Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

“Hooray!” the ship answered. Unaided voices, several shouting on the intercom, and Midshipman Dorst using the PA system itself from the Battle Direction Center.

“Hip-hip—”

“Hooray!”

“Hip-hip—”

Everyone aboard the Princess Cecile was cheering. Illiterate engine-wipers, women whose families had been RCN for every generation in living memory, men whose idea of patriotism was that anyone not from Cinnabar was a wog with no honor and no rights.

All those people cheered; and so did Mistress Adele Mundy, the scion of Chatsworth, a woman whose culture was as broad and deep as all human history.

“Hooray!”

Lt. Mon, returned to the Battle Direction Center, announced, “One minute to reentry to normal space!”

Chapter Thirty-two

Transition. Daniel’s display came live with imagery; he adjusted the scale so that the edge of the frame encompassed without waste volume the Alliance squadron forming above the huge disk of Getica. In Daniel’s present state, the discomfort of being slowly disemboweled wouldn’t have prevented him from functioning.

“Reentering the Matrix!” he said, personally decreasing the charge levels of the Princess Cecile’s current set of thirty-six sails. In Daniel’s mind, negative images of the bridge and his companions were projected in infinite series “up” and “down” through a nongeometric dimension.

Mon, the midshipmen, and an artificial intelligence within the astrogation computer were all working on an attack solution. If Daniel dropped dead in the next ten minutes or so, perhaps one of those courses would be chosen. Otherwise, Lt. Daniel Leary would be trusting his own instincts with only the barest regard for other opinions. A warship wasn’t a democracy, and a captain who didn’t lead was a fool and a disaster for those whom he commanded.

A red-lit sidebar appeared at the top of his display. He glanced at it in furious annoyance, thinking, What a bloody time for the screen to malfunction—

And noticed to his amazement that the six tiny images there were the ships of the Alliance squadron, rotating to show what appeared to be their current sail plans rather than the maximum theoretical rig. Optical data gathered at three light-seconds distance wasn’t good enough to provide such detail.

Daniel enlarged the images, looking through the haze of coherent light toward Adele. Through the intercom her voice said, “Admiral Chastelaine believes in keeping tight control of his formation. The flagship, Der Grosser Karl, microwaved full rigging instructions to the other vessels, and I’ve copied them to you. Do they help?”

“Well, dear one, they may just save our lives,” Daniel said. He felt an odd elation. He’d expected to die in the next few minutes . . . and it might still happen, of course; there were no guarantees in life. But now that Daniel knew the angles from which the battleship’s secondary batteries would be screened by the expanse of her sails, he would give his command opportunities for survival that couldn’t be expected from pure chance.

Oh, yes. The sail plans helped.

“Attack officers,” Daniel said, cuing the message to Betts, Sun, and the Battle Direction Center; and Adele of course, but not by his determination. “The attachment is the rig the Alliance squadron will be wearing. Adjust your solutions accordingly. Our desired reentry to sidereal space continues to be one mile, plus or minus one half mile, from the Alliance battleship. Out.”

Betts nodded without looking away from his console and continued working. Sun looked around in amazement, however. Sun had been a rigger in the merchant service before enlisting in the RCN and finding a new focus in gunnery. He knew, though not as well as Daniel himself, how difficult it was to navigate through the Matrix with that degree of precision.

The Princess Cecile shifted again between universes. A vessel couldn’t remain at rest within the Matrix, so to hold position it moved from one bubble to another, balancing flow against time to return to its original position.

The Alliance squadron had almost certainly noticed the Princess Cecile’s brief return to normal space. A merchant vessel wouldn’t have been able to transition so quickly, so even though Daniel had turned off the corvette’s identification transponder Admiral Chastelaine would know that a warship had spotted his ships.

Whose warship remained an open question: Strymonian frigate, Selma pirate, or just possibly an RCN ship like the one which the Tanais defenses had mauled or destroyed a week previous? Chastelaine would pause to make sure his ships were in full fighting trim before he set off for Strymon to put down the rebellion there.

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