Some people saw things in the Matrix; ghosts, if you will, and not always human ghosts. Adele merely felt queasy when she wasn't concentrating on something; therefore she concentrated on things, which was what she ought to be doing anyway.
At present she was using her time to review communications among the ships of the Alliance squadron, which Rene had intercepted and transmitted to her. She'd been busy with the imagery while thePrincess Cecile was in sidereal space, and cursory dips into the commo chatter had convinced her that it wouldn't be of importance.
She'd been correct about the lack of importance, but it was interesting to see that the Alliance's initial reaction had been something close to panic. Adele got the impression of people who'd started to enter their house and found a ravening monster striding down the hall toward them.
She was also distressed by their lack of communications security, though none of the heavy ships were so distraught that they broadcast in clear the way theT 65 had done. The Alliance officers were the enemy, so she knew she ought to be pleased when they seemed incompetent. The truth appeared to be that she felt much more angry about bad craftsmanship than she did about people trying to kill her.
Adele smiled faintly. Daniel would probably understand that, though it was unlikely that he felt that way himself.
Antennas and the bitts to which the rigging was fastened creaked, transmitting strains through the double hulls. Sounds and light were different, flatter, in the Matrix. Some scientists claimed that was an illusion: instrument readings demonstrated that frequency rates and amplitude across the electro-optical spectrum remained the same whether the ship was in sidereal space or in a discrete bubble of the Matrix.
Adele sniffed; it was amazing how foolish highly educated people could be. Sight and sound were artifacts of the brain which processed neural signals. Though the signals might be identical, the processing wasn't-as anybody who'd been in the Matrix could have told them.
She closed the file of Alliance intership communication; there was nothing she needed to pass on to Daniel. That negative knowledge was useful, though.
They had the information because of Rene Cazelet's skill. And courage, of course, but Adele grinned in self-mockery… though it was true.
– in the RCN one took courage as a given. Guarantor Porra had hurt himself worse than he could possibly have imagined when he drove that young man into the service of the Alliance's enemies.
Adele hoped it'd be possible to retrieve the escape capsule after the battle. Frowning, she realized that only the Sissies knew of the capsule's existence, so a single Alliance missile could doom Rene and his boat handler to a lingering death. Adele quickly composed a message stating the capsule's purpose and location. She set her equipment to transmit the data to all ships of the squadron as soon as they returned to sidereal space.
It'd be extremely bad luck if the corvette were destroyed in the instant of extraction. Regardless, Rene and Mathews were subject to the same fortunes of war as the other members of the crew.
The rig groaned again; an icy knife slid between the hemispheres of Adele's brain and then down the length of her spine. Presumably thePrincess Cecile had passed from one bubble universe to another.
Vesey had gone out onto the hull where she could make minute changes to the sail plan based on her reading of the Matrix. Daniel said she had a real talent for it, judging energy gradients with a delicacy and precision that theSailing Directions -compiled from averages-and an astrogation computer could never equal.
Thought of Vesey caused Adele to play back the lieutenant's discussion with Daniel regarding attack plans. Again, Adele'd listened to snatches of the conversation at the time, but she'd decided that other matters were more pressing. She'd been correct in her assessment, but now that she had leisure she found a great deal of interest-not so much in the words as in the insights to be gleaned from the interchange.
Adele looked at the image of Daniel, now poring over further course projections. She'd sent him a full dossier on Admiral Guphill and on all the captains in the Alliance squadron. Indeed, she'd provided the same information on all the RCN captains as well; she didn't believe in the concept of too much information.
She hadn't sent Vesey that data-but she'd have been glad to do so if Vesey'd asked. And Danielwould have asked if his Signals Officer hadn't volunteered it. For that matter, thePrincess Cecile 's regular database had information on all Alliance admirals which Vesey could easily've retrieved on her own.
That didn't mean Vesey was stupid. Rather, it meant that Vesey viewed human beings as interchangeable data points. She had an instinct for the nuances of the Matrix, but she was trying to predict people in large classes.
There was no humor in Adele's smile. Vesey was a smart, decent, normal human being. She couldn't look on people with the dispassionate precision which Adele directed toward them.
Elspeth Vesey wouldn't kill unless she were in a rage, and even then she'd probably twitch the muzzle to the side in the instant before the trigger released. She'd loved and been loved by a fine young man, just as young women were supposed to do. She had not only a good mind but all the human attributes that Adele Mundy so signally lacked But she didn't seem happy or anything remotely approaching happy. Of course Vesey probably didn't have as many dead people visiting her in the early hours of the morning as Adele did; but perhaps she saw Timothy Dorst, and that might be as bad.
Adele minimized her screen and looked across the console at Tovera. Tovera raised an eyebrow in query, but Adele brought the holographic display back up without speaking.
Tovera had no conscience, so she slept soundly every night. Though… Adele had seen hints that by closely observing her mistress, Tovera was starting to internalize the concept of friendship. From there it was only a series of short steps to regret, remorse, and misery. As best Adele could tell, that was what it meant to be fully human.
She was audibly chuckling when Daniel announced, "Extracting from the Matrix in thirty, I say again three-zero, seconds!"
There was so much adrenalin coursing through Daniel's system that he didn't feel the shimmering discomfort of extraction. We ought to go into battle more often, he thought; and he was laughing as the corvette slipped back into the sidereal universe.
TheAlcubiere had extracted within a fraction of a second of thePrincess Cecile; it was easy to tell by the energetic debris streaming from each High Drive motor. There was none in the case of the heavy cruiser, whereas the destroyersEscapade andExpress must've arrived thirty seconds ahead of schedule to have left the trail they did.
The two battleships arrived to head the line less than fifteen seconds later, with the remaining four destroyers appearing in the next fifteen seconds and theAntigone staggering in a few heartbeats after that. Admiral James wouldn't be thrilled about the sloppy timing on a short intrasystem hop, but the ten vessels of his squadron were in notably good line.
Which put them strikingly at variance with the Alliance ships. If Daniel didn't know they had to be in formation, he wouldn't have been able to guess what that formation was: two reverse echelons spreading like the strokes of a 90-degree V with its implied base at Z3. There was a battleship in either line, but the four heavy cruisers were in the right wing and the two light cruisers in the left; Guphill had apparently decided to keep the cruisers' divisional structures intact instead of splitting them to balance his wings as Daniel had theorized.
Other than that, Guphill's formation-raggedness aside, though there was quite a lot of raggednessto put aside-was exactly as Daniel had theorized it'd be, save that it was only five light-minutes out from Z3 and the huge green ball of Zmargadine itself. Full marks to the late Midshipman Dorst, who'd have expected that. The boy couldn't navigate his way to the latrine, but he'd had an instinct for an enemy's weaknesses.
TheT 65 andT 72 were the only destroyers remaining to Guphill since he'd sent the others with his sloops off to the Bagarian Cluster. They were wallowing between the squadron's wings while signals flashed in both directions.
The destroyer captains knew less about the Alliance situation than the RCN officers did. Guphill hadn't informed the Diamondia pickets that he intended to send half his force out of the Jewel System, so they were probably expecting the battlecruisers and the remainder of the screening forces either to extract or to lift from Z3 momentarily.
Daniel studied the sail plan of the Alliance vessels. If you knew the present conditions in the Matrix-as he did-and you had experience as a hands-on astrogator-which again he did; a bloody good astrogator, not to be modest-you could get a fair notion of the enemy's intentions by seeing how his sails were arrayed.
Oh, certainly, there were as many different ways to accomplish a trip from point to point in the Matrix as there were to go from the bridge to the BDC; but you didn't make the latter journey by stepping out onto the hull and back in through the after airlock unless there was a very good reason. Likewise theSissie 's astrogation computer could reverse analyze thePleasaunce 's sail plan to determine the course they'd been adjusted to solve.
Though close by astronomical standards, the opposing squadrons remained over three hundred million miles apart-well beyond the range of missiles, let alone plasma cannon. That also meant that the schematic of the enemy array on Daniel's command console, though perfectly accurate, showed the situation twenty-five minutes in the past. A great deal can happen in twenty-five minutes…
The wings of the Alliance formation were separated by one and a half light-seconds at the wide end and about half that as they tapered toward Z3. The ships were accelerating at nearly 2 Gs, but that seemed to be to straighten out the lines in the sidereal universe instead of dipping back into the Matrix to do the job more efficiently. Perhaps Guphill trusted his officers' pilotage farther than he did their astrogation.
The only vessels which began adjusting their sails for reinsertion were the two startled destroyers. Daniel didn't need the summary of communications intercepts from Adele to know that they were being directed to take their place in the left wing ahead of the light cruisersBat Durston andRip Waechter. Unlike Admiral James' dispositions, the Alliance dreadnoughts were farthest from the enemy.
Laser backed with microwave flashed orders from theZeno. Daniel opened the kernel instantly, then forwarded the data to the other bridge consoles and the BDC. He wondered if Admiral Guphill had anyone on his staff who could decode RCN signals as quickly as Adele did those of the Alliance. Perhaps, but it didn't really matter; at this stage of the engagement, Guphill was going to learn about the RCN's plans more quickly than signals would propagate over the intervening distance.
TheSissie vibrated in a familiar fashion; Sun was rotating his turrets and running the paired 4-inch plasma cannon from minimum to maximum elevation to be sure that they moved freely. They did, of course, just as they had when the corvette reached orbit initially.
The entire squadron was to insert into the Matrix in seven minutes from arrival of the order. The Foxhunt element would extract between the arms of the Alliance formation, launch a single salvo of missiles at the ships of the right wing, and reenter the Matrix. Because there wouldn't be time to adjust their sails before this second insertion, they'd carry on to the orbit of Samphire-though that barren rock would itself be on the other side of Jewel for the next seventeen months-and reform.
A lot of assumptions would have to work out for there to be anything left of Foxhunt to reform. Well, nobody'd told them that enlisting in the RCN would guarantee that they'd die in bed.
Daniel plotted the course that would put thePrincess Cecile in the middle of the enemy squadron. Borries was laying out missile attacks, Sun was determining the best angles at which to deflect incoming missiles with his cannon-which was a grim joke to anybody who'd calculated the flux density required to affect a five-tonne missile over such a short range-and the midshipmen were figuring the escape sequence following the attack.
Somewhere out on the hull, Vesey was looking at the orders relayed to her by hydro-mechanical semaphore and frowning; at any rate, Daniel would be frowning if it were him, as he much wished it were. But Vesey could read the Matrix almost as well as he could, and nobody could lay out a detailed attack as well as Commander Daniel Leary.
"Ship," Daniel said, "prepare for insertion in thirty, I say again three-zero, seconds."
And may the Gods have mercy on our souls.
ThePrincess Cecile shuddered into the Matrix again. Adele leaned back against the cushions and lifted her commo helmet with her fingertips so that she could massage her temples. Quick in-and-out transitions were uncomfortable, though long periods in the Matrix were uncomfortable also and led to hallucinations. Or hauntings, Adele supposed; it didn't matter, since in her judgment one irrational experience was as bad as the next.
She noticed that Daniel had called the riggers in from the hull. Only the genesis of the signal was electronic: the crew received it by hydro-mechanical semaphores placed at bow and stern, dorsal and ventral. On Adele's display the recall was a boxed translation; on the hull, the six semaphore arms rose vertically, then swung equidistant around the circle.
The riggers used hand signals to communicate among themselves. When the corvette was under way, the hull was a jungle of antennas, cables, and the shimmer of Casimir radiation impinging on the sails spread above. Inevitably not all the crew would see a semaphore, but those who did passed the signal to their fellows. The bosun's mates were responsible for bringing in all members of the sections they took out.
Everybody on the bridge with Adele was busy with preparations for the attack. Well, Tovera and Hogg weren't; they sat on the jumpseats behind the signals and command consoles, blank-eyed and as tense as trigger springs. Neither was a person with whom Adele could imagine having a restful conversation.
Grinning minusculely, Adele returned to the most recent Alliance intercepts to have something to occupy her mind. As she did so, a green telltale winked on her display. Cory's voice from the BDC said, "Sissie Five-two to Signals, over."
Frowning because she couldn't imagine what the midshipman wanted, Adele said, "Go ahead, Cory."
It was a two-way link so she didn't bother with protocol. They could talk over one another's words just as easily as they could if they were face to face, since their voices were on separate channels.
The midshipmen were under Vesey, Sissie Five, the First Lieutenant, in the table of organization. Cory was junior-by accident of name-to Blantyre, so he became Five-two while she was Five-one. It all seemed ludicrously complicated to Adele, though she could see it'd be necessary on a battleship with a crew of a thousand. Since the RCN arranged everything on the basis of the lowest common denominator, the same rules applied to an undercrewed corvette.
Well, they didn't apply to Adele Mundy unless she chose that they should. She'd been concentrating on the minute details of decoding; now she ached and had nothing to do, putting her in even less than usual of a mood to mouth nonsense when plain words would do.
"Ah, yes, mistress," said Cory. "I've copied the internal ship traffic for you so you can review my decisions now that we're in the Matrix, ov-that is, ma'am."
Adele's face softened slightly. While she'd been busy with external signals-those from other RCN vessels as well as Alliance intercepts-she'd made Cory the human filter between Daniel and the yammering that always filled theSissie 's intercom circuits when they were on the verge of action.
She'd tested Cory on recordings of earlier actions where she herself had made the decisions. He'd done quite well-surprisingly well, she'd have said a year earlier; since then she'd realize that though the midshipman was lucky to have graduated from the Academy, he had a real flair for communications. He hadn't blocked any signals that Adele had let through, and even initially he'd filtered about 80% of what she'd deemed to be pointless chatter. Further, he'd gotten better.
"Thank you, Cory," she said. "I'll go over the material, but I have every confidence in your ability."
From somebody else, those would be mere words. Adele spoke them because they were an accurate statement of her belief. She'd never fathomed why people generally danced around the truth instead of saving time and effort by stating it bluntly.
"Mistress?" said Cory. "There's another thing I wanted to say, while, you know, there's time."
"Then you'd better say it or therewon't be time," Adele said. She hoped she'd kept her tone polite, but this was more nonsense in place of plain speaking. The part of her that would always be Mundy of Chatsworth twitched toward a riding crop to bring Cory to what would obviously turn out to be the only real point of his call.
A whipping wouldn't really have gotten the information out sooner, of course, but it'd have given her pleasure to administer it. Though-since Adele had just been wishing she had a useful way in which to spend the next few minutes, she was being foolish as well as uncharitable.
"Yes, mistress," contritely muttered Cory, who must've heard the lash in her voice. "I, well, I want to thank you for the guidance you've given me since you came to theHermes. I know I'd never have gotten to be as good as you are, but, well, I don't think many signals lieutenants in the RCN know their jobs better than you've taught me. I think bloody few do! "
Adele frowned. "You're welcome, Cory," she said. "You were willing to learn, and you've learned very well. Very few midshipmen would've recognized that there was anything to the job besides watching the software route signals."
And from what she'd seen over the past several years, very few signals officers had any greater interest, despite having the rating.
She cleared her throat. "If I may ask, Cory," she went on, "why did you bring this up now?"
TheSissie shook as the inner airlock door opened in the forward rotunda. Though the bridge hatch was closed, stiction made the airlock's mating surfaces release with a highcling! recognizable to anybody who'd heard it once.
The riggers were coming in. Both watches had been on the hull, so it required a double cycle of the airlocks to complete the business.
"Well, mistress," Cory said in embarrassment. "I thought you'd seen the battle plan. Ah, I don't… I mean, I'm not afraid, and I know Six'll bring us through as well as anybody could. But you know, the formation…"
Adele imported the battle plan from the command console. Daniel was busy with the third in a series of projected attack boards, but the initial layout from Squadron Six was there, wedged into a sidebar on the screen.
She stared at it. "All right, Cory," she said. "I see the battle plan but I don't see the problem with it. We'll be placed between the two enemy formations. They won't be able to launch missiles for fear of hitting their own ships. Wewill launch missiles and then reinsert before they can maneuver out of their own way. It seems a simple and effective plan. Not that I could've created it, but on looking at it now. What am I missing?"
"Mistress, they'll be using their plasma cannon, we're so close," Cory said. "The big ships, maybe even the destroyers, chances are they'll make out all right. But theSissie-we don't have the hull to take the hammering they'll give us. It's nobody's fault, I don't blame the Admiral or anything. But it's… well, I've been honored to serve with you and with Mister Leary, mistress."
"Ah," said Adele. Beads on a holographic display looked the same no matter what the scale was; she hadn't considered that this time the actual range was short enough to make plasma bolts a real danger. "I take your point, Cory."
The outer airlock rang; the second rigging watch was coming in. Adele understood why Daniel wouldn't want personnel on the hull during the coming sleet of ions, though as Cory said-it probably didn't make any difference.
"And as for them not being able to use missiles themselves, mistress?" Cory went on. "That's saying they shouldn't use missiles, but I'd be surprised if one of them didn't. There'll be some missileer who's eager or scared or who just doesn't think about there being friendlies on the other side of us. They'll launch, I'd bet you."
"Thank you, Cory," Adele said. "I agree that one can usually predict that people won't think through the results of their actions. Or anything else."
She was more than usually disgusted with herself to be educated by Cory on two separate points in a short conversation. The second matter involved the behavior of normal human beings, though, and that was a subject about which Adele had never imagined herself to be a competent judge.
Hatches clinged again; the aft airlock provided a faint distant echo to the one just outside the bridge. The riggers didn't have electronic links in their suits, so Woetjans keyed the flat-plate communicator beside the lock to report, "Six, this is Rig. Both watches are ship-side, sir."
"Roger, bosun," Daniel said. "Break. Vesey, are you forward or aft, over?"
There was no response. Adele folded two of the corvette's three microwave horns into their travelling position against the hull. From what Cory suggested, they wouldn't survive in the extended position. If the hull was breached-again as Cory suggested-it didn't matter a great deal whether or not the transceivers were functional, but it was a matter of pride to Adele that she took care of her equipment.
"Sissie Five, report at once!" Daniel barked. The demand echoed itself through the PA system.
"Ship, extracting in thirty-five seconds," called Blantyre from the BDC. After a pause, "Extracting in thirty seconds."
There was no response from Vesey. Woetjans called, "Six, this is Rig. Polatti was last through the aft hatch. He says the Lieutenant told him she was going forward. Sir, I swear I didn't see any sign of her when I closed the lock and brought in the port watch. I'm going out to get her. Rig out."
"Negative, Woetjans!" Daniel said. "Do not-"
"Extracting!" called Blantyre.
"-exit the ship! Do not leave the ship!"
The inner airlock clinged open. Then Adele saw flashes of heat and her nose smelled purple as thePrincess Cecile returned to normal space, in the jaws of an Alliance squadron.