Not until the third swallow did she identify the contents as milk—the perfect choice once she thought about it. As Dorst had obviously already done.
“I’m very sorry,” Adele said, irritated by the concern in the eyes of her three companions, and even more irritated because she couldn’t deny she gave them reason for it. “Daniel, we, ah, have provided some alternative courses for the guardship and . . .”
Her knees were wobbling now. Great heavens, what was wrong with her?
“Mistress,” said Vesey, “you haven’t had a thing to eat or drink in eighteen hours. Please won’t you sit and let us bring you some food?”
Dorst guided Adele back into the seat where she’d been working. She was accessing the ship’s computer through the familiar pathway of her personal data unit. The battle computer’s great holographic display showed what looked like a twisted circle of ribbon: the track of the guardship Hammer as it orbited Falassa. Date variations were color coded from violet to the deep red of the most recent.
Dorst put another bulb of milk in Adele’s hand. Vesey said earnestly, “Sir, she’s done it all herself. The only help we’ve given is to calculate the orbits from the data she’s found in the logs.”
Daniel nodded. “You asked me to look over your plots, Adele,” he said. “I did, and I found them quite satisfactory. I’m amazed that the orbit’s been so consistent over a ten-year period.”
He gestured; obediently Adele drank more of the milk. For a moment her stomach threatened to rebel; then the combination of texture and food value went to work and she began to feel better.
She managed a smile. Of course she still had quite a lot better to feel.
“I thought it was rather like a moon,” Adele said. “The orbit stays the same, that is. Doesn’t it?”
“It’s a low orbit, mistress,” Dorst said. “They have to burn the High Drive every few days to keep atmospheric friction from dragging them back to the surface. But they want to overfly Homeland every orbit, so they porpoise up and down without any lateral motion to speak of.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, “and very useful that is to us, I must say. I’ll have the course plotted to three decimal places, though we’ll have to exit, say, five light-seconds out for the final refinements. I just wanted to know if you felt that additional computation might lead to significant changes?”
“What?” said Adele. “No, no. We had a perfectly adequate data sample. And anyway, there isn’t any more data. Not that I’ve been able to find here on, on wherever this place is. Dalbriggan.”
She scowled to hear her own words. Her mind wasn’t working any better than her body seemed to be. She’d been lost within the problem, and now that it was solved—her task was complete, at any rate—she couldn’t get back to normal.
Adele giggled. “Mistress?” Vesey said.
“I thought, ‘normal,’ ” Adele explained. “But of course I meant ‘what passes for normal with me.’ ”
The midshipmen looked aghast, but Daniel grinned at her. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll have Lieutenant Mon draft a movement order for the fleet while I develop the actual attack. Ah, will you have further need of the Direction Center?”
“Oh, heavens no,” Adele said. She heaved herself to her feet again and managed to keep upright this time. “I had to have Vesey and Dorst with me—somebody who understood navigation, at any rate—so I couldn’t block off the people around me as I usually would. But I did need privacy.”
Daniel offered Adele his arm. “I was about to get something to eat in the galley,” he said, probably a lie. “Will you join me, then?”
“Yes, I’d better, I suppose,” Adele said. The milk had awakened a raging hunger that she’d suppressed while she copied and collated data.
The pirate cutters operated on unique internal clocks, determined either by the whim of the captain or as an accident because the astrogation computer had been shut down and reset to zero following repairs. Though Adele didn’t suppose that had added much to the complexity of the operation. Even if they’d all been RCN warships, she would’ve felt constrained to check each time slug against reported star positions. There was no such thing as acceptable error in her universe.