Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

He might have succeeded, but he hadn’t had to try. Adele’s warrant whisked through the Navy Office like grass through a goose. It was delivered to the Princess Cecile before the port commander decided which bay the corvette would refit in.

Daniel grinned. Adele was his friend, and she was a lady in every sense of the word; but for romance, Daniel preferred something younger, rounder and, frankly, not so smart. Besides which, so far as Daniel had been able to tell, Adele had no interest in romance whatever.

The sails were stretching the length of the yards. The electrostatic fabric was so thin that bright stars were visible through it. For this initial deployment Mon was running everything out to its maximum extent. The antenna and sail mechanisms had been tested thoroughly on the ground, but vacuum and the vibration of liftoff could expose flaws that would only appear in real service.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Daniel said, speaking more to himself than his companion. A warship’s enormous suit of sails spreading to shadow the universe was a sight to move a dead man.

“What is, Daniel?” Adele said. “Cinnabar from up here, you mean?”

A dead man, but not necessarily a librarian. “Ah,” Daniel said aloud. “I was thinking of the arrangement of the sails fully set. Imposing their own order on the universe, so to speak.”

Cinnabar was “rising” beneath them as the Princess Cecile rotated slowly on her axis, though that wasn’t a sight Daniel would ever have called attention to. Planets were very interesting places—when you were on the ground. From low orbit, they were simply a difficult problem in shiphandling.

Before he left the bridge, Daniel had programmed a rotation to introduce a slight angular strain on the rig. The purpose of a shakedown cruise was to find anything that might have gone wrong during a refit. Daniel appreciated the compliment implied when Admiral Anston ordered the Princess Cecile into operational service immediately, but he still intended to wring out the corvette while he had the leisure of no one shooting at them.

“Ah,” said Adele in turn. She shifted slightly in an obvious attempt to feel what Daniel felt.

The rig had reached its fullest extent; now its elements began to retract to the setting programmed for entry into the Matrix. Masts and yards telescoped, rotating on their axes and occasionally tilting to bring the sails into precise alignment.

“Daniel,” Adele said. She’d lowered her voice reflexively so that Daniel could barely make out the words vibrating from her helmet to his. “Vaughn being sent back to Strymon means either that there are factions in the government working outside the knowledge of . . . the people who talk to me. Or that when they talk to me, they conceal as much as they tell. Unfortunately, both of those options are quite possible.”

“Yes,” Daniel said, pursing his lips in a look of frustration. He thought of his own interview with Admiral Anston: what he’d been told—virtually nothing—and what he hadn’t. “The same’s true within the RCN, of course. Well, we’ll make do, won’t we?”

The Princess Cecile was about to enter the Matrix: Daniel felt the charge building. He’d never been sure whether it was a real sensation or something his soul recognized. Engineers had sworn to him that a rigger’s suit was completely insulated, even if the minute potentials being bled into the sails could be sensed at all.

It happened. The charged fabric of the sails formed a series of precisely calculated barriers against the Casimir radiation that flooded the cosmos. Pressures that could not be relieved in the sidereal universe built up, shifting the Princess Cecile—

Golden light suffused the corvette, throwing her rig and outside crew into silhouette as though against an angel’s wing. Daniel shivered with anticipation.

Palpable energy flared. The Princess Cecile slipped from the universe of her creation into the greater glowing infinity that would take her to Strymon . . . under the command of Lt. Daniel Leary.

Chapter Ten

Dasi and Barnes had collapsed the wall between the two rooms of the captain’s suite, then pegged it down as a central table. The bunks—Daniel’s and the one from what had become Adele’s cabin—became cushioned benches at the long sides of the table. The arrangement was tight, but not notably worse than any other portion of the corvette’s interior.

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