Color codings on the icons would have told Daniel that the port sails were all set at 37 degrees; that ventral and starboard courses were at 63 degrees; and that the mainsail on Dorsal Three was spread straight fore and aft to serve as a rudder.
Daniel needed a reminder of the reality of the ship about him, the ship he commanded. This image provided it. He didn’t care about the precise details, though his trained eye could have called the settings to within a hair’s breadth if he’d been out on the hull.
Which is where he wanted to be. Duty kept him aboard.
“Every day we’ve been out of normal space . . .” he said, aloud but not really concerned whether anyone else on the bridge heard him. “It’s seemed that the hull was getting thinner. Subliming like a block of dry ice. I wasn’t sure there’d be anything left in another day.”
“God help us!” Betts said, bent over his console; plotting solutions that were as imaginary as the holographic sails on Daniel’s display. His missiles were, like Daniel’s sails, the anchor that held his mind to—if not sanity, then to the memory of sanity.
“One minute!” said Mon. Again Daniel failed to acknowledge. All that mattered was that the spacers aboard the Princess Cecile each find a way to create reality. Create: because such long immersion in the Matrix proved to every soul aboard that reality wasn’t an absolute, that it was no more than the whim of an individual mind for as long as the mind could stay sane.
The time column on the sidebar was shrinking to zero. If Daniel switched back to the navigational display, he would find the cyan bead approaching the pinpoint that was Sexburga. Toward ze—
“Now!” a voice screamed; maybe Mon’s, maybe Daniel’s own as his left hand drained the sails’ charge and the Princess Cecile shuddered back into normal space, this time to stay.
Nothing changed within the hull, but the light was richer, the fittings had palpable density instead of being gassy umbras, and the air filled Daniel’s lungs with the smells of weeks of being lived in. The stench was indescribably wonderful, like the rough texture of a log in the grasp of a man who had been drowning.
The cheers were rough, bestial. The relief the spacers felt came from far below the conscious levels of their minds.
His fingers moving by reflex, Daniel switched his display to a Plot Position Indicator. The icon that stood for the corvette was less than 150,000 miles out from the planet Sexburga, almost too close for a proper approach.
“Power room, light the High Drive!” Daniel said to his console. His fingers moved on the semaphore controls, directing the riggers to unpin the antennas.
Then through the intercom Daniel added, “Captain to ship. We’ve arrived, spacers. And by God, every one of you is going to have a drink on your captain when we’re on the ground!”
Chapter Twelve
Adele—Signals Officer Mundy—was busy for the first time since the Princess Cecile entered the Matrix outbound from Cinnabar. Since the events on Kostroma, really. She’d studied the corvette’s electronics on the voyage to Harbor Three, and during the past seventeen hellish days she’d been learning all she could about Strymon and the adjacent planetary systems.
That had been work at her own speed—which didn’t mean it was done in a leisurely fashion by most people’s standards, but there was no outside pressure involved. Now—
“Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one—” GR1751 was the Princess Cecile’s pennant number, which her transponder sent automatically when interrogated “—you are cleared to land at Flood Harbor in numbers nine-five, I repeat nine-five, minutes. There will be no liftoffs or landings from Flood Harbor for half an hour either way of your slot, but be aware that there may be traffic from the Cove or Drylands. Hold to your filed descent. Condor out.”
Adele had reconfigured the communications console to use wand control as its default. This wasn’t ideal, as a computer capable of missile launches and astrogation had a much broader range of options than a civilian database. Adele preferred to layer command sets within her wands’ existing software rather than use the virtual keyboard created for the console. It was still much faster, and for her there was less risk of an error.