David Drake - When the Tide Rises

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…