“Sir, Commodore Pettin requests to speak with you,” Lt. Mon said. “Do you wish me to take the conn? Mon over.”
As the Princess Cecile struggled to hold position over Palia, it was dropping toward the surface of Strymon. Eventually Daniel was going to have to gain altitude or enter the atmosphere—and he certainly wasn’t going to enter the atmosphere. Still, he didn’t have to make that decision quite yet.
“Right, hold position as long as you can, Mon,” Daniel said. “And Mon? Warn me if our allies do something I need to know about, even if that means breaking in on the commodore. Out.”
Adele’s body was rigid. Her hands danced like a pair of balletomimes, and her display was a mass of data. It meant no more to Daniel than his astrogation vectors would have meant to her, but so long as Adele was at the signals console he knew he’d have all the warning there could be from that source.
He switched to the squadron command frequency that Mon had used to alert the ships on the ground. “Sir!” he said. “Lieutenant Leary reporting, over!”
Pettin wouldn’t have heard Daniel claim to be an admiral to overawe the guardships. With luck—and a Signals Officer who was preternaturally adept at wiping records—he never would learn about that.
“Leary, what the hell is going on, over?” Pettin said, his voice beginning to break up in the higher registers.
“Sir, you’ve got to—” wrong word, junior lieutenants don’t tell commodores what they’ve got to do “—get your personnel aboard and lift ship soonest!” Daniel said. “I’ll explain as soon as—”
The command link was dual frequency, with the emitting and receiving antennas at bow and stern respectively. The separation wasn’t enough on a vessel as small as a corvette to send and receive simultaneously through an atmosphere without interference, but it did allow Pettin to manifest his fury in a roar of static that silenced Daniel.
“—the Winckelmann will be in orbit in ten minutes, Lieutenant,” the commodore was saying in the enforced silence. “I’m asking you now, what the hell is going on? Over!”
Daniel let out his breath in a sigh of relief. Regardless of what happened to the career of Lt. Daniel Oliver Leary afterwards, the Winckelmann and her consorts would be safely out of the Strymon system within the hour. It might be months or even years before circumstances allowed the RCN to reenter the Sack with a force sufficient to deal with the powerful Alliance squadron now based on Tanais, but at least the Cinnabar ships and a thousand trained spacers had avoided massacre.
“Sir,” he said, “we were attacked when we discovered an Alliance battleship, heavy cruiser, and four destroyers on Tanais. We repaired our battle damage on Dalbriggan and returned immediately to warn you of the danger. Ah, we’re accompanied by a squadron of allies from the Selma Cluster. Over.”
“God help me,” Commodore Pettin said. The words sounded heartfelt. “Leary, we’ll discuss this at a time of greater leisure, and I don’t have to tell you what will happen to you if you’re lying. Right now I’ve got my hands full gathering up the seventy percent of my crews who’re on detached duty thanks to the rebellion you started. Squadron out!”
“And if you want to know about that rebellion, Daniel,” said Adele over the intercom, “I have some information for you here.”
* * *
Strymon was a developed world with a highly organized information infrastructure. It occurred to Adele as she viewed clips of the chaos below that she could probably find similar records of the Proscriptions following the Three Circles Conspiracy.
She’d heard her parents had been shot against the wall of the garden behind their townhouse. Adele hadn’t been an outdoors child, but her room was at the back of the house. She had familiar memories of ivy growing against the sun-bleached red bricks.
“Ten days ago . . .” said Adele, using a two-party link to the command console. “Rumors were circulating that Cinnabar had decided to support Delos Vaughn. The secret police couldn’t determine precisely who was starting the rumors. Nunes, that’s the Guardian, Friderik Nunes, had his agents stir up a mob to attack the Cinnabar Observer’s residence. He thought Observer Mariette was behind the rumors and hoped the threat would make him stop.”