As it turned out, three technicians and Lieutenant Wilsing—wearing coveralls and looking as incongruous as Adele would in a brothel—were doing the refit. There was neither need nor for that matter room for her involvement. She could’ve found a place to sit and work either aboard the corvette or elsewhere, but she decided to simply step out onto the quay and view what was going on from enough distance to get a grasp of the whole of it.
The two companionways—the only internal connection among the corvette’s four levels—were armored like the decks themselves. The spacers went up and down the helical treads in long jumps; Adele wasn’t especially sure-footed, nor was she in a hurry. She was halfway down the stage from B to C deck when she heard someone enter the tube at the top, but she’d scarcely gotten clear of the hatchway when Sun crashed into the entrance hold behind her.
“Oh, sorry, mistress!” the gunner’s mate said. He gestured her ahead of him out the main hatch and onto the catwalk; Adele didn’t have any real destination, so she walked along. “I didn’t hear you with all the racket. Do you know how many missiles they’ll leave behind for us?”
Adele deliberately stepped onto the concrete quay before she turned to follow Sun’s gesture. A lowboy with three cradles, two of them already holding missiles, waited to receive the third long cylinder clanking gear-tooth by gear-tooth down the conveyor from the magazine on B Deck.
“One moment,” Adele said, setting her data unit on the barrel where she’d sat earlier in the morning to listen to Daniel’s speech. It was already linked to the Sissie’s computer; she brought up the proposed manifest and said, “We’re to carry ten.”
She heard Daniel’s voice from above, modulated by the faint breeze; she glanced up. Daniel and Woetjans were on the top, the truck, of an antenna extended to its full 90-foot height above the corvette’s dorsal spine.
Adele grimaced and looked back at her display; she was mildly afraid of heights. Besides, she didn’t see what Daniel and the bosun could learn in that fashion that they couldn’t learn by looking at the tubes while they were nested together and lying flat against the hull. Still, it was their job; she wouldn’t thank anyone who tried to tell her how to do hers.
Though Adele’s attention was deliberately on her display, it was a moment before the words she read penetrated her disquiet over what might happen to her friends if a freak gust of wind struck or the Sissie for some reason rolled; then she frowned. Sun peered over her shoulder—uselessly, because the air-formed holograms were only a shimmer anywhere except at the focal point of Adele’s own eyes.
“This says that the missiles are single-converter units captured with the vessel when it was in Kostroman service,” Adele said. “But surely that’s wrong? Daniel acquired RCN standard missiles before we even left Kostroma.”
Sun cleared his throat in something like a chuckle. “Well, mistress,” he said, “if there was any deal like that, it was done off-book. A fighting captain like Mr. Leary—and a captain with as much to trade as Mr. Leary had—wouldn’t have lifted with wog missiles no matter what the manifest showed.”
Missiles, a warship’s primary armament, were miniature spaceships driven by High Drive motors. If they were allowed to run to burnout they reached .6 C. The projectiles were solids, because even fusion warheads would’ve added nothing significant to their kinetic energy at such speeds.
For shorter-range engagements, acceleration was a significant factor. Twin-motor missiles, each with its own antimatter converter, had the same terminal velocity as single-motor units, but they reached it in half the time though at nearly double the cost. Cinnabar and the Alliance considered the expense justifiable; most of the lesser navies didn’t or couldn’t spend the extra money.
The lowboy’s pair of lifting arms locked around the missile, fore and aft. A man from the Logistics Service stood at the control panel at the vehicle’s rear; his female partner was in the articulated cab. Chief Betts, the Princess Cecile’s missileer, watched from the open bay.
“Wish we were keeping them all,” Sun said wistfully. “Though I guess we’ll be well-armed compared to most freighters—and the Chief knows how to use ’em.”