Which left Daniel’s own solution, the one he’d probably have chosen even if he’d had Admiral bloody Anston as well as Commander Foulkes, the Academy’s instructor in tactics, in the BDC sweating over their alternatives. Lt. Daniel Leary commanded this vessel.
Daniel chuckled as he entered the chosen course into the active file. The schematic of the corvette’s sails changed; potentials fluttered, spiking before dropping to zero as the Princess Cecile slid dimensionally sideways into another universe. The set of the sails immediately began to change for the second of the three legs of the approach.
“Ship, this is the captain!” Daniel said. His voice sounded vaguely bored when he heard it over the PA system. “We will reenter normal space in three minutes thirty . . . five seconds. Prepare for action. All personnel don emergency suits.”
He and Adele—she under protest—were still wearing their rigging suits. Sun had slipped on his emergency suit of thin fabric while Daniel was topside. Betts, looking at his display with anguish for the perfect solution he still couldn’t find, stood. He jerked open the drawer in the chair seat and pulled out his.
Tovera had disappeared into the wardroom. There were emergency suits there, so she and Hogg—
Almighty God, what about Delos Vaughn?
“Wardroom!” Daniel said. The servants and their prisoner were probably the only ones present in the compartment, but Daniel needed to get the message to anyone who could possibly help. “Get President Vaughn into a suit soonest! Hogg, do you hear me? Cut him loose and suit him up!”
The Princess Cecile made another transition, this the one that brought her onto the long final approach. On Daniel’s display the sail schematic changed again.
The topsail of Ventral 6 rotated to 238 degrees instead of the programmed 257 degrees; abruptly it leaped another five degrees, then warped around the remainder of the way in tiny jerks. Daniel thought of riggers ignoring the transition and hauling around by main force the frozen tackle.
The rig was aligned. Daniel checked the schematic again, then fed to the sails the charges that would cause them to react against the pressure of Casimir radiation. The Princess Cecile canted in space-time.
Daniel pressed a dedicated signal button on his console: All Personnel Within the Hull. The six arms of every semaphore station on the hull now stuck out like the petals of a daisy, a clear sign to the riggers that they were to come in immediately. Those who couldn’t see a station themselves would be warned by hand-signals from their fellows, but veterans like the Princess Cecile’s crew knew without being told that the corvette was making her attack run.
“Two minutes to reentry into normal space!” Dorst announced in a firm, normal-sounding voice. Daniel would be able to praise the lad to his grandfather without hesitation. Both midshipmen were assets to the Princess Cecile’s crew.
The riggers weren’t coming in.
Daniel cleared the semaphore control, then hammered it with his fist. That was waste effort, he knew, but he had to do it anyway.
“Adele?” he said desperately. “Is there anything wrong with the topside signal apparatus?”
If there was, he could send a man out—could go himself, he was wearing a rigging suit—and bring the crew down with hand-signals.
Adele brought up a display, checked it, and quickly checked it against three columns of similar data—the recorded values from past occasions when the semaphores were known to be working properly. He’d known there wouldn’t be anything wrong.
“No, Daniel,” she said without inflexion. “The equipment’s in order. Is there a problem?”
“One minute to reentry into normal space!”
“Woetjans’s keeping her crew topside,” Daniel said. He felt a sudden despair, though he knew he’d have done the same thing if he’d been the Sissie’s bosun. “She wants them ready to clear battle damage immediately so that we can maneuver as quickly as possible.”
The survivors would be ready.
“Thirty seconds to reentry!” said Lt. Mon. “God bless the RCN!”
Transition.
* * *
The first missile released with a thump so quick that Adele thought it was part of the buffeting of the corvette’s return to sidereal space. The second, launched five seconds later so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the exhaust trail of the first, corrected her misapprehension.