David Drake - Lt Leary Commanding

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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.

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 signals 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.

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.

The ship lifted high enough that its plasma motors no longer licked a shroud of steam from

the pool on which the vessel had floated. The plume of ions flaring from the thrusters was a

rainbow beauty over which a long steel cigar continued to lift. She was an Archaeologist-class

heavy cruiser, an old ship with a greater length-to-beam ratio than more modern vessels of the

type. If Daniel had wanted to, his goggles would have let him read the pennant number to identify

her.

The plasma motors stripped atoms and voided them as ions to provide thrust. Any reaction

mass would do, but water was ideal as well as being available generally on human-habitable

worlds. Permanent harbor facilities were usually on seas or lakes which absorbed the plasma

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Lt.Leary,CommandingbyDavidDrakeThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2000byDavidDrakeAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenP...

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