The airlock in the corridor just outside the Battle Direction Center clanged, drawing Adele's involuntary glance. The outer hatch had closed, sending a shock through the whole vessel but especially the BDC. Very little penetrated Adele's concentration while she was working, but the ringing crash succeeded.
She was echoing Daniel's display on a quadrant of her own. He was checking the readiness of the four cutters while running a plot of the Hermes' course overlaid on major stars of the sidereal universe. That was entirely a matter of dead reckoning: the Hermes hadn't made a star-sight in the three days since they set off from the anonymous point in space where they'd disguised the tender.
Dead reckoning or not, Adele was sure that the plot was accurate. She trusted Daniel, and if he'd had any doubts he would've checked himself in the sidereal universe. Daniel had a healthy appreciation of his skill, but he didn't make claims that the facts didn't justify.
The inner door of the airlock opened for the last six riggers who'd been out on the hull; Woetjans brought up the rear. The hatch of the BDC was locked back so that the crew on duty—Daniel, Adele, and their servants—could get out immediately when it was time to abandon ship.
Woetjans caught Adele's eye and bent the thumb and index finger of her gauntlet together in a high sign. She didn't speak and risk distracting Captain Leary. Adele nodded approvingly. Five of the spacers clanked down the corridor toward Cutter 614, but the bosun herself remained just outside the Battle Center.
"Ship, this is Six," Daniel said, his fingers hovering above his virtual keyboard. "We'll extract from the Matrix in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds from—now."
Adele returned her attention to her display, though there was nothing of interest on it at the moment except for a frontal view of Daniel's face. He looked cheerful and alert—as he was, she was sure.
She smiled wryly. Daniel was usually cheerful and he was invariably alert, even when he was so drunk that he couldn't walk without help. She herself was calm, but it was the calm of resignation. Death meant she could stop worrying, or at least she hoped it did.
"Ship, prepare for extraction," Daniel said. "Let's show 'em what it means to fight the RCN, my friends!"
Adele felt as though her body were being sectioned by a microtome and the slices were then dipped in liquid air. Transitions were always different and always unpleasant. Fortunately, she wasn't a person who expected life to be pleasant. . . .
Her display came alive as the Hermes reentered the universe of men. She'd set her equipment to register emitters across the electro-optical band, sort out stars and planets, and then to paint the tender's immediate neighborhood with what remained.
The Hermes had receivers at her bow and stern. That separation, slight compared with the distances between vessels, was sufficient for the huge astrogational computer to triangulate ranges very accurately. The result was similar to a Plot Position Indicator, but passive and biased toward communications rather than the cross-sectional area of the objects surveyed.
There were fourteen vessels ranging from forty-three thousand to three hundred and twenty-seven thousand miles of the Hermes. The nearest warship was the Z21, a hundred and three thousand miles ahead. The destroyer was on a nearly parallel course, but it and the other ships of the convoy were proceeding much more slowly than the tender.
"All ships, all ships!" Adele said. "This is the Zerbe. We've had a control failure and our bloody High Drive's full on! For the love of God, somebody match courses with us and send technicians over to help us shut down!"
She'd created a program that chopped and molded her voice into a close approximation of that of the House of Zerbe's captain. A highly skilled observer—somebody as skilled as Adele Mundy; there were a few of them, but not, she thought, in this convoy—would notice that the waves varied in square-edged increments instead of the analog curves of a human voice, but to the human ear it sounded right.
Daniel was keying in commands. In the Matrix the Hermes had maneuvered with its dorsal and ventral topsails only, but now the ship squealed and shuddered: according to plan, the full suit of sails was dropping from the yards to which they'd been furled. Normally riggers'd be out on the hull, straightening the inevitable kinked cables and wadded fabric. This time the mechanical systems had to be left to their own devices.
"All ships!" Adele said, trying to inject panic into her tone. She wasn't very good at it; to her own ears it sounded like a simpering falsetto. "Come aboard and help us for the love of God! We can't shut off the High Drive!"
Daniel had written a script for Adele with the help of Woetjans and Pasternak. They'd explained that it was nonsense; none of the ships in the convoy could possibly match velocities with the putative Zerbe, travelling at over .04 C, but it was the kind of panicked nonsense that might come out of the mouth of a tramp captain in a crisis. All the transmission was intended to do was to delay the moment at which the Alliance vessels realized they were under attack.
"Steiglitz Seven, this is Rampart One!" the Scheer signalled. The escort commander was tightening his signal with a parabolic antenna, but he was transmitting on the 10-meter short wave instead of using microwave or modulated laser which the House of Zerbe might not be able to receive. "You're on a converging course, you idiots! Bear off at once or we'll destroy you, over!"
"Mr. Pasternak," Daniel ordered, "board 614 with all your people now. Move it, Chief!"
"Aye aye, Six," the Chief Engineer mumbled. He and two senior technicians were alone in the Power Room; the remainder of his personnel were aboard the three cutters already closed up and awaiting launch.
Adele's display was alive with signals collected by her sensitive equipment. Every electrical motor was a radio-frequency transmitter when in use. Adele had accumulated templates for thousands of the involuntary signals that starships broadcast: pumps feeding reaction mass, fans circulating air through the compartments, and—
"Daniel, the Scheer's turrets are rotating!" Adele said, forgetting RCN protocol in her haste to relay the warning that'd flashed in red block letters at the bottom of her screen.
Even as she spoke, she saw that Daniel had the image of each Alliance warship inset into his display; that of the Scheer was suddenly framed with a white border. The Hermes' optics were good enough at the present ranges to provide visual confirmation of what Adele had deduced from the drive motors: the turrets holding the heavy cruiser's secondary armament were rotating to bring their pairs of plasma cannon to bear on the Hermes. She was of the Admiral Class with four 20-cm, rather than a heavy cruiser's normal eight 15-cm, weapons.
The Alliance Commodore still didn't realize that the "House of Zerbe" was actually an RCN vessel in disguise. He was nonetheless willing to destroy her rather than risk his own ship to the incompetence of the tramp's crew.
"Cutters away!" Daniel said. He shifted his cursor to a prepared sidebar and made three forceful keystrokes.
The davits holding 610, 612, and 613 were already extended and unlocked. Each time Daniel's paired fingers stabbed down, electromagnets flung one of the cutters away from the Hermes. The thin fabric wrapping the tender's waist bulged upward, then shredded on the small external image Adele kept at the top of her display.
The Scheer's powerful plasma cannon fired, the pair in the dorsal turret near the cruiser's bow followed a moment later by the ventral turret offset toward the stern. The weapons were primarily intended to deflect incoming missiles, but they could rip away any vessel's rigging and blast open a cutter's thin hull plates.
The Hermes staggered like a man hit by a succession of medicine balls: all four jets of focused ions expended themselves among the tender's spread sails, vaporizing the filmy material into secondary shockwaves. One of the masts must've taken a direct impact also: the steel fireball rang against the hull like the gates of Hell slamming.
Sun began to fire the pair of 4-inch cannon in the Hermes' nose at maximum rate; they shook the tender as they channeled minute thermonuclear explosions. The light guns packed only a fraction of the energy of the cruiser's battery, but at least they might disconcert the Alliance captain downrange.
"Rampart One, cease fire!" Adele said. She was ad-libbing now, but the change seemed called for. "You're shooting at us, you Fleet baboons! Cease fire!"
Daniel made a series of tiny adjustments at his console. Adele felt the direction of thrust—and apparent gravity—shift minusculely.
"Ship, this is Six!" he said as he rose from his console. "All personnel board Cutter 614 soonest. Abandon the Hermes now!"
Adele stood. She almost fell back when another salvo of plasma bolts struck the tender, but Tovera had her right arm and Hogg took her left. With Adele between them they rushed to the corridor where Woetjans snatched her like a sack of grain.
The bosun carried Adele toward the open hatch to Cutter 614 at a dead run. Daniel brought up the rear. Sun, previously alone on the bridge at the gunnery console, was sprinting down the corridor in the other direction.
Adele clasped her personal data unit in both hands. She was wearing an air suit and didn't want to face whatever was coming next without a weapon.
Information was Adele Mundy's weapon of choice.
Daniel paused short of 614's entry. He planned to let Sun, running full tilt but still two strides away, board first. Daniel was the Hermes's captain, after all, and he was abandoning her if not the battle.
Barnes and Dasi waited in the airlock, probably under Woetjans' orders. They grabbed Daniel by the elbows and jerked him aboard the cutter. They passed him to Hergenshied, who passed him to Claud, who thumped Daniel down in the command console. His boots hadn't touched 614's deck until that moment.
They're a well-trained crew, Daniel thought as he adjusted the display to his liking. But they obviously aren't robots who've lost their sense of initiative. . . .
Sun bolted into the cabin and clawed his way to the gunnery board; Barnes cycled the airlock's outer hatch closed behind him. "All present, sir!" Dasi cried. "Cutter 614 is ready to lift!"
The icons for the three High Drive motors were green. So were those for the four plasma thrusters, but Daniel'd decided—with a degree of regret—not to use both systems though he was trying to get as much distance as possible from the tender. They'd almost double the cutter's acceleration, but 614 was going to be very bloody short of reaction mass as it was. The thrusters were only fractionally efficient compared to the High Drive's matter/anti-matter annihilation.
The cruiser's third salvo crashed into the Hermes. Previous plasma bolts had burned away most of the rigging, so three of these four hit the tender's hull. At least one ruptured the plating, adding the softer secondary explosion of white-hot metal recombining with the air in the vessel's interior to the clang of ions vaporizing steel.
"614 prepare to launch!" Daniel said as fingers jabbed the keyboard. "Launching!"
The electromagnets kicked Cutter 614 out from the tender. Daniel had planned this, the riskiest portion of the attack, with the detail of a ballet choreographer. The Hermes was positioned to put 614 on the side opposite the Alliance cruiser; that way the tender's mass would continue to shield them for some while after they'd launched.
Things go wrong. The bolt that hit the hull had started the Hermes rotating on her axis an instant before the cutter separated. 614 slid out of the tender's shadow almost instantly.
You play the hand you're dealt. Daniel adjusted the angle on his High Drive motors from what he'd planned, then hit ignition. Normally he'd have balanced the motors at low output; no two provided quite the same thrust at the same nominal setting. This time he immediately rolled the throttles up from the initial 20 percent to Maximum Continuous Output. The cutter began a slow corkscrew.
That'd provide at least a slight problem for the Scheer's gunners if they shifted their fire from the tender to the cutter. Daniel didn't think they'd do that—they couldn't yet be sure what was happening—but he needed to help his luck any way he could.
So far the cruiser's fire had been extremely accurate. That was good, because it meant that at least Daniel didn't have to worry about Cutter 614 running into a 20-cm bolt by accident. Nobody aboard the cutter would know if that did happen, of course.
Adele was handling communications. She'd blocked the chatter from the other three cutters, but text at the bottom of Daniel's display gave the gist of the signals among the Alliance vessels. The Commodore's attempts to keep control were being swamped in panicked questions from the transports.
Sun had set the guns of the Hermes to fire at their maximum rate as they tracked the nearer of the Alliance destroyers, the Z21. At this range the light charges could only damage sails and rigging. That wouldn't degrade the destroyer's ability to fight and maneuver in sidereal space, but it'd help the cutters considerably if the Z21 tried to pursue them into the Matrix. The destroyer'd be sluggish until the damage was repaired, and her captain'd have to recalculate his values every time she slipped from one bubble universe to the next.
612 rippled four rockets at the Bird of Pleasaunce, the big freighter carrying most of the mines that were intended to form a Planetary Defense Array above Yang. Daniel'd made all the target assignments himself to prevent all three cutter commanders from concentrating on the same ships and leaving the bulk of the convoy to sail on unhindered.
He hadn't had time to plot detailed attack plans, however; that was up to the midshipmen themselves. Vesey was an excellent officer, but Daniel noted without surprise that it was Dorst who was first to engage. His 612 made a perfect, zero-deflection attack and passed on to the next target.
There were brighter officers than Dorst, but Daniel had met very few in the RCN with a surer instinct for an opponent's jugular. Dorst would be an ornament to the service for as long as he managed to survive.
Which might be at least a few years. Daniel himself wasn't dead yet, after all.
Daniel touched his controls, recalculating 614's course on the fly because the screwed-up launch had thrown his plans out the window. There was bound to be some variation between actual and predicted data, but the tender's spin and the corkscrew it'd induced in the cutter's course were beyond the computer's ability to adjust optimally for an attack.
Z21 launched four missiles. The projectiles were mere flickerings, but the puffs of superheated steam which expelled them from the destroyer's launching tubes waved like flags in the light of the distant sun. For a moment Daniel thought they were aimed at 614, but the dashed orange lines of the course extrapolations on his display showed beyond question that the salvo was meant for the Hermes.
Good God, how could they have been so stupid? But as the thought crossed Daniel's mind and his lips spread in a delighted grin, he knew the answer: the tender's guns were punishing the Z21, so the Alliance captain lashed out with his full force to swat the gadfly. The consequences of what he'd just done might not occur to him for the better part of a minute.
Blantyre had brought 610 within 3,000 miles of the transport Delta Conveyor with 600 Alliance troops aboard, part of the planned garrison for the base on Big Florida Island. Her gunner, a former Bridgie named Rosinant, launched two rockets, then two more. The first pair missed ahead of the target, while the follow-ups passed behind it.
The transport took no evasive action. Daniel wasn't sure that its captain had even grasped that his vessel was being shot at.
Sun turned from his gunnery display and screamed, "Sir, I've got a target! Can I hit them, sir?"
The Alliance convoy was a globe as loose as the separation between orbiting electrons. Daniel was threading through the center of the formation, striking for the ships on the other side. Chance had brought 614 within two thousand miles of the Eliza Soane. The mixed-use transport was a sitting duck for a gunner as skilled as Sun, but—
"Negative, Sun!" Daniel said, shouting over the keening of the High Drive. "She's not ours, I gave her to Vesey. Save your—"
Three rockets burst on the Eliza Soane's hull and rigging. An antenna in the A ring shattered. The upper two-thirds with the yards, sails and stays, carried backward at the transport's 1 g acceleration. It broke off three more masts before the whole tangle spun wobblingly astern.
The hull had ruptured also. Not seriously, Daniel assumed: rocket warheads weren't large enough to do real harm to a 10,000-tonne transport. Air escaped in another sunlit banner, though. That was damage which the inexperienced civilian crew would have to repair before they even thought of replacing the shredded sails. The Eliza Soane wasn't going anywhere for a considerable length of time.
"Target, Mr. Sun!" Daniel said, highlighting the Z17 on his screen and echoing it on the gunner's. "Two rounds only!"
The destroyer was accelerating hard to put herself between 614 and the three outermost transports. She was still 103 thousand miles distant, but Daniel was sure she'd have been firing her 13-cm guns if the Eliza Soane hadn't been nearly in line with the cutter.
614 hummed as the basket of rockets on its dorsal spine gimballed around. The projectiles were ballistic. They couldn't course correct after they'd been launched, but neither could they be jammed. Sun determined his line, tapped his firing key, and then tapped it again.
When the second rocket launched, slapping the hull with its exhaust, Daniel shut down 614's High Drive. If the destroyer's gunner was calculating his lead based on his target's constant acceleration, the change would throw his aim off by a little.
Loose objects floated away within 614's cabin—a wrench that hadn't been locked down, a sub-machine gun which shouldn't have been brought aboard in the first place; grit and trash hidden in places inaccessible under normal gravity. The spacers knew to strap themselves in, but Daniel hadn't been sure Adele would remember.
Maybe she hadn't, but somebody'd latched her harness. Her wands continued to twitch as she worked, oblivious of what was going on around her.
After three calculated seconds, Daniel brought his thrust up to 80 percent, 2.6 gravities. He balanced the motors' output now, but the cutter's previous oscillation meant that because of the brief shutdown their present impulse was at a five degree vector to the original course. Again it wasn't much, but a trivial change multiplied by the distances of a space battle could be the margin between life and death.
The image of the tramp freighter Arkadiy 412 sparkled. A moment later several antennas went by the board. Rosinant had redeemed himself, hitting his second target with at least three of his four-rocket salvo.
Blantyre was braking Cutter 610 hard. The flotilla'd attacked with the enormous velocity with which the Hermes had returned to sidereal space. That made it possible for the cutters to penetrate to rocket range before the escort could react, but it made the attacks themselves difficult. Blantyre knew Rosinant was inexperienced, so she was coming as close as possible to her assigned targets and trying to slow down besides. The tactics were dangerous but in the best tradition of the RCN.
Sun launched two rockets at the Belsen Bull. The transport was one of 614's targets, but she was a good 5,000 miles distant. Daniel frowned, because he'd expected his gunner to wait for a closer approach.
Both 6-inch rockets burst on the transport's starboard outrigger, blowing it apart and excising three of the five High Drive motors on that side. The Belsen Bull began to tumble. Her captain shut off the asymmetric thrust as quickly as he could, but it'd take anywhere from minutes to an hour to correct the transport's present spin. The blasts'd shredded the starboard and ventral topsails of rings C and D besides. Fragments had probably cut the maincourses to pieces also, though the damage wasn't visible because they were furled to the yards.
Sun had his job under control. Daniel cut thrust momentarily, hearing the basket of rockets whine as it compensated to hold its target despite the change in acceleration. Maybe it would—
The hair on the backs of Daniel's arms and neck lifted. His console dissolved in white fuzz, and a bank of strip lights on the ceiling burned out. Images began to re-coalesce almost instantly, but it was ten long seconds before Daniel could be sure there hadn't been permanent damage to either the display or the computer itself.
A salvo from Z21 had missed 614 by a hair's breadth. The minute particles of matter across eighty thousand miles of interplanetary space were sufficient to fringe the originally compact plasma bolts with a haze of ions. This penumbra bathed the cutter, doing only minor damage but warning all the veterans that Death's thumb was poised above them.
Dorst brought 612 so close to the Ina Walton, another troop transport, that Daniel thought they were going to collide. The Alliance vessel was trying to transition back into the Matrix where it'd be safe from attack. It was almost successful, but two rockets burst against its hull an instant before the remainder of the salvo passed through the portion of sidereal space which the vessel had previously occupied.
Sun rippled four rockets in the close sequence, the technique he preferred over launching pairs simultaneously from opposite sides of the basket. The exhaust of one rocket could interfere with the flight of a later one if they were too close together, but the firing sequence had to be kept short to group the salvo.
Daniel didn't know what Sun's target was—probably the Delta Conveyor, some 8,000 miles distant, but possibly the United Brotherhood of Crecy. The latter was much farther away but proceeding at only a slight angle to the cutter. A target's low relative motion made the attacker's job much easier.
Daniel didn't have time to check what his gunner was doing because Cutter 614 was now driving away from the Z21 at a three-degree angle. The cutter's speed was .04 C, astoundingly fast for a vessel in normal space, but bolts would rip from the destroyer's 13-cm guns at precisely light speed.
At the present range, a single hit would probably destroy the cutter. Two certainly would, and the Z21 wouldn't stop firing until its target was a ball of gas.
The crew was shouting with excitement as they watched the image Adele must be projecting for them. Daniel knew what it was, but that wouldn't help either. Though if his people died instantly while they were capering in triumph—well, there were worse things.
Daniel initiated the sequence he'd hoped wouldn't be necessary. Needs must when the Devil drives. . . .
Cutter 614 gave a violent lurch.