Icons on the far left of Adele’s display shifted. The whine of the High Drive ceased, and the braking thrust Adele’s body perceived as gravity lessened for a heartbeat or so before the plasma thrusters roared to full life. Adele must have looked startled, because Sun glanced over at her and shouted, “We can’t chance double thrust, mistress. The masts wouldn’t take it, even brought in and locked.”
Adele nodded understanding. She’d known that, of course. This wasn’t the first time she’d landed in a starship, for heaven’s sake, nor even the first time she’d done so as an officer on the bridge with full access to the details of what was going on.
But—her intellect had known what to expect. The lizard brain deep within Adele had known only that it had suddenly dropped into nothingness.
The riggers were coming through the airlock, unlatching their helmets and congratulating themselves with enthusiasm. Riggers even more than other spacers loved the void, but this had been a hard run. In the future the crew would brag to others about how Mr. Leary had brought the Princess Cecile from Cinnabar to Sexburga in seventeen days . . . but for the moment, they were glad to know they’d be walking on solid ground in an hour.
Daniel switched his display to the harbor plot. Adele, still watching her echo of the navigational console, saw pennant numbers blink into life beside each cylindrical hull. She smiled wryly. That was a much simpler route into the problem than those she’d taken.
“Commodore Pettin isn’t on Sexburga now,” Daniel said through her helmet. “Has the squadron already landed and lifted for Strymon?”
“We’re the only RCN vessel to arrive from Cinnabar in the past thirty days, Daniel,” Adele said. “Pettin had a ten-day start and you’ve beaten him.”
The upper atmosphere began to buffet the corvette. Over the windroar came a bang and a momentary fluttering rattle outside the hull. Woetjans snatched the handset from beside the suit locker and shouted into it.
Daniel focused on his screen, then looked unperturbedly through the hologram toward Adele again. “A furling clamp on the Starboard Three topsail gave way,” he said. “Rule of thumb is you’ll lose a sail on every leg of a cruise. If we’d made five or six intermediate landings as the squadron probably did, we’d have a much higher damage bill than this one.”
He frowned. “Commodore Pettin had no reason to push the way we were doing,” he continued in a careful tone. “I couldn’t be more proud of the ship, the crew, and the—and my astrogation that brought us to Sexburga in a record run. But I do hope the commodore doesn’t feel, ah, challenged. That would add complexity to a situation that’s already less simple than it could be.”
Woetjans and the riggers still wore their suits as they waited in the corridor. Delos Vaughn stood in the doorway of the wardroom, looking into the bridge past them. The hard voyage had worn him as badly as it had anybody else aboard the Princess Cecile; his face looked like a mummy’s skull.
But he was smiling.
* * *
The echoes of the corvette’s landing had stopped reverberating around the high cliffs of Flood Harbor, but when Daniel switched to a panoramic view he saw that a vast doughnut of steam still hung in the sky. The Harbormaster’s office was a blockhouse built out from the natural rock wall at the base of the broad embayment. A vehicle pulled away from it and turned up the quay that would bring it to the Princess Cecile. That was greater efficiency than Daniel had expected on so distant a world.
He keyed the intercom and said, “Captain to crew. After the ship has been opened, spacers, there’s a twenty-four hour liberty for everybody but the designated anchor watch. I’ll remain aboard as officer of the watch.”
He paused, then added, “Good work, Sissies. God grant this won’t be the only record you and I will set! Captain out.”
Daniel sighed and stretched his arms back, then forward to where they muddied portions of the display. The panorama provided a holographic image of what he would see were he standing on the Princess Cecile’s spine and if the rigging weren’t in the way. Like quite a lot of things—Daniel’s fingers idly called up a file; women’s faces, little mementos, cascaded across his display—the image was more attractive than the reality.