The Princess Cecile lifted suddenly out of the plume of steam from the harbor. She was accelerating at 1.2 g, as much thrust as a sensible captain chose except in an emergency. Starship hulls were optimized for the barely-perceptible thrust of Casimir radiation against their charged sails; high acceleration, especially within a gravity well, would strain her fabric if it didn’t rupture the vessel outright.
An occasional streak of plasma drifted past the Sissie. From below the vessel would be a flare of coronal brilliance, dangerous to the eyes of anyone who looked directly at her; the thunder of her progress would tremble through Xenos and the surrounding countryside. Nothing like the liftoff of a battleship, of course, but still a reminder of Mankind’s raw power.
The vessel’s progress steadied. Daniel looked at the altimeter; they were passing through 100,000 feet. The atmosphere had become thin enough that he could engage the High Drive, if he had to and if he was willing to accept the erosion of the motors when air molecules combined violently with antimatter particles which hadn’t been devoured in the normal reaction. He wouldn’t switch to High Drive here until Cinnabar Control had routed him through the minefield, of course.
“Ship, this is your captain,” Daniel said. No one could see his face, but he knew he was smiling like a triumphant angel. “God bless the Princess Cecile and those who fare upon her!”
He couldn’t hear the cheering for the ship’s own thunder, but he knew the cheers were there; and he was cheering himself.
CHAPTER 9
4795-C wasn’t any more prepossessing from orbit than it’d seemed from Surveyor Austine’s handheld photos of years before, but at least the Princess Cecile’s new imagery gave Adele a way to distract the Klimovs while the corvette roared downward.
Daniel had said the landing would be a little tricky because they’d be setting down on land instead of in the water. 4795-C had no lack of open water—ponds, lakes, and broad meandering rivers were evident to the naked eye, despite the mist that covered the entire planet—but since there was no dock to tie up to, the Sissie would drift with the wind.
From the Klimovs’ expressions, either the prospect worried them or they were simply uncomfortable because of the thrusters’ bone-shaking snarl and the additional half their body mass weighing them down in their couches as the vessel braked. So far as Adele was concerned, she trusted Daniel’s skill implicitly—and sixteen days (Daniel had shaved two days off his estimate) in the Matrix with only a few hours total taking star-sightings in sidereal space had been quite enough for her. The chance of Daniel flipping the Princess Cecile onto her back because he’d misjudged the way exhaust would reflect from solid ground was vanishingly slim, but Adele wasn’t entirely sure she’d regret death if that were the alternative to additional uninterrupted star travel.
“Captain Leary is landing here,” Adele said calmly over the channel she’d set aside for herself and the Klimovs. Her wands drew a red cross on the gray-brown image. For an instant she showed an entire planetary hemisphere, but she quickly reduced the scale until it was a ten-by-ten kilometer square with the X still in the center.
As an afterthought, she added thin grid lines. “You’ll note—”
And to make sure they did, she circled the sites in red.
“—that he’s put us within three kilometers of a pair of pyramids.”
“And the dragons?” asked the Count, proving that Adele had successfully distracted him. The Klimovna seemed altogether less flighty than her husband, though Adele wasn’t ready to say she liked the woman. In fairness, neutrality was about all Adele felt regarding most human beings.
“We’ll need to be on the ground to determine that,” Adele said. “The source suggests that they’re not uncommon, though; or at any rate, they weren’t uncommon ninety years ago.”
The Princess Cecile was a small general-purpose warship, not a dedicated reconnaissance vessel. Her equipment could probably locate some of the creatures from orbit, but that’d appeared to Adele to be a waste of time. Daniel had taken her recommendation to go straight in.
The Klimovs had taken their meals at a combined mess of the Princess Cecile’s officers and warrant officers. This was a change from normal RCN practice, but Daniel felt it was the better idea on a vessel as small as a corvette.