“I see the light,” Adele said. That was along the lines of saying that she breathed air, but Daniel tried to keep from frowning. Adele was trying to understand, albeit trying to understand something that was obvious to him. “And I see what could be herringbones. But I don’t see any difference from what it looks like between the other masts.”
The cold, no-colored light surrounding the Princess Cecile was the human eye’s response to the Casimir-Bohr Radiation that bathed the entire cosmos instead of being limited to individual bubble universes. The antennas and the sails of charged fabric they spread controlled the pressure of radiation on the vessel, driving it through and between universes whose physical constants differed from those of the sidereal universe.
Imbalances in Casimir radiation were the pragmatic reality of star travel. The light, pure as nothing in the human universe could be, was also beautiful beyond Daniel’s ability to say.
“Stay here for a moment, Adele,” Daniel said. “Ah, you might want to hold onto the mast with both hands. I won’t be a moment.”
He paused to make sure that she was taking hold of the mast—which she didn’t do until she realized that Daniel was waiting and watching until she obeyed what he’d meant for an order though he hadn’t been willing to phrase it that way to a Mundy of Chatsworth. Perhaps he was being overly cautious, but he’d twice caught Adele’s feet as they missed rungs on her climb up the antenna.
Sure that his friend was safe, Daniel strode out to the tip of the main yard. The magnetic strips in his bootsoles gave him a positive grip on the steel yard; rigger style, he duckwalked so that his insteps followed the curve of the yard and maximized the surface-to-surface contact. The added square inches greatly increased the grip of a spacer who might unexpectedly have a spar or a length of heavy tackle catch him between his shoulder blades. That extra could be the difference between life and a slow death in some universe not meant for Mankind.
Daniel could see four riggers; there might be more, all but an eyeslit concealed by the hull and rig. Beneath him, the half-furled mainsail quivered minusculely to the rhythm of his step. An expert eye—his eye—could see a reflection in the Matrix of even that infinitely small variation in the corvette’s balance of energy.
Daniel signaled, bending his arms in riggers’ code. The first symbol was the antenna for which the command was intended; the rest of the string, shorter or longer as need required, described the operations which were to be carried out on the antenna.
For the most part the riggers were on the hull to execute commands transmitted from the bridge by mechanical semaphore. The astrogation computer could process more data than any number of human beings in a lifetime: the captain set a course, and the computer translated that human desire into a path through the Matrix.
But the Matrix was as variable as a cloud-wracked sky, so a computer had only approximations of the reality through which the vessel sailed. No sensors but the human eye were available outside the hull, but the eye was a tool of great subtlety when used in the right fashion.
Daniel’s arms moved; swiftly, precisely. He was modifying the set of six antennas, two of them on the ventral row which was completely hidden from him. The spacers watching him would relay his commands around and along the hull to those who were in position to carry them out.
Daniel couldn’t have navigated the Princess Cecile to Strymon or even across the Cinnabar system by himself. He could refine the choices made by the astrogation computer, however; and right now, viewing aberrations in the smooth whirls of Casimir radiation . . . and all right, perhaps they weren’t herringbones, exactly, but they were patterns that didn’t belong in the natural sequence of the Matrix . . . viewing those markings, Daniel knew he’d found three ships travelling in close company.
Only naval forces did that. Well, naval forces and pirates coming to grips with their merchant prey. From the course and location, so close to what Daniel had plotted for the commodore, he was sure that he’d found the RCN squadron.