And nothing, because the Princess Cecile was again within the Matrix, safe from attack and probably beyond pursuit by those aboard the Alliance ships. They weren’t Selma pirates.
Adele gave a snort of laughter. They weren’t Daniel Leary, either.
The alarm that had been pulsing cut off. Lt. Mon said on a dedicated channel between the Battle Direction Center and the bridge, “No hull penetration, I repeat, no penetration. Damage on Dorsal Three-Four-Five, the mainsails fucked and masts severed below the topsails. Minor damage on Starboard Two but the topsail is still eighty percent. Shall we start repairs immediately? Over.”
“Negative,” Daniel said as he typed, his strokes as hard and exact as a hammer driving nails. “We’ll make our second run with the present rig. Mon, I want you to go out on the hull and tell Woetjans this time she’s to bring her crew in when I give the order. Break. Hogg?”
“Standing at your side, master,” Hogg said, not shouting but speaking loudly enough to be heard over the sounds of a ship at war. Missiles rumbled on their loading tracks, making the whole vessel vibrate. The remaining rounds in the magazine added their thunder as well, each rolling into the space vacated by the one ahead of it.
“Go with Mon, he won’t let you drift away,” Daniel said. His voice sounded like wind roaring through a long tube. “Go out with a pistol in your hand. Tell Woetjans that you’ll shoot her if she disobeys my order. I won’t ask that of Mon; but I will of you, Hogg, and Ellie knows that you’ll obey.”
“Yeah, all right,” Hogg said. He turned to watch Mon coming up Corridor C, dressed in a rigging suit. “But I tell you, he better not let me float away.”
Sun stared without expression at the servant’s back as he went to join the lieutenant. He felt Adele’s glance, nodded, and forced a smile to her. “She’ll bring ’em in,” he said. “She knows the captain means business.”
Adele looked at her friend. She didn’t remember ever having seen Daniel so bleak. It was as though she were again staring up the bores of the Aristotle’s great plasma cannon in Harbor Three.
She hand-cued the intercom and said, “Daniel?”
Daniel’s face changed in a way she couldn’t have described even though she watched as it happened. The planes of muscle over bone fractured into minuscule slivers, then reformed into the smiling young man she’d known—for months only, but the most important months of her life.
“We’ll be making four shifts on this approach,” he said. “The last’ll be a long one, four minutes twelve seconds; we’ll be building velocity for our return to normal space. After we exit at the end of the run, we won’t need riggers topside, and I won’t throw them away.”
As he spoke, the Princess Cecile trembled between universes. Within the bubble of space-time formed by the ship’s electric charge, nothing palpable changed; but the pressure of the universe beyond was different.
“Daniel?” Adele asked. “I, I’m glad that you’re bringing the riggers in, I don’t mean that. But are you sure that you won’t need them on the hull?”
They shifted again. The first three stages must be intended simply to align the corvette with its target. Adele no longer noticed the feeling of her body falling into four separate infinities.
Daniel smiled again, though there was a rueful quality to it this time. “Chastelaine will be ready for us this time,” he said. “We won’t need riggers topside because after those eight-inch cannon hit us, we won’t have any sails left.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Daniel whistled “Been on the Job Too Long” as he computed tracks for the eighteen missiles remaining aboard the Princess Cecile. It was quite a cheerful tune, though the words were another matter. That was true of a lot of catchy songs, come to think.
When the women all heard that King Brady was dead—
The Princess Cecile would pass through the Alliance squadron at high velocity. That wouldn’t affect the plasma cannon, of course, except to minimize the corvette’s exposure to the bolts, but it did mean that Alliance missiles would have a long time catching up even at twelve-gee accelerations.