“To the Princess Cecile and her captain,” Mon said. He didn’t slur his words, but his voice boomed louder in the small cabin than it might have done a few bottles before. “Because they’ll get us out of any Goddamned hole the politicians manage to stick us in!”
It was silly. It was the kind of emotional gesture that offended Adele’s belief that the intellect should dominate in all human endeavors.
But she downed her sherry in a single gulp and cheered with the others.
* * *
“Ready to enter normal space,” called Lt. Mon over the intercom from the Battle Direction Center. Daniel’s display already echoed the BDC data, which was identical to that of the main computer. The chance of the systems being out of synch was vanishingly small, and even in that event the smaller BDC computer was more likely to be in error; but spacers lived to retirement age by making every calculation redundant.
“Ready to record data,” Adele said, frowning slightly at her console. She accepted that standard operating procedure required her to verbalize each step of the process, however obvious it might seem to her—however obvious it was, given that Daniel was echoing her display also. She did it, but she was unlikely to ever come to like the process.
“Ready to return to normal space,” Daniel said. He touched the alarm, sending whistle calls and green light across the Princess Cecile’s corridors and compartments. On the hull, the semaphore posts—four each at bow and stern, offset from the lines of antennas—flipped their arms out at 90 degrees and 270 degrees to warn the riggers still topside. Normally, but not now, they were already in the air locks.
Daniel pulled the astrogation module’s main switch, cutting off the trickle of power that charged the sails. The corvette staggered. When the charge dropped, the bubble universe which the Princess Cecile was crossing squeezed the vessel out as incompatible with its natural order. The potential dropped at various points of the hull and rig at minutely different times. The discontinuity was noticeable, the way a sleeper can be aware of lightning.
Delos Vaughn watched intently from the corridor just outside the bridge. When Daniel called general quarters for a position check, Vaughn had as usual been playing cards in the wardroom with the off-duty officers. He lost money consistently, though never in large amounts.
A suspicious man might suspect that a fellow who was as knowledgeable about poker as Vaughn showed himself to be should at least break even. Daniel didn’t like to be suspicious. Still, he’d spent his youth among the influences of his father’s political maneuvering and the natural world he observed under Hogg’s tutelage. In both environments only the strongest could survive without using deception.
“Ready to enter the Matrix!” Mon’s voice reported, a half-tone higher than it had been a moment before. Vaughn’s face looked like a skull, and even the RCN officers on the bridge were suddenly taut.
Humans adapted to the Matrix. They could live and work outside the sidereal universe for days at a time and not be fully conscious of the strain—until it stopped. It was wrenching to experience the relief of returning to sidereal space, only to bounce back in seconds to a bubble universe in which what humans thought of as the natural order was an intrusion.
Wrenching for the captain as well, but Daniel was determined to harden his crew and himself to the process. “Entering the Matrix!” he said. He hit the five-second warning. Then, as the whistle called and red light surged and subsided, he slid the navigation module live again.
Bony fingers clutched his heart; somewhere a man screamed in abject horror. The Princess Cecile rippled into another universe in a wave of golden light.
Nobody spoke for a while, though Daniel could hear heavy breathing over the whirr of electronics and groans as the hull worked. He got his own pulse under control. Impressions flickered in his brain like afterimages of something glimpsed in bright light. He didn’t know what they were, but his subconscious insisted they were important.
“Daniel?” Adele said in a small voice. She swallowed as if she were trying to keep breakfast down. “Will I get used to this after a time?”