"—now!" said Daniel's voice over the general channel, and everything except the interior of Adele's mind blurred in what had become a familiarly horrible fashion. Transition was worse than travel in the Matrix, and that was uncomfortable enough.
Adele thought for a moment about the times in her life when she hadn't been uncomfortable. There'd been many of them, long periods in fact, but they all involved her being lost in her studies or her work. It was difficult to work while the starship was in transition, but perhaps she ought to try harder in the future.
The Princess Cecile had been three days on the voyage from the rendezvous point—Salmson Catalog 115A3 but otherwise unnamed—to Radiance, a distance the Goldenfels had covered in a little over a day. The difference was the ship's velocity at the time they entered the Matrix. They could've dropped back into normal space to increase speed once they'd gotten clear of the Bluecher—Dorst had asked about the possibility—but Daniel had preferred to take the longer, less exposed route.
As Adele knew from their private conversations, Daniel didn't believe they had gotten clear of the Bluecher. While the Princess Cecile was in the Matrix, she couldn't be touched by an enemy who, no matter how skillful, was literally in another universe.
The sidereal universe returned as though somebody'd rolled back the rug covering Adele's existence. Things were brighter, sharper, and the communications display came alive with RF emitters. Adele had purpose again, so she was content.
They'd reentered normal space 250,000 miles from Radiance and almost three times as far from Gehenna, on the sunward side of its primary. There were thirty-seven vessels in what Adele had set as her immediate coverage area, a sphere with a million-mile diameter centered between Radiance and the moon. Many of the ships were orbiting Radiance at a lower level, preparing to land or to light their High Drives before entering the Matrix. Those were the normal traffic of a busy commercial port.
Another of the ships was the Bluecher, orbiting Gehenna within the Planetary Defense Array.
"Unidentified ship exiting Matrix," said a male voice transmitting from the cruiser on microwave. "This is AFS Bluecher. Identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you, over."
"Daniel," said Adele, clipping the syllables short as her wands arranged the other thirty-six vessels by type at the edge of her display. "They're calling on tight-beam, that means they were watching us return to normal space."
Ten of the ships orbiting Radiance were elements of the Commonwealth fleet. They were 600-ton vessels no different from those trading and raiding all over the Galactic North save that their crews were paid—indifferently—by the State, and that they were armed with batteries of short-range rockets. No Commonwealth warship had been aloft when the Goldenfels attacked Lorenz Base four days earlier. That disaster had obviously convinced the Commonwealth government to lock its barn door, now that the horses had been stolen.
"Roger," said Daniel imperturbably. "And targeting us, no doubt. They'll have visual identification shortly, but stall them if you can, over."
Adele opened her mouth to reply to the Bluecher and froze. Good God, would they be able to recognize her voice? She switched her transmission to the upper sideband so that the compression would conceal her voice to most ears—and said, "Bluecher, this is AFS Nymphe, Lieutenant Archimbault commanding. Admiral Raeder sent us ahead to make sure Lorenz Base is prepared to take his squadron in thirty hours time, over."
If the Bluecher had them under optical observation, they couldn't pass for a country craft—Adele's first choice—nor even a merchant vessel from the Alliance or one of the neutral worlds outside the two power blocks. The Princess Cecile's slim lines and the suit of sails that required a large crew to work marked her as a warship beyond question. The only option was to pretend to be an Alliance warship.
"Nymphe, shut down your High Drive," the voice ordered after a delay greater than the considerable distance separating the vessels explained. He didn't make any comment about the fact the "Nymphe"—a real sloop in the Fleet list, one of a series of false identities Adele had ready for emergencies—was responding on a single sideband in the 20-meter range. "Our cutter will board you after you've fallen into orbit, over."
The Bluecher must have a very skilled team on its sensors to've been able to spot the distortion of the Sissie's imminent arrival. Still, they seemed to be fooled—
"Sir, they're launching!" Sun shouted over the command net.
Daniel's hands moved. The thrusters and High Drive lit together, braking the Princess Cecile more fiercely than Adele had ever before felt.
"Mr. Betts, fire one!" Daniel shouted as he fought the throttles into balance. The solid CLANG of a slug of vaporized reaction mass ejecting the 30-ton missile rang through the Buzz! and Burr! of the power units. "Fire two!"
Adele didn't have leisure to call up a realtime display, but the relative positions of the ships on her signals board indicated that the Princess Cecile was diving toward Radiance. She was confident Daniel knew what he was doing, and regardless she had enough things on her plate to occupy her.
The emitter of the laser communicator was formed by fifteen separate light guides. They could operate in unison, in bundles, or as individual lenses sending an ultra-tight-beam message in fifteen simultaneous directions.
Adele split the emitter to target the ten Commonwealth warships and said, "Peacock Throne—" the call sign of the control station in the Palace of Delegates below "—to all Commonwealth vessels. The Alliance of Free Stars is launching a surprise attack on the Commonwealth. Destroy the cruiser Bluecher at all costs! It's preparing to launch missiles into the spaceport and palace. Destroy the cruiser at once!"
She was scrambling her message according to the Commonwealth naval code for the month. The automated response from the receiving units indicated that three of the ships didn't have the code loaded, so she looped her signal alternating scrambled and clear. Idiots! Couldn't anybody do his job?
Sun's bow guns hammered, trying to turn an oncoming missile by blasting material off one side to nudge the remainder in the opposite direction. It was impossible to destroy a solid, multi-ton projectile, but with luck and sufficient time the plasma cannon might redirect it. The range here was probably too short for even that.
"Holy God our savior!" cried somebody who must've been watching imagery of the battle. Almost with the words, a vibrating Whang! heeled the Princess Cecile violently to starboard. A missile had severed an antenna or mainspar, thick steel tubing whose structural strength couldn't withstand the impact of a projectile accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
The Sissie launched two more missiles in succession, rocking with the recoil of each. Adele had studied the data on their opponent while she was providing it to the command group. The heavy cruiser mounted twelve missile tubes and had a hundred and twenty reloads in its magazines. The details would mean more to Daniel than they did to her, but it would be obvious to a child that a straight-up slugging match between a cruiser and a corvette with only half her normal twenty missiles could end only one way. "Bluecher, what in God's name are you doing!" Adele screamed into the sideband transmitter. "Admiral Raeder will feed you to the antimatter converters, you idiots! Stop shooting!"
She didn't expect her feigned panic would convince the Bluecher to cease fire, but it might. She wondered how the Bluecher had unmasked them. Probably they'd gotten a solid visual identification and had acted on it; Captain Semmes was obviously a decisive captain as well as a skillful one.
Adele focused a microwave on one of the net of communications satellites orbiting Radiance. She linked to channels for the Commonwealth navy and government, and also to The Word of God, the state-run civilian broadcasting system. "Alliance warships are attacking Commonwealth vessels!" she said. "Launch all ships immediately or they'll be destroyed on the ground! The cruiser Bluecher is attacking Commonwealth vessels!"
The confusion of additional scores of vessels milling above Radiance would make the Bluecher's calculations more difficult. It might not help much, but it'd help; and anyway, it was something for Adele to do while the Princess Cecile maneuvered violently.
Other people could put their faith in God, but Adele would get along with belief in the things she could touch:
Semmes was skillful, but he wasn't as good as Daniel Leary.
The Bluecher's spacers weren't as good as the Sissies.
And whoever Semmes had for a signals officer couldn't match Adele Mundy.
"Alliance warships are attacking the Commonwealth!" she cried as she felt two more missiles slam from their tubes. The plasma cannons' firing drummed through the hull, and a heavy shove twisted the corvette as something ripped away part of her sails.
"Launch all ships immediately to engage the cruiser Bluecher!"
The Sissie's antennas were raised, so Daniel couldn't land on Radiance even if he'd been ready to kill the riggers on the hull. Buffeting on the way through the atmosphere was rough even with the antennas and yards telescoped and the sails furled about them. The best that'd happen if the ship came down with her antennas at full extension was that everything would wrench off. If by some miracle it didn't, they still couldn't set down on the ventral row.
Woetjans had both watches out, ready to instantly adjust the sails however Daniel wanted them. She'd figured that they wouldn't want to stay in the Radiance system any longer than they had to, once Daniel had calculated the best escape route based on what he saw when they came out of the Matrix. This would've been their first star sighting since they'd fled Salmson 115A3.
The bosun was correct about them not having much time, but unfortunately they had even less time than that. The Bluecher was so close and so alert that the corvette had no chance whatever of returning to the Matrix before a salvo of missiles arrived.
But if Radiance wasn't a bolthole, at least it was big enough to stop Alliance missiles and direct observation. Daniel was diving toward the planet as the only chance the Princess Cecile had of surviving the next five minutes. After that—well, first get the five minutes.
"Betts, fire at will!" Daniel shouted over the command push as he tried to do three things at once. It'd be tempting to conserve the Princess Cecile's slight stock of missiles, but unless they managed to screw up the Bluecher's plans, the corvette would shortly take a direct hit that'd vaporize the missile magazine along with everything else.
Not even the coolest officer likes to see hostile missiles streaking across his attack board toward him. The slight chance of disconcerting the cruiser's command group was worth all the "what if?" fairy gold of saving rounds for later.
Daniel had programmed the first two missiles, but the rest Betts would have to aim. It was his job, after all, and he was perfectly able—he wouldn't have been aboard the Princess Cecile at this time if he weren't. He couldn't read Daniel's mind, though. In a perfect universe the Sissie's missile launches and maneuvers would be parts of a choreographed whole.
Well, in a perfect universe the Sissie wouldn't have been trapped by a heavy cruiser commanded by a man who'd get Daniel's vote for Best Captain in the Alliance Fleet. And if it came to that, a perfect universe wouldn't need warships and fighting officers to command them. Daniel'd play the hand he'd been dealt.
There was only so much he could do. Semmes hadn't expected his prey to dive for the planet, but his twelve-missile salvo had allowed him to hedge his bets. Space might be infinite, but in human terms a corvette covered a considerable volume of it with her antennas extended seventy feet from the hull in all directions.
Daniel's Plot Position Indicator was three-dimensional and multi-colored. The incoming missile tracks were blue with their predicted continuations in purple. A purple trace appeared to intersect with the yellow line of the Princess Cecile's course. Daniel expanded that tiny segment till the corvette's 230-foot length filled the width of the display. The purple line was still there, merely a thread even at the larger scale.
Bloody Hell, it was going to—
Daniel couldn't add power, so he shut off the thrusters instead. The High Drive took thirty seconds to build or collapse, so he didn't bother with them. The effect of reduced braking was to move the Sissie slightly higher above Radiance and slightly forward of the path the astrogational computer had predicted.
The incoming missile segment slipped beneath her hull. If they'd been lucky it would've missed entirely, but it clipped Antenna Ventral B. The impact converted twenty feet of the mast to vapor which shredded the sails of VA and VC. Expanding gases rang the hull like a steel drum.
Daniel lit the thrusters again, knowing he was stressing the corvette beyond what her frames were meant to bear. He loved the Princess Cecile as much as a man could love a machine, but if she got her crew clear of this and back to Cinnabar then they could scrap her. Pray God, just get the Sissies back to Cinnabar!
Daniel reverted to a standard PPI. Instinct showed him the opportunity that the software couldn't have computed. He throttled the thrusters back to 70%, a slight but calculable reduction. The Bluecher's sensors noticed the change and fed it into the attack computer. Three seconds later, the cruiser launched another salvo of missiles.
Missiles under power could follow a curving course. The Princess Cecile was ducking into the ballistic shadow of Radiance, but the cruiser's attack computer could send missiles into her predicted position even though there was no line of sight between the Bluecher and her prey.
"Chewning, get the riggers inside!" Daniel ordered, wishing he'd thought to say that before they lost people—almost certainly—on Ventral B. The riggers were of no use outside as things were. If the Sissie escaped into the Matrix they could go out again, but they weren't going to attempt to enter the Matrix while the Bluecher followed.
The cruiser had waited in an unpowered orbit so she was slow getting under weigh, but the acceleration of her missiles meant the launching vessel's speed didn't matter. The Sissie could keep Radiance between her and the Bluecher for the time being, but she couldn't get away; and when the cruiser got moving, the corvette couldn't hide either.
Daniel watched the PPI as an incoming missile's curving track changed from purple to blue—then stopped abruptly when it intersected a Commonwealth warship. Daniel had factored in the other vessels, but the Alliance missileer had not. The victim bloomed as a varicolored fireball, not only superheated metal but the propellant and warheads of its rockets.
Another Commonwealth ship launched three salvos of forty-eight rockets apiece at the Bluecher. The range was too great for the primitive Commonwealth fire control computer, but the sheafs of tiny projectiles caused three more of the country craft to launch also. As soon as they'd emptied their external rocket racks, they dived for the surface of Radiance.
Daniel continued maneuvering to keep the planet between the Princess Cecile and the cruiser. He was dropping deeper into the gravity well also so that Radiance subtended a broader arc. It was a temporary expedient at best, since they were only ten thousand miles above the surface. That was a considerable altitude under most circumstances but a matter of minutes when it's your lifeline.
He'd expected to lose realtime imagery of the Bluecher as soon as he put the Sissie behind the planet, but there was no gap in coverage after all: the cruiser continued to be visible as a blur in the midst of ionized exhaust. Adele was importing a signal, probably from Lorenz Base. Commonwealth observation satellites were unlikely to be this clear if they even existed. How had she been able to do that?
But thank God she had!
Semmes had been accelerating on High Drive, but he cut in his plasma thrusters when the Bluecher became the target of hundreds of unguided rockets. Daniel judged his enemy's new course and adjusted the Sissie to stay in the planet's shadow in this deadly game of hide and seek.
Three Commonwealth ships unloaded their rockets at the cruiser, then two more. Great heavens, Daniel hadn't imagined a reaction anything like this when he tricked the Bluecher into destroying a country craft! He hadn't imagined the Commonwealth vessels could react that quickly even if they'd wanted to. It was as if they'd been waiting for an excuse to launch on an allied vessel!
More ships were rising from Radiance. Daniel couldn't tell whether they were civilian or more naval units; the only external difference was the bundles of rockets on naval vessels, easily overlooked among the folded rigging. Captain Semmes must not have been able to tell either, for the Bluecher suddenly opened fire on them with her 15-cm plasma cannon.
Daniel supposed Semmes was simply trying to discourage another irritating rocket volley, because nobody'd expect serious results from plasma cannon at a range of several hundred thousand miles. The guns were for defensive purposes, to deflect incoming missiles which couldn't be dodged. The country craft were so fragile, however, that the concentrated hammering of six cannon—only three of the cruiser's turrets bore on the target—caused the victim to stagger and curl back into the atmosphere.
A handful of Commonwealth rockets suddenly detonated against the Bluecher. The cruiser's image sparkled like a butterfly's wing shaking off scales. The rockets' small fragmentation warheads were meant to destroy an enemy vessel's masts and rigging so that it couldn't escape—or pursue, depending on who was pirate and who was prey during a given engagement. They wouldn't seriously damage the hull of a country craft, let alone the thick plates of an Alliance heavy cruiser.
But nobody likes to be shot at, to have the steel around him ring with slamming explosions followed by the sizzle of fragments that ricocheted among the rigging. Maybe it was for that reason that the Bluecher's gunnery officer began ripping another rising Commonwealth ship instead of turning the concentrated fire of his cannon on a projectile from the Princess Cecile as he should've done.
The segment hit a stowed dorsal antenna, erupting in a white-hot spray like the tail of a comet nearing the sun. The damage wasn't serious, but everybody aboard the Bluecher knew that it could've been: that a course different by a matter of meters would've gutted the cruiser and left her adrift for the salvage teams.
The Princess Cecile now had at least a prayer of succeeding. The cruiser'd launched another salvo after vaporizing the Commonwealth ship, but those missiles had missed by several miles. Daniel resumed acceleration with both powerplants as soon as he'd put the Sissie behind Radiance. Semmes' missileer didn't have the direct observation of the Princess Cecile that Daniel—thanks to Adele—did of the Bluecher.
"Six, there's a heavy vessel reentering sidereal space out-orbit of Radiance, over," said Vesey. She'd focused on her duties, watching the sensor board while the battle raged around her. Many officers with more experience wouldn't have been able to do that.
But it didn't matter now: the Princess Cecile would be clear or destroyed before the new opponent got sufficiently organized to take a hand. The description "heavy vessel" was based on the amount of distortion Vesey's instruments recorded as the newcomer reinserted itself into normal space-time. There hadn't been another cruiser in the Alliance squadron, so that probably meant one of the battleships had also been working up when the Goldenfels destroyed the vessels hangared at Lorenz Base.
"Ship, this is Six," Daniel said as his fingers pounded a new set of instructions into his virtual keyboard. "We will be entering the Matrix—"
His display flashed with orange letters each the size of his extended hand:
BREAK BREAK BREAK
"RCS Aristoxenos, this is RCS Princess Cecile," said Adele's voice over the announcement channel. "We have a target for you, Admiral O'Quinn—an Alliance cruiser. All other vessels are friendly. I repeat, all vessels except the Alliance cruiser are friendly. Princess Cecile over."
Daniel felt the rocking clunk of the Sissie's last two missiles sliding into the tubes, ready to launch. "Mr. Betts, cease fire!" he ordered, instinctively placing a lockout on the attack console. "Prepare attack solutions for the Aristoxenos and transmit them to her soonest. I don't trust their computers or their people either one, but the good Lord knows I'm glad to have their company, out!"
Betts had been doing a fine job, but he might not see the sudden necessity of holding the Sissie's final rounds in reserve. Daniel would explain the situation when he had a moment, but the first priority was to prevent the Chief Missileer from spending what might otherwise become an opportunity to mousetrap the Alliance cruiser.
Adele was in conversation with the Aristoxenos. She'd cut Daniel into the channel but he was too busy controlling the Princess Cecile to worry about what they were saying.
The Bluecher had swung from its predicted course and shut down its thrusters when the missile grazed it. Daniel had to fight the Sissie back into Radiance's cone of shadow. As a practical matter, that meant dipping closer to the planet; they were already deep enough that the upper stratosphere created minuscule but noticeable drag. The corvette wasn't safe until the last Alliance projectile was headed harmlessly out of the system, and even then there was the problem of landing with what might be unnoticed damage.
The cruiser had stopped launching missiles with the fourth salvo. She was accelerating at 1.5 g, probably the best she could manage under the High Drive alone, along the course Semmes had set while he was preparing to winkle the Princess Cecile out of concealment. It would take her past Radiance on the down-orbit side—and, probably the major factor now—away from the Aristoxenos.
Semmes doesn't know what's happening, Daniel realized. He must be pretty sure the newcomer wasn't a friend, but he couldn't be certain she was an enemy either. Having managed to get into combat with his Commonwealth allies, he'd be especially cautious not to repeat the mistake with—
The Aristoxenos launched four missiles at the Bluecher. One of them described a tight arc. It was headed back toward the battleship when one or both High Drive motors failed and the missile disintegrated into a sphere of molten droplets.
The Bluecher responded with a salvo split between the Aristoxenos and the Princess Cecile. The cruiser was extending its antennas. A large piece drifted away, the spar damaged by the Sissie's missile, cast off or broken off by the acceleration.
The battleship had thirty-six missile tubes: thirty-one launched at the Bluecher. The thirty-second tube exploded, a blue-white cancer against the vessel's bow which took fifteen seconds to burn down. Daniel keyed in his final corrections, waited a heartbeat for a green icon to indicate the attack computer concurred, and launched the Sissie's remaining two missiles.
He boosted thrust from the High Drive. The Sissie was far more nimble, now; even the half-magazine of missiles she'd carried on this voyage weighed in aggregate a quarter of the corvette's empty weight. The six missiles the Bluecher'd just launched blindly at them weren't a serious threat. The cruiser's missileer would've been smarter to direct the entire salvo at the battleship for which he had full course and speed information.
Daniel brought the Princess Cecile out from behind Radiance, adjusting their course to a line nearly reciprocal to that of the Bluecher. He touched a port-side plasma thruster, then countered the thrust instantly with a blip from starboard, rolling the ship 30 degrees on her axis so that her dorsal and ventral turrets both bore on the cruiser.
"Sun," he ordered, "dust 'em up! I want to give them something to think about besides their proper jobs!"
"Roger, roger!" the gunner said delightedly, swinging his guns to take advantage of the unexpected target. There was no practical reason to fire 4-inch plasma cannon at a cruiser over a quarter million miles away; the Bluecher's own 15-cm weapons couldn't have done serious harm to the corvette at this distance. The psychological effect of plasma bolts—though only sprays at this range—flash-heating the cruiser's hull might cause somebody to make a mistake, though, the way the Commonwealth rocket salvoes had distracted a gunnery officer who should've been worrying about an incoming missile.
The ventral turret rubbed hard enough to send a squeal trembling through the whole vessel. It was supposed to be free-floating above the turret ring on magnetic repulsion. Given the strains the corvette had been taking Daniel supposed they ought to be thankful it rotated at all.
The Princess Cecile could probably escape while the cruiser was occupied with its new enemy, but the possibility barely crossed Daniel's mind like the chance of landing on Radiance. Neither was a real option: the latter because the corvette wasn't rigged for landing, the former because Daniel Leary was an RCN officer and the RCN didn't run from fights. Even mutineers remembered that, apparently, once they'd had a chance to reflect.
The Aristoxenos' antennas were extended with sails spread on many of them. O'Quinn hadn't taken the time—or perhaps had the crew—to clear the ship for action before entering sidereal space for what must've been meant as an attack on Lorenz Base. The Aristoxenos could've made a quick pass from outside the Planetary Defense Array, launched a salvo of missiles at the hangars, and then—if things worked out—escaped back into the Matrix before the Alliance survivors could respond.
It was a perfectly good plan, basically what Daniel had intended when he went to Todos Santos; though if the expatriate spacers had agreed then, they'd have had Adele's signals skill to make the task easier and a great deal more safe.
Daniel had to admit that it'd taken the Aristoxenos over a month to reach the Radiance system, though. Were it not for the Sissie's earlier attack, that would probably have been too late.
Not that he was complaining at the way matters had developed. Neither "easy" nor "safe" was a watchword of the RCN; victory, however, was.
As the Bluecher's half-salvo neared the Aristoxenos, the battleship's 8-inch plasma cannon began to fire from two turrets which the ship's own rigging didn't mask. A double-pulse caught one of the missiles before it'd separated into segments, converting it into a sphere of glowing gas spreading at the rate of a nuclear explosion. Other bolts vaporized segments with such violence that their destruction buffeted the remaining parts of their clusters off course.
An 8-inch turret blew up with a white flash. A portion of the laser array that compressed the tritium pellet hadn't tripped, but the other lenses were sufficient to detonate the charge with only the gun's iridium breech to confine it. The blast sculpted a divot from the battleship's belly and sheared off two antennas of the ventral row.
That cleared a line for the other belly turret, which immediately began to fire. Battleships had independent targeting, and the turret captains were apparently tracking even though they couldn't fire until the targets appeared beyond the ship's rigging. None of the cruiser's missiles made it through the sledging defensive fire, though one segment vaporized close enough to its target that a pair of topgallants ripped away when the Aristoxenos slid through the still-expanding cloud.
The weight of the Aristoxenos' missiles was beyond the ability of any defensive battery to withstand, even that of another battleship. Semmes reacted in the only fashion that even hinted survival, slamming High Drive and plasma thrusters both to full power at right angles to the incoming salvo. The Bluecher's frame warped visibly at the overload, but the acceleration took her almost out of the cone of predicted missile tracks.
The cruiser's eight big plasma cannon concentrated on the segments at the near edge, that ones that were still potentially dangerous. Bolt for bolt the 15-cm guns had only half the punch of the battleship's 8-inchers, but the Bluecher was cleared for action and her gunners were at a high state of training. The guns' hammering reduced parts of the multi-ton missile segments into gas whose escape drove the remainder off at angles harmless to the cruiser.
Daniel knew precisely what acceleration the cruiser could manage in an emergency because he'd seen the Bluecher react to avoid the Commonwealth rockets. He predicted the direction of that acceleration by the angle he'd have chosen if he captained the Bluecher and the battleship was launching at him. The Princess Cecile's last pair of missiles stabbed in unnoticed till the cruiser's starboard turret desperately engaged a second before impact.
A segment struck the Bluecher's bow as a cloud of gas still so dense that it crushed hull plating and carried away the leading dorsal, starboard and ventral antennas. Microseconds later another segment hit the stern squarely. The release of kinetic energy engulfed the last twenty meters of the vessel in a fireball which left only vacuum behind when it dissipated.
The Bluecher had been about to launch missiles when she was hit. Several left their tubes but tumbled; the computer which should've updated their courses until burn-out instead spasmed when the cruiser whipped sideways.
"Sissie Six to flagship," Daniel said, adding the alert channel so that the corvette's crew could listen his transmission. They'd earned it, the good Lord knew! "Admiral, I suggest we cease fire until you offer the Bluecher a chance to surrender. Her captain is named Semmes, and I won't willingly participate in the murder of a man so able. Sissie over."
"Sir?" said Betts, turning toward Daniel but speaking over the command channel. The bridge was too noisy for unaided voice. "The battleship has to cease fire. The conveyors from her magazines to the launch tubes are all frozen. They just had what was in the tubes when they lifted from Todos Santos."
"Sissie Six, this is Zanie Six," said Admiral O'Quinn's voice, wheezing noticeably. Both ships had visual capacity, but standard operating procedure in the RCN was voice only. In a battle, bandwidth could become too valuable a commodity to waste on frills. "You take their surrender, Leary. You knocked her out."
O'Quinn snorted and went on, "Your missileer even launched our missiles, though I'm damned if I know how he got control of our system. I didn't think that was possible! Over."
Ah. Daniel hadn't thought it was possible either, but obviously Adele had known better. Apparently she hadn't been wasting her time while the Princess Cecile was moored adjacent to the battleship in San Juan harbor. That explained why the salvo had come so quickly. Daniel had expected minutes to pass before the Aristoxenos was ready to launch, even with Betts transferring solutions to the battleship's attack board.
"Admiral," Daniel said, "the Princess Cecile was only a target before your very welcome arrival. If you'll take the credit for the victory which you've certainly earned, it'll make my job easier when I talk to people back in Xenos about what the Republic owes you. As I most certainly will, over."
There was a pause greater than transmission lag before O'Quinn responded, "By God, Leary, if I'd had half the respect for your father that I do for you, we wouldn't be in this place now. Break. AFS Bluecher, this is Admiral O'Quinn, RCN. Do you surrender, or would you prefer to provide the target practice which I'll admit my crew could use, over?"
Over the intercom alone Daniel said, "Personally, fellow Sissies, I'm just as glad they are here now."
Adele let the cheers sound over the general push, though they almost drowned out the mumbled words of Captain Semmes surrendering unconditionally.