The last thing the Princess Cecile needed was a brilliant young first lieutenant determined to show himself—or herself—to be just as dashing as Daniel Leary. Chewning was brave—he must be, to have brought the crippled Cape Coronel to port in seventy-two days with a six-man crew. But he didn’t feel he had to prove it.
“Sir, we’re ready,” Chewning said. He and the two midshipmen with him in the armored BDC were ready to take over if the bridge crew were lost or incapacitated. “Over.”
“Captain, we’ve been cleared by Harbor Control,” Adele said, her voice as emotionless as a speech synthesizer. “Over.”
“Ship, this is the captain,” Daniel said on the general push. “All systems are green, all hatches are closed, the vessel is cleared for liftoff. We will lift in thirty seconds. Commencing sequence . . . now.”
He enabled the plasma thrusters, letting the control system itself light the nozzles in balanced port and starboard pairs. He could override the computer and do as good a job, but he didn’t need to—either because of the ship or to prove himself.
The thrusters lit but remained at low power: Starboard Three and Port Four, Starboard Two and Port Three, working outward from the ship’s center of gravity to affect her balance as little as possible.
The Princess Cecile trembled, as much from waves in the pool as from the minimal thrust. A shroud of steam billowed, masking the optical sensors on the hull. Daniel’s external displays switched automatically to high-frequency, low-power radar to paint a picture of the vessel’s immediate surroundings.
A ship could lift or set down with its ports open, but the bath of live steam and charged particles was uncomfortable for the crew as well as damaging to the vessel’s interior. An assault barge landing on a hostile world had reason for such a stunt; a yacht on a pleasure cruise did not.
“Orbital control has reserved a slot for us,” Adele said. Her voice, calm even when she was murderously angry, seemed particularly out of place while the ship around her strained thunderously to slip the leash of gravity. “I’ve fed the course data to the navigational computer. Over.”
“Message received,” Daniel said. “Out.”
He could check the data, but there was no point in doing so. While in cis-lunar space above Cinnabar, all vessels were under dirtside control. Depending on the state of alert—and even after an armistice with the Alliance had been formally approved, Daniel suspected the state remained very high—deviating from the imposed course would bring either a guard vessel and the loss of the captain’s papers . . . or simply a ship-wrecking blast of ions from the Planetary Defense Array that protected Cinnabar from attack.
Thruster output rose to a nominal 20% power; the Princess Cecile skipped up and down on the waves her own exhaust hammered into the pool. All other gauges and readouts were at the high range of their readiness parameters.
“Ship,” Daniel said as he thumbed a roller switch from Standby to Liftoff, “we are commencing liftoff.”
All eight feed valves opened to 70%; the thrusters roared. The Princess Cecile shuddered, matching thrust to gravity, then began to lift with the ponderous majesty of a queen mounting her throne. But no queen ever had a throne as high as the one to which the Sissie would carry her captain. . . .
Icons on Daniel’s display indicated the Klimovs were both speaking; to him, he supposed, but you couldn’t expect laymen to have good sense. Adele would keep them occupied, and perhaps they’d learn in the future.
The Princess Cecile rose, her initial acceleration moderate. The bow was down three degrees, but the computer had begun adjusting power before Daniel could reach the control. The thruster nozzles were aligned correctly—that could be checked on the ground—so there must be a problem with stowage. Perhaps one of the tanks of reaction mass had warped during the hammering the Sissie’d taken in battle. Mon should have noticed it, but he’d had other problems to deal with—
And despite Mon’s technical skill, he didn’t have quite Daniel’s feel for a ship. Daniel grinned with a pride that was surely harmless if he kept it within himself: very few captains had his feel for a ship.