“I’ve never worn an atmosphere suit,” Adele warned. “I’ll need help putting it on.”
She’d need help with more than that, and she’d need luck as well. Thus far she’d had both.
And the greatest luck in Adele Mundy’s life was that now for the first time she did have help.
Chief Baylor entered the bridge. He’d barked his left knuckles; his right arm to the elbow was a black smear of congealed lubricant; and his expression was furious enough to face down a fox terrier.
“Sir,” he said, “I’ve got fucking work to do so I’d really appreciate you getting to the fucking point!”
“You’ve become Attack Officer,” Daniel said calmly. “That’s your console.”
He pointed to the navigator’s console, empty since Adele’s departure. “I’ve programmed the first two missiles but you’ll launch any others. There are others, I hope?”
“Oh,” said the warrant officer. “I—”
Baylor seated himself. He typed with the power of somebody driving nails expertly: far harder than necessary for the job but absolutely precise. The PPI switched to a targeting screen, similar in gross essentials but vastly different in detail and the keyboard functions associated with it.
“Well, not so very different from ours,” he said with something short of approval.
Baylor looked back at Daniel. “Sir,” he said, “we’ve got ten missiles aboard, all of them in the ready magazines now and I think they’ll at least launch. Those wog cretins just let them sit in the grease they got them in from the factory. I swear! They’re Pleasaunce built, though, and they seem to power up all right.”
He shook his head. “They’re low-acceleration models. Seven gee max. I wish to God we could’ve transferred some of my babies from the Aglaia before, before . . .”
The Princess Cecile was over Kostroma City at this point in its orbit. A quadrant of Daniel’s display showed an enlarged view of the scene below. Dawn had broken over the capital, but fires blazed beneath trails of smoke. Explosions flashed in the Floating Harbor.
A warship on the surface fired plasma cannon in quick, nervous flickers. So far as Daniel knew there was no real enemy for the bolts to engage.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I regret that too.”
If he’d been wishing for things, he’d have started some distance beyond a chance to transfer missiles between ships. That was an all-day job and they didn’t have the heavy equipment to carry it out besides. He knew, though, that Baylor was mourning the loss of what were “his babies” in every sense but the biological.
Baylor gave him a faint, thankful smile. “I guess worse things happen in wartime, sir,” he said. He reached for the commo key as he added, “I’ll put Massimo in charge at the tubes. She’s a good man. I got a good team.”
Message traffic was passing from the Bremse to the ground at an increasing level of frustration, and from the ground to the Bremse with frequent contradictions caused by a complete collapse of the civilian communications net. Since the Alliance forces hadn’t yet built an alternative net, commo was unit to unit rather than through a multilateral system which could analyze the data from all points simultaneously.
Locking bolts withdrew with a clang. The cutter spurted clear of the hold. The Princess Cecile shuddered in reaction. Bolts rang again to reseal the corvette.
Daniel wondered if the confusion in Kostroma City was a result of something Adele had done but hadn’t bothered to mention, or if it was a chance result of the burgeoning disaster. People talked about the fog of war, but the truth was a much harsher thing. In war a fire swept across all sources of information. Equipment failed and humans, trying to balance dozens of competing crises, lost them all in crashing shards.
“I thought you’d be handling the Attack Board, sir,” Baylor said. His hands were spread across the virtual keyboard. He faced the display with an expression as solidly determined as the nose of one of his beloved torpedoes.
Daniel looked at him. The missileer was setting up course data based on possible locations of target and tube. The courses would have to be refined when it came time to actually launch, but having a setup in the computer made that simpler by a matter of seconds or even minutes.