target, just as the same computer could direct the ship from star to star within the Matrix. A ship without a trained astrogator would take a very long time to reach its destination, and missiles launched by the computer were unlikely to strike home.
Well, if it came to that, missiles launched by the greatest bloody genius of a missileer mostly vanished into distant vacuum as well. Here, though, the range was short and the enemy both unsuspecting and on a closing course. Those factors, and an initial salvo of in the neighborhood of two hundred rounds, made the odds a good deal better.
105 read the clock. 106 107 108.
"Prepare to launch," said Daniel, hearing his voice echo from the bridge loudspeaker. The missileers of the Johann and one or two of the late-appearing destroyers might not have refined their attack plans yet, but the delay might prove an advantage: a second wave that would paralyze defenders with indecision.
"Launching four!" Daniel said.
"—ing four!" said Borries over the intercom. His missiles syncopated Daniel's by a half beat, steam slamming each multi-tonne projectile from its tube.
Missiles were driven by High Drive motors, and some antimatter always escaped in the exhaust instead of being annihilated. Starting the motors within a vessel would eat away the launch tube and shortly the hull itself. Instead, reaction mass flash-heated by a jolt of electricity became live steam in the tube. That shoved the missile into vacuum where it could safely light its High Drive.
The clock read 128. "Launching four," Daniel repeated. The cruiser's sturdy construction allowed him to sequence the launches within each set more closely than he would have dared do on a destroyer.
The Milton's interior was pandemonium. The thick-walled launch tubes withstood the slamming steam discharges, but the violence made the hull ring. When they came eight at a time in close succession, the whole ship rang. The hull set the rig aquiver in turn. Since the antennas and yards were steel tubes whose sections telescoped within one another, the sound of them shaking together was overwhelming and indescribable.
As soon as missiles banged from their tubes, reloads began rumbling down rollerways from magazines close to the cruiser's center of gravity. Against any background save that of combat, the process would have been deafening.
A crew under the Chief Engineer was responsible for guiding the reloads, clearing stuck or misaligned rounds and—if something went wrong with the launch—winching the massive projectiles back to the magazines and stowing them. It was a brutal job and accounted for most of the casualties aboard ships which had survived a battle.
The Milton's gun turrets had been in resting position until Daniel ordered the launch. Now their mass rotated into firing position, creating its own varied clangor. If the situation had permitted, Daniel would've been echoing the gunnery displays—and been tempted to take control.
The cruiser rated not only a full gunner but a gunner's mate, a dour man named Ragi Sekaly who'd been previously been mate and acting gunner on a destroyer. He was in the BDC with independent command of the ventral turret for as long as the plasma cannon were being used as offensive weapons. Their primary use was to deflect incoming missiles, however. When they reverted to that, Sekaly would become backup while Sun directed both turrets as a unit.
133 seconds.
"Launching four," said Daniel. He pressed the red execute button again with his index and middle fingers.
This time the whang/whang/whang/whang! from his tubes was complete before Borries announced, "Launching four!" and his missiles began to clang out of the ship. The missileer was being more gentle with his equipment than the captain was.
Daniel treated the missiles, the guns, and the Milton herself as tools to be used as efficiently as possible but not to be considered for their own merits. To Borries the equipment was not only his life but his faith, the naval equivalent of the way a devout priest viewed the statue in the sanctum of his temple.
That was inevitable, but Daniel was the captain. He wouldn't come down hard on Borries for being a trifle slow in sequencing his salvo, but he'd mention it when they had time to reflect.
Missiles were leaving all fifteen RCN vessels, including the Treasurer Johann. Force Anston was rather bunched toward the starboard wing because of the way ships had extracted, but the Johann was well out to port and created a useful balance. As such things went, things were going very well.
"Launching four," said Daniel and pressed execute for the final time in this salvo. He was wrong, though, because there were only three notes, whang! and a stutter whang/whang! The missile in set Starboard A hadn't left its tube.
The failure was in the launch mechanism itself: either reaction mass hadn't been injected into the steam crucible—a failed relay? corrosion or a break in the feed line?—or the electrical charge had failed to heat it for one of a similar series of reasons.
The Milton had a crack crew and, unlike the captured Alliance vessels, had been lovingly refitted by the captain's own workmen before she lifted on this cruise. Everything made by human beings could fail, however, and all human beings could fail as well.
A cannon in the ventral turret fired, making the cruiser squirm like a fish. The bead indicating the Alliance destroyer Heinz Zwack blurred momentarily. She was closer to the Milton than most of Force Anston was, and an 8-inch plasma bolt would have been devastating. Part of her internal atmosphere had vented through her ruptured hull.
The controlled nuclear explosion from the plasma cannon was greatly the loudest individual noise on the Milton. While not lost in the general cacophony, it certainly didn't stand out as vividly as it had when the cruiser was shooting at ground targets on Bolton.
Daniel instinctively waited for the second ventral gun to fire. Instead the dorsal turret crashed, shuddered through a triple beat while the tube returned to battery, and crashed again from the second tube.
Sun and Sekaly—and the other gunners in the RCN squadron—were hampered because their ships had just extracted from the Matrix and the rigging restricted their guns' fields of fire. They fired only when they could safely. There were plenty of targets, but lack of clear lines of sight reduced the rate of engagement sharply.
Petersen's ships had been operating entirely in sidereal space with their antennas telescoped, their sails furled, and the entire rig clamped against their hulls. Though Force Anston's attack came as a complete surprise, the Alliance gun crews were on alert for fear of a sally by the Cacique defenders. Their plasma cannon began nibbling at the incoming missiles much more quickly than Daniel had hoped would be the case.
"Launching four!" said Borries. His final quartet of missiles began to whang! out of their tubes.
Time for us to leave too, thought Daniel. Aloud he said, "Ship, prepare to insert. Inserting—"
The second ventral plasma cannon fired, the shock stunning because Daniel had been concentrating so completely on his own task. Sekaly's target, the destroyer Z43, was too distant to burst the way the Heinz Zwack had, but specks which had been rigging tumbled away on the PPI.
"Cease fire!" Daniel said. "Cease fire! Break, inserting in fifteen seconds, over."
A vessel entering the Matrix had to balance the electrical charge over all her external surfaces, which was impossible to do while her guns were spurting ions. At the velocity the Milton brought with her into normal space, however, fifteen seconds should be more than enough time to clear the cloud of disruption.
"Inserting," Daniel said, "now!"
His displays flickered as the Milton slid shuddering back into the safety of the Matrix. The last thing Daniel saw was the tracery of lines on both attack boards as the cruiser's missiles neared their targets.