Commodore Pettin hadn’t fled in the breathing space the Princess Cecile had provided him. In the best tradition of the RCN, he was coming to fight.
* * *
Adele kept her face expressionless as she viewed the corvette’s outer hull through imagery provided by Woetjans’s suit. If she hadn’t known better she’d have guessed she was looking at a nickel-iron asteroid, pitted and half-melted by a pass through the upper reaches of an atmosphere.
The internal air pressure was beginning to rise. Damage crews filled spaces with quick-setting foam, blocking leaks through torn plates and ruptured seams. It wasn’t up to eight pounds yet, and Adele had been repeatedly warned during drills that there could still be catastrophic hull failure at this stage of the proceedings.
She unlatched her helmet anyway. It constricted her mind, and that was far more worrisome than the chance of death.
“They’re launching!” Sun said. He’d opened his helmet also; his voice was squeaky but clear to Adele in the next station. “Look at those bastards! Well, we didn’t get their fire control, that’s for sure!”
The Alliance ships exchanged course data on what they assumed were secure links. Adele intercepted and decrypted the signals, then forwarded them to Daniel. Presumably he was doing whatever could be done with it, his face intent as he typed furiously.
Voice communications within the Alliance squadron were properly Adele’s own area of responsibility. They passed through her ears and she filtered them for content. Occasionally she summarized them for Daniel and the Battle Direction Center.
Admiral Chastelaine hadn’t panicked, but he was in a fury—an equally disruptive state of affairs in respect to the good governance of his squadron. He’d announced he was proceeding by gig to the Yorck, the heavy cruiser, to transfer his flag; had cancelled that order and summoned a destroyer to carry him from the damaged battleship to the Yorck; and had finally, at least for now, determined to direct the battle from aboard Der Grosser Karl. Adele had no idea of what was going on inside the Alliance vessels, but she very much doubted that the moral atmosphere resembled the ordered enthusiasm aboard the Princess Cecile.
Adele’s ears were given over to duty, but her eyes were her own. She echoed Sun’s display in a corner of hers, replacing the wasteland of the corvette’s hull.
At once she felt her spirits lift—not for what she saw, but because she no longer viewed the Princess Cecile’s mutilated exterior. Adele wasn’t the sort of sentimentalist—the sort of fool!—who imagined machines have life, let alone personalities. Even so, there are tools which serve their users so well that it could be reasonable to feel regret when they break.
Sun’s attack screen looked similar to Daniel’s PPI, save that it showed missiles as colored tracks rather than points. The computed courses were orange, with the portions already traversed in scarlet.
Adele understood the gunner’s amazement. Der Grosser Karl had launched twenty-four missiles, more than the corvette’s capacity at full load; and as Adele watched, another dozen rippled from the battleship’s tubes.
“Adele!” Daniel snapped as his eyes and hands continued their separate work. “Can you transmit the Alliance courses to Commodore Pettin. Soonest!”
“Yes, Daniel,” Adele said mildly. “I’ve been doing that.”
She didn’t add, “Of course.” This was no time to play foolish games.
There were proper times for punctilio, of course. She was a Mundy of Chatsworth and had no intention of brooking a deliberate insult; but she’d have been equally curt with Daniel if she needed something from him and failure would be the price of delay.
Daniel opened his helmet. Adele suspected the delay had been because he was busy, not that thin air or the risk concerned him. Internal pressure had risen to over ten psi, enough that Adele’s lungs no longer felt as though they couldn’t fill.
“Admiral Chastelaine knows he’s not very maneuverable,” Daniel said. He spoke conversationally, but Adele noticed that his eyes were on the data, not her face. “He’s using his magazines to do what his High Drive can’t, keep our ships away from Der Grosser Karl while the rest of his squadron destroys them.”
He smiled brilliantly and met Adele’s eyes for an instant. “And as your intercepts show, he’s mad enough to chew rocks.”