Daniel grinned as he started a new set of course calculations. The Alliance admiral wasn’t the only one wondering about the future.
Tovera stood at the wardroom hatch, looking in all directions without appearing either nervous or furtive. She and Hogg must have moved Delos Vaughn from the suit locker to there. Knowing Hogg, Vaughn was trussed to the clamps that held the table legs during meals.
Daniel smiled as he calculated potentials—on the astrogation display, not the attack screen. If he’d had time, he’d have had to order a more polite form of confinement for their guest and ally. Fortunately, Daniel was very busy.
Maroon a Leary of Bantry in the desert, would he?
The attack involved three aspects of the Princess Cecile’s course: velocity, vector, and location in sidereal space. Velocity was a mere mathematical conversion of force applied through the physical constants of the universes which the corvette had traversed after entry to the Matrix. Vector was more difficult, the real business of astrogation; but there were thousands of astrogators who could achieve an approximation that would be adequate to the needs of the present attack.
Absolute location, though . . . that went beyond science, perhaps beyond art. It required that the astrogator—that Daniel—read the Matrix from topside and keep it in the back of his mind as he viewed the gauges on his display.
The weight of Casimir radiation affected the potential of the sails resisting it to thrust the Princess Cecile through the Matrix. There were ongoing efforts to develop software which could chart deviations from the calculated mean and adjust the sails to take maximum benefit from the actual conditions. All the programs to date had failed: they overcorrected, inducing a pyramid of errors into the system until the computer had to shut down for reprogramming.
A human being who’d seen the flow of universes beyond the sails and who felt each stress, each charge, of the ship he captained could hope to do what no electronic mind could encompass. It was no more than a hope, of course; but for the crew of a corvette preparing to attack a battleship, hope was an unusual boon.
“Battle Direction Center,” Daniel ordered. “Bring forward your solutions.”
“Sir, I’ve not complet—” Dorst began to say.
“Now, spacer!” Mon said before Daniel could offer his equivalent of the same thought. Knowing Mon, if Dorst was within reach at the time he started his excuse there’d been a slap as punctuation.
If that’d happened, Daniel hoped Dorst would have better sense than to resent it. The midshipman was big, young, and healthy, but Mon was too experienced a veteran to fight fair. He’d literally mop the deck with Dorst’s face after kicking him in the balls a few times to induce the proper frame of mind.
There were things you learned in the Academy, and there were things you learned from the Mons and Woetjans and Hoggs of this world. You needed both to be a credit to the RCN.
Lt. Daniel Leary wore a smile as he viewed the solutions of Mon, Vesey, the computer, and Dorst’s own partial. The last was a good start, but the boy had to learn that sometimes having the answer right was less important than having the answer now.
The computer’s course would require fourteen hours in the Matrix and two intermediate returns to normal space to fix the corvette’s location. No other procedure could achieve the required accuracy parameters.
Vesey had done something quite original, plotting back from the target. It wouldn’t work in the real world because the small change in the Princess Cecile’s course during the plotting couldn’t be factored in; the whole solution had to be recalculated. Despite that, it was an intelligent attempt to deal with requirements that one of the most advanced computers in the human universe found beyond practical resolution.
Mon’s solution was practical and practically suicidal: wham, bam! Thank you, Admiral Chastelaine. Following exit, the Princess Cecile would have to reenter the Matrix within thirty-one seconds to avoid plunging into Getica’s upper atmosphere. Daniel wasn’t sure so quick a transition was possible, and he knew it wasn’t possible if they received battle damage during the run-in.