The Road of Danger: Chapter Fifteen

Ashetown on Madison

    Adele, seated at the Battle Direction Center console she had appropriated, watched imagery of the Savoy lifting off. Exhaust curling upward from the plasma thrusters curtained the blockade runner, though the ship was generally visible as something between a shadow and a lumpy cylindrical shape. It was thirty-seven minutes after Principal Hrynko had warned Kirby Pensett that his ship might be seized.

    I wondered whether–I doubted whether–Daniel was correct in believing that he could get away in an hour. I’ll apologize when we’re next together.

    The BDC was an armored box of irregular shape, designed to protect the equipment and personnel within to the greatest degree possible. As with the Power Room, there were no piercings to weaken its structure save for the hatch onto the corridor.

    Cory and Cazelet had gone to the wardroom, just forward of the Battle Direction Center on the starboard side. That compartment had an external hatch from which the two officers were watching Daniel lift off. They wore RCN goggles whose lenses would filter the dangerous actinics and could magnify the image if they chose to.

    Adele considered the situation with part of her mind. Cory and Cazelet were spacers. They used holographic displays constantly and with great skill, but they were even more at home on the hull of a ship in the Matrix–directly viewing not just stars but the very cosmos in its majesty.

    Adele was a librarian. Given the option, she preferred to observe her surroundings through an electronic interface. The male officers were doing the same thing–their goggles were as surely electronic as the console at which Adele sat–but they were subconsciously counterfeiting direct observation.

    A smile almost reached her lips. Cory and Cazelet were her students, but she had not turned them into her clones. For that, the RCN–and their RCN careers–could be thankful.

    Nor was either of them a particularly good shot. They should be thankful for that.

    Another alert throbbed on her sidebar. She opened it as text, though she kept Daniel’s lift-off as background to the message.

    The signal was from Forty Stars HQ to the Estremadura in distant orbit, but it was routed through Platt’s station as a cut-out to protect the identity of the initial sender. Though Platt and Commander Doerries were careful about communications security, Adele had retrieved their internal codes as part of her haul from Platt’s sanctum. She now could read the contents instead of just knowing that there had been a message.

    Doerries–whom she had identified with certainty from reviewing Platt’s records–was ordering the Estremadura not to disturb the Savoy. Adele had not yet determined what game–or games–Doerries was playing with the blockade runners, but he apparently had his reasons for wanting the Savoy to get through.

    That was all very well, since Adele very much wished Daniel to have a safe trip also. Unfortunately, because Adele had destroyed the retransmission station and killed its operator, the message was not going to reach the Estremadura.

    Dropping the clutter of the Savoy‘s lift-off from her display, Adele instructed one head of the Sissie‘s stern microwave cluster to lock onto the lurking cruiser–and froze. Doerries had placed this message at his highest security level. Instead of sending it through the planetary satellite network, it had to go by direct microwave link. The handshake between the systems was achieved through a pair of randomizing chips which were identical at the molecular level.

    I can’t duplicate the signature. The necessary chip in Platt’s station was irretrievable, even if it hadn’t cracked from heat stress during the short circuits.

    She would punish herself at leisure for her mistake–for her choice; it hadn’t been a mistake, because she had made the correct judgment under the circumstances. If the choice cost Daniel his life, she would punish herself till she died, and that day couldn’t come soon enough. For now, though, she had to mitigate the damage.

    Adele switched to the laser transmitter. It wasn’t ideal–there wasn’t a good way to communicate with a ship lifting off–but it was more practical to punch coherent light through the optical haze of the exhaust than it was to drive microwaves through the RF hash caused by the volume of ions changing state.

    “Savoy, this is Hrynko,” Adele said, her voice as dry as salt fish. “Respond at once; I repeat, respond at once, over!”

    “–at once, over!” Daniel’s commo helmet said in what he believed was Adele’s voice. The helmet eliminated static from the signal, but it could only fill in the holes with flat approximations of what the algorithm decided were the missing particles.

    “This is Savoy,” he said. The helmet wasn’t his personal unit from the Sissie–that had Six stencilled above the visor–but it was RCN standard. It wouldn’t strike anyone as unusual that a lieutenant dumped out on half pay would manage to liberate a commo helmet before he strode down the gangplank for the last time. “Go ahead, Hrynko, over.”

    Starships didn’t–couldn’t–accelerate very quickly. Not only were they underpowered for the purpose, accelerations more than 3 gees would torque the hull even of a warship and leave a trail of rigging in the wake as tubes sheared and clamps vibrated off.

    Civilian vessels were even less sprightly than warships. The Savoy was straining upward at less than two gees, as much as her three thrusters could manage. Daniel could have walked about the cabin if that were necessary; holding a normal conversation wasn’t a strain.

    “Savoy, the Estremadura was alerted twelve hours ago to make a particular effort to capture you,” Adele said, her voice sounding even more emotionless than usual. “The information provided to the Estremadura includes the four alternative course plans in your computer for the route from here to Cremona. The cruiser entered the Matrix as soon as imagery of your liftoff reached its location three light-seconds out. Ah, over.”

    “Roger, Hrynko,” Daniel said, smiling in fond amusement. “Thank you for the warning. I think we should be able to put matters right shortly. Savoy out.”

    He realized that though Adele might worry in part because the patrolling cruiser was targeting the Savoy, most of her concern was because she herself wasn’t aboard the blockade runner to work some sort of magic. Perhaps she would have come up with some amazing trick–she certainly had before–but Daniel didn’t imagine it would be necessary. A yawl commanded by Captain Daniel Leary, RCN, ought to be able to run circles around the yokels here in the Macotta Region.

    The Savoy‘s only acceleration couch was his on the command console. The four crewmen–West and Edmonson wore the ship’s two rigging suits–were seated on the folded-down bottom bunk, and Hogg was on Kiki’s couch with her. He sat at the foot and wasn’t being over-companionable, but Daniel knew that his servant hadn’t asked her before he chose his location.

    He thought of warning the others, but the Savoy didn’t have a PA system. Nor was there room for the whole console to rotate as it was designed to do, and Daniel wasn’t willing to turn the seat alone at this juncture: he needed to keep his eyes on the display more than he needed to keep the others abreast of what he was doing.

    The Savoy was thirty miles above Madison’s surface. If Daniel had been commanding an RCN ship, he would have switched to the High Drive by now to conserve reaction mass. On a commercial vessel there were other factors to consider. The throats of Savoy‘s High Drive motors were already badly eroded. It made sense to minimize the further damage inevitable when anti-matter atoms which hadn’t combined in the reaction chamber flared into an atmosphere.

    Daniel finally shut down the thrusters. Instead of switching directly to the High Drive, he adjusted controls to bring the electrical balance of the yawl’s surface as close to zero as possible.

    “Preparing to insert!” he shouted. He wasn’t sure if anybody but Hogg–who had covered his ears–could hear him. Though the ship was simply coasting on inertia, the thrusters’ roar had been numbing to unprotected hearing. Like most civilian spacers, the Savoy‘s crew didn’t bother with pansy frills like sound-cancelling earphones or even ear plugs.

    “Pensett, what are you doing?” demanded Lindstrom, who must have heard something after all.

    “Inserting!” Daniel said as he pressed the red Execute button. The console was so old that the keyboard was real instead of virtual, and the tactile thunk through his thumb was immensely satisfying.

    The yawl slipped from normal space into the Matrix. The physical sensations accompanying the change of state were entirely imaginary and in Daniel’s case had differed on each of the by-now thousands of times that they had occurred. This time he felt as though he had dropped fifty feet, been brought up short by a rope anchored in his solar plexus, and then dropped twice more in similar fashion.

    He leaned back on the acceleration couch, gasping and hoping that his insides would settle down before long. Knowing that the experience was purely psychological didn’t make it any less real–or exhausting.

    “What in hell have you done, Pensett?” said Lindstrom, bending over Daniel’s couch to shout. Hogg had gotten up also. Obviously neither of them had been as badly affected by the recent insertion as Daniel was. “We don’t have any way on yet!”

    Daniel set the rigging to deploy, extending the antennas and unfurling the initial sail set, before he looked up at the owner. He didn’t care to have anybody bellowing at him, but he formed his lips into an engaging smile.

    The expression was as much for her sake as his own. He didn’t want Hogg to change the situation with the enthusiasm he’d been known to show when he decided that somebody was threatening the young master.

    “We had an Alliance cruiser coming down on us, Kiki,” Daniel said. “We won’t need to go far, I hope, to confuse them for long enough that we can set off in proper fashion.”

    West–the oldest of the crewmen; he was sixty if he was a day–and Hargate had risen and were settling their helmets in place. It was nearly certain that the rigging wouldn’t work properly the first time it was deployed after liftoff, so the crewmen were preparing to go out to clear kinks and jams.

    Daniel straightened. He thought for an instant, then said, “No, stay inside for now. As the boss says–”

    He grinned as he nodded to Lindstrom, who had returned to her couch. Hogg remained standing in the center of the compartment.

    “–we don’t have much way on, so we’re not going anywhere in particular. We’ll extract and accelerate for a while; then you can get your exercise.”

    “Suits me, Chief,” Hargate said, giving Daniel the first smile he had seen on the man’s face. “This suit–”

    He clacked his gauntleted fingers against the stiffened chest plate.

    “–lacks about two inches of what it ought to have for height, and with the helmet locked down I feel like somebody’s trying to pound me through the deck.”

    “I see,” said Daniel. “When we hit ground on Cremona, I’ll see if we can’t promote a hard suit that fits you a little better.”

    Hogg could probably arrange something. Quite apart from common decency–hard suits of the wrong size were miserably uncomfortable–he didn’t want the ship’s safety to depend on a rigger whose suit hobbled him when he needed to move fast.

    Daniel returned to his display. The equipment on the hull was hydro-mechanical; electric current would have generated magnetic fields. They could randomly and sometimes enormously affect the sails’ resistance to the Casimir radiation which shifted a vessel through the Matrix. In a well-found modern vessel the hydraulic input was converted to electricity within the hull and appeared as readouts on the console.

    The Savoy had instead four pointers above the airlock. Three were vertical; the fourth–the starboard antenna–was at ninety degrees, indicating that the antenna had only partially extended.

    Daniel grinned. A jam at this point didn’t matter, as he had told the riggers. More to the point, he had no reason to believe that the gauges were working properly either.

    “Preparing to extract,” he said. One real benefit of a small vessel was that insertion and extraction were relatively simple procedures. An 80,000 ton battleship might be five minutes completing either operation, even with a crack crew.

    Daniel pulled the sliding control toward him, saying, “Extracting!”

    Ice water trickled inward from each finger and toe, meeting in the center of Daniel’s chest for one freezing moment; then the extraction was over. The yawl had reemerged in the sidereal universe and all her external sensors were live again.

    Daniel had set his display to a naval-style Plot-Position Indicator simply out of habit. The Savoy‘s console was old, but it had originally come from a warship–certainly Pantellarian, and probably a destroyer.

    He lighted the High Drive as soon as a quick glance showed that the Savoy was still headed outward. His quick in-and-out of the Matrix could have reversed the ship’s attitude in normal space, and they were close enough above Madison that diving toward the surface could have serious consequences.

    The second order of business was to locate the Estremadura. With luck, the cruiser had extracted half a million miles away or even farther. That would give the Savoy plenty of time to build up speed before Daniel had to take her into the Matrix again.

    The Estremadura wasn’t visible on the PPI, which meant she was still in the Matrix. Since the Savoy‘s console was a naval unit, it would have shown the cruiser on a predicted course even if she were momentarily behind the planet from the yawl’s vantage point. Daniel had deliberately allowed plenty of time for his opponent to extract from her initial jump toward Madison.

    Are they completely incompetent? That could certainly happen, but it wasn’t a safe assumption to make about an untested opponent.

    Speaking of untested, the yawl’s two High Drive motors were buzzing in nearly perfect synchrony, making the vibration in so small a ship not only unpleasant but potentially dangerous. When there was time–which there certainly wasn’t now–Daniel would adjust the units to syncopate one another with their pulses. Their present output created harmonics which could fracture electronics and might very well crystallize metal if it went on for long enough.

    Daniel wondered if Petrov had deliberately aligned the motors’ phases in some mad quest of a perfection that actually degraded performance. The gods alone knew what naval officers were taught on Novy Sverdlovsk!

    The PPI highlighted the precursor effects of a ship extracting from the Matrix about 19,000 miles from the Savoy‘s present location, some three light-seconds outsystem from Madison. That could be chance, but even if it were chance–

    “Prepare to insert!” Daniel said as he slammed the paired High Drive feeds shut. The yawl wouldn’t be able to insert until they’d coasted beyond the haze of anti-matter atoms finding atoms of terrene matter with which to immolate themselves, but she was far enough out now that her surroundings were hard vacuum.

    “Sir?” said one of the crewmen on a rising note. “Sir? What’s going on?”

    Lindstrom wasn’t speaking this time, but she’d gotten from her bunk and was hovering–literally, they were in free fall–beside the console, maneuvering expertly by taps on the bulkheads. Daniel couldn’t blame the others for wondering what was going on, but it certainly wasn’t helpful.

    “Inserting!” Daniel said.

    He didn’t notice the transition this time because his mind was wholly focused on his display. He got a momentary glimpse of the ship which had returned to the sidereal universe just as the Savoy was leaving it. As he had feared, it was the Estremadura.

    And when his console enhanced and enlarged the image, Daniel could see that the cruisers’ guns had been aligned to bear on the yawl.