Not that Adele cared. She was in the sea of information which flooded from the ships of the Alliance squadron and Tanais Base. Admiral Chastelaine was organizing his force and simultaneously trying to learn what the Strymonian base personnel knew about the recently sighted warship.
Reading between the lines of the queries, Chastelaine didn’t trust his new allies even though he’d left a force of Alliance personnel both on Tanais and in the orbital forts defending the base. She smiled grimly. The only certainty with traitors was that they’d stab you in the back also if they found it expedient.
“God the mother of us all!” somebody screamed over the PA system.
Adele flicked her left wand, a hair’s breadth from cutting access to the idiot who’d misused the system for babble at a time of crisis. She saw for the first time the image echoed from Daniel’s screen to the top of her display.
It was still a misuse of the PA system, but this time she’d let it pass. She stared transfixed at the image.
Der Grosser Karl’s mass hid all but an edge of Tanais because the corvette viewed her at such close vantage. Adele had seen the Aristotle from closer yet, but that had been in dry dock with the Aristotle’s sails removed and her antennas folded against the hull. The bulk of Der Grosser Karl’s seventy thousand deadweight tonnes was increased by fully extended eighty-meter antennas and enough hectares of electroconductive sails that a small city could hide beneath them.
“Entering the Matrix in—” Dorst was announcing.
Working forward along the battleship’s hull, a topsail, a midsail, and last the mainsail of three successive antennas bulged against their original stress and tore. Sparks of antimatter exhaust danced through them, devouring more of the fabric. The missile had grazed Der Grosser Karl, but without seriously affecting the target’s ability to sail and fight.
“—thirty seconds,” Dorst said.
The maincourse of an antenna near the battleship’s stern vanished in a rainbow fireball. The second missile, Adele thought, but then two more sails, amidships to port and starboard, ruptured. The battleship’s plasma cannon were clearing their own fields of fire, blasting away rigging that had been in the way. The Princess Cecile jolted sideways in a bath of flame.
A deep, three-hundred-foot-long gouge opened along Der Grosser Karl’s bow in a roostertail of coruscance. Red, yellow, and white sparks erupted into vacuum. Metal burned where sufficient air escaped to support combustion; otherwise it merely radiated away the frictional heat that had ripped it apart.
Alliance ships were signaling wildly. Adele noticed with a grim smile that two destroyers were sending in clear and that the heavy cruiser’s messages were encrypted according to two separate systems—apparently depending on whether they originated on the bridge or in the Battle Direction Center. She was quite certain that the Alliance vessels were having more trouble understanding their own communications than she was.
“Entering the Matrix in fourteen seconds!” a voice said, Daniel’s. Adele cut in an image of his face, set and a little redder than usual. The recalculation to adjust for loss of sail area to the battleship’s plasma bolt must have been a strain both mental and—as Adele well knew—physical in the need for absolute precision in typing in the commands that alone could save the corvette.
“Entering—”
Der Grosser Karl fired another rippling volley, but the missile’s grazing impact and damage to several High Drive nozzles caused the great ship to slew. The bolts missed the Princess Cecile. An antenna in the battleship’s sternmost ring exploded, the uppermost ten meters shooting off as a projectile driven on a shockwave of the portion vaporized by plasma.
Transition.
People were shouting, perhaps everyone aboard the corvette except Adele herself. She sorted the data her equipment had gathered during the Princess Cecile’s seconds within normal space.
Most were ordinary communications, the ash and trash of the Alliance squadron leaving port for the first time after a difficult voyage, but there was also the series of messages dealing with the briefly spotted unknown warship. Then, like shouts of “Fire!” in a crowded theater, came the disbelieving reactions to the corvette’s reappearance in the middle of the squadron—