And unlike Daniel, she couldn’t convince herself that avoiding death was really that valuable a benefit.
* * *
Daniel watched a trio of strangers enter the bridge through the exterior bulkhead, talking in silent animation. They looked perfectly normal—an older man, a boy, and a woman Daniel wouldn’t have minded getting to know better—except that they had downy feathers instead of hair.
“Five minutes to return to normal space,” said Lt. Mon from the BDC. His voice sounded shaky, but that could be a flaw in the communications system . . . or in Daniel’s ears. The voyage had been hard, very hard.
“Acknowledged,” Daniel replied, then switched to intercom and said, “Captain to ship. We’re five minutes from entry to the Sexburga system, spacers. If God favors us and I’ve done my calculations correctly, there’ll be liberty for all but an anchor watch inside of twelve hours. Captain out.”
He could hear faint cheering from other compartments. After seventeen days of discomfort punctuated by agony, nobody had much energy even for that.
Adele stared transfixed at the three phantoms, looking horrified. The remaining bridge personnel kept their attention on their displays.
“Ah, you see them too, Mundy?” Daniel said. The older male was making wide, oratorical sweeps of his right arm while his left remained cocked over his chest.
It was all automatic from here on in unless there were an emergency. Betts was setting up missile launches. That had drawn Sun to simulate gunfire targets on his display. Daniel was all for training, but plotting for immediate attack on entry into a major Cinnabar naval base couldn’t be called realistic preparation. So far as Daniel was concerned, calming a friend who looked uncomfortable was at least as good a use for his time.
Adele let her breath out slowly and looked at him. “You mean they’re real?” she said. “Daniel, I thought I was going mad!”
“I don’t think they’re real—well, not part of the sidereal universe, at any rate,” he said. “But to be sure, I see them too.”
“I knew three fish couldn’t really swim through the wall,” Adele said. “I’d forgotten what you’d said about phantoms.”
She looked at the men on the battle consoles and said, “Sun, Betts? What do you see over there?”
The gunner’s mate turned and smiled shyly at her. “I don’t see anything right now, mistress,” he said. “But I know what you mean, sure. They’ve been walking the corridors since the third day, I know.”
Betts said nothing, utterly engrossed in plotting courses for his missiles. The muscles in Daniel’s jaw bunched, then relaxed. The missileer was reacting to the stress of the voyage in his own way. He was no more to be censured than Daniel and Adele were for seeing feather-haired strangers on the bridge.
Adele shook her head in wonder. “But why do we see fish standing upright, Daniel?” she asked.
“Ah!” said Daniel. Apparently the range of options was wider than merely seeing a phantom or not.
“Uncle Stacey and his friends had no idea what caused the visions,” he said. “Stacey claimed to think they were random synapses firing in the watcher’s brain, but I don’t think he really believed that. You know as much as I do. Ah, I see people, more or less; not fish.”
“Three minutes,” Mon said, verbalizing the countdown that Daniel’s screen showed as a sidebar.
His main display was a navigational tank in three dimensions, the portion of the sidereal universe analogous to the Princess Cecile’s location in a wholly separate bubble of the cosmos. A bead of pure cyan drifted across the star map in tiny caracoles like a leaf blowing in the wind. If Daniel were to cut the charge of the sails now, the bead would be the corvette’s location; if the astrogational computer was correct.
Abruptly, almost angrily—the voyage had been just as hard on the captain as it had on the rest of the complement—Daniel switched his display to the Princess Cecile’s sail plan. Instead of the icons that provided information in the most concentrated form, he rolled the controller up to give him a simulated real-time view of the corvette hanging in space, lighted by a sun like Cinnabar’s at a distance of 107 million miles.