On a whim, Adele inset a head-and-shoulders view of Daniel in a corner of her display. He was smiling faintly, perhaps remembering as Adele did that the Astrogator’s cloth-of-gold costume at the Assembly was even more ornate than Daniel’s Dress Whites.
He touched a key and said over the PA system, “Prepare for entry, exit, and reentry to the Matrix in one minute.”
The chimes and lights echoed his words. “Prepare for immediate action,” Daniel went on. “Captain out.”
His eyes in the little inset seemed to meet Adele’s. Did he know that she was using the broad bandwidth required for visuals in this completely needless and un-naval fashion? He must, because he winked.
“RCN to Selma Control,” Daniel said. “We’ll go into action in thirty seconds from . . . now! RCN out.”
Adele’s display whirred; the Astrogator’s flagship was relaying the synchronization data to his whole fleet in a single multirecipient burst. Two more icons had joined the forty-three of a moment before, meaning that every ship which lifted from Dalbriggan had arrived within minutes of schedule at a point two light-years distant.
“If they can fight the way they sail,” Daniel said on his secure link to Adele, “then this should go very well. Of course, their Falassan kin may be equally able. That’ll mean a real battle.”
He sounded quite cheerful at the prospect.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Normally entry and exit from the Matrix made Daniel as queasy as they did any other spacer, no matter how experienced. This time he was aware of the sensations but couldn’t really be said to feel them. His body had become no more than the apparatus his mind used to effect his plans.
“—reenter normal space!” Lt. Mon’s voice was saying as the lights pulsed.
The Princess Cecile dropped into consensus reality, then fluttered back into the Matrix like a butterfly with a damaged wing. They’d appeared five light-seconds from Falassa, close enough to determine the guardship’s exact location.
The attack console held a hundred preset launch patterns; the final choice depended on where the Hammer really was. Adele’s data showed a consistent pattern, but a pattern wasn’t a bull’s-eye—and nothing short of a bull’s-eye would suffice when the Princess Cecile was on the wrong end of such a disparity of force.
Betts was running solutions, one for each of the two ready-launch missiles. Daniel did the same at his command console, not quite so quickly but with an assurance that surprised a dispassionate part of his mind.
Daniel was no longer the Princess Cecile’s captain, giving orders to the crew and controlling the machinery which would execute his will. He’d become part of the vessel. His awareness of the rig, of the output from the fusion bottle—even of the hums and clings and whines of the parts working in concert—was subconscious. He no more thought about the commands his fingers typed than he thought about breathing. It was all one, and it was all Daniel Leary.
The display plotted a missile track in red, another track in blue, and between them a streak of purple merging the solution which Daniel and the Chief Missileer had both picked. The attack computer would execute the chosen pair when the Princess Cecile next exited the Matrix. Daniel didn’t trust humans disoriented by the transition to launch missiles with the split-second timing this attack required.
Without hesitation, Daniel entered his solutions instead of Betts’s.
Betts turned from his console to look at his captain. Daniel was aware of the missileer as a portion of the composition Ship and Crew, but Betts no longer had a separate existence in which his thoughts and fears could have meaning.
Mon had already set up the slight necessary adjustments to the sail plan. He and Daniel together had planned the Princess Cecile’s course from Dalbriggan to this point within the S2 system with the attack in mind. Modifications of the charge levels rather than the area and angle of the sails would take the corvette the final stage to her target.
The external electrics of a well-maintained starship operated properly ninety-five times in a hundred. The hydromechanical gears and pumps that moved the masts and sails failed—froze, broke, or simply dragged—ten times as often. On an ordinary voyage the riggers would fix the trouble and the astrogator would compensate for the divergence during the next leg.