"Rampart Two, this is Rampart One," said Adele, affecting the nasal Blythe accent of the Scheer's signals officer. She was using a modulated laser communicator and the Fleet code which had been current when the Alliance convoy left Pleasaunce. "The vessel claiming to be the Delta Conveyor is the Cinnabar command unit, directing attacks on the convoy. Destroy the Delta Conveyor at once! Repeat, destroy the Delta Conveyor! Out."
She didn't expect her misdirection to have any effect, but it'd seemed to her to be worth a try. She'd projected a holographic echo of the command display in the center of the cabin for the off-duty crewmen to watch without locking their visors down, but she wanted to be of some active help.
Though the signals intelligence Adele was gathering would be very useful in an after-action report, it didn't have tactical importance. She'd only distract Daniel if she told him—for example—that the freighter Bloemfontein had lost a fourth antenna, Dorsal D, whose stays had to be severed unnoticed when 613's rockets destroyed Starboard A, B and C.
Although Cutter 614 was in the middle of a battle, most of her crewmen had nothing but their fears to occupy them. Riggers made up the majority of a cutter's crew, and 614's antennas were still retracted and folded against the hull as they had been when stowed alongside the tender.
"Rampart Two, destroy the Delta Conveyor!" Adele repeated. She was trying to be forceful but she was afraid she sounded mostly peevish. She couldn't seem to take this seriously. To her lower brain if not her intellect, this was a game of phosphor dots twisting in the air rather than a real battle.
The imagery which she'd copied from Daniel's console to the cabin as entertainment for the crew and to her own display as background was a Plot Position Indicator, not a specialized attack board such as Sun was using. The spacers were familiar with the PPI, and by now so was Adele herself.
The courses of RCN vessels were blue lines racing across the display; the projected continuations of those courses—assuming the degree and direction of their acceleration remained the same—were purple. Alliance vessels were red lines which ate away their pink continuations much more gradually than the Hermes and her flotilla did. Each course had a three-digit descriptor at the point the ship itself would be, an infinitesimally small dot at the present scale.
Alliance missiles were orange lines, their projections dashed. There were no RCN missiles, but Daniel had set the display to show the cutters' rockets as pulsing white sparks. 610, Blantyre's cutter, passed close ahead of hor, the Alliance freighter Hornchurch, with a flurry of white. Three sparks continued on into the void, but the thin white cross now overlaying hor indicated that a rocket had gotten home.
All three escort vessels were launching missiles, but even Adele could see that the only ones likely to hit their target were the four the Z21 had aimed at the Hermes early in the action. The cutters' high initial velocity meant that even a missile's acceleration wasn't enough to overhaul its target quickly. Besides, the cutters were maneuvering violently in order to attack the transports and freighters. That had the unintended benefit of making their courses impossible to predict.
The purple continuation of Cutter 610's course faded and disappeared. Adele frowned, then realized that Blantyre had expended her rockets and transitioned into the Matrix in accordance with Daniel's orders. She and her crew had gotten away at least for now, though Adele knew there was a risk that the escort vessels would follow and destroy the cutters when lack of air forced them to return to sidereal space.
The blue thread of Dorst's 612 crossed that of the freighter Spirit of Quincy. The ships must've nearly collided, because the descriptors 612 and spi suddenly offset on the display to avoid overwriting one another. The cutter's salvo was only a blink on the screen, too brief for Adele's eye to catch, but the thick cross that marked the Quincy showed that several rockets had hit.
612 drew away from the damaged freighter, describing a curve that diverged increasingly from her predicted course as Dorst vectored thrust to avoid the Scheer nearly dead ahead. 612 must've fired all his rockets, so he too would be—
The cutter vanished abruptly. Adele frowned. How had Dorst entered the Matrix so quickly? She knew from experience that even a small vessel in the hands of an expert like Daniel took fifteen to thirty seconds to make the transition.
"Oh bloody hell, the cruiser nailed them," Timmons said hoarsely. "Oh, bloody Hell, my cousin was on 612."
"Oh lookit lookit lookit!" Barnes shouted in delight. "The Hermes, lookit!"
Adele looked, but all she saw was that Z21's missiles were about to hit the tender. They'd left nobody aboard the Hermes, so she didn't see that it mattered. Besides, the crew was cheering instead of crying out in horror and concern.
Cutter 614 lurched violently. Adele's left hand clamped the data unit to her lap. Paired electromagnets, on the underside of the unit and woven into her uniform trousers, should hold it in place while it was live, but reflex overruled intellect.
Have we hit—
There was a world-splitting crash. Everything went white, then black.
Daniel pounded the three-stroke sequence that dumped two of 614's four tanks of reaction mass. Full tanks weighed nearly half of what the hull and rigging did, so the cutter had a pressurized air ejection system to void any or all the tanks in case it was necessary to land or dock with only partial thrust for braking.
Cutter 614's need was much more immediate than that. An instant after tons of water spewed out behind the vessel in a freezing fog, a salvo from Z21's plasma cannon lit it in a coruscating fireball.
Dumping reaction mass was a good trick, but it would only work against a plasma weapon directly in line with the ejection port. Also, it'd only work once. As it was, 614 would be dangerously short of reaction mass when it next tried to land. It might be possible to transfer water from a friendly vessel, but first things first.
None of the focused ions had struck the cutter directly, but the interior lighting went out and two of the High Drive motors stalled. Because the third motor continued to run at full output, the cutter fell into a tumbling barrel roll.
Daniel's console went monochrome but didn't shut down. After a few nervous heartbeats, the moan from the unit's interior built back up till the whine was inaudible and color returned to the display. The cabin lights were still off, but fluorescent strips outlined the bulkheads and the airlock.
"Prepare for transition!" Daniel said, trying to calculate potentials while the cutter's corkscrew motion shoved him toward the port bulkhead. His ears rang with the crash of the plasma bolts; he wouldn't have been sure he was speaking except for feeling his lips move. "Beginning transition now!"
Z21's missiles reached the Hermes. They'd just burned out and were beginning to separate into three segments apiece, increasing the volume they'd sweep as they coasted onward at .06 C.
Multi-ton fragments tore through the tender, vaporizing the steel hull plates. They bloomed as expanding shockwaves, tearing apart the larger portion of the ship that hadn't been in the projectiles' direct path. In a fraction of a second what had been a 3,000-ton warship became a cloud of gas and debris, still continuing on its original course.
Daniel had aimed the Hermes toward the Scheer as his last action before abandoning the ship. He'd known the Alliance cruiser would have plenty of time to maneuver out of the tender's path, but—like the pair of rockets fired at the hopelessly distant Z17—it'd give the Alliance captain something to think about besides swatting the cutters into oblivion.
Z21's ill-considered missiles converted the Hermes from an irritation for the Scheer into a catastrophe. The tender's fiery remains expanded as they sped onward, a ball of blazing gas concealing thousands of massive fragments. It'd become a comet composed largely of steel instead of ice and gravel.
The Scheer's captain had tried to accelerate out of the Hermes' path when he realized what was about to happen. The pale flames of the cruiser's plasma thrusters flared alongside the diamond-hard actinics of the High Drive's anti-matter conversion. An antenna swayed and snapped, overweighted by the topsail yard that there hadn't been time to lower.
It was almost enough.
Almost. The blazing ruin swept across the stern of the Scheer, tearing off masts, rigging, and the portions of the outriggers that were in its path. The ventral 20-cm turret exploded in a spike of white light like the dwarf star glowing at the heart of a supernova. Either the guns had fired while the haze of vaporized metal filled the bores, or the cloud itself had detonated the chambered rounds.
Vesey had managed to shift Cutter 613 into the Matrix. Her third attack had brought her dangerously close to Z17, but she'd used the bulk of the freighter Hornchurch to shield them from the destroyer's guns. She was a skillful officer: a better astrogator than most officers twenty years her senior and a capable tactician. Vesey would never have flair—that wasn't something you could learn—but she was efficient, dependable as the sunrise, and as thoughtfully brave as anyone Daniel had met.
There're different kinds of courage. Adele, though it pained Daniel to see it in a friend, would just as soon be dead. She didn't put the same weight on danger that most people did.
Daniel did his duty first while his second concern was for his subordinates, whether they were the spacers in his crew or retainers of the Learys of Bantry. There wasn't room in his mental universe to worry about personal safety.
But Vesey was different. She hated violence; feared it, perhaps. Yet she used violence because it was a necessary part of her duty, and she faced it without flinching or hesitation.
Dorst, the late Ensign Dorst, had been a lot like Daniel. Cutter 612 had hit all three of its targets because Dorst had taken it in so close that even his inexperienced gunner couldn't miss. He was brave because a man—in Dorst's definition—is brave, and it'd never crossed Dorst's mind to be anything but a man. If he'd had time to think in the instant the bolts hit 612, it was with a sense of satisfaction at the memory of antennas collapsing in the blast of his rockets, leaving crippled hulks that were no longer a danger to Cinnabar.
Daniel knew that, as sure as he knew the joy he'd felt when he saw the abandoned Hermes reduce the Scheer to a ruin that'd require months in dock to repair. He, Lieutenant Daniel Leary, had planned that result though he hadn't dreamed that he'd succeed.
Daniel regretted Dorst's death, for the RCN's sake and especially for the sake of Midshipman Vesey. Though she'd probably seen 612 destroyed, the reality wouldn't have sunk in yet. Daniel wasn't sure how she would react when it did. The sleet of ions that vaporized Dorst might well have cost the RCN two promising young officers instead of just one.
That was a problem for the future, and at the moment it was less than certain that anybody aboard 614 had a future. The Scheer was no longer a threat, but the cutter'd spun beyond the fog of reaction mass which still sparkled with the ions it'd absorbed. Another salvo from the Z21 would finish the job easily, and 13-cm guns were powerful enough that Z17 could cripple the cutter despite the extreme range.
The destroyers salvoed so closely together that their four turrets might've been on the same firing circuit. The reaction mass, by now a thin haze spreading over more than a cubic mile, fluoresced in streaks under the lash of multiple plasma bolts.
The Alliance vessels had mistaken the tumbling cutter for a piece of debris. They were shooting instead at the mass of charged water because it gave a much brighter signal. They needed an expert like Adele to sort targets for them. . . .
"Sir, I've got four rockets left!" Sun said, screaming to Daniel over the motor's high-pitched burr. Adele must be blocking intercom traffic, knowing that Daniel had his hands full. And knowing Adele, she was probably considering sticking a gun in Sun's face to prevent him from getting past her barriers with voice alone.
"Save them!" Daniel shouted back. "We'll need 'em later!"
And as he spoke, his skin crawled: Cutter 614 was completing her transition into the temporary safety of the Matrix.
Temporary, because the job wasn't done yet. They'd be back.
Dorst would've understood.