Her fingers twitched, ripping data from banal files and reconnecting them in shapes that the people who’d entered the bits could never have imagined. By combining information from a score of service operations, most of them run by civilian contractors, she was creating the targeting data Daniel needed.
Lorenz Base’s twenty-four hangars were dug into the crater’s inner walls in groups of eight. Each hangar was 57 meters wide and 412 meters long if the power connections were flush with the walls. Two of the groupings were in the northwest and southwest quadrants; the third was to the east. There were 90 meters of rock between hangars in a group and 450 meters between the nearest members of the two western groupings.
“Adele, can you tell which ones are occupied?” said a voice through her console. “Those hangars are big enough that any one could hold the whole destroyer flotilla. I don’t want to waste time smashing empties unless I have to!”
Adele was aware that it was Daniel speaking, though that didn’t matter in her present frame of mind. Her task was simply to answer the question no matter who asked it; to retrieve the needed information in a form that the querent could use.
Power usage wasn’t conclusive, but water was another matter. Water by the kiloliters was needed for washing, for drinking, and particularly for filling the reaction mass tanks of ships that’d been months in transit and avoiding landings for fear their movements might be reported. Hangars one through five in the southwest grouping showed a vast increase in water usage over the past fourteen days. There were frequent burps in flow to Hangar East One as well, but those were fairly consistent over the past three months.
“Here are the active hangars, sir,” she said. “Sir” was a polite response to a querent, not a junior officer addressing her commander. She transferred to Daniel a schematic of the base overlaid with color-coded gradients based on water inflow. SW1-5 were bright red, E1 was yellow; the other eighteen positions ranged from violet to dark indigo.
“By God they are!” Daniel said. “By God they are!”
Adele drew a deep breath and relaxed. She had a realtime visual of Lorenz Base at the top of her display, but she hadn’t taken time to look at it. Now she did.
The Goldenfels was slanting toward the crater at a steep angle from due west. Its jagged walls were ochre where sunlight touched them and sharp purple shadows where it did not: Gehenna had no atmosphere to blur the edges of light and not-light.
A few above-ground installations glinted, elevator heads and gun positions. Near the center of the crater floor was a slim naval vessel, one of the eight destroyers whose presence Daniel had foretold when he was released from the grip of the Tree on New Delphi.
Adele’s console clucked an attention signal; she brought up the information which it thought she needed to have.
The console was correct. “The computer’s solved the minefield code,” Adele said as her wands moved in tight arcs, transmitting new orders to the node which controlled the defense array. “I’m setting the command node to reject all signals to attack the Goldenfels. I’ll have it . . . there, we’re clear.”
“Roger that!” Daniel said. Then in an exultant voice he went on, “Ship, this is Six. Prepare to engage the enemy!”
CHAPTER 29
Daniel hadn’t had enough time to do all the things he needed to do for an effective attack, so—thank God and Adele!—he made time now that it was safe to. He reached for the controls himself, shouting, “Ship, I’m taking the conn!”
He regretted treating Vesey with brusque discourtesy, since she’d been performing with her usual skill. Vesey’s only flaw was that she couldn’t read Daniel’s mind—but that was critical now, because he couldn’t explain to her the things that had to be done instantly. He’d apologize to her afterwards, if there was an afterwards.
Daniel rolled the thrusters up from the 40% power at which they were idling toward a landing to 95%, not quite normal maximum and certainly not through the gate into overload. He didn’t need thrust quite that badly, and at the highest settings—even with the units properly warmed up as these were—there was always a risk of fracturing a nozzle and sending the ship into a dangerous oscillation.