With the Lightnings (43 page)

Daniel fiddled at the
Princess Cecile
's command console, trying to get the adjustable seat positioned properly for him. The controls were reversed from those on similar Cinnabar equipment; he kept getting a hump in the upholstery where he wanted a dip and vice versa.

The ship's systems were live: the telltales were green or amber, with the only red warnings those for the open main hatch and the enabled armament switches. The
Princess Cecile
was fully crewed with some of the most experienced ratings in the RCN. There was only one commissioned officer, but that wasn't unheard of for a vessel as small as a corvette.

The single officer shouldn't have been a junior lieutenant on his first cruise, but that wasn't a problem that Daniel could find it in his heart to really regret.

Lt. Daniel Leary, Officer Commanding the RCS
Princess Cecile
. That was a fact forever now, even if he died in the next ten minutes or the RCN cashiered him after he reached Cinnabar.

Dying in the next ten minutes was actually quite probable, because the
Bremse
, an Alliance cruiser/minelayer, was in orbit over Kostroma.

Daniel's main display was a Plot-Position Indicator for the region above the planet to an altitude of 100,000 miles: near space by interstellar standards, but if the
Princess Cecile
could get through it alive she'd have a very good chance of making it the rest of the way home. The Commonwealth of Kostroma's automatic defense system hadn't been a joke, not quite, but the Alliance had come prepared to update the defensive constellation to a level of protection comparable to that over Pleasaunce.

Alliance cruiser/minelayers were built on the hulls of large light cruisers, but their large magazines were configured to accept either missiles or thermonuclear mines like the ones the
Bremse
was deploying now above Kostroma. The ships were fast because their mines could interdict hostile planets as well as defend friendly ones; and even though the
Bremse
would be heavily loaded with mines, Daniel was sure she could out-slug a Kostroman corvette by a considerable margin.

The options available to the
Princess Cecile
were guile or incredibly good luck. And disaster, of course. Disaster was far the most probable option.

"The Mundy section is beginning extraction," said Domenico from the console to Daniel's right. That was normally the navigator's position, but Daniel had put the bosun there for now because he needed someone trustworthy handling communications.

Navigation and attack were Daniel's own responsibilities until he handed the
Princess Cecile
over to somebody better qualified. He switched the main display to an attack screen which echoed data from the
Aglaia
's sensors. The PPI shrank to a holographic fifty-millimeter cube, one of a series of similar displays at the upper edge of the projection volume.

"Understood," Daniel said. He tried to keep the gleeful excitement out of his voice. He didn't want the crew to think he was insane. . . . "Alert the ship."

Domenico passed the report over the general communicator in a rasping tone with as little emotion as he'd have put into a drinks order. These were good people, and they were depending on Daniel Leary.

"Holy shit!" said Dorfman. She'd been gunner's mate aboard the
Aglaia
—a communications vessel didn't rate a warrant gunner—and was seated at the remaining bridge console with responsibility for the corvette's defenses. "All the missile batteries at the palace just fired!"

"Yes," said Daniel as he transmitted preprogrammed commands to the
Aglaia
. "We're fortunate to have a communications officer of Ms. Mundy's skill. She said she'd trip the automatic defenses to create a diversion as they departed the target area."

Daniel pressed the red Execute switch with the full weight of his thumb. "And now," he added with satisfaction, "we're going to create a diversion of our own."

Fifty feet below the APC, a line rippled through three blocks of housing in the center of the city. Buildings crumbled. A pall of dust spread up and outward. Where the hypervelocity rockets hit something harder than brick an occasional spark flew into the night, but the flames growing slowly in the projectiles' wake were for the moment unimpressive.

Adele stared in horrified amazement. She'd had no idea that the rockets would penetrate so far. All she'd intended was to add to the confusion by destroying vehicles parked in the palace gardens.

"It is very important that you preserve my life," said Markos. "Your superiors will punish you severely if anything happens to the information I bring them about my nation's intelligence operations."

Adele turned. Sailors stared in disbelief at the hostage, still bound, who sat upright in the middle of the compartment.

"That woman is a spy," Markos said, nodding toward Adele with a malevolent expression. "Her real name is Adele Mundy. She was recruited on Bryce."

"Why you lying
bastard
," Woetjans said. She punched Markos in the face. He fell against Dasi. The sailor knocked him upright again with an elbow.

"I do not lie," Markos said, dripping blood from a cut lip. "There's proof of what I say in the data unit that looks like a communicator on my belt. I'll give your superiors the key to the information inside as soon as they guarantee my safety."

He turned his gaze on Adele again. "She's a spy," he repeated. "She provided the information that permitted us to capture the palace and your ship so easily."

Adele was detached. It was as though she were listening to the history of an alternate reality in which events transpired in a fashion slightly skewed from those in which she had participated.

But only slightly skewed: the reality would be enough to hang her. She thought of the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Cinnabar traitors betrayed in turn by their Alliance paymaster.

Adele Mundy didn't belong in this world; or any, she supposed. She'd briefly thought otherwise, but she'd been wrong.

She smiled. A sailor swore under his breath.

"That's a lie, right, sir?" Dasi said. He was pleading. "It's all bullshit that he's talking!"

The APC was over water now. To the north behind them, fires burned in Kostroma City and weapons fired at nothing.

Adele continued to smile. There was no way out. She could lie, but the sailors wouldn't forget Markos's words. She was quite certain evidence would be found to implicate her. Markos would have arranged that, so that if she balked at some demand he could threaten her with exposure to the Cinnabar authorities.

As he was exposing her now, to save himself and punish her with the same stroke.

The sailors stared at Adele in stricken horror. They'd seen her shoot. But she couldn't fly an armored personnel carrier, and she couldn't kill the sailors who'd risked their lives for her and with her in the past. The only family she'd known since the proscriptions; and in a real sense, the only family she'd ever known.

"I'll handle this," said Hogg. He raised the flap of Markos's jacket and unclipped the belt communicator.

"Be careful," the spy warned. "If you try to retrieve the data without the codes you'll destroy it instead. But I will tell all to the proper authorities."

He sneered at Adele in bloodthirsty triumph. His lips and left cheek were swollen from Woetjans's blow.

Hogg weighed the false communicator in the hand that didn't hold a submachine gun. "You know," he said conversationally, "the master wouldn't believe a word of this. He's a honest sort himself, my master Daniel, and he thinks the whole world's like him. But there's a lot of people back on Cinnabar who
would
believe it."

He grinned at Adele. "Right, mistress?" he said.

"Yes," said Adele.

Hogg shot Markos in the temple. The spy's head jerked sideways, losing definition as hydrostatic shock violently expanded his brain tissue.

Hogg thrust his right leg straight, shoving the corpse out the open side of the APC. He tossed the communicator after Markos. He fired a burst from his submachine gun as the little object spun off in the vehicle's wake.

"Missed," Hogg said. "When my eyes was better I'd have blown it to shit in the air, but I guess we'll have to trust salt water to do the job."

He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. "What the fuck's going on?" Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.

"It's like this," Hogg said to the sailors. "The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there."

He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.

"Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they're all the same sort, I don't give a fuck what color uniform they wear," Hogg continued. "That wouldn't be doing my job. Besides, you can't trust
them
even if they do happen to tell the truth."

"Too fucking right," said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, "You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance."

Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps you'd do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel."

"The APC's approaching at speed!" Domenico said. The bosun's console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.

"Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico," Daniel ordered without looking around. "Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we're out of the system and in one piece."

A computer-generated model of the
Aglaia
was at the center of Daniel's display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the
Aglaia
's sensors and transmitted to the
Princess Cecile
.

The
Aglaia
launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.

The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it'd been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.

The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the
Aglaia
's flank; water pressure hadn't had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun's corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.

Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.

But the missile weighed thirty tons.

It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.

The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile's own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.

The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor's surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you'd use to shim a bearing.

The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.

Daniel split his main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the
Aglaia
was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.

The
Bremse
orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma's surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.

Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, "Commonwealth ship
Princess Cecile
to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!"

The
Aglaia
had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls . . .

But humans do have souls, and humans who depended on Daniel Leary would die unless he focused on the next step of the road to safety. He opened his mouth to blurt another dollop of simulated panic to justify the
Princess Cecile
lifting. Before he could speak, a voice from the console demanded in a guttural accent, "AFS
Bremse
to
Princess Cecile
. What is going on down there? Over."

"Emergency!" Daniel repeated. He heard a bustle beside him, figures moving at the right-hand console. "Ships are blowing up,
Bremse
! We must lift to save ourselves. All ships on the surface must lift!"

"
Bremse
to
Princess
," the harsh voice spat back. "Negative on lifting,
Princess Cecile
. Stay where you are and provide a full imagery link on commo channel twelve, no encryption. Over."