Radiance was a bright spot in the panoramic starfield at the top of Daniel's display; Gehenna was a similar bead 30 degrees to clockwise along the ecliptic. Either could have passed for an unusually bright star to an inexpert eye, but Daniel would've picked out the planet and satellite by their slight proper motion during the ninety-seven minutes he'd been waiting for the picket boat to clear the Goldenfels to land.
The picket had just arrived, a 600-ton country craft whose antennas had been removed. Instead of making the vessel look sleeker Daniel found the result ugly and disfigured, like a man with cropped ears.
Though the picket was unarmed, its real duty was to act as trigger for the Planetary Defense Array orbiting not Radiance but rather its satellite Gehenna. If there'd been any doubts about there being an active base on Gehenna, the presence of a newly-installed Alliance minefield would've dispelled them. The Commonwealth homeworld itself was only incidentally covered by the array centered on the satellite, 730,000 miles from its primary.
"Four persons are boarding the scooter," Adele announced from her console. She was using her unaided voice across the stillness instead of speaking over the intercom; Daniel didn't know whether that was for security reasons—Adele was listening to low-power transmissions within the picket boat—or if she just preferred to talk normally when that was possible. "Three are Commonwealth personnel, a naval officer and two spacers. The fourth is Lieutenant Caravaggio of the Alliance Fleet, officially an advisor to the local authorities."
She coughed, keeping her eyes on her display instead of turning to look at her companions on the bridge as she spoke. "The guardship is named the House of Peace, but its crew and their control in the base on Gehenna refer to it as the Outhouse."
Daniel unlatched his shock harness, though he didn't get up from his couch just yet. "Sun," he said, "take your pipper off the picket boat. I don't want our friends to feel threatened when they board us in a few minutes."
"But sir!" Sun said. "What if they—"
"If you vaporize them, as I'm sure you could, Sun," Daniel said, "within ten seconds one of those mines is going to detonate and send a jet of charged particles through us. We both saw the result of that above Kostroma. Personally, I wouldn't find our lives a fair exchange for that orbiting dustbin."
The mines were thermonuclear weapons, each fitted with a simple magnetic lens. When the mine acquired a target, the device detonated and the lens in its last microsecond of existence directed a significant proportion of the blast toward that target. The mines were either triggered by command, or because a target had approached too close without the correct response to its interrogation code, or because the target violated some other parameter. Attacking the guardship would certainly be such a violation.
The gunner grimaced, but he immediately touched a control that made the targeting circles vanish from his display. "No sir," he said, "I guess I wouldn't either."
"They're leaving the guardship," Adele said. The scooter was a simple cage of struts and wire woven around a tank of reaction mass with a plasma thruster at either end. Daniel saw rainbow exhaust puff from the back. The image swelled rapidly at first, then burped plasma from the bow and slowed to a crawl.
Daniel rose from his couch. He wanted to give a final pep talk to the crew over the intercom, but Adele's concern for security stopped him. Instead he called in a voice that the score of spacers on the bridge and loitering in the corridor beyond could hear, "All right, Sissies. All we have to do is act like a gang of half-uniformed cutthroats who generally operate on their own. That shouldn't be much of a stretch, should it?"
Because the Goldenfels' cover was that of a freighter, her crew hadn't worn Alliance Fleet uniforms. Besides, on-duty clothing for spacers tended to be anything loose and drab no matter who they happened to be working for. The ship's present crew wore garments from both Alliance and RCN stores, along with a mixture of civilian garb from a score or more of planets which they'd visited in the course of their careers. In fact they looked exactly like the crew which Captain Bertram had commanded and were pretty similar to the crew of any vessel in either navy that wasn't either an admiral's flagship or otherwise cursed with officers who worshipped spit and polish.
Through the laughter, Daniel heard the clank of the scooter's electromagnets clamping to the hull, then lesser clinkings as the boarding party entered the airlock. He propelled himself into the forward transfer compartment which contained the companionways and airlock, waiting for the inner hatch to open.
Adele, still strapped into her couch, shook her head at the unthinking skill with which Daniel and the other spacers moved in freefall; he grinned boyishly at her. So far as he was concerned, that wasn't a patch on the way she navigated the thickets of information retrieval. It was all in what you were used to, he supposed.
The airlock opened. The Commonwealth officer and a spacer whose vacuum suit looked dangerously worn got out, followed by Caravaggio, the Alliance advisor Adele had warned about. He was a young fellow, no more than nineteen, with close-cropped black hair and a pugnacious expression.
Last through the lock was Woetjans, a hulking giant when her rigging suit doubled her apparent bulk. The boarding party must've left the remaining spacer on the hull to guard their scooter—a piece of mindless paranoia, so far as Daniel could see.
"HSK2 Atlantis, requesting permission to dock on Lorenz Base," Daniel said to Caravaggio, ignoring the Commonwealth officer who was nominally in charge. The latter was a man in his fifties with a sad expression and a drooping gray moustache, a considerable contrast from the bold red-and-silver patterns on his vacuum suit.
"Where's Captain Bertram?" Caravaggio said, his eyes narrowing. "And what the hell happened to you guys, anyway? You look like a wreck on the way to the scrapyard!"
"Bertram's dead," Daniel said, clipping his words and glaring at the Alliance lieutenant like he wanted to tear his throat out. Neither he nor Caravaggio was quite perpendicular—and they slanted in opposite directions. Daniel wasn't sure you could really be threatening when you looked like part of a comedy act, but he was trying.
"And as for what happened to the Goldenfels," he continued, "if you were cleared to know that you wouldn't have to ask. Give us the codes, sonny, and go back to wiping windshields for tips."
"Look, you!" the youth replied, flying hot before the situation really sunk in. When it did, he paused with his mouth open.
Daniel let his lip curl, which wasn't really an act. Though young, Caravaggio was older than Midshipman Dorst. Dorst would've kept his temper until he understood what was going on—though if he decided then that there was a problem, he'd proved himself in the past to be strong and determined when he went about finding solutions.
"Look," Caravaggio resumed in a less argumentative tone, "I have to report who you are. I mean, whoever you are, I have to report before they'll clear you through."
Daniel grunted. "I'm Kidd," he said. "I was the Third Lieutenant. Lieutenant Boster, he was the XO till the same problem as took off the Old Man."
In fact Lieutenant Kidd—whom they'd captured on Morzanga and released there with all the other Alliance spacers who hadn't signed on with the freighter's new management—was a lanky fellow who resembled Woetjans more than he did Daniel. Caravaggio and his superiors would very possibly have the Goldenfels' crew list, but it would be abnormally bad luck if the Alliance officer happened to know Kidd by sight.
The important thing was that Kidd and Daniel were about the same age. There was no way a twenty-three year old could pass for a senior officer of a vessel like the Goldenfels.
"And if you're wondering about Lieutenant Greiner," Daniel continued after a heartbeat pause to make sure his luck hadn't been abnormally bad, "don't, because he wasn't in the chain of command. If you take my meaning."
Caravaggio did and grimaced, though the Commonwealth official looked in puzzlement from his advisor to Daniel, then back again. The Goldenfels was a spy ship, and as such the signals officer was a specialist from a pool of officers other than those of the ordinary Fleet. Spies were folk whose business and associations made fighting officers steer clear of them, lest some of the muck stick.
Daniel smiled musingly. He understood how Caravaggio felt. If Adele weren't Adele, he'd feel much the same way about her.
"All right," said Caravaggio. "I'll feed the codes into your main computer, but be careful—once you enter the minefield, you have to follow the programmed course precisely. If you deviate by more than a few percent in course or speed, you're dead. There won't be a warning. The array's like a mousetrap: it doesn't think, it just acts."
"Thank you, Lieutenant," Daniel said calmly, as though the threat didn't concern him. "If I lose control of the ship that badly on landing, we'll auger in without needing a minefield to kill us. Follow me, if you will."
Daniel reached back for the hatch coaming, then pulled firmly to send himself into the bridge again. He gave himself just enough spin to rotate his body so that he faced forward when he reached his console and caught himself. Caravaggio kicked off a bulkhead and followed in a similarly slow, graceful flight.
Adele was concentrating on her own display, but Daniel smiled at the back of her head as he went past. The way spacers learned to maneuver in weightlessness was rather amazing when he thought about it, which he normally didn't, of course. Well, after all, you didn't normally think about walking on the ground either; but if you considered all the muscles that had to work just so to keep you from falling on your face, that was pretty remarkable also.
"Here, you can couple to the command console," Daniel said. He made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. "Or if you want to use another, be my guest. We're short-handed since the trouble, as you can see."
He gave Caravaggio a cynical smile. The Goldenfels was indeed short-handed. Daniel had thought about trying to conceal the fact by putting techs from the Power Room at the consoles. There were too many ways that could've gone wrong, though, so he'd decided to make a virtue of necessity and hint at the horrendous casualties which had also ripped open the freighter's belly.
Caravaggio looked grimly impressed as he seated himself on the couch. "No sir, the command console will be fine," he said, taking a data syringe from the pocket strapped to the left forearm of his vacuum suit. He pointed the syringe, a short tube with a pistol grip, into the console's input port and squirted the code into the ship's system.
When the telltale above the port winked green, Caravaggio stood and slipped the syringe back into its container. "There you go, Lieutenant Kidd," he said. "Your identification signal will change in a continuous keyed sequence which matches the interrogatories from the defense array. Just follow the program I've input and you'll be fine."
He pushed off toward the airlock where the Commonwealth personnel continued to wait in morose silence. Over his shoulder he called, "But for God's sake, don't abort your landing and try to lift again. You'll be blown to atoms before you've risen a thousand meters!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," Daniel repeated, remaining where he was in the middle of the bridge.
With luck, Adele should be able to unravel and emulate the code Caravaggio had downloaded into the command console; she'd assured him the decryption suite of the Goldenfels was just as advanced as her own unit aboard the Princess Cecile. If she succeeded, then the defense array ceased to be a matter of concern.
If that codebreaking didn't work out, though, well . . . it wasn't going to prevent the Goldenfels from doing considerable damage to Lorenz Base. But it was very unlikely the Goldenfels and those aboard her would survive more than seconds following their initial slashing attack.
The Goldenfels was under weigh again. Vesey had the conn. Adele assumed that controlling the ship's descent into Lorenz Base was simpler than the chore Daniel had taken for his own: preparing to loose the full weight of their weaponry against the Alliance.
Adele was so sunk in her own work that she aware of acceleration in the same fashion she was aware of breathing—mostly not at all. What a wealth—what a treasure house!—of information she was finding.
The ship's computer ground away at the code controlling the Planetary Defense Array. Starship computers had to be able to project courses through multiple bubble universes, each with varied space-time constants; no workable human encryption system could be more complex.
The algorithms necessary to attack encryption were quite different from those needed for astrogation, however. Adele had brought her software from the Princess Cecile. The system already aboard was configured specifically to the astrogation computer of the Goldenfels, however, so she was using the installed version instead of her own.
She had nothing to add to the processing once she'd put it in hand, so she concentrated on Lorenz Base, dug into the surface of the moon which always faced Radiance. The installations were almost completely hidden, but by opening the files of the maintenance department—which weren't protected any more rigorously than the similar files of the Xenos city government were—Adele had retrieved complete schematics of the power, sewer, water, and air-handling systems of every portion of the base.
Some of it didn't mean anything to her—the huge overhead trackways could be for any purpose from food storage to missile transfer—but she was confident that Daniel could layer usage on her armature of facts. She was transferring the files to all members of the command group as she uncovered them, slugging them as to source and adding titles when possible.
It struck Adele almost absently that Lorenz Base was huge. It was built into the rim of an asteroid impact crater seven miles in diameter, the largest terrain feature on this side of Gehenna. On Radiance the crater was known as the Eye of Darkness, and many of the more devout inhabitants refused to do business on days when the Eye appeared to wink in the rising sun.
It was long after sundown on the portion of Radiance that now faced the moon. Adele didn't suppose what was about to happen in the Eye was bad news for those on the primary, but it would certainly look that way to anyone here on Gehenna.
While Mr. Pasternak was refitting the Goldenfels with High Drive motors from the wreck on Morzanga, Adele had taken the time to configure her console into the fashion she wanted it. Now she could control it directly with her wands instead of using her handheld unit as an interface.
Her fingers twitched, ripping data from banal files and reconnecting them in shapes that the people who'd entered the bits could never have imagined. By combining information from a score of service operations, most of them run by civilian contractors, she was creating the targeting data Daniel needed.
Lorenz Base's twenty-four hangars were dug into the crater's inner walls in groups of eight. Each hangar was 57 meters wide and 412 meters long if the power connections were flush with the walls. Two of the groupings were in the northwest and southwest quadrants; the third was to the east. There were 90 meters of rock between hangars in a group and 450 meters between the nearest members of the two western groupings.
"Adele, can you tell which ones are occupied?" said a voice through her console. "Those hangars are big enough that any one could hold the whole destroyer flotilla. I don't want to waste time smashing empties unless I have to!"
Adele was aware that it was Daniel speaking, though that didn't matter in her present frame of mind. Her task was simply to answer the question no matter who asked it; to retrieve the needed information in a form that the querent could use.
Power usage wasn't conclusive, but water was another matter. Water by the kiloliters was needed for washing, for drinking, and particularly for filling the reaction mass tanks of ships that'd been months in transit and avoiding landings for fear their movements might be reported. Hangars one through five in the southwest grouping showed a vast increase in water usage over the past fourteen days. There were frequent burps in flow to Hangar East One as well, but those were fairly consistent over the past three months.
"Here are the active hangars, sir," she said. "Sir" was a polite response to a querent, not a junior officer addressing her commander. She transferred to Daniel a schematic of the base overlaid with color-coded gradients based on water inflow. SW1-5 were bright red, E1 was yellow; the other eighteen positions ranged from violet to dark indigo.
"By God they are!" Daniel said. "By God they are!"
Adele drew a deep breath and relaxed. She had a realtime visual of Lorenz Base at the top of her display, but she hadn't taken time to look at it. Now she did.
The Goldenfels was slanting toward the crater at a steep angle from due west. Its jagged walls were ochre where sunlight touched them and sharp purple shadows where it did not: Gehenna had no atmosphere to blur the edges of light and not-light.
A few above-ground installations glinted, elevator heads and gun positions. Near the center of the crater floor was a slim naval vessel, one of the eight destroyers whose presence Daniel had foretold when he was released from the grip of the Tree on New Delphi.
Adele's console clucked an attention signal; she brought up the information which it thought she needed to have.
The console was correct. "The computer's solved the minefield code," Adele said as her wands moved in tight arcs, transmitting new orders to the node which controlled the defense array. "I'm setting the command node to reject all signals to attack the Goldenfels. I'll have it . . . there, we're clear."
"Roger that!" Daniel said. Then in an exultant voice he went on, "Ship, this is Six. Prepare to engage the enemy!"