“Faugh, do what you please,” the Count said abruptly. He turned on his heel. “I’m going to play cards in the wardroom.”
Valentina watched her husband stalk off the bridge. “Cards and women,” she said in a tone of disgust. “Other men manage to amuse themselves without risking the lives of everybody around them!”
She shrugged. “I have notes from Morzanga to organize,” she said as she walked toward the companionway. “Men are all fools!”
Daniel smiled faintly. Adele raised an eyebrow. “I hope you don’t expect me to argue the point,” she said. “Of course, I don’t have a high opinion of women either.”
“Mr. Chewning,” Daniel said, cueing his helmet. “You have the watch. I’ll return to the bridge in three hours, when we’re ready to drop back into sidereal space for a final star sight. Six out.”
He grinned broadly at Adele. “I anticipated the owners’ agreement, you see,” he explained. “We’ll be attempting the passage shortly. Until then, I’m going to take a nap.”
“But it’s only three hours, you said?” Adele said. She pursed her lips but took care not to frown.
“Yes, well, it’s not long,” Daniel said, his grin becoming rueful. “But you see, I’ll be on the truck of Antenna Dorsal A the whole time we’re in the passage. Which will be thirty-four hours, if all goes well.”
* * *
Daniel stood at the top of the leading mast of the dorsal row, the point farthest from the Princess Cecile’s hull. There wasn’t—there couldn’t be—a more gorgeous and awesome display than the blaze of the hundred universes now beating down on him. He didn’t feel like a starship captain or a Cinnabar nobleman, he felt like the Lord God Almighty. It was all he could do to fight down the urge to raise his arm and shout, “Let there be light!”
The Princess Cecile was a universe of her own, a fragment of sidereal space-time thrust through universes by the pressure of Casimir radiation, the one true constant which permeated every bubble of the Matrix and the immaterial spaces separating those bubbles. Her antennas and yards stretched molecule-thin sails of conductive fabric. Their area, angle and electric charge determined the vessel’s course within the Matrix and therefore her location when she returned to the sidereal universe. The navigational computers which plotted those relationships were the most powerful available to humanity, but even so a course computation was likely to require an hour or more.
Daniel eyed the heavens’ pattern of color and intensity. He knew the next programmed correction: adjustment by ten percent of the maincourses of all twelve lateral masts while the dorsal and ventral sails remained the same.
That was what the computer said, based on observed gradients . . . and if they followed that program, the Princess Cecile would drive herself into a bubble where a photon had three orders of magnitude greater energy than that of the universe where men had built her. She might survive those pressures long enough for her automatic systems to dump her back into the sidereal universe . . . but the chances were that she wouldn’t survive, and there was no chance at all that she’d be able to proceed with the course the computer had planned.
Daniel raised his right arm as an attention signal; the quartermaster, waiting at the semaphore control panel at the base of Dorsal Two, gestured back. Daniel’s arms made a quick series of signs as precise as the movements of a trapeze artist and as certain to bring disaster if bungled.
The quartermaster dialed the new orders into his mechanical computer, then pulled the long lever on the side. The arms of semaphores at twelve locations across the Sissie’s hull sprang to life. A person anywhere on the outer surface of the vessel could see at least one of the stations.
Only mechanical and hydraulic equipment was used to control operations on the deck of a ship in the Matrix. A radio signal or even the field generated by an electrical conductor within the bubble of sidereal space was enough to throw a vessel off-course to a literally incalculable degree. A fiber-optic cable didn’t set up a field—but neither could it do any work at the far end: that would require an electrical booster with the same attendant problems.