Daniel kept a real-time exterior panorama running at the top of his display as he readied the Princess Cecile for liftoff. It didn't seem to him that the sky was brighter than it'd been a few minutes before, but now the water of the harbor shimmered in pale reflection.
"Six, this is Three," announced Pasternak on the command channel. "We're ready to light thrusters, over."
Daniel glanced at his holographic display. The Power Room readouts and the PPI shared the body of the tank, with an astrogational screen scrunched up below. He'd expand that last as soon as they made orbit and it had immediate bearing on his actions.
He keyed a two-way link, beyond the ability of anybody else on the Sissie to hear, and said, "Adele, when can we lift?"
"In two minutes, fifty . . . three seconds, Daniel," Adele said calmly. "After that we have a window of ninety-two minutes if you wish to wait."
"Roger," Daniel said, realizing that she wasn't going to close her transmission. "Thank you, Adele. Break, Pasternak? You can start lighting them in thirty seconds, over."
"Roger, Three out," muttered Pasternak as he broke the connection.
On the PPI the destroyers Echo and Encounter patrolled at the edge of the planetary defense array. They couldn't stop a major attack, but they kept the Alliance minesweepers at a distance from the array. The sweepers had the laborious task of slinging metallic junk toward the nuclear mines using electromagnetic charges; generally the projectors'd been modified from automatic impellers. Eventually a pellet would hit and neutralize the target; then the clearance vessel moved on to the next.
It was a dangerous job, too. Mines could be set at greater than the usual sensitivity so that they'd go off when a target was as much as a hundred thousand miles away. Though focused, the jet of X-rays wouldn't be dangerous even to a corvette at that range, but a mine-clearance vessel, basically a lifeboat, would crumple into lifeless, drifting slag.
Thrusters One and Eight lighted, licking glittering plumes of steam from the harbor. The Governor's Residence wasn't directly visible from the Sissie's berth, but Daniel wondered whether Admiral James was watching remote imagery of the liftoff. No reason he should, of course . . . .
Daniel didn't know how Adele'd determined when the Princess Cecile should lift, but he assumed she'd based the determination on enemy commo traffic. The Alliance patrolled in the vicinity of Diamondia on a regular basis. Usually that involved a squadron of four cruisers and accompanying destroyers passing close to the minefield to chase any RCN ships in orbit back to harbor.
Two and Seven lighted. Though their nozzles were flared, the iridescent blooms beating the harbor set the corvette to rocking.
Occasionally Alliance capital ships would join the sweep in hopes that Admiral James would sally expecting cruisers and face battleships instead. Guphill's forces played it too safe to fool anybody, though. The battleships and battlecruisers doubled the usual hundred and fifty-thousand kilometer safety cordon out from the minefield that their lighter vessels maintained.
Admiral James wasn't likely to come up to fight anyway, however much he and his spacers wished to. The attrition of frequent skirmishes between the screening forces would leave James without the missiles necessary to fight the fleet action that'd certainly come.
Thrusters Three and Four lighted. The Power Room display told Daniel what was happening, but he thought he could tell by the vibration alone. Each of the pumps feeding reaction mass to the thrusters had a slightly different rhythm. The Princess Cecile was as much part of Daniel Leary as his liver was.
Daniel expanded the astrogation display briefly. It was only seven days by Navy House charts from Diamondia to Pelosi, the capital of the Independent Republic of Bagaria; he thought that with him conning the Sissie they could shave a day off that.
It was only seven days from Diamondia to Pleasaunce as well. The Jewel System was at a node between bubble universes. Voyages staging through it were considerably shorter than other routes between many common destinations—most of which were in Alliance territory. The presence of Diamondia, a world providing a first-class harbor and amenities to travellers, in Cinnabar hands was a both a practical obstacle and a gross insult to Guarantor Porra and his government.
Its main importance to Cinnabar was as a point from which to attack the Alliance. From the RCN's viewpoint that was extremely important, but not so critical that additional resources could be diverted from sectors where the Republic's survival was threatened.
"Six, this is Three," Pasternak reported. "All thrusters are lighted and operating within parameters. Operating at high efficiency if I may say so, out."
"Roger, Three," Daniel said. "Break, Signals, are we cleared for liftoff, over?"
"Princess Cecile, this is Delacroix Control," said the same female voice which'd cleared them in. Had Adele held the transmission or was the timing just fortunate? "You are cleared for liftoff, over."
"Roger, Delacroix Control," said Daniel. "Sissie out. Break, Ship, prepare to lift in thirty, say again three-zero seconds. Six out."
He ran up the throttles, feeding reaction mass to the thrusters. For the moment he didn't sphincter down the nozzle petals for maximum efficiency.
He grinned and continued on the general push, "Ship, this is Six. I don't know what we're going to find in the Bagarian Cluster, but I do know anybody with ideas we don't go along with is going to find a lot more than they expected! Up Cinnabar!"
Responding cheers rang a descant to the roar of the Sissie lifting from the surface of another planet.
Above Diamondia
The plasma thrusters shut off and Adele's body lifted against the restraints. The console's upholstery expanded now that acceleration didn't ram her body into it. A moment later the High Drive coughed into life, returning the Sissies to the equivalent of normal gravity.
"Commander Leary always allows a slight gap when he switches propulsion modes, Cazelet," Adele said on the link she'd set up with the man at the jumpseat on the rear of her console. "That way a late surge from the one he's shutting down doesn't double the strain on the ship needlessly."
She winced as she heard herself. Adele knew she had a tendency to be pedantic, but this was absurd. And why was she bragging about her knowledge of shipboard life to this boy?
He wasn't really a boy. At 24, Cazelet was older than Daniel had been when they met on Kostroma.
"I'd wondered," Cazelet said, "because Captain Leary is clearly skillful enough to match the commands more closely than he chose to do. I hadn't thought about the possibility of mechanical failure."
He cleared his throat. Adele had a miniature of Cazelet's face on the bottom of her display; his brow furrowed as his mind worked with a question.
"Ah, Lady Mundy, I don't mean to be forward . . . ," he said. "But I'd be much more comfortable if you called me Rene. It wouldn't be a breach of naval discipline because I'm not a member of the RCN. Ah . . . . But of course whatever you prefer is fine with me. Over."
Adele started to speak, then closed her mouth. She didn't know how she felt about the request.
She snorted. She'd noticed that lawyers, when asked questions which didn't have clear answers, always said, "No." That gave her a course of action in her own similar circumstances.
"All right, Rene," she said. "Now that the thrusters aren't spreading static across the whole RF spectrum, I'll show you how to identify the ships in the Alliance squadron."
She pursed her lips. "And you'd best call me Mundy," she added. "I'm not Lady Mundy in my own mind—or many other people's, I'm confident. Ah, or Adele, I suppose. Though generally only Daniel calls me that. In private."
"Thank you," Cazelet said. "Ah, since we're on a private channel—thank you, Adele."
"Yes," said Adele, working to keep her mind as neutral as the syllable. "I'm giving you control of the display, now."
She didn't, of course; she'd merely enabled the Training facility to allow Rene temporary access until she made an input herself. The jumpseat positions were intended to train ordinary spacers striking for a specialist rating and, secondarily, as backup in case something happened to the assigned officer. Ordinarily the rear controls were locked whenever the console proper was occupied.
To Adele's surprise, the first thing Rene did was call up the existing Order of Battle for the Alliance squadron, the data gathered by Naval Intelligence officers on Admiral James' staff. Face blank, she said, "I suspect that this was gathered mostly through visual identifications. We'll cross-check it using signals intelligence. I believe signals provide more accurate data than optical recognition, but I recognize that there can be a difference of opinion on the matter."
Adele cleared her throat. They couldn't look at one another directly through the shimmering holographic display, but she'd set a real-time image of Rene's face on her screen—and he'd done the same with hers. She'd expected the boy to interrupt with questions—nervous or pushy, unwelcome in either instance. He said nothing, merely waiting expectantly.
Ordinarily Tovera'd be in the jumpseat, just as Daniel's servant Hogg sat on his. Today she sat behind Cory at the navigation console, looking across the compartment at Adele. Her face had no more expression than the muzzle of a gun has.
"First," said Adele, "lock onto the nearest Alliance communications transponder."
The distance between Diamondia and the Alliance base was nearly 800 million miles, and Z3 would sometimes be on the other side of Zmargadine from ships that needed to communicate with their headquarters. Admiral Guphill had deployed a constellation of communications transceivers so that his forces could communicate in the event the RCN force tried to cut off a separated element.
Adele expected Rene to ask where to start, but he immediately went to work on his own. Instead of going to a sector which he'd memorized against need and setting the corvette's laser communicator to seek—which is what Adele herself would've done—he went into the database, found the listing of orbits, and entered the nearest manually.
It was more of a textbook solution than Adele's was, but it was adequately quick. It could've been duplicated by anybody aboard the Sissie—if someone had told them what to do.
Rene locked one of the laser heads on the satellite; it'd remain connected despite the motion of both corvette and satellite. If the head's own line of sight to the target were blocked, it'd hand off to another head. "Ready, Adele," he said.
"All right, Cazelet," Adele said. "Enter the satellite by emulating an Alliance ship asking for an automated communications check."
"Yes, mistress," he said. She was subconsciously aware of the buzz of the High Drive and the chatter on intra-ship communications channels—all of which passed through her station. The corvette was building velocity in sidereal space before inserting into the Matrix. "I'll be entering as the Stein."
"Go ahead," said Adele. Cazelet hadn't asked permission, but he'd given her the opportunity to overrule him if she chose. Nor had he asked her for the cruiser's coded handshake: he'd apparently captured it himself from the BDC when the Stein signalled that she was under attack by an RCN corvette. Mistress Boileau must be very proud of her grandson.
"Here are the protocols we'll use when we get in," Adele said, opening one of her own files for Cazelet and then exiting from the console again. "We'll be looking for a ship that didn't sign out properly so that we can use its identity to enter the restricted files."
They had a wait of seven minutes for query and response. The satellite was one of a tiara of five in orbit between Diamondia and the third planet, Samphire, an airless lump of blue-gray rock which didn't have a metallic core. It many respects it would've made a better base than Z3, but reaction mass would've had to come from Zmargadine regardless. Guphill had chosen to consolidate on Z3, a cold, shifting Hell that made the Jewel System a hardship posting for the Alliance personnel.
The handshake came back. The connection with the satellite was open but the Princess Cecile in her own guise couldn't go any farther with the operation.
"The Stein herself didn't sign out, mistress!" Cazelet said. "I'm entering the satellite's data banks. Why, we could enter the headquarters system from here! This is amazing!"
"If we had enough time, I'd do just that," Adele said with a wry smile. "We'll be inserting in a few minutes, though. Signals to and from Z3 would take several hours."
Cazelet was navigating the satellite's internal memory, using the codes Adele had supplied. The second part of the communications handshake required randomly variable code sets which synched perfectly. Without capturing a vessel equipped with the code generator, it was impossible to duplicate them.
When a ship opened a connection and didn't close it properly, however, that connection remained open. The Stein had inserted into the Matrix without signing out. That'd happened in the heat of battle, but six other connections were open, including that of Guphill's flagship, the Pleasaunce.
Most people were sloppy. Adele supposed she should feel good about that, given that in the present case the people involved were enemies whom it was the RCN's job to destroy. She found that evidence of human failure made her a little more sour than she already was, though. Oh, well.
The Alliance protocols Cazelet was using to open directories in the satellite's data bank were part of the kit which Adele had received from Mistress Sand. She'd initially wondered why they weren't more generally available to the RCN, but a little experience had taught her that most officers wouldn't have been able to use them even if they'd been trained by an expert like Adele herself.
Whereas Rene Cazelet—given access but without training—was sorting and copying Alliance files with bright enthusiasm. "Oh, mistress, this is amazing!" he said. "They're all here, and look! The second battlecruiser isn't the Mackensen as our files say, it's the Stosch!"
"That's correct," Adele said, "but we're not going to inform Diamondia of that."
"We're not?" Cazelet said, raising his eyes in puzzlement. He was trying to see through the display instead of looking at her image on the display. "Why, mistress? Shouldn't they correct their files?"
"Yes," said Adele, "in theory; but the information doesn't have tactical significance because the two ships are of equivalent force. Whereas if we transmit it back to Diamondia Control, the enemy may intercept the message and realize that we've entered their communications system. That could have tactical significance."
"Oh," said Cazelet. "Yes, of course. I'm sorry, I should've seen that."
"You may reasonably think that the Alliance forces in the Jewel System are barely competent to speak to one another, let alone intercept our communications," Adele went on with a hard smile. "But because we know our business, we won't take a chance that they don't have anybody who does."
"But this is just wonderful!" Cazelet said, bubbling again. "Mistress, you're a genius, just as Granna says!"
"You did the work, Rene," Adele said.
She might've said something further, but Daniel's voice announced, "Ship, this is Six. We will insert into the Matrix in thirty, that's three-zero, seconds. Next stop, Pelosi, shipmates!"
It was probably as well that Adele had been interrupted. Cazelet's enthusiasm was an entirely good thing, and he deserved to be pleased after such an impressive first essay into signals intelligence.
But even though Adele wasn't a commissioned officer, she'd spent enough time in the RCN to understand what the list they'd just called up meant: two battleships, two battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, six destroyers and six sloops.
It meant certain doom for Admiral James and his squadron unless they got a considerable helping hand.