She smiled back. He really did make the absurd seem possible. And so maybe it was.
CHAPTER 31
Daniel wished he had time to strip off his rigging suit, but the best he could do for the time being was to unlock his helmet and twist it to release as he threw himself down at the command console. A quick shuffle through the displays showed him that things were as well as could be expected: they were accelerating at 1.4 gravities, as much as the High Drive could manage when the corvette was so heavily loaded. Woetjans’ riggers had begun setting the sails according to plan, now that the Princess Cecile was unmasked as fully operational.
The Bluecher had launched a spread of twelve missiles, a full salvo, which Daniel supposed he should take as flattering. Captain Semmes thought so well of the Goldenfels’ commander that he was using all available force to crush what on the face of it was the crippled remnant of an initially weak opponent. Perhaps when all this was over, it would give Daniel a warm feeling; what he saw now was certain destruction accelerating toward them at 12 Gees.
Daniel punched a three-stroke combination into his keyboard, triggering the complex program of commands he’d prepared aboard the Goldenfels before abandoning her. Missiles launched from both the freighter’s tubes, and her thrusters lit at full power. The missile courses were vague approximations, but that wouldn’t be certain to the Bluecher till they burned out.
He doubted that either of those things were going to befuddle Semmes, but they provided a few more factors on the Alliance commander’s plate. Though Semmes seemed to have all the cards from where Daniel sat on the other side of the table, he knew that things would look different on the bridge of the Bluecher.
Betts had been alone on the Sissie’s bridge until the regular crew arrived from the Goldenfels; Chewning and Dorst had been handling gunnery and command duties from their usual station in the Battle Center.
Sun, still wearing his airsuit, was at the gunnery console now, but the Sissie’s four 4-inch plasma cannon couldn’t significantly affect the oncoming missiles. There was no hope for escape save into the Matrix, and that was only a momentary bolthole. The corvette didn’t have enough way on to get any significant distance from their present location, no matter how many times their relative velocity was multiplied.
“Ship, this is Six,” Daniel said. “We’re entering the Matrix—”
His left hand shut off the High Drive; his right thrust two fingers down hard to initiate the entry sequence. A complex charge built on the Princess Cecile’s hull, acting both as pressure and a lubricant, forcing and allowing the vessel to slip from sidereal space into the complex of other space-times.
“—now.”
To those aboard the Princess Cecile, it was as if time dragged on at an agonizing crawl during which the individual atoms of their beings turned inside out. In fact time was moving just as fast as it ever did, but within the bubble of special space-time movement slowed. The actual process of insertion into or extraction from the Matrix took anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute, depending on the energy gradients involved.
And it didn’t affect the Bluecher’s missiles. Daniel had what was either a Matrix hallucination or a flashback to the time he was one with the Tree on New Delphi: the missiles launched on initially diverging courses which then curved back toward intersection; their twin High Drive motors reaching burn-out and shutting down as each round split into three segments, moving at .6 C and packing so much kinetic energy that a thermonuclear warhead would add complexity without increasing the effect of a hit; the segments crisscrossing the volume of space containing the Goldenfels and the Princess Cecile.
He’d hoped the Goldenfels would successfully make the transition into the Matrix where its track would at least be a distraction for Captain Semmes when he came hunting the Sissie. The freighter’d begun her programmed sequence at the same time as the corvette did, but the bigger vessel still wallowed in normal space when segments of two Alliance missiles plunged into her.