She was scrambling her message according to the Commonwealth naval code for the month. The automated response from the receiving units indicated that three of the ships didn’t have the code loaded, so she looped her signal alternating scrambled and clear. Idiots! Couldn’t anybody do his job?
Sun’s bow guns hammered, trying to turn an oncoming missile by blasting material off one side to nudge the remainder in the opposite direction. It was impossible to destroy a solid, multi-ton projectile, but with luck and sufficient time the plasma cannon might redirect it. The range here was probably too short for even that.
“Holy God our savior!” cried somebody who must’ve been watching imagery of the battle. Almost with the words, a vibrating Whang! heeled the Princess Cecile violently to starboard. A missile had severed an antenna or mainspar, thick steel tubing whose structural strength couldn’t withstand the impact of a projectile accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
The Sissie launched two more missiles in succession, rocking with the recoil of each. Adele had studied the data on their opponent while she was providing it to the command group. The heavy cruiser mounted twelve missile tubes and had a hundred and twenty reloads in its magazines. The details would mean more to Daniel than they did to her, but it would be obvious to a child that a straight-up slugging match between a cruiser and a corvette with only half her normal twenty missiles could end only one way. “Bluecher, what in God’s name are you doing!” Adele screamed into the sideband transmitter. “Admiral Raeder will feed you to the antimatter converters, you idiots! Stop shooting!”
She didn’t expect her feigned panic would convince the Bluecher to cease fire, but it might. She wondered how the Bluecher had unmasked them. Probably they’d gotten a solid visual identification and had acted on it; Captain Semmes was obviously a decisive captain as well as a skillful one.
Adele focused a microwave on one of the net of communications satellites orbiting Radiance. She linked to channels for the Commonwealth navy and government, and also to The Word of God, the state-run civilian broadcasting system. “Alliance warships are attacking Commonwealth vessels!” she said. “Launch all ships immediately or they’ll be destroyed on the ground! The cruiser Bluecher is attacking Commonwealth vessels!”
The confusion of additional scores of vessels milling above Radiance would make the Bluecher’s calculations more difficult. It might not help much, but it’d help; and anyway, it was something for Adele to do while the Princess Cecile maneuvered violently.
Other people could put their faith in God, but Adele would get along with belief in the things she could touch:
Semmes was skillful, but he wasn’t as good as Daniel Leary.
The Bluecher’s spacers weren’t as good as the Sissies.
And whoever Semmes had for a signals officer couldn’t match Adele Mundy.
“Alliance warships are attacking the Commonwealth!” she cried as she felt two more missiles slam from their tubes. The plasma cannons’ firing drummed through the hull, and a heavy shove twisted the corvette as something ripped away part of her sails.
“Launch all ships immediately to engage the cruiser Bluecher!”
* * *
The Sissie’s antennas were raised, so Daniel couldn’t land on Radiance even if he’d been ready to kill the riggers on the hull. Buffeting on the way through the atmosphere was rough even with the antennas and yards telescoped and the sails furled about them. The best that’d happen if the ship came down with her antennas at full extension was that everything would wrench off. If by some miracle it didn’t, they still couldn’t set down on the ventral row.
Woetjans had both watches out, ready to instantly adjust the sails however Daniel wanted them. She’d figured that they wouldn’t want to stay in the Radiance system any longer than they had to, once Daniel had calculated the best escape route based on what he saw when they came out of the Matrix. This would’ve been their first star sighting since they’d fled Salmson 115A3.
The bosun was correct about them not having much time, but unfortunately they had even less time than that. The Bluecher was so close and so alert that the corvette had no chance whatever of returning to the Matrix before a salvo of missiles arrived.