Lt. Leary, Commanding Read online

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  by David Drake

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-671-31992-2

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First paperback printing, June 2001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Number: 00-031050

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  WHAT’S UP, DOCK?

  “Tanais control to RCN vessel,” an agitated voice said after more than the normal lag for communications over a 70,000 mile separation. “We have no information regarding your arrival here. You are not approved for landing. I repeat, you are not approved for landing! You must land on Strymon and get authorization from the Fleet Office before you can land here. Tanais control over.”

  Daniel Leary frowned, the expression of an RCN officer and Cinnabar nobleman who’d just been told what to do by wogs. “Tanais control, this is RCN, I repeat, RCN, vessel Princess Cecile,” Leary said. “Your response is not satisfactory. Be advised that I intend to dock my vessel at Tanais Base in accordance with Strymon’s treaty obligations to the Republic of Cinnabar. Over!”

  His hand reached for a red button set into the material of the console. Before he touched it, General Quarters chimed through the corvette; Lt. Mon in the Battle Direction had been a hair quicker than his captain.

  “RCN vessel, wait please,” said the controller. He sounded as though he was on the verge of a coronary or a nervous breakdown. “Please wait. Tanais out … ah, over.”

  Daniel switched his display to a real-time image of Tanais. His ship’s course had already brought her within the forts’ interlocking orbits. Tanais Base was a scrawl within the moon’s ice sheet, visible from diffracted light.

  “RCS Princess Cecile, this is Tanais control,” said a new voice: male, forceful, very determined. “Return to the challenge point immediately and stay there until you have authorization to close. You are in a restricted area at a time of national emergency. Return to the challenge point or we will fire! Tanais over!”

  Good God, there was a heavy battle squadron down there! Not in the base proper but on the ice on the side of Tanais which eternally faced Getica.

  “Tanais Base, we’re withdrawing immediately!” Leary said as his fingers typed preset emergency codes. “I repeat, RCS Princess Cecile is withdrawing immedia—”

  “Daniel,” said Adele’s voice over the intercom. She didn’t sound nervous but her tone was as joyless as a slaughterhouse. “Base Command has just ordered the forts to open fire on us.”

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher’s Bill

  The Sharp End

  Independent Novels and Collections

  The Dragon Lord

  Birds of Prey

  Northworld Trilogy

  Redliners

  Starline

  All the Way to the Gallows

  The Belisarius series:

  (with Eric Flint)

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Destiny’s Shield

  Fortune’s Stroke

  The Tide of Victory (forthcoming)

  The General series:

  (With S.M. Stirling)

  The Forge

  The Chosen

  The Reformer

  The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Armageddon

  (edited with Billie Sue Mosiman)

  Foreign Legions (created by David Drake)

  DEDICATION

  To my webmaster, cybrarian Karen Zimmerman,

  who wasn’t the model for Adele Mundy,

  but might have been if I’d met her sooner.

  (Of course, we’d have to work on her pistol shooting.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I guess one could say “the usual suspects” by this point.

  Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel took care of the series of computer events. (Did you know that files can become cross-linked on your hard drive? Well, at any rate, they could on mine.)

  Dan Breen continues in curmudgeonly excellence as my first reader. There could be no better person for insights and scholarship.

  When I’m working, I take up a lot of room and am frequently less than cheerful. I’m working most of the time. My wife, Jo, sticks with me; I really appreciate the fact.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’m using English and Metric weights and measures throughout Lt. Leary, Commanding, as I did in With the Lightnings. I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, but the decision seems to concern some people. I’m doing it for the same reason that I’m writing the novel in English instead of inventing a language for the characters of future millennia to speak.

  I’d like to note for those who’re interested that the orders in Chapter Nine are a close paraphrase of those which sent the frigate USS Congress to Hawaii in 1845. Here as elsewhere, I prefer to borrow from reality rather than invent it.

  David Drake

  david-drake.com

  When the skies are black above them,

  and the decks ablaze beneath,

  And the top-men clear the raffle with

  their clasp-knives in their teeth.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Chapter One

  Lieutenant Daniel Leary rolled his uncle’s wheelchair to the end of the catwalk and paused, gazing back at the corvette Princess Cecile nestled in the center of the graving dock. He turned the wheelchair. “Now that you’ve inspected her, Uncle Stacey,” he said, “wouldn’t you agree there’s no finer ship in the RCN?”

  The battleship Aristotle in the next bay lowered over them: seventy thousand tons empty, with a crew of two thousand and missile magazines sufficient for a day-long engagement. The eight-inch plasma cannon of the Aristotle’s defensive battery could not only divert incoming projectiles but also devour ships the corvette’s size in rainbow cascades of stripped nuclei.

  Daniel was as oblivious of the battleship as he was of the wisps of cirrus cloud in the high heavens. For him, the twelve-hundred ton Princess Cecile was the only ship in Harbor Three. He’d commanded her, after all. Commanded her and fought her and—by the grace of God and the best crew ever to come a captain’s way—destroyed an Alliance cruiser of many times the corvette’s strength.

  “Didn’t we, Adele?” Daniel said, forgetting how little of his previous thoughts had made it to his lips. He grinned over his shoulder at the severe-looking woman of thirty-one who’d joined him and Uncle Stacey on their excursion.

  Adele Mundy smiled in response—it was hard not to smile when Daniel was full of happy enthusiasm, as he was at most times—but her expression gave no sign that she knew what he was talking about. Like Daniel she wore a 2nd Class RCN dress uniform, gray with black piping. Her collars bore the crossed lightning bolts of a s
ignals officer, a senior warrant rank with pay and allowances equal to those of a bosun.

  Adele’s handheld data unit slipped into a fitted pocket on her right thigh. That modification to her uniform was absolutely nonstandard and the sort of thing that would send an inspecting officer ballistic if it were noticed.

  Daniel didn’t even bother to wince any more. Adele without her data unit would be like Adele without hands, personally miserable and of no value to the RCN. Whereas with the unit—and with the little pistol, also nonstandard, nestled in a side pocket—neither Daniel nor Cinnabar ever had a better bulwark.

  Adele Mundy was an RCN officer by grace of the Republic’s warrant. By training and inclination she was an archival librarian, a task she’d performed with skill amounting to genius before circumstances required her to accept other duties. By birth, she was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful houses in the Republic before the Three Circles Conspiracy had forfeited the money and cost the head of every adult Mundy but one.

  Adele had been at school off Cinnabar when the cycle of treason and proscriptions played itself out in blood. Distance had preserved her life; not her fortune, but she wasn’t the sort to whom money meant much one way or the other.

  For that matter, Daniel sometimes suspected that life didn’t mean much to Adele either; but duty did, and craftsmanship. Daniel didn’t try to remake his friends.

  “She’s a trim craft,” Uncle Stacey said, assessing the corvette with a mind no less sharp for being confined to a wheelchair-bound body. Commander Stacey Bergen, the finest astrogator of his day, had opened or resurveyed half the routes in the Sailing Directions for Ships of the Republic. “I’ve never seen a Kostroman-built ship that wasn’t as pretty as anything of her class, though some of them use lighter scantlings than I’d have chosen for anything coming out of my yard.”

  The old man cocked his head over his shoulder to catch his nephew’s eye with the implied question.

  “The frames and hull plating are at RCN specifications, Uncle Stacey,” Daniel said quickly. “The only problem we’ve had in the conversion was that all the astrogational equipment is calibrated in Kostroman AUs instead of Sol standard like us and the Alliance. Granted of course that the Sissie’s a fighting corvette, not a dedicated survey ship built to accept stresses that’d turn a battleship inside out.”

  The Princess Cecile’s hull was a rough cylinder two hundred and thirty feet long and fifty-five feet wide, with bluntly rounded ends. Here in the graving dock she was clamped bow and stern by collars like the chucks of a gigantic lathe. They could rotate her into any attitude, so that the antennas that lined her hull in four rows of six each could be extended and canted throughout their range of motion.

  Two twin four-inch plasma cannon provided the corvette’s defensive armament in turrets offset toward the starboard bow and sternwards to port. Their bolts of charged particles could deflect incoming missiles by vaporizing portions of the projectile and converting that mass into slewing thrust. Offensively, a practiced crew in the Princess Cecile could launch her twenty missiles in pairs at one minute intervals. The crew which Daniel had brought from Kostroma was trained very well in that and every other aspect of war.

  As a boy, Daniel had listened to Uncle Stacey and the naval friends who came to chat with him in the shipyard he ran after retirement. They’d talked of shifts in the Matrix, of sheared antennas, torqued hulls; of days at a time spent in the glare of Casimir radiation, picking a course where none was known before.

  It was those tales, told by master astrogators to other masters of the art, that had led Daniel to join the RCN at age sixteen after the flaming row he’d had with his father, Corder. The Learys weren’t a naval family: they were politicians, movers and shakers of the Republic, and never a one of them had risen higher than Corder Leary, Speaker Leary, himself.

  Daniel laughed, surprising Adele and his uncle both. Grinning apologetically at their surprise he explained, “I was just thinking that six years on, there’s no decision I’m more glad of than that I joined the RCN, but it could be that my reasons for making that decision had more to do with spiting my father than they did with making a name for myself.”

  “I’ve never noticed that the reasons people do things have much connection with how well or badly matters turn out,” Adele said. “For example, I’m confident that my parents entered the Three Circles Conspiracy with the full intention of saving the Republic from men who couldn’t be trusted with power.”

  She smiled. Adele gave the impression of being dispassionate about everything except knowledge, and then only knowledge in the form of marks on paper or electronic potentials. That wasn’t true—the passion was there, Daniel knew, as surely as it was in his own explosive outbursts—but Adele’s analysis would always be as cold and clean as the blade of a scalpel.

  That was true even at times like this one, when Adele was analyzing the factors that led to the severed heads of every member of her family, including her ten-year-old sister, being displayed from Speaker’s Rock.

  “Your Lieutenant Mon’s a good man,” Stacey said. “Who did the yard assign for a supervisor? Archbolt, I suppose? Or did they give you Berol?”

  “Yes, Archbolt,” said Daniel, watching members of the Princess Cecile’s crew—the Sissies—clambering over the antennas with tool belts.

  Harbor Three had a regular dockyard staff, but the strain of fitting out the fleet in anticipation of full-scale war with the Alliance had overstrained their capacity. There would have been jobs for three times the number of workmen, and there were no trained personnel to hire into the new slots.

  One way around the problem was to use a vessel’s own crewmen to perform all but the specialist yard work. Normally crews were paid off when their ship docked in its home port; now, a third of the Princess Cecile’s crew was at work refitting the vessel under the command of a ship’s officer who also was kept on full pay.

  Daniel, as the corvette’s captain, would normally have been that officer. He’d passed the posting down to his first lieutenant, Lt. Mon, who would otherwise have been trying to support his family on half pay and no other resources. Mon had been a prisoner during the capture of the Princess Cecile; therefore he had no share of the prize money which the Navy Office would eventually adjudge for the ship.

  Daniel had two eighths of the prize money coming to him. That would be months or years in the future, but his bank was more than happy to advance him funds against the event. Daniel didn’t have the expense of a wife, and he did have a great personal interest in meeting young women who might be impressed by a dashing naval officer. Leaving the full-time duties to Mon gave both officers what was best suited to their circumstances; an idyllic situation so far as Daniel was concerned.

  “A trim ship,” Uncle Stacey repeated, “and very well found.”

  In his present state of health, Stacey hadn’t been able to walk the telescoping antennas and yards, so now he locked a pair of naval goggles down over his eyes to use their electronic enhancement to view them. They determined the position, attitude, and expanse of sails of charged dielectric fabric which created imbalances in Casimir radiation and drove the vessel through the Matrix.

  Raising the goggles, the old man looked up at his nephew again. “Are they going to give you command again after she’s commissioned, lad?” he asked.

  Daniel shrugged. Civilians assumed the answer was obvious: of course the Hero of Kostroma would be returned to command. An RCN officer, however, knew there was much more to the question.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I performed well, but there’re many skilled officers senior to me.”

  He smiled at a sudden thought. “Lieutenant Mon among them.”

  It was a grim joke, of course, because Mon would never have a command of his own. He didn’t have the interest of a senior officer nor the sort of family money that would allow him to cut a figure socially and call attention to his undoubted abilities.

&n
bsp; Worst of all, Mon had bad luck: he’d always been at the wrong place when there were prizes or honors to be won nearby. And there he differed from Daniel Leary, who’d been sent to Kostroma with no interest and no money, but whose good fortune had handsomely made up for those lacks.

  “Short of Admiral Anston,” Adele said dryly, “there’s no better-known officer in the RCN today. You won’t be the wonder of Cinnabar forever, but I think you still have some of your nine days left.”

  Daniel grinned, but he said, “That’s not an unmixed blessing, you know, Adele. There’ll be some who think I’ve carried myself a little higher since my return than an officer so junior ought to do. And they may be right.”

  Uncle Stacey nodded, his lips pursed. “You’re young, Daniel, you’re young, and they’ll understand that. But still …”

  “You carried yourself here with the same well-justified confidence that you showed on Kostroma,” Adele said, raising her voice slightly. Her words had the precision of the teeth of a saw cutting timber to the proper fit. “The reason we’re not in an Alliance prison—or dead—is that you never let any of us doubt that you were going to get us free. I have far too much respect for the organization of which I’m now an officer—”

  She touched a fingertip to the rank flash on her collar with a thin smile.

  “—to doubt that those in charge can also see the merit of a more extroverted personality than mine when the task involves leading others into battle.”

  A plume of steam expanded from a berth halfway across the port. The ground trembled for several seconds before the roar of a ship lifting off reached Daniel’s party through the air. He slipped his goggles down to protect his eyes—the optics blocked UV completely and filtered white light to a safe intensity—and looked toward the event.

  In truth, Daniel was glad to have an excuse not to respond. He was comfortable with the praise of his peers and generally amused by the compliments of civilians who hadn’t the least notion of what they were talking about. Adele’s words were disconcerting, though. He couldn’t equate her cold analysis with the confused bumbling he remembered going through; to ultimate success, agreed, but that was due less to Daniel’s own efforts than to luck and the expert assistance which Adele and so many others provided.