Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

The words and tone were perfectly predictable, Adele thought as she looked across the crowded bridge at the captain. Daniel would say the same thing—and mean it—if he’d just had both legs amputated. If Daniel Leary had a motto, it would be While there’s life, there’s hope.

On duty, at any rate. Off duty his motto would probably involve the age of suitability for girls.

Adele smiled faintly. Her own motto would be more along the lines of While Daniel’s alive, there’s hope. The Princess Cecile’s crew was a normal assemblage of human beings, some more sanguine than others; but not a soul of them would disagree with Adele there.

Woetjans and Pasternak stood in the center of the bridge. Even without Betts and Sun at their consoles—they were on the hull, checking the launcher hatches and gun turrets respectively for external damage—the chiefs of rig and ship filled the compartment. Condensate dripping from metal fittings of their rigging suits shrouded them in a clammy reminder of the environment from which they’d just returned.

“It’s bloody well bad enough!” Woetjans said. “The sails, all right, we can patch and pair so that with the spares we’ve got pretty much a full set. They’ll be the devil to furl where we’ve double-hung a yard to get full coverage out of rags, but we’ll cope. The masts, though, the masts are fucked good.”

“The hull’s as solid as the day she came from the builders, though,” said Pasternak. “The bolts pretty much dissipated on the sails—”

He glanced at the lowering Woetjans.

“—which is hard lines for the bosun here. I’m not saying I’m happy about what happened to her sails, but we’re all better for not having taken an eight-inch bolt square on the hull, right?”

Woetjans grimaced, but she nodded agreement.

The corvette was full of noise. She was double hulled, and the cavities held spare rigging along with other stores which cold and vacuum wouldn’t affect. The sound of hollow steel spars being withdrawn through the outside hatches rang within the hull like a tocsin.

Adele’s screen quivered with pairs of conversations, sometimes a dozen at the same time, as spacers assessed the damage and started repairs. The Princess Cecile hung in normal space. Sun and Gansevoort had inserted intercoms from the internal helmets into prepared sockets in the riggers’ suits, though Adele as Signals Officer had to activate each unit before it could be used.

A low-power radio signal on the hull of a starship in the Matrix would distort navigation by many light-years and in theory could rip antennas out of their steps. The Princess Cecile wouldn’t be returning to the Matrix any time soon, however, so Daniel had approved his chiefs’ request for quicker communications on the hull.

Lt. Mon entered the bridge, slipping between Woetjans and Pasternak without touching either of them. “All the spars are out of storage or will be,” he announced. “Unless the bosun salvaged some pieces I don’t know about, though, we’re short six masts and four more of ’em are going to hang shorter yards than the standard.”

He glared at Woetjans. Mon always looked angry, on the verge of a snarling explosion. From what Adele had seen of the man, his normal expression accurately described the personality beneath.

Despite that—because of it?—Mon’s bubbling anger in a crisis was just as bracing as Daniel’s cheerful insouciance. No one seeing either man could imagine they thought there was anything to be afraid of in the present situation.

“Naw, we’re screwed,” Woetjans agreed. “It was just bad luck that so many masts were burned through or near through, but because it happened when we were entering the Matrix . . .”

She shrugged. “The pieces’re scattered through three, maybe four bubbles. We’d do better to carve new poles from asteroids than we would to go searching for the ones we lost.”

“If we hadn’t been entering the Matrix, there wouldn’t ‘ve been enough left of the Sissie to make you sneeze,” Mon snapped. “The captain saved our butts by shunting us out so fast.”

He rotated his glance around the room in search of anyone to deny his statement. Adele met the look with a cool frown; Mon’s attitude affronted her, foolish though she understood her reaction to be.

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