David Drake: When the Tide Rises

"Signals, this is Cory," the midshipman called from the BDC. "Mistress, me and Blantyre are going out with the riggers. Is that all right, over?"

Adele frowned. Was she to take the call as a statement of fact or a request for permission? And anyway, who was she to give permission?

"Yes, of course, Cory," she said. "But why, if you please?"

"Mistress, we've got suits and we're trained as riggers," Cory said. "We figure we'll do more good cutting loose rigging that we could to back up you and Six, over."

"Go, then!" Adele said and resumed her inspection of her console.

Borries was planning missile attacks. Sun was making keystrokes on his console with increasing violence, but the display wasn't changing; he'd begun to shout curses at it. If the gunnery station had been damaged seriously, what of hers adjacent to it?

She wondered if she'd lost data. The equipment was designed to oscillate storage between two separate backup units. That way if the main unit failed, the storage cell which'd been off-line at the moment of disaster should be complete up to that last split second.

The problem this time was that there'd been several separate jolts. Only the first had done obvious damage, but Adele was well aware that electronic data could've been affected by something she hadn't noticed. She set the unit to self-test, knowing that it would be an indefinite time before it completed the task; knowing also that until it completed the task, she couldn't trust any operation the console conducted.

A sequence of clangs echoed through the ship. The sound wasn't quite regular enough to be mechanical.

Adele looked around in frowning puzzlement. Sun slammed the heel of his land against his console and shouted, "Bloodyfucking hell, it's welded and there's not abloody thing I can do about it from in here!"

"What's the matter, Sun?" Adele said. Normally she'd have needed the intercom. With thePrincess Cecile drifting in the Matrix and only a faint humming from her console, ordinary speech was enough. "And what's the ringing sound, if you know?"

"Ma'am, that's Woetjans cracking the weld holding her hatch shut," said Sun. "Anyway, trying to crack it. From the plasma, you see, same as froze my dorsal turret."

"Oh," said Adele. The explanation was simple and obvious-once she'd been told. So many things were like that-once you've been told.

"If Woetjans can't open it from inside, the crew coming out through the aft ventral hatch'll clear it for them," the gunner continued. He gestured toward his console. "And they'll have to break loose my turret, too; it won't budge whatever I do with the controls."

He grimaced. "I could go out myself once they get the hatch open," he said, "but-well, you know, as soon as we extract there's a chance we'll need the guns; and the ventral turret's fine, no problems."

"I see," said Adele. The crew of thePrincess Cecile was largely composed of people who liked doing their jobs. Neither Sun nor Borries thought of themselves as bringing death and destruction to other human beings-they were just proud of their skill with guns and missiles respectively.

Adele's smile was cold. Sun and Borries were luckier that she was: their targets were beads on a holographic screen. That made it possible for them to divorce themselves from the reality she woke to so often.

She heard the outer hatch cycle open. Reminded by the sound, she rotated out the communications heads she'd locked into their landing position. The aft unit opened normally but the head amidships didn't budge.

That didn't mean it'd been destroyed, of course; Adele had been out on warships after a battle and knew that plasma or vaporized metal could paste a tangle of rigging to the hulls. The midships head might be perfectly all right once the swath of sailcloth had been removed from it.

The bow head, the one she'd left up, had vanished. The readout on her display indicated a gap in the circuit feeding the unit.

"I bet I could shoot'em free," Sun said. "Just one round, not even both tubes, and the recoil'd crack the weld."

He looked over hopefully to see if Adele was agreeing with him. She gave him a stony glare.

"Right," he muttered. "I dunno what's in front of the guns now, and anyhow the riggers're on the hull. Well, they'll clear me, they know how bad we need the guns."

"Ship," announced Daniel, "we'll be extracting in sixty, that's six-zero, seconds, out."

Adele looked at her console. Everything was reading normally. She'd been lucky; which made her think "Sun," she said, "what happened to Vesey? If she was outside when we were hit?"

"Well, it could be she's fine," Sun said, but he twisted his head away and spoke so softly that Adele could barely make out the words. "Why she's out there to begin with, though, it's not my place to say."

"What!" snapped Mundy of Chatsworth, straightening at her console. Does this little oik think he can conceal information from me?

"What he means, ma'am," said Hogg unexpectedly from the back of the command console, "is that the Cazelet boy's too busy mooning after you to give Vesey so much as a look. She hasn't been too tightly wrapped ever since Dorst bought it, so maybe she just decided not to come in."

Adele stared at him. Hogg looked back; not challenging her, just a dumpy countryman the wrong side of fifty perched like a sack of potatoes on a jumpseat. But not afraid, either; or anyway, not about to shirk his duty to the Leary family because a member of it might shoot him for answering the question she'd asked.

For in Hogg's mind, Adele was a member of the Leary family. In Daniel's mind, and in her own too, she supposed.

Adele collapsed her display. "Tovera," she said, "is this true?"

"Yes, mistress," Tovera said. "I think Blantyre tried to talk to Vesey, but it didn't go well."

"And I had a chat with the kid while we were on Pelosi," Hogg said evenly. He crossed his hands over his paunch, but he was as tense as Adele'd ever seen him. "It seemed to me that being a gentleman didn't mean looking right through a nice girl like she was a piece of glass, you know? I think he'd've taken a swing at me if he hadn't decided it was beneath him."

Tovera giggled. Hogg looked at her and said, "Say, it wouldn't be the first time I've give a young gentleman a spanking when he acted up. I haven't forgot how t' do it."

"Thank you, Tovera," Adele said. Her lips were dry. She brought up her display. It appeared to be operating normally, though she wouldn't know for certain until they returned to sidereal space and received sensor inputs. "And thank you, Hogg."

I should stick to machines, she thought. But even when I do, I create disasters. I don't belong in a world of human beings!

"Extracting!" Daniel announced.

The shiver of universes forming within one another was a relief from the leaden misery in Adele's heart.

Daniel stabbed the Execute button and shivered at the start of the process of extraction. He felt as though he'd swallowed a tortoise whole and was now trying to vomit it out with its shell carving away whatever remained of his esophagus.

It'd taken two minutes in the Matrix instead of the one Daniel'd expected before thePrincess Cecile was far enough from the kill zone for him to extract into normal space again. The corvette was small and flimsy; worse, more than half her personnel were on the hull with no protection. The fireball from a single plasma bolt would cook them all.

Pushing the button wasn't usually Daniel's job any more. It was the sort of mechanical ash and trash duty which he left to whoever was senior in the BDC while he focused on the course or the attack or the latest tidbit which Adele'd dredged up from the Gods knew where.

If Vesey'd been aboard, he'd have handed the command over to her and gone out to help Woetjans. The bosun had an eye for how to proceed on what looked to most people-certainly looked to Captain Leary-like an impossible tangle. Woetjans would be sorting the debris like a professional gambler shuffling with never a miscue.