CHAPTER 23

En Route to the Cancellaria System

Adele, would you like to have a drink in the day cabin? Daniel asked at the open door of what'd been Orly's quarters before she and Daniel had moved into the Captain's suite. Don't worry—it's good brandy.

Yes, I'd be pleased to, Adele said, shutting down her personal data unit and wondering if she'd just told a lie. And don't worry about the quality. My father was a connoisseur, but it didn't take with me during the years I lived at home.

She slipped the data unit into its pocket and smiled wryly. Since then, she added, I've sometimes mixed industrial alcohol with the water if I didn't have bleach to disinfect it. They were places where the alcohol was more readily available, you understand.

She certainly didn't mind taking a break. Adele was truly glad to be able to help a friend, and it was clear beyond question that Daniel needed help although he was smiling. She'd been examining the Greif's dispatches in detail now that she'd run them through her specialized equipment. The task was involving and therefore fascinating, to Adele Mundy if not to anybody else; but it would wait.

She followed Daniel into the day cabin. On the tiny table sat a pair of plastic tumblers and a squat green bottle which'd been hand-blown into a mold. She didn't recognize the markings. Daniel dogged the door behind them.

The bustle and limited space of the junior warrant officers' cabin hadn't bothered Adele: she was used to cramped quarters, and she'd always been able to escape into a book or her computer display. She—and probably Daniel as well—gained a degree of comfort by sharing the suite, though; and from what Daniel'd said, Slidell and his clerk weren't going to need it in the future.

I thought of asking you to take a turn with me on the hull, Daniel said as he took the chair she hadn't. He grinned, but though the expression wasn't forced, it wasn't entirely happy either. But I really wanted to have a drink while I talked about it.

Adele broke the wax seal and poured a generous slug of brandy into Daniel's tumbler, then her own. This bottle was fresh, but there'd been another bottle of something before he'd invited her over. Daniel wasn't drunk, exactly, but he'd certainly been drinking.

There are no listening devices in this suite, Adele said. She allowed herself a slight smile. Unless somebody more skillful than I am manages to undo the lockouts I've placed on the system. I don't think there's anybody in that category on the Hermes at present.

Daniel grinned into his brandy as he swirled it. Of course the best way to keep it secret . . . he said, raising his tumbler slowly. Would be to keep my mouth shut. Which I don't seem to be able to do.

He swallowed half the contents in a convulsive gulp. That was doubtless a sin against good liquor, but Adele'd been telling the truth when she said she wasn't a connoisseur.

She shrugged. Telling me is the same as telling nobody, she said. But as you please.

Daniel gave her a real smile. I could've talked to Hogg, of course, he said, but Hogg wouldn't care. He wouldn't see there was anything to be concerned about. And there is. It's Captain Slidell, you see.

Adele sipped, savoring the brandy. It had a faint cinnamon overtaste, rather pleasant once she got past the surprise. All right, she said, because Daniel seemed to be waiting for a response.

My father will think I deliberately killed Slidell, Daniel said. He asked me to, because he thinks Slidell murdered Oller Kearnes in revenge for what father did to Slidell's brother. Kearnes was actually my father's child.

Daniel tossed down the rest of his tumbler. He reached for the bottle, then paused and looked at Adele.

She waved dismissively. Go ahead, she said. It's your brandy, after all.

He laughed. Yes, it is, he said. He shook his head as he poured. It's absurdly complicated, isn't it? It's complete nonsense, it has to be.

Well, it's not too complicated for your father, Adele said as she took another sip. Nor for mine either, back when he was alive.

She lowered her tumbler and looked at Daniel. Did you kill Slidell? she said. Well, did you maneuver him into killing himself?

No, Daniel said forcefully. No, I didn't. I told him the truth and I wanted the assignment for myself. I think I might've been able to pull it off, you see—with my crew, of course.

Adele shrugged. Then tell your father the truth, she said. Or tell him nothing at all, which ought to be even simpler.

She hadn't realized Daniel had been in contact with Corder Leary since their acrimonious break years before she'd met him. It was disquieting to learn that she'd been wrong in that assumption.

The thing is, Adele, Daniel said. He lifted the tumbler again, then forced himself to lower it to the table where he glared into its honeyed depths. The thing is, I knew that Slidell would take the assignment. He shouldn't have—I was the right person to execute the attack for several reasons.

He grinned broadly and added, Mainly the fact that I could make it work and Slidell didn't have a prayer of that. Which I knew and he should've known if he'd been thinking instead of just reacting. But also because it was my plan. Anyway, Slidell's primary duty should've been to the Hermes and the flotilla as a whole.

Adele nodded. She could see what was troubling Daniel now—see it and understand it as well. He was right that Hogg would've shrugged, or laughed.

Daniel, she said, you believe that Captain Slidell was too paranoid to do his duty to the Republic. That's correct, isn't it?

Well . . . Daniel said, taken aback. That's harsher than I—

He paused. Yes, he said, that is basically what I'm saying. I understand why he'd be, well, doubtful about me, but . . . Yes, that's true.

All right, said Adele. And I assume there's another way to delay the Alliance convoy, that's right too, isn't it? Since after all, we're not heading back to Nikitin ourselves.

Yes . . . said Daniel carefully. It's chancy, of course, but I do have a plan. The bones of one.

Adele gestured with her left hand to indicate that she understood. Daniel was hesitant to talk about something which was nebulous even in his own mind until he'd gathered more information. That didn't matter: what she'd needed was the fact, not the details.

Would Captain Slidell have been able to execute this other plan? she said. As well as you will, I mean?

No, Daniel said, shaking his head. No. It takes . . .

He looked up from the table and grimaced. Adele, I don't want to sound as if Slidell's incompetent, he said. That isn't at all true. But this isn't, well, the normal sort of thing to come up. I'm very much afraid that the Captain would be too hesitant—or else bull straight in. Which is why he'll blow the mission he's on now, I'm very much afraid, though truly I'd be delighted to be wrong.

I know you would, Adele agreed. You're not your father, and only a man like your father would think you were. So. There were two possible responses to the Alliance threat. Captain Slidell was too—

She gestured. Hidebound. Limited. Whatever you want. To see those possibilities. That left you the choice of either saying nothing and seeing Guarantor Porra gain a considerable advantage over the Republic, or of giving Slidell good advice in the awareness that he probably wouldn't take it . . . but that the Alliance might still be thwarted. Where did your duty lie?

Daniel laughed cheerfully. He drank, but this time it was with the normal gusto of a young man who likes liquor and women and life. Well, when you put it that way . . . he said and laughed again.

I put it that way, said Adele austerely, because I make rather a fetish of factual accuracy.

She finished the tumbler and dabbed her lips with the kerchief from her left sleeve, then put it away again. Do you have further questions? she asked.

Daniel grinned. Yes, he said. Will you have another glass of brandy while we work through the manifests of these transports you got out of the Greif's dispatches? I've got the two carrying the planetary defense array highlighted, but some of the Alliance commercial nomenclature is new to me. I may need a reference librarian.

Adele took the bottle and poured herself another drink, larger than the first. With great pleasure, she said.

And this time it was the literal truth.

* * *

Ship, this is Six, Daniel said. We will reenter sidereal space in thirty, I say three-zero, seconds.

He felt as though he were the ship herself speaking. Laughing, he said to Adele at the console beside him, If I'd had my choice, I'd be at the top of a foremast reading the sky. I couldn't conn her from the hull, though . . . but you know? She isn't a trim craft, but she's not a pig either. She gives me as much feel through the keyboard as ever the Sissie did.

Daniel, Adele said, using the two-way link though they were alone in the BDC with Hogg and Tovera, if somebody put sails and an astrogation computer on Chatsworth Minor, you'd claim it was a good ship. And with you for her captain, it probably would—

The Hermes shuddered across the boundary between universes. The transition wasn't quite instantaneous, nor did it affect every atom of the tender and her crew in precisely the same way.

Daniel's sensation was that of leaping wildly through vacuum, trying to cross from one antenna to another and knowing that if he missed his grip at the far end he was lost for eternity. From the way Adele's face went white and her mouth opened like that of a goldfish sucking air, she felt more like she was being disemboweled.

Adele's face cleared; she gave him a rueful smile. It would be a good ship, she finished, but she and Daniel both had work to do now.

The Plot-Position Indicator highlighted a ragged group of fourteen vessels at a tangent to the Hermes' course, between three hundred and five hundred thousand miles away. One ship had just come out of the Matrix after making a short maneuvering hop to bring it closer to the main body.

RCS Hermes to unidentified vessels, Adele said, her voice crisp and emotionless. Identify yourselves at once. Over.

She'd said she'd be sending tight-beam microwave as well using the 20-meter short-wave band for broader coverage. The transports—one of the twelve was missing; had Commander Slidell destroyed or damaged it?—might not be alert enough to pick up even the short-wave transmissions, but the escorting warships certainly would.

Daniel had brought the Hermes to .04 C before entering the Matrix, much faster than was common or even desirable for a starship under normal conditions. High velocity made it more difficult to maneuver within the Matrix, and it was generally more efficient to hasten a voyage by careful choice of bubble universes than it was to maintain a high rate of progress within individual universes. Besides, it required as much time and reaction mass to brake a starship for landing or orbiting a planet as it did to accelerate her in the first place.

The Hermes' present case was an exception: speed and relative motion in sidereal space were the only protections she had against the Alliance warships. Any reasonably competent RCN officer could maneuver to avoid a full-deflection missile from the nearest destroyer, and it would take a minimum of ten minutes—by Daniel's assessment—for any of the escorts to place themselves on a closing course.

It was difficult for a group of ships to maintain station at the best of times, and the problems increased with their absolute velocity. A well worked-up naval squadron might manage to proceed at .02 C, but the present assemblage of civilian transports from a variety of Alliance client states was at less than .01 C—and straggled badly even so.

Daniel felt reasonably confident the tender could safely fly past the convoy: a missile would take longer to accelerate to closing velocity than it would take the Hermes to shift back into the Matrix. The real danger lay in the possibility that one of the destroyers would chase the tender instead of staying with the convoy. That wouldn't be good practice—the Hermes might've been a decoy, after all, drawing off the escort so that other Cinnabar vessels could attack more easily—but a hot-headed, ambitious, or simply stupid Alliance captain might well do that. He'd very possibly succeed if he did.

You couldn't avoid every risk; and for that matter, an RCN captain who considered risk avoidance to be a major goal was by definition a bad officer. It wasn't a stricture ever likely to be directed against Daniel Leary, at any rate.

The transports had been either holding position at 1 g acceleration to mimic gravity or were closing up. Daniel was sure the Alliance commodore was angrily encouraging the laggards. Within a minute of the Hermes' challenge three merchant ships—in all likelihood, the only three whose crews were keeping a proper communications watch—shifted course away from the tender.

The Eliza Soane, a mixed freight and passenger liner out of Pleasaunce, even lighted her thrusters in addition to her High Drive. She was a new vessel, almost as large as the heavy cruiser Scheer leading her escort. The Soane's captain was apparently willing to warp her frames in order to avoid an RCN warship, even a warship that no naval officer would've considered a threat.

Adele's challenge went out again, but this time it was a recording. Daniel glanced sidelong at his friend: her face looked like carved wood, immobile and expressionless. He knew she'd pre-programmed her equipment to gather information she wanted, but she'd found additional work to do now. Her fingers were dancing with the control wands.

Woetjans was on the hull with both rigging watches. Pasternak had his Power Room crews at their consoles and his repair personnel suited up, ready to clear frozen feed lines or replace High Drive motors in flight. Sun was on the bridge at the gunnery controls, poised to deflect an incoming missile or—the target of a gunner's dreams—blast the rigging and hull of a hostile vessel that'd come improbably close. The three midshipmen on the bridge were nervously working solutions to every problem they could imagine in the areas to which Daniel had assigned them.

Captain Daniel Leary had nothing to do but to watch the Alliance escort react, and to choose the last safe moment for the Hermes to escape again into the Matrix. He smiled. That was a sufficient responsibility. If he misjudged their timing, a missile would vaporize the tender and her skillful, hard-working crew; and unless he got fully into the head of the escort commander, he wouldn't be able to disrupt the convoy.

The Scheer didn't shift her position at the front of the loose globe of freighters. The destroyer nearer the Hermes, the Z21 according to the legend which Adele's software had careted onto the display, was braking to drop rapidly behind the convoy. Within ten minutes she'd be between the remaining Alliance vessels and the Hermes.

She would also be in position to pursue if the tender remained in sidereal space. Destroyers were built for speed and maneuverability. Newly constructed vessels like the later Z Class had a high enough power-to-weight ratio to accelerate at 3 g, and their sturdy frames could accept such stresses.

The Scheer launched a pair of missiles. Daniel nodded approvingly. The heavy cruiser had twelve missile launchers and her magazines carried over a hundred reloads. Possibly two hundred, though the higher figure was unlikely in a vessel fitted out for a long voyage. A Z Class destroyer carried no more than fifty missiles, including those in her six launchers. The Alliance commodore didn't expect to hit the Hermes, but he could afford to expend two rounds from the cruiser to hasten the RCN vessel on her way.

Daniel's instinct caught a distortion in the PPI even before a visible blip appeared. He highlighted it and snapped, Signals, get me full particulars on this vessel—

A line of data appeared at the bottom of his screen in lime green letters: House of Zerbe, registered Caxton's World; 3,000 tonnes nominal; present identifier number C7.

ASAP, I was going to say, Mundy, Daniel went on with a broad smile. But you were a little quicker than that, as usual. Break. Ship, this is Six. We are inserting into the Matrix—

He pressed the code key with his index and middle fingers together, initiating the sequence he'd programmed days earlier. At the moment the details didn't matter as much as entering the Matrix before that pair of missiles reached the point in sidereal space which the Hermes at present occupied.

—now! Out.

Daniel felt the universe shiver as the tender and all those aboard her prepared to enter another of the interpenetrating bubbles of the Matrix.

He had plans for what came next as well; the planning was easy.

Executing those plans, though—that wasn't going to be easy at all, and it might not even be possible. But he was going to try.