Lt. Leary, Commanding (22 page)

"Yes, that's a good idea," Daniel said, momentarily surprised but concealing the fact beneath commonplaces. "I wouldn't have had time to view them before, but now the cruise has started to settle down to a routine, so I can—"

"A damned hard routine," Taley said. She hadn't eaten much of her soup, but she was matching Mon mug and mug with the punch. "
Damned
hard."

"Aye, that's so," said Pasternak without raising his eyes from the table. "But the fittings're solid, just like Signals said—"

He gave Adele a sidelong glance of acknowledgment.

"—and by God, the crew's solid too, most of them!"

"I got a couple I don't have on the hull when we're making in-and-outs," Woetjans said, staring into her mug with a bleak frown. "They're going to scream and flail around the compartment if they're inboard, but that's better than . . ."

She swallowed down the contents of her mug, then waggled the fingers of her free hand in the air.

Adele had a bleak vision of a rigger drifting in a bubble universe that had nothing human in it but him—forever. She shivered. Death didn't frighten her, but the thought of that eternal loneliness had a terror for even her gray soul.

They were all looking at Daniel. Adele was suddenly aware of how pale the officers' faces were, how deep-sunk their eyes. The spacers gathered here in the wardroom were among the most experienced in the RCN, but even they were being ground down by Daniel's daily regimen of the Matrix punctuated by heart-freezingly brief returns to the normal universe.

"It is a hard routine," he said softly. "A very hard routine. When we reach Sexburga, I'll give every person in the crew the opportunity to transfer to another vessel of the squadron. It's no disgrace to be unable to withstand an environment that isn't meant for humans."

"Aye, we know that, sir," Pasternak said. His voice was steady, but his hands trembled until he laced them around his mug. "We're spacers of the RCN. We'll stick it."

"And there won't be any of our people who go off to a clapped-out cruiser, sir," Woetjans said, gripping her glass as if trying to strangle it. "They'll stick with the
Sissie
. They'll stick with the
Sissie
if it kills them!"

Adele felt herself trembling. Without glancing toward her, Daniel covered her right hand with his left and said in a measured voice, "The purpose of practicing touch-and-goes is so that we and our friends
won't
be the ones who're killed, of course. That's the only justification I would accept for the cost."

He lifted his tumbler to call attention to it. "A very dry atmosphere here in your wardroom, Mistress President," he said. "All the punch appears to have evaporated from my glass!"

The general laughter as Tovera filled the mug dissolved the mood of a moment before; but though Adele smiled at the humor and the skill with which Daniel used humor for a tool, there was a cold weight in her guts. She thought of the insertions of the next day and the nine days after that—if they lived so long.

And unlike Daniel, she couldn't convince herself that avoiding death was really that valuable a benefit.

Daniel watched a trio of strangers enter the bridge through the exterior bulkhead, talking in silent animation. They looked perfectly normal—an older man, a boy, and a woman Daniel wouldn't have minded getting to know better—except that they had downy feathers instead of hair.

"
Five minutes to return to normal space
," said Lt. Mon from the BDC. His voice sounded shaky, but that could be a flaw in the communications system . . . or in Daniel's ears. The voyage had been hard, very hard.

"Acknowledged," Daniel replied, then switched to intercom and said, "Captain to ship. We're five minutes from entry to the Sexburga system, spacers. If God favors us and I've done my calculations correctly, there'll be liberty for all but an anchor watch inside of twelve hours. Captain out."

He could hear faint cheering from other compartments. After seventeen days of discomfort punctuated by agony, nobody had much energy even for that.

Adele stared transfixed at the three phantoms, looking horrified. The remaining bridge personnel kept their attention on their displays.

"Ah, you see them too, Mundy?" Daniel said. The older male was making wide, oratorical sweeps of his right arm while his left remained cocked over his chest.

It was all automatic from here on in unless there were an emergency. Betts was setting up missile launches. That had drawn Sun to simulate gunfire targets on his display. Daniel was all for training, but plotting for immediate attack on entry into a major Cinnabar naval base couldn't be called realistic preparation. So far as Daniel was concerned, calming a friend who looked uncomfortable was at least as good a use for his time.

Adele let her breath out slowly and looked at him. "You mean they're real?" she said. "Daniel, I thought I was going mad!"

"I don't think they're real—well, not part of the sidereal universe, at any rate," he said. "But to be sure, I see them too."

"I knew three fish couldn't really swim through the wall," Adele said. "I'd forgotten what you'd said about phantoms."

She looked at the men on the battle consoles and said, "Sun, Betts? What do you see over there?"

The gunner's mate turned and smiled shyly at her. "I don't see anything right now, mistress," he said. "But I know what you mean, sure. They've been walking the corridors since the third day, I know."

Betts said nothing, utterly engrossed in plotting courses for his missiles. The muscles in Daniel's jaw bunched, then relaxed. The missileer was reacting to the stress of the voyage in his own way. He was no more to be censured than Daniel and Adele were for seeing feather-haired strangers on the bridge.

Adele shook her head in wonder. "But why do we see fish standing upright, Daniel?" she asked.

"Ah!" said Daniel. Apparently the range of options was wider than merely seeing a phantom or not.

"Uncle Stacey and his friends had no idea what caused the visions," he said. "Stacey claimed to think they were random synapses firing in the watcher's brain, but I don't think he really believed that. You know as much as I do. Ah, I see people, more or less; not fish."

"
Three minutes
," Mon said, verbalizing the countdown that Daniel's screen showed as a sidebar.

His main display was a navigational tank in three dimensions, the portion of the sidereal universe analogous to the
Princess Cecile
's location in a wholly separate bubble of the cosmos. A bead of pure cyan drifted across the star map in tiny caracoles like a leaf blowing in the wind. If Daniel were to cut the charge of the sails
now
, the bead would be the corvette's location; if the astrogational computer was correct.

Abruptly, almost angrily—the voyage had been just as hard on the captain as it had on the rest of the complement—Daniel switched his display to the
Princess Cecile
's sail plan. Instead of the icons that provided information in the most concentrated form, he rolled the controller up to give him a simulated real-time view of the corvette hanging in space, lighted by a sun like Cinnabar's at a distance of 107 million miles.

Color codings on the icons would have told Daniel that the port sails were all set at 37 degrees; that ventral and starboard courses were at 63 degrees; and that the mainsail on Dorsal Three was spread straight fore and aft to serve as a rudder.

Daniel needed a reminder of the reality of the ship about him, the ship he commanded. This image provided it. He didn't care about the precise details, though his trained eye could have called the settings to within a hair's breadth if he'd been out on the hull.

Which is where he wanted to be. Duty kept him aboard.

"Every day we've been out of normal space . . ." he said, aloud but not really concerned whether anyone else on the bridge heard him. "It's seemed that the hull was getting thinner. Subliming like a block of dry ice. I wasn't sure there'd be anything left in another day."

"God help us!" Betts said, bent over his console; plotting solutions that were as imaginary as the holographic sails on Daniel's display. His missiles were, like Daniel's sails, the anchor that held his mind to—if not sanity, then to the memory of sanity.

"
One minute!
" said Mon. Again Daniel failed to acknowledge. All that mattered was that the spacers aboard the
Princess Cecile
each find a way to create reality. Create: because such long immersion in the Matrix proved to every soul aboard that reality wasn't an absolute, that it was no more than the whim of an individual mind for as long as the mind could stay sane.

The time column on the sidebar was shrinking to zero. If Daniel switched back to the navigational display, he would find the cyan bead approaching the pinpoint that was Sexburga. Toward ze—

"
Now!
" a voice screamed; maybe Mon's, maybe Daniel's own as his left hand drained the sails' charge and the
Princess Cecile
shuddered back into normal space, this time to stay.

Nothing changed within the hull, but the light was richer, the fittings had palpable density instead of being gassy umbras, and the air filled Daniel's lungs with the smells of weeks of being lived in. The stench was indescribably wonderful, like the rough texture of a log in the grasp of a man who had been drowning.

The cheers were rough, bestial. The relief the spacers felt came from far below the conscious levels of their minds.

His fingers moving by reflex, Daniel switched his display to a Plot Position Indicator. The icon that stood for the corvette was less than 150,000 miles out from the planet Sexburga, almost too close for a proper approach.

"Power room, light the High Drive!" Daniel said to his console. His fingers moved on the semaphore controls, directing the riggers to unpin the antennas.

Then through the intercom Daniel added, "Captain to ship. We've arrived, spacers. And by God, every one of you is going to have a drink on your captain when we're on the ground!"

_A
dele—Signals Officer Mundy—was busy for the first time since
the
Princess Cecile
entered the Matrix outbound from Cinnabar. Since the events on Kostroma, really. She'd studied the corvette's electronics on the voyage to Harbor Three, and during the past seventeen hellish days she'd been learning all she could about Strymon and the adjacent planetary systems.

That had been work at her own speed—which didn't mean it was done in a leisurely fashion by most people's standards, but there was no outside pressure involved. Now—

"
Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one—
" GR1751 was the
Princess Cecile
's pennant number, which her transponder sent automatically when interrogated "—
you are cleared to land at Flood Harbor in numbers nine-five, I repeat nine-five, minutes. There will be no liftoffs or landings from Flood Harbor for half an hour either way of your slot, but be aware that there may be traffic from the Cove or Drylands. Hold to your filed descent. Condor out.
"

Adele had reconfigured the communications console to use wand control as its default. This wasn't ideal, as a computer capable of missile launches and astrogation had a much broader range of options than a civilian database. Adele preferred to layer command sets within her wands' existing software rather than use the virtual keyboard created for the console. It was still much faster, and for her there was less risk of an error.

Her hands moved, sending the core of the message from Condor Control—the station that handled starship traffic for all Sexburga—to Daniel's display in visual form. The course plot, the time parameters, and the two smaller harbors with their approach cones were instantly visible; if Daniel for some reason wanted the audio message as well, he had only to key an icon to get it.

That was the open part of Adele's duties. At the same time she'd entered the Condor database covertly and copied from it the complete records of landings and departures from the planet in the past thirty days. Her real concern—Daniel's real concern—was to see when and whether Commodore Pettin had arrived, but for safety's sake Adele had given her search broader parameters.

RCS
Tampico
, arrived four days previous. From . . . Adele's wands moved . . . Holtsmark, berthed at Slip Thirty-two, Flood Harbor. She accessed another file, this one internal RCN records held in the
Princess Cecile
's database. RCS
Tampico
, communications vessel, 1700 tons empty; defensive armament only.

"
Condor Control to Gee Are one-seven-five-one,
" the controller on Sexburga said. "
You're to put down in slip thirty. I'm transmitting a plot of Flood Harbor. Condor over.
"

The speaker was male, probably in his forties, and sounded alertly professional. He hissed his esses and more generally spoke with a soft lilt; Adele decided to class the peculiarities as a Sexburga accent until she learned otherwise.

A schematic appeared in gold light on the left side of Adele's display. It was offset from but identical to the harbor plan from the
Princess Cecile
's database. The local transmission also showed cigar-shaped vessels settled in roughly half the fifty-seven slips. Sexburga was clearly a major port, though most of the ships berthed here were of moderate size.

Adele framed the plan and retransmitted it to a suspense file serving the command console while Daniel set up his final approach. It was received, becoming a sidebar on the upper left corner of a screen almost completely filled by numerical data.

"Gee-Are one-seven-five-one acknowledges receipt of the Flood Harbor berthing plan," Adele said. "Gee-Are one-seven-five-one out."

Nothing went to the command console until it had been cleared through Adele's filters and then requested by the captain. The captain could set up categories for immediate update—this harbor schematic, for example—but even so the data didn't appear on Daniel's display until he called for it. The priorities were determined by a human being.