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CHAPTER 27

 

Above Cacique

"Green element," ordered Daniel, "launch at maximum rate. Squadron out."

He hadn't spoken the last words before Borries and Chazanoff had stabbed their execute buttons. The Milton's hull began to twist to the rhythm of her missile launches while the sharper, heavier slamming of the four plasma cannon punctuated the tubes.

Daniel had launched the first salvo at long range to break up Petersen's formation, but continuing to fling missiles while the targets scattered wildly would have been wasteful. Now that the Alliance ships had settled—onto individual courses, not into a formation—it was possible to launch with some purpose.

Space battles involved a great deal of nothingness. A missileer who thought random launches would have a good result was either a cretin or in a blind panic. The Alliance missileers who'd been launching at Force Anston while their own ships gyrated had probably been panicked.

"Six . . . ," said Vesey on the command channel, her voice showing the strain of heavy acceleration. "Unless we begin braking within forty seconds, we risk being in the pattern of either the Heimdall or the Elisabeth, over."

Daniel placed her calculations in the lower right-hand quadrant of his display and opened them. She'd coded the missile tracks red for the battleship and green for the heavy cruiser. It was the seventh salvo for each and the first to even approximate accuracy. The Heimdall's spread was aimed to cross the Milton's current course a little ahead of the Elisabeth's.

But Vesey was being overly cautious—well, very cautious, which in a battle was the same thing. You couldn't predict courses precisely until the missiles had burned out and split, since the process of separation induced variables. It was just possible that the projectiles would spread as widely as Vesey feared, but even if they did there was little chance of them hitting anything but vacuum.

"Green element," said Daniel. "On command, turn two points toward enemy and boost thrust by point-two gees. In thirty seconds, over."

"Sir!" said Vesey on a two-way link. The strain in her voice wasn't entirely due to their present acceleration of 2.1 g. "We'll lose rig if we do that and tumbling yards could damage the hull, over!"

"Needs must when the devils drive, Vesey," Daniel said. "Break, Squadron, execute!"

Not even Daniel could feel the incremental acceleration, though a change in the buzz of the High Drive was barely perceptible. The added stress was real, however: just as Vesey had warned, the Port E antenna, jammed with only the topmast telescoped, carried away. The shriek of twisted steel shearing was followed by the nervous jangle of broken cables lashing the ship as they flailed past.

There was only one further WHANG! though, when one or the other end of the antenna spun back against the hull. Daniel hoped it hadn't penetrated the plating, but he knew very well that they'd be lucky if they got out of this affair with nothing worse than a bad dent.

The Alliance commanders weren't just wasting the contents of their magazines when they made maximum-effort launches at extreme range. The first missiles of an engagement had been pampered: loaded at leisure and checked whenever the missile crew had a moment's leisure.

After that—and inevitably even then, to some degree—things began to go wrong. The locks of launching tubes jammed or—worse—sprang open. Reloads jumped the rollerways and sometimes slammed the breech of a tube, putting it out of action until the machinists could turn it smooth. Electrical contacts might fail, feed lines might kink or clog, and a missile which had been on the lowest tier for years might have been hammered enough out of round that it wouldn't seat.

For that matter, a hydraulic ram could malfunction instead of sliding its missile the proper distance into the tube. Ordinarily "malfunction" meant that several inches of missile stuck out into the compartment and the tube couldn't be closed, but Daniel remembered once on the Defiance when the ram overtravelled and thrust itself a hand's breadth deep through the missile casing. That had been a bitch of a job to clear, and nobody was shooting at the old training cruiser at the time it happened.

A half-salvo from the Heimdall was forty-eight missiles if everything operated to specification; the spread she launched at the Milton was thirty-one. Miserable as the battleship's performance was, it was still a better percentage than the seventeen out of twenty-eight missiles that the Elisabeth managed.

Mind, one missile was enough to put paid to a ship, even a battleship. Neither vessel appeared very accurate, but a spacer never discounted luck. Particularly not bad luck.

The remaining ships of Green element were conforming to the Milton's course, though the seriously underpowered Arcona had been forced to light her plasma thrusters in addition to her High Drive, and the Treasurer Johann was so far out of position that only by plotting her course could you tell that Captain Rowland really had obeyed Daniel's orders. If the engagement continued any length of time, the Arcona might have to borrow reaction mass from another ship before she could risk landing. The trick, of course, would be to survive long enough for that to be necessary, let alone possible.

By turning toward the enemy and accelerating, Daniel reduced the length of time Admiral Petersen's squadron had to react to incoming missiles. It reduced the RCN's reaction time also, but thus far at least the Alliance ships were shooting very poorly. They hadn't recovered from the disruption of realizing Daniel's initial salvo was coming straight down their collective throat, and most of the navigating officers appeared to be maneuvering without informing the missileers.

As Daniel had directed, Blue element, the RCN destroyers, was shadowing the Alliance squadron but not closing the considerable distance separating them. Every two minutes or so, the Blue vessels individually loosed a pair or two pairs of missiles toward the Alliance battleships.

The range was well beyond the possibility of accurate shooting, but Daniel expected a number of projectiles to come close enough to their targets to be noticed. That would prevent the Alliance captains from concentrating wholly on the threat from Green element.

And who knew? Maybe some Alliance vessel would have bad luck.

The enemy destroyers were keeping close to their heavy ships, acting as a screen but not actively trying to engage Blue element. If asked, the Alliance captains would probably claim that the RCN destroyers were too far out to be dangerous, and that the greater risk was that RCN assets which had been concealed to that point would mousetrap them if they attacked Blue.

Daniel wouldn't have done that even if he had hidden assets. He knew to keep his eye on the main target, and that was the pair of battleships.

Speaking of which, the Oldenburg had stopped launching. Had something gone wrong with her missile control apparatus? Battleships had several-times-redundant systems, but combat stresses were beyond what the most careful captain could test for. Sometimes that caused a catastrophic failure.

There was nothing wrong with the Oldenburg's defensive armament, though. Her six turrets mounted twin 20-centimeter plasma cannon. At present her gunner was mostly working the turrets in pairs. Four high-intensity bolts hitting in quick succession were enough to convert a projectile into a gas cloud which caromed off at a slant from its dangerous original course.

Once, however, five turrets fired together at a projectile from the Milton, catching it before burnout. Even at extreme range, that was enough energy to rupture the tanks of reaction mass and leave the melted remains to tumble harmlessly in the void. Somebody on the Oldenburg's bridge had recognized a threat even before it developed and had removed it with a skill beyond anything Daniel had seen before.

His sudden smile was harsher than usual. It was an article of faith with Daniel Leary that the RCN was the finest naval organization in the human universe. The RCN did not, however, have a monopoly on skilled personnel.

The four Alliance light cruisers were at the end of their formation. Three—one continued to launch at the Blue element—were concentrating on the Eckernferde, the rearmost vessel of Green element.

Lighting her plasma thrusters, the Eckernferde made a desperate attempt to avoid a well aimed spread of eighteen missiles from the Ratisbon. The acceleration would flatten any personnel who weren't already in couches as well as shaking loose all manner of things. When the multiple frequencies hit harmonics, they could shatter metal.

A missile from the Emden struck the Eckernferde squarely amidships. Bits flew away: antennas and yards broken by the impact, and hull plates blasted off when the solid remainder of the projectile exited the hull. The Eckernferde's plasma cannon hadn't engaged that missile because it hadn't been a danger until the target accelerated into its path.

When Daniel ordered his Green element to resume missile attacks, the Treasurer Johann had launched a salvo of twenty-five, followed by a second of—remarkably—twenty-six missiles from her twenty-eight tubes. The entire spread was aimed at the Heimdall because the leading Alliance battleship masked her consort from the Johann's angle.

None of the Alliance ships were engaging the Johann, so her crew wasn't distracted. Also, her Chief Missileer was very good. Daniel didn't know that officer's name, but he would after the battle—if there was an after for him.

The Heimdall's bridge crew had been concentrating on the half-salvos from the Direktor Friedrich and to a lesser degree on missiles from the Milton and the two cruisers accompanying her. The dead-accurate spreads from the Johann went unnoticed until they were too close to maneuver away from. They fell on the battleship like the Wrath of the Gods.

The Heimdall's 20-centimeter plasma cannon were in their element. Ordinarily the faster rate of fire of lighter guns made up at least to a degree for the enormous wallop from a heavy bolt. Now there wasn't time for multiple shots, but each twenty-centimeter round destroyed the integrity of an incoming projectile. No solid missile got through the battleship's defensive fire.

But four clouds of recently vaporized metal swept over the Heimdall. They scoured off rigging, sensors, and everything less sturdy than the hull itself. The steel fog didn't penetrate the gun turrets, but they and the cannon themselves were welded in place.

The Oldenburg resumed launching. This time the full salvo, sixty-three missiles, was aimed at the Milton.

Daniel brought up the High Drive control panel. There probably wasn't going to be a happy ending; but still, you did what you could.

If the Oldenburg's spread had been better aimed, he would have found it easier to choose a response. The central clump of about half the salvo was just that, a random distribution which grouped around the center.

Whether the Milton braked or tried to increase what was already high acceleration, there was a likelihood that one or more projectiles would hit her. The remaining missiles were scattered around that lethal core.

Daniel gimballed the motors to slew the Milton sideways at maximum output. The new course would be a shallow tangent to the previous one, the sum of the new thrust acting on the original momentum. It didn't mean safety, but if the cruiser held together she had a chance of survival.

If. A cadet who proposed that solution in a shiphandling class would be flunked for the exercise, with the notation that the High Drive mounts wouldn't take the unsupported strain.

On the other hand, the Academy instructors would be doing the same bloody thing if they had this many incoming missiles to deal with. They would if they thought quickly enough, at any rate.

One of the motors in the cruiser's stern section broke the welds on one side, then banged against the outrigger because the other side still held and the attachment plate folded under the strain. The other motors stay put for now.

The Oldenburg's captain, unlike her gunner, was uninspired and leisurely in his responses. The Direktor Friedrich and the Milton directed full salvos at the remaining Alliance battleship now that the Heimdall was out of action.

The Oldenburg braked with both High Drive and thrusters, the first evidence Daniel had seen that her captain understood the gravity of his situation. The strain would make even a battleship squirm like a snake, but it did drop her out of the spread from the Friedrich.

That put the Oldenburg squarely in the path of Borries's fifteen missiles. The Chief Missileer had allowed for maximum braking, while his mate had aimed the remaining fourteen missiles of the Milton's salvo ahead, reasonably assuming that the Friedrich would fill the center of the box.

As the Direktor Friedrich's salvo neared the target, a missile struck her amidships. It was high, slamming into A Level, though the fireball would scoop away all internal subdivisions in that section down to the armored deck between E and F Levels.

The battleship began to roll away from the impact. A second missile struck well forward, engulfing her bow including the bridge. She was out of the fight and probably beyond economic repair.

The Oldenburg's cannon were swatting away incoming projectiles with contemptuous ease. How the bloody hell are they keeping up that rate of fire? It's too fast even for 6-inch

As Daniel formed the thought, a change cued his console. It threw up a visual of the Oldenburg. A turret lifted from the battleship's spine, shedding bits as it tumbled outward. Two of the fragments were the barrels of plasma cannon, the portions that were outside the armor when a round vented through the breech. The blast plucked the turret from the barbette on which it rotated.

If you fired a plasma cannon faster than its tube could be purged of vapor sublimed from the bore, the charge reflected back instead of stabbing toward the intended target. Bad things happened, then.

Worse things happened to the Oldenburg some nine seconds later: a projectile hit her starboard outrigger at a quartering angle and raked sternward. By the time it slanted out through the port outrigger it was a cloud of superheated steel, more a shock wave than an object. The battleship's hull wasn't seriously damaged, but the thin plating of the outriggers vanished like chaff in a flame.

The High Drive motors went with the outriggers, and in all likelihood most of the plasma thrusters—set into the lower curve of the hull—were burned away also. The Oldenburg had become a drifting hulk. A considerable portion of its armament remained, but it was unusable.

Three projectiles were driving toward the Milton. Their grouping was accidental: they weren't segments of the same missile.

Sun fired his dorsal turret, bouncing the ship seriously despite the other violent inputs. One of the incoming trio diverged from its previous course, driven by the thrust of the half its mass which sublimed when struck by the heavy ion charges.

The ventral turret didn't engage the remaining projectiles. Because of the angle of approach, the Milton's lower pair of guns didn't bear.

Daniel touched his port thruster controls, giving them a blip to rotate the Milton slightly on her long axis. That would bring the ventral turret into action. The dorsal guns alone couldn't cycle quickly enough to take out both projectiles.

The PPI showed the Arcona holding station, though she must have taken damage: her two most recent salvos were of only six missiles each. The Eckernferde drifted without power; the missile had cut her almost in two.

Meanwhile the Treasurer Johann continued to fight her own private war, ignored by the enemy. She had just launched a second salvo at the Alliance light cruisers, a choice of target so wrongheaded that for a moment Daniel found it perverse. Then he took in the whole tactical situation.

The enemy battleships were out of action. The Oldenburg was in freefall and spinning around her long axis, driven by the missile which had ripped away her outriggers. Even veteran spacers in her crew would be finding it difficult to keep their breakfasts down. The Heimdall was even more hopelessly crippled: her shutters and hatches were welded shut. Launching at either of them would merely kill fellow spacers to no military purpose.

The heavy cruisers Sedan and Elisabeth were the next most important Alliance assets, but from the Johann's angle they were largely screened by the Heimdall. The light cruisers, however, had reformed in a line ahead after their initial panicked scattering. They provided the Johann with a zero-deflection shot. The Emden, leading the formation, blocked the view of the following ships unless they were communicating better than they'd seemed to be in the past.

When the Emden realized the danger, she broke onto starboard tangent from her original course. As she turned, she slewed so that two of her three twin 15-centimeter turrets could bear on the incoming missiles without causing blast damage by overfiring her own hull.

The next in line, her sister ship Ratisbon, reacted only moments later. Her captain was obviously on his game.

The older Thetis slewed and turned also, but to port. She carried six 10-centimeter twin turrets. Five bore on the incoming, but the stern dorsal and ventral turrets didn't fire.

Last in line, the Agadir launched another spread of twelve missiles in the direction of the RCN destroyers. Her captain seemed oblivious of everything that was going on around him.

The Milton started to rotate, but three more High Drive motors on the port side broke their mountings. Unbalanced thrust made the ship yaw violently.

Her dorsal guns slammed. Sun was trying to bunt one projectile into the path of the other. Remarkably, he came close to succeeding.

The last things Daniel remembered from his display were—

A projectile spiking the Ratisbon just aft of center and slanting out near the stern. The impact carried with it the contents of half the target's internal volume.

A second projectile striking the prow of the Agadir on a reciprocal. The cruiser became an expanding cloud of debris which followed the course she had been on when she was destroyed.

An Alliance missile hit the Milton's stern. Everything went white for Daniel, then black.

 

The crash was so loud that Adele perceived it as a flash of light. Her data unit was tethered to her equipment belt. It flopped around, of course, but the display corrected for movement.

Adele's wands twitched also, but she automatically clutched for one or the other of her mechanical aids in a crisis. Reflex didn't send her left hand for her pistol when a missile hit; instead she kept her data unit controls in a grip which would have required surgical shears to break.

The unit was bulkier than most of its capacity, because it had internal cushioning and an outer case that would stop a pistol shot. It wouldn't have been harmed if it had gone flying across the compartment, but it would have injured anybody who got in its way.

A jumpseat leaped from the aft bulkhead and cracked Daniel in the head, splitting his commo helmet. The seat caromed off the ceiling, then fell to the deck. One of its broken attachment bolts skittered around the compartment, sounding peevish but not able to do real harm.

Hogg stepped toward his master. He rode the careening deck as he would a small boat in a storm off the coast of Bantry.

"Tovera!" Adele said, jerking her head toward Daniel because her hands were busy with the control wands. Her console had blinked when the missile hit, but after running its self-check it was back in service.

Tovera had been taught field medicine during her training with the Fifth Bureau. This certainly wasn't the first head injury Hogg had seen either, but Tovera probably knew more about painkilling drugs—besides alcohol—than he did.

Adele wanted Daniel to make a full recovery more than she wanted anything else in life. The only thing she could do to aid the process was to carry out her own duties, which was what she would have done anyway.

She smiled coldly. Other people seemed to make life more complicated than she found it to be. For example—

"Sir! Sir!" Vesey cried. She'd turned to stare at Daniel and was fumbling for the catches of her seat restraints.

"Lieutenant Vesey!" Adele said. If her most recent transmission—and Adele couldn't remember—had been on the command channel, then this rebuke was going to all the Milton's surviving officers instead of remaining between her and Vesey on a two-way link. That didn't matter. "Take control of this ship now!"

"Sir!" said Vesey, but this time it wasn't her earlier whimpering. She straightened, bringing up the High Drive and thruster controls on the lower half of her display.

On the upper portion, Vesey had been trying to view the damage through the Milton's external sensors. That was an obvious waste of time, at least obvious to Adele. Her wands flickered.

The High Drive shut down momentarily. Things—including Daniel's head on the couch—lifted. Before weightlessness was more than a lurch in Adele's stomach, the motors resumed their snarl, though at a lower level: they were developing no more than the standard 1g acceleration. The cruiser's wild gyrations gradually slowed.

While Vesey did her proper job, Adele imported visuals of the Milton from the sensors of the Arcona and the Direktor Friedrich. The battleship was operating in emergency mode, limited to passive data collection. Adele switched the command console back to normal, then directed it to amplify the image and transmit it through the laser link.

After her own computer had sharpened both sets of imagery, Adele forwarded them to Vesey at the astrogation console. As expected, they were ugly sights.

The missile had taken off fifty feet of the Milton's stern. The outriggers, though tattered at their stern ends, remained to provide scale; otherwise Adele would have had to superimpose a before-action schematic of the cruiser over its present image.

The Battle Direction Center was gone, along with everyone in it. The missile's trajectory must have been nearly perpendicular, striking on the spine and blasting everything beneath down through the keel.

Armored bulkheads divided the ship vertically. It was lucky that the one ahead of the impact hadn't ruptured—or again, perhaps it had. The riggers acted as the damage control party on a warship, since they were normally inside the hull during action. Woetjans was chivying sternward the personnel waiting in the forward rotunda.

Adele glanced around the bridge. Chazanoff looked groggy, but he was trying to plot a missile attack.

"Officer Chazanoff!" Adele said. "Take command of all the missile sets. Officer Borries is dead, over."

The only reason she gave the order was that it would waste time to pass the information to someone who had command authority, which Signals Officer Mundy assuredly did not. That was a good reason, though, and in a crisis like this it might well be the best reason.

"Aye aye, sir," said the new Chief Missileer phlegmatically. He adjusted his display. As Adele had expected, an order delivered in a tone of command was sufficient. Chazanoff was operating on trained reflex rather than intellect as chaos rained down on him.

Did the Milton have any functional missile tubes? Well, that wasn't Adele's problem.

"Mundy!" Senator Forbes shouted over the racket. She wasn't linked to the cruiser's commo net, but she'd managed to cross the bucking deck. She clung to the supports of the signals console. "Take command of the fleet! Somebody needs to, and that puppy Vesey certainly can't!"

"Sit down, Senator," Adele said. "I don't have the authority or the skill either one."

"Launching four!" said Chazanoff. Only two missiles banged out in response. Still, that was two more than there might have been.

"You know which ship is which," Forbes said. "And you know how to fight someplace besides on the Senate floor."

"I can't—"

"May the demons eat your tits, you bloody fool!" Forbes shouted. "I'll make you an admiral, does that satisfy you? I'm brevetting you! You're a bloody admiral!"

Adele opened her mouth, then closed it. Forbes was an unpleasant woman, but she wasn't stupid; and in this case, she wasn't wrong.

Commander Potts in Z44 was probably competent to handle the task or Daniel wouldn't have given him command of the Blue element, but Adele wouldn't trust a destroyer's communications suite to coordinate a fleet action. The Arcona was damaged, and Adele didn't know how badly. The Treasurer Johann was untouched, but Daniel would rise from his stupor and strangle her if she passed the command off to an officer who couldn't astrogate better than Commander Rowland had.

And Forbes was right about Vesey too. The lieutenant wasn't a puppy, but this was a job for someone who was ready to kill without hesitating an eyeblink.

"All right," said Adele, bringing up a PPI screen. She'd done so in the past, but only for curiosity. "Now get out of here, I'm busy."

"Mistress?" said Rene Cazelet urgently. "The squadron on Cacique is coming up, over."

And so they were. Five, no, six icons; one was crosshatched because it was in the planet's shadow relative to the Milton's sensors. Each had a six-digit alphanumeric designator which Daniel would have identified immediately. Adele could have looked them up, of course, but that would have taken time which she could better spend on other matters.

"Cory, how long before those ships from Cacique are able to maneuver, over?" Adele said.

Cory's image stared from her display like a death mask. Adele recalled that he and Midshipman Else, who'd been stationed in the BDC, had become friends.

"Mistress," he said and swallowed. "The Jervis, seven minutes. The Lupine, eight minutes. The Dido, nine minutes, and the other three cruisers spaced behind her at a minute each. Over."

"Very good," said Adele. "Break. Anston elements, this is Mundy of Chatsworth speaking for Anston Six. Engage the enemy more closely. Mundy out."

The force from Cacique guaranteed victory, but if the remaining Alliance forces began launching into the gravity well, they could destroy the reinforcements before they came into action. Therefore the remnants of Admiral Petersen's squadron had to be fully occupied for the next ten minutes or so to ensure an RCN victory.

There wasn't any doubt what Daniel would have done if he were alert. Adele couldn't execute the details of the plan, but the decision itself hadn't been difficult.

She wondered if the other RCN captains would refuse or ignore the order. She smiled faintly. If so they wouldn't have to worry about court-martials if she survived. Adele tried to take a more relaxed attitude than came naturally to her, but Mundy of Chatsworth had given the order. Lady Mundy was quite meticulous about the family honor.

A single gun fired from the Milton's ventral turret. Adele frowned at the visuals. The dorsal turret was intact but unmoving; the plasma cannon were cocked upward at a high angle. Perhaps there was an electrical fault that would be quickly remedied. More likely the turret had jumped its ring and couldn't be repaired short of a dockyard.

It wasn't likely that the Milton would survive long enough to reach a dockyard, of course. The mission was to drive the Alliance out of the Cacique system. If that required throwing cripples against undamaged enemy ships to buy time, so be it.

Adele looked at the PPI again. She'd basically exhausted her expertise when she ordered the squadron to attack.

None of the slowly moving dots on the display were missiles. She knew that it was possible to track the missiles on the PPI—Daniel did it all the time—but she had no idea of how. There was a great deal of what was necessary in a naval battle which she had no idea of. Ordinarily that wasn't a problem.

Chazanoff continued to launch in sequences of one to three at a time, if a single item could be called a sequence. Adele had no way of telling how many of the launches were reloads; perhaps fewer than a dozen of the Milton's thirty-two tubes were functional.

Sun's single plasma cannon continued to fire slowly. How much immediate danger was the Milton in? Adele hoped that the way they'd spun after the missile blasted off the stern had taken them out of the zone the Alliance ships had been targeting. The enemy had had time to revise its course predictions by now, but the distances involved meant the projectiles might be some time arriving even if they meant certain death when they did.

Adele wasn't an admiral save by fiat of Senator Forbes, but she was a signals officer. "Cacique Squadron," she said, broadcasting in clear. "This is Mundy of Chatsworth, speaking for Admiral Daniel Leary."

The ships rising from the surface might well have lifted with partial crews. If the missing personnel included the signals officer and code clerks, Adele wanted to be sure that her orders were nonetheless understood. They might be her last words, after all.

"You will carry the attack to the enemy with all available means," Adele said. "Under no circumstances will you break off the engagement until the enemy base and all Alliance vessels in the system have surrendered or been destroyed. Do you copy, over?"

"Chatsworth, this is Commodore Battenberg," replied a harsh female voice. She was transmitting from the first ship to lift. "We copy you. I think I speak for the entire New Harmony Squadron when I say that I've never received an order which will give me greater pleasure to execute. Cacique Six out."

Several additional ships were laboring up from Cacique now. Judging from the example of the first six, Adele estimated that it would be at least half an hour before the newcomers could possibly join the action.

"Sir!" said Lieutenant Cory on the command channel. "Two transports are lifting from the moon base! I suggest we send destroyers to capture the prizes, over."

Adele thought of what Daniel would say, then quirked a smile. She didn't need Daniel's advice on the matter: their instincts were the same.

"No, Cory," she said. "Nothing else matters until we've eliminated all the enemy warships. Out."

During their conversation, Forbes had clung to the communications console and shouted into Adele's ear to be heard. No one else on the Milton's bridge had the faintest notion that the Plenipotentiary had raised Signals Officer Mundy to the brevet rank of admiral.

Nonetheless, the Milton's officers accepted her orders as though she had the right to issue them. Adele suspected that was because they viewed her as Daniel's friend rather than anything she'd earned in her own right . . . though earning Daniel's friendship wasn't a small matter, when she came to think of it.

Adele's smile was minuscule, but it had more warmth in it than she usually displayed. She would much rather be Daniel's friend than be an admiral in her own right.

The beads on the PPI which indicated the four Alliance cruisers began to fade. The enemy destroyers blurred also as Commander Potts led the Blue element down on them.

Adele frowned and switched from the console to the much less capable internal display of her personal data unit. There could be a delayed fault in the console from the missile impact. . . . 

The Alliance ships had vanished. Only wreckage and the two disabled battleships remained in the Cacique system.

"Mistress!" Rene Cazelet said. "They're running! All of them that can get under way are running into the Matrix!"

"We've won!" shouted Cory. "By the Gods, we've won!"

Neither youth remembered to sign off properly. Perhaps they'd been infected by a signals officer who tended to be cavalier about such things herself.

What do I do now? Hand the whole business over to Vesey, I suppose.

"Mistress, Heimdall is signalling to you, over," said Cory. Communication from the enemy flagship seemed to have brought back his professional demeanor.

Cory had been handling the ordinary signals traffic, but it continued to run as a text sidebar on Adele's display. Adele found the thread easily: Petersen calling Chatsworth, over. Petersen calling Chatsworth, over. . . . 

"All Anston elements, cease fire," Adele said, taking care of the main priority first. She couldn't be certain that the Alliance commander wanted to surrender, but if he didn't nothing would be lost by delaying the final salvos by a minute or two. "Break, Officer Chazanoff, cease fire. Break. All Cinnabar elements—"

Cory would be directing the transmission to the destroyers and the ships rising from Cacique, though Adele's real concern was for the cruisers which had been attacking the heavy Alliance vessels.

"—cease fire by order of Admiral Leary."

The Alliance didn't provide proper missile targets any more, but Adele knew human beings too well to be sure no one would launch at the crippled battleships. Missileers on most warships had few opportunities to practice their craft. A battleship in freefall and without defensive armament would tempt even what passed in the RCN for a saint.

"Break," Adele continued. "Petersen, this is Chatsworth. Go ahead, over."

The Heimdall was sending by tight-beam microwave, but the transmission was badly broken. Damage to the battleship must be more extensive than Adele had assumed from the visuals.

The vaporized projectiles had wiped everything less refractory than the gun turrets off the Heimdall's port and under sides, but the remainder of the hull appeared normal at a distance. Apparently redeposited steel had plated equipment on that side also and seriously degraded its performance.

That also explained why the Heimdall was limping along on the power of seven thrusters, inadequate to impart more than a modicum of acceleration to 80,000 tonnes. A thruster nozzle was wide, and even a partial blockage would merely reduce power. If the minuscule throat of a High Drive were plated shut, the explosion which destroyed the motor would be only the start of the problem.

"Lady Mundy," said Admiral Petersen, his voice breaking despite his painstaking formality. "Fortune has not favored the Alliance of Free Stars today. I ask that you accept the surrender of the forces under my command, over."

"Admiral . . . ," said Adele. As she spoke, her wands expanded real-time imagery of the Alliance base and both battleships. "When you say 'the forces' do you include your base and any ships there, over?"

"Yes of course, Lady Mundy," Petersen said. With a flash of miserable anger he went on, "Do you think I don't see they'd be bloody slaughtered if they tried to run? We surrender, over!"

The transports that had been trying to escape were back on the ground, their thrusters cooling. When the Alliance warships fled, the unarmed vessels must have realized that their situation was hopeless. The base personnel were shooting up flares, white star clusters which burned out almost before they started drifting down in the low gravity.

"Admiral, I have no authority to do so in my own right," Adele said. "However, my commanding officer, Admiral Daniel Leary, accepts your surrender on behalf of the Republic of Cinnabar. My colleague Commander Potts will coordinate salvage and rescue operations. Chatsworth out."

She took a deep breath and sank back onto her couch. Hogg and Tovera were carrying Daniel out of the compartment on a cocooned stretcher; there was a Medicomp only fifty feet down the corridor. They hadn't been able to move him until Vesey reduced acceleration and brought the ship under control.

Adele supposed she needed to give Potts a direct order, though he would have heard the entire exchange already. She would get to that in a moment.

Adele closed her eyes. Be well, Daniel. The Republic needs you almost as much as I do.

 

"He's coming around," said Daniel in a cold female voice.

"I dunno," Daniel objected in a gruffly male voice. "He still looks pretty bad. I think it's going to be a while."

"The readouts say he's awakening," Daniel said, her enunciation clipped and precise. "Therefore he's awakening. We don't know whether or not there's been brain damage, but he will awaken."

Daniel opened his eyes and blinked. Adele and Hogg were watching down at him. They were talking, not me. Cory and an older, angry-looking woman—Senator Forbes, of course—were looking at him also, and Tovera was looking both ways down the corridor.

Cory looked worried. Why is he wearing lieutenant's pips? But then Daniel remembered he'd promoted the boy himself . . . and when was that, a long time ago?

"What happened to me?" Daniel said. He tried to lift his torso. Everything around him blurred to gray shadows against a lighter gray background.

He relaxed. He was hooked to a Medicomp, as he should have guessed; and he would not be trying to get up again for a moment or two.

"We were hit by a missile," said Adele. "A seat broke loose and the metal frame gave you a nasty crack on the head."

She paused, then said in the same flat tone, "If you hadn't recovered, I would have invented a more heroic story. Much as I dislike to lie."

By the time Daniel managed to stop laughing, it didn't hurt much at all—which was a welcome change from the agony with which he'd started. He sobered, though he was careful to leave a smile on his lips.

Adele lied expertly when carrying out her duties to the RCN and to her other master. Daniel didn't recall her ever lying about a personal matter, however. Her offer was a monument more impressive than the statue on the Pentacrest which a grieving Republic might well erect to his memory.

Aloud he said, "What damage did the missile do, besides breaking the seat?"

"Cory?" said Adele with a curt nod. She was holding her data unit, but she hadn't taken the control wands out of their conformal restraints.

"Sir!" said Cory. "We've lost everything aft of Frame 260, but the bulkhead there held. Other than that, surprisingly little damage."

He coughed. "Leaks everywhere from the whipping," he added. "Of course."

"Of course," Daniel said. He closed his eyes, but that didn't help so he reopened them.

"Even so the Millie's tighter than a lot of ships that never saw action, sir!" Cory said earnestly. "Ah, there's thirty-three casualties beyond bruises and such. Mostly they were in the aft section—"

And therefore vaporized.

"—but there were half a dozen broken bones and—"

He actually smiled as he nodded.

"—head injuries. Woetjans says she'll have the outriggers watertight in six hours so we can land. We'll ride low, but there's enough buoyancy. I estimate seventy percent of the rig is serviceable. We've got over half our High Drive motors now, and Pasternak figures he can raise that to eighty percent in a day or two when he's replaced feed lines. And the plasma thrusters, all but the aft eight, they're fine."

"You haven't asked about the battle, Leary," said Senator Forbes in a rusty voice. "Don't you care?"

Daniel looked up at her. It wasn't a silly question to a civilian, he supposed.

"Your Excellency," he said aloud. "At the point I left duty—"

Hogg guffawed. Adele and Cory smiled; hers cold, his startled. The senator didn't react.

"—I already knew that we'd won. The fact that I'm alive and the Milton is functional if not healthy means that we've won at lower cost than I'd feared. I'll get to other matters in good time, but first I had to learn our status."

He tensed to rise. That went well enough, so he began to lever himself up. Hogg put his broad hand beneath Daniel's shoulders to steady and carefully assist, though his frown showed that he didn't approve of the young master's decision.

"We're still above Cacique," Adele said. "You've only been unconscious for three hours. Captain Battenberg of the Jervis is in operational command. She, ah, was commodore of the ships that escaped from New Harmony, and she appeared to be fully competent."

"She is indeed," Daniel said. "She commanded one of the destroyer flotillas under Admiral Ozawa, I believe."

He was puzzled to detect—he thought—a defensive note in Adele's voice, as though the command was something to do with her. Since Battenberg was the senior captain, she naturally took command after the—he grinned—admiral had been incapacitated.

"Can this ship get to Cinnabar, Leary?" Forbes said. "Or do we have to transfer to another one? I want to get back with this news immediately."

"Ah, Your Excellency . . . ," Daniel said. He wondered if he were hallucinating. "We've effectively captured the Montserrat Stars. Organizing the cluster will be an enormous job."

"Yes, it bloody well will," snapped Forbes. "A job for a Senatorial Commission, whole shiploads of bureaucrats, and I shouldn't wonder if it required any number of people from Navy House and the Xenos Barracks as well. For now there's nothing here that Governor Flanagan on Cacique and Captain Battenberg can't handle as well as we could."

"As you say, Your Excellency," Daniel said. "But I would have expected that you'd want to take charge of the reorganization yourself?"

"What?" said the senator. "Bury myself here in the boondocks? I don't think so, Leary!"

She tented her hands and grinned over them. "No, no," she said. "We'll go back to Xenos, where you will make a personal report to the Senate in open session."

Forbes chuckled. Her expression was almost a parody of delight. "Let's see them keep me out of the cabinet now, when I've recovered the Montserrat Stars," she said. "At the side of the Navy's greatest hero!"

I will be buggered, Daniel thought. He didn't speak.

Adele turned to Forbes. There actually was humor in her smile, which made it all the more horrifying.

"If we're to be the supporting players in your little drama, Senator," she said, "you should learn that the correct terminology is 'the RCN,' not 'the Navy.' But regardless, you can expect us to honorably accomplish the tasks assigned by our political masters."

 

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