“Ship, this is Six,” Daniel said, shutting down the thrusters. “Prepare to enter the Matrix. Entering Matrix—”
He’d set the switches minutes ago, a lifetime ago; he’d set the switches as soon as the Alliance heavy cruiser dropped back into normal space. He pushed the Execute button with the tips of two fingers, hard enough to have shoved a hatch closed. A virtual keyboard didn’t care about pressure, but Daniel Leary wasn’t a man for half measures.
“—now!”
Daniel felt the shudder of the vessel slipping into a bubble of normal space driving through space-times more alien than the heart of a sun. The sensation was by now long familiar, but it wasn’t and probably would never become comfortable. The physicists said that nothing changed—the Goldenfels herself and the volume bounded by the tips of her antennas remained a part of the universe in which the vessel was built and her crew was born.
The physicists were wrong. A one-time passenger could have told them that, let alone veteran spacers with hundreds or thousands of hours in the Matrix. The ship might remain part of normal space, but something interpenetrated it. You could feel the difference, a scratchy sensation like wearing another man’s skin beneath your own, and sometimes you saw things.
Once Daniel had seen a group of humans shambling down a corridor identical to that of the Swiftsure, the ship on which he was in training. They were naked and blank eyed. Behind them strolled a feathered biped with compound eyes; it stared at Daniel in shock and horror before vanishing with its charges as suddenly as an image tilts away in a mirror.
Sometimes you saw things that weren’t real. Things that Daniel told himself couldn’t ever have been real.
“Ship, this is Six,” he said. His face had fallen into a mechanical smile at that memory—that false memory. When he realized, his expression turned into wry self-amusement. “I’ve programmed our course. I’m going onto the hull now to supervise the rig. In seven hours we’ll drop back to take a star sighting, then proceed to rendezvous with the Princess Cecile. I estimate that’ll take another eighteen and a half hours.”
He took a deep breath, then added, “Sissies, there’s a possibility that we’re not done fighting just yet. You deserve a chance to rest, but we all know that life isn’t fair. If things work out as they may despite my best efforts, I’m confident that Alliance cruiser will know it’s been in a fight. Six out.”
He’d check the armament, but not just now. . . .
Daniel started to get up from his couch; the shock harness still gripped him. He touched the release stud and rose again, smiling at himself. He was more tired—more wrung out—than he’d realized. Well, he’d get some rest when he could, but that wouldn’t be till they took their star-sight in seven hours time . . . and maybe not even then.
“Mistress Vesey, you have the conn,” Daniel said, walking toward the airlock. He wouldn’t be on the hull long, so he wasn’t going to bother donning a rigging suit.
The sailcloth patch in the corridor ceiling quivered; well, the Power Room crew could switch to damage control duties now that the ship was in the Matrix. Vesey would take care of that without being told.
He stepped into the airlock. Adele was with him. Daniel looked at her in surprise. She had no business out on the hull.
But to tell the truth, neither did he: Woetjans could handle the rigging without the captain on the hull to watch. Daniel’s presence was a matter of moral support, that was all. And so was Adele’s, of course.
Daniel beamed and nodded to her. He had a good team. The Goldenfels might be short handed, but she had the best crew she’d carried since commissioning, of that he was sure.
And if the Bluecher caught them, as the Bluecher might very well—it’d be just as he’d told his crew: when it was over, they’d know they’d been in a fight.
* * *
When Adele thought about it, this short run from Gehenna had been one of the most physically uncomfortable voyages she’d made. When she wasn’t thinking about it, though—and she hadn’t thought about it except fleetingly—the discomfort really hadn’t made any difference. She’d been busy, assimilating the enormous lump of data she’d scooped from the systems of Lorenz Base when the Alliance forces were bypassing communications safeguards during battle.