Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

“Damn your bones, Kelburney!” he bellowed through his hacking laughter. “If you won’t have him in your bloody crew, I’ll take him in mine!”

Kelburney smiled as his subordinates laughed. “You might do after all, Leary,” he said.

His expression hardened. In this mood the tall pirate had the look of a saint or an inquisitor. “You have the course plot in a form you can transmit?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Daniel said, professionally curt. “When will your fleet be ready to accept it?”

“We’re bloody ready now,” said Kelburney. Over his shoulder he boomed, “Mineo, send out the call. Liftoff in half an hour!”

The burly captain grimaced, then walked through a side door with a gait between a waddle and a saunter. Other members of the Council tossed off the last of their drinks and prepared to leave as soon as Kelburney got out of the doorway.

“You going to be ready to lift, RCN?” the Astrogator said with a cant of his eyebrows.

Adele gave Daniel a tiny nod, indicating that the Princess Cecile had already been alerted. “Yes,” he said.

He turned and said, “Let’s go, Sissies!”

“Hey, RCN?” a Dalbriggan called. Daniel looked back over his shoulder but didn’t speak. The speaker was Mineo, who’d returned to the main room.

“Good hunting!” he said.

“You got that right!” said Woetjans, lengthening her stride on the way back to the corvette and the shadow of battle.

* * *

“Prepare to exit in one minute!” Dorst announced from the Battle Direction Center, his powerful baritone deepened and blurred by the ship’s PA system. The lights pulsed their version of the warning.

Adele turned from her blank display. The spacers all around her were motionless but as tense as wires stretched to within a feather’s weight of breaking. The riggers prepared to go topside, while the gunner and missileer poised to fight the Princess Cecile out of an ambush by Alliance forces or by the Falassans, or indeed by their self-styled Dalbriggan allies.

Daniel was running reentry scenarios in sequence, changing the parameters according to this or that assumed degree of damage from the enemy attack. Similar preparation had saved the Princess Cecile at Tanais when her armament could not have done so.

“Exit!” and yet again Adele realized, with perfect clarity, that if she put her pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger she would never, ever have to feel that nausea again. The fit passed as quickly as it came. She returned to being Officer Mundy, with things to live for and responsibilities to others.

She smiled faintly, remembering a snatch of ancient dialogue called “The Arkansas Traveller.” “I can’t fix the roof when it’s raining, and when the sun comes out the roof don’t leak no more.”

The commo display was alive with conversations among starships which had emerged within a hundred thousand miles of one another. A dozen ships had arrived already, and more popped into the sidereal universe every few seconds following the Princess Cecile.

Whether the vessels spoke through microwaves or modulated laser, the hull of the receiving ship reflected part of the energy in secondary radiation. The Princess Cecile’s sensors and correction algorithms were sensitive enough to turn the leakage into coherent speech.

The splendid RCN communications suite isolated and recorded pairs of conversations. Adele checked each one, finding they were uniformly the chatter of captains seeing which of their fellows hung in space around them. When she’d heard enough to allow the software to review the remainder—there was a new burst of empty small talk every time a ship appeared—she leaned back in her chair and sighed.

“Adele?” Daniel said over a two-party intercom link. “I gather everything’s under control from your viewpoint?”

Adele smiled. She’d have liked to turn and call her answer across the bridge, but she respected Daniel’s desire to keep the discussion private.

“Nobody’s saying, ‘Now let’s cut the throats of those dogs from Cinnabar,’ at any rate,” she said, letting the intercom direct her words to most recent sender in lieu of a specific recipient. “It’s more along the lines of, ‘What, hasn’t that wreck you’re sailing fallen apart yet?’ ”

There were more than thirty ships on her display now. They continued to appear, but the rate had slowed considerably.

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