David Drake - When the Tide Rises

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.