CHAPTER 20

Adele came back to the bridge after showering and putting on a clean utility uniform. The attack console was empty; like Adele, Betts had gone off-duty when the Princess Cecile entered the Matrix. Neither a missileer nor a signals officer was of any use until the vessel returned to sidereal space. There was no need of a gunner, either, but Sun had remained at his board; he shot Adele a worried look.

Daniel must've released the Klimovs from their quarters when the Sissie left sidereal space, because now they stood to either side of his console. Adele heard their raised voices while she was down the corridor, the Count saying, ". . . didn't intend when we engaged you that you'd use the opportunity to wage war on your national enemies!"

"Captain Leary," Adele said sharply as she stepped to her console. "Pray help me adjust this knob on my couch, if you'd be so kind."

Sun started to rise, his mouth open with an offer to help. Adele pointed her left index finger at the gunner's face and gave him a look that would've melted rock. He subsided with realization dawning in his eyes as thought replaced reflex.

"One moment, your excellency," Daniel said, rising from his couch and by doing so forcing the Count to back away. Daniel stepped to Adele's console, his lips pursed.

"I see . . . ," he said. He deliberately kicked the knuckle of the hydraulic support with the heel of his boot. "I think you'll find it satisfactory now, Mundy."

The Klimovs had trapped Daniel, perhaps by conscious plan, by standing in their anger so close to his couch that he'd have had to touch one or the other of them to get up. His unwillingness to escalate the encounter in that fashion meant he stayed pinned on his back for them to hector from above. By implicitly ignoring the Klimovs as she intruded on the equation, Adele had freed her friend.

"Thank you, Captain," she said politely. Turning to Klimov before he could resume his harangue, she continued, "Count Klimov, while I was in the Goldenfels' data bank for other purposes, I downloaded all files dealing with the Princess Cecile or her personnel. Among other things, they indicated that Captain Bertram was able to track you because you discussed your plans with locals on Todos Santos and Tegeli. This of course is your right as owner of the Princess Cecile; but given Bertram's animus against you, I thought you should be made aware of the risks your talk created."

"Animus against me?" Klimov shrieked. "Animus against Cinnabar, you mean!"

"Not at all," Adele said calmly, setting her data unit on the edge of her console and bringing out the wands. "Bertram was furious that you'd cheated him—outcheated him, I gather—at cards. Reading between the lines, I suspect that he was gambling with government funds and that he expects very serious personal consequences on his return to Pleasaunce unless he gets the money back."

"That's a lie!" Klimov said.

"Georgi!" shouted his wife, her voice rising. She stepped in front of the Count, her hands pushing him back. She shot Adele a glance over her shoulder; there was real fear in her eyes. "He didn't mean that!"

It struck Adele, standing as still as a deck stanchion, that Valentina knew more than Adele had ever told her. There were plenty of people aboard who might've talked, of course. The Sissies were proud of their Signals Officer: the lady who'd as soon shoot you as look at you, who knew everything, and who never missed. . . . 

"Count Klimov," Adele said in a general silence of fear, "I'd sent a prepared search signal into the Goldenfels' computer during the banquet. Yesterday evening and night I had time to analyze the results while we were waiting for Captain Bertram to attack. I'd be pleased to show you the information in both raw and processed form."

She cleared her throat. "Now," she went on. "I believe you started to say something which I was too abstracted to hear. If you'd care to repeat your statement, we can proceed as the situation dictates."

Valentina pinched her husband's lips closed and whispered viciously into his left ear, watching Adele sidelong. Klimov stared at Adele, nodded, and then moved his wife's hand away from his mouth.

"Your pardon, Lady Mundy," he said, bowing. "I've completely forgotten what I started to say. Knowing me, it was probably something very foolish anyway."

"Yes," said Valentina, glaring at her husband. "It was."

Daniel cleared his throat, his eyes on a bulkhead, then turned to the Klimovs with a smile as though seeing them for the first time today. "That's all in the past, of course," he said, "but it does bring up an associated point. I don't believe the Goldenfels will be pursuing us any longer—"

Adele glanced at the Klimovs. While in their stateroom they could've accessed the visuals of the Alliance vessel rolling over on its side, but she wasn't sure they'd done so.

"—but other Alliance vessels may be searching for them. Any such ship that arrives on Morzanga and learns what happened will become a new problem for us. I suggest that we not leave via the ports from which we arrived."

"What choice is there?" the Klimovna asked. "A cul-de-sac, you called this."

"Yes, with the exception of the passage Commander Bergen traversed," Daniel said, nodding. "For part of the way, that route requires travelling between rather than through bubble universes. I don't honestly believe anyone but Uncle Stacey could have opened the route. I hope—I believe—that using his log books, I can retrace it, but I won't pretend there isn't serious risk."

"You think John Tsetzes tried this passage and was destroyed, not so?" Valentina said.

Daniel nodded. "I think that's possible," he said. "After finding the copy of the Earth Diamond on Morzanga and no evidence that Tsetzes ever left this cul-de-sac, I think in fact that it's very probable. We have the advantage of Uncle Stacey's logs over him, of course."

The Count looked at his wife, then back to Daniel. "If it's so risky," he said querulously, "why would we do it?"

"Because the risk is less than that of being shot by the people you and your card tricks put about our heads, Georgi!" Valentina said; summing up the situation in much the way Adele would've done herself, and in an equally peevish tone. "That's what you mean, Daniel, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's what I mean," Daniel agreed. "I'm not seriously concerned about meeting Alliance ships here in the North, but . . . this is a lawless region at the best of times. An Alliance vessel which found the Goldenfels and offered a reward on Todos Santos would get many takers. Whereas if we first make landfall at New Delphi, the planet with the tree oracle you know, I think we'll have outdistanced potential trouble."

"Faugh, do what you please," the Count said abruptly. He turned on his heel. "I'm going to play cards in the wardroom."

Valentina watched her husband stalk off the bridge. "Cards and women," she said in a tone of disgust. "Other men manage to amuse themselves without risking the lives of everybody around them!"

She shrugged. "I have notes from Morzanga to organize," she said as she walked toward the companionway. "Men are all fools!"

Daniel smiled faintly. Adele raised an eyebrow. "I hope you don't expect me to argue the point," she said. "Of course, I don't have a high opinion of women either."

"Mr. Chewning," Daniel said, cueing his helmet. "You have the watch. I'll return to the bridge in three hours, when we're ready to drop back into sidereal space for a final star sight. Six out."

He grinned broadly at Adele. "I anticipated the owners' agreement, you see," he explained. "We'll be attempting the passage shortly. Until then, I'm going to take a nap."

"But it's only three hours, you said?" Adele said. She pursed her lips but took care not to frown.

"Yes, well, it's not long," Daniel said, his grin becoming rueful. "But you see, I'll be on the truck of Antenna Dorsal A the whole time we're in the passage. Which will be thirty-four hours, if all goes well."

Daniel stood at the top of the leading mast of the dorsal row, the point farthest from the Princess Cecile's hull. There wasn't—there couldn't be—a more gorgeous and awesome display than the blaze of the hundred universes now beating down on him. He didn't feel like a starship captain or a Cinnabar nobleman, he felt like the Lord God Almighty. It was all he could do to fight down the urge to raise his arm and shout, "Let there be light!"

The Princess Cecile was a universe of her own, a fragment of sidereal space-time thrust through universes by the pressure of Casimir radiation, the one true constant which permeated every bubble of the Matrix and the immaterial spaces separating those bubbles. Her antennas and yards stretched molecule-thin sails of conductive fabric. Their area, angle and electric charge determined the vessel's course within the Matrix and therefore her location when she returned to the sidereal universe. The navigational computers which plotted those relationships were the most powerful available to humanity, but even so a course computation was likely to require an hour or more.

Daniel eyed the heavens' pattern of color and intensity. He knew the next programmed correction: adjustment by ten percent of the maincourses of all twelve lateral masts while the dorsal and ventral sails remained the same.

That was what the computer said, based on observed gradients . . . and if they followed that program, the Princess Cecile would drive herself into a bubble where a photon had three orders of magnitude greater energy than that of the universe where men had built her. She might survive those pressures long enough for her automatic systems to dump her back into the sidereal universe . . . but the chances were that she wouldn't survive, and there was no chance at all that she'd be able to proceed with the course the computer had planned.

Daniel raised his right arm as an attention signal; the quartermaster, waiting at the semaphore control panel at the base of Dorsal Two, gestured back. Daniel's arms made a quick series of signs as precise as the movements of a trapeze artist and as certain to bring disaster if bungled.

The quartermaster dialed the new orders into his mechanical computer, then pulled the long lever on the side. The arms of semaphores at twelve locations across the Sissie's hull sprang to life. A person anywhere on the outer surface of the vessel could see at least one of the stations.

Only mechanical and hydraulic equipment was used to control operations on the deck of a ship in the Matrix. A radio signal or even the field generated by an electrical conductor within the bubble of sidereal space was enough to throw a vessel off-course to a literally incalculable degree. A fiber-optic cable didn't set up a field—but neither could it do any work at the far end: that would require an electrical booster with the same attendant problems.

Cables and hydraulic lines worked. Oh, they stretched and broke and leaked and sometimes froze, but for the most part they worked. And the riggers worked, the human beings who used their eyes to spot trouble and their muscles to correct it; knowing that if they misjudged they might drift into a bubble universe whose very matter was hostile to them.

The sails of the lateral antennas began to skew counterclockwise, coming slightly closer to alignment with the axis of the ship. In response to Daniel's order, riggers moved across the Sissie's hull to the capstan at the base of each dorsal mast. Daniel felt through his boots the vibration of pulleys turning, shifting the set of Dorsal One's lower course as other riggers were adjusting the sails of the antennas behind his in the file.

The effect of Daniel's order would be to rotate the corvette on her axis instead of skewing her in plane. The Princess Cecile would squeeze between unacceptable gradients instead of smashing directly into one.

Daniel eyed the heavens pressing against the very existence of the Princess Cecile. The Matrix wasn't hostile, but it was pitiless and vastly beyond the ability of Mankind to conceive, even to the degree that Man understood the universe which had created him.

The Princess Cecile's transition would come shortly. The astrogation computer had used Uncle Stacey's logs to determine the course—but the Matrix changed, and a computer could predict but could not feel. Daniel, here on the leading mast-truck of a ship not very different from Commander Bergen's, was doing what his uncle would have done. If he misjudged, they'd go off course or very possibly disintegrate.

He wasn't as skilled as Uncle Stacey, of that he was sure. But in his heart Daniel believed his judgment was good enough.

Someone moved on the hull below him. Daniel looked down, gripping the mast with his left hand because the helmet of his heavy rigging suit distorted his peripheral vision. Yes, somebody had just emerged from the forward hatch and was handing his way along by the lubber lines which acted as guides and support for the non-riggers who were forced by circumstances to work on the hull.

Daniel smiled. The only person so clumsy who'd have come out now was Adele. She knew better than to try to climb to him; even if she'd been able to do so without drifting away, there was no room for her here at the peak which he already occupied.

She stopped at the base of the antenna and attached her safety line to an eyebolt, then bent backward to look up. She didn't signal and he couldn't see her features through his faceshield and hers; but she was there. She had nothing to offer but her presence nearby, so she was offering that.

Daniel looked at the heavens again. The lights surrounding him, surrounding them all, shivered and changed like the cascading images of a kaleidoscope, each linked to the one before it but utterly different.

The Princess Cecile slid between universes. Her sails blazed. Though the rippling heavens gave the impression of movement, the reality of her change in relation to the sidereal universe was beyond human understanding.

Daniel felt transitions ripple swiftly, each within safe parameters. Once a violet glare shoved against the bubble in which the corvette sailed, but only for a heartbeat; then the Princess Cecile was through the throat, the danger point, and proceeding on a course that an intrasystem scow could've navigated safely.

We'll make it, Daniel thought. Of course. Together we'll make it again.

He even had mental leisure to wonder what the oracle of New Delphi would be like. . . .