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."
"Emer—" Daniel said. An amber bar slashed across the green telltale on his display, indicating that the channel was locked to him. He turned his head in surprise.
Adele sat at the console to his right. Her uniform was splotched with blood, brick dust, and substances Daniel couldn't even hazard a guess at.
He'd thought his own was the master unit and couldn't be overridden. That wasn't true, at least with Adele working in the same system.
"Princess Cecile to Bremse," Adele said. Her voice was perfectly calm. Anyone who'd had experience with people reacting to crises would assume she was in shock. "We are transmitting data now as we lift off. I repeat—"
She pointed a bandaged left hand to Daniel. He nodded; he was already initiating take-off sequence. Domenico had sealed the Princess Cecile as soon as the palace detachment boarded, so it was just a matter of bringing up pressure to the plasma motor feeds and unlocking the outriggers so they could be brought in as soon as the vessel left the water.
"—we are lifting off for safety. Princess Cecile out."
The motors rumbled beneath them. The Princess Cecile shuddered on a bubble of steam and plasma, then began to rise. She was shorter than the Aglaia and therefore wobbled at a higher frequency as she found her balance, but she was a lot steadier than Daniel had expected.
He grinned at Adele, then settled into his seat. His fingers moved across the console's keyboard as he set up the next step on the corvette's targeting display.
One step at a time, until they got home or went off the end of the final cliff.
Adele coughed wrackingly, doubling over in her seat to bring up orange phlegm. Her first thought was that she'd had a lung hemorrhage, but the color came from the brick dust she'd breathed as they shot their way out of the palace. It and the ozone generated by electromotive weapons were irritants, but she didn't think either of them would kill her.
She wiped the sputum on her sleeve and went back to work. The fabric couldn't be much filthier than before anyway.
Starships weren't stressed for high acceleration. The Princess Cecile lifted at less than two gravities, making flesh a burden but nothing worse. Sailors moved about, albeit a little slower than they had in Adele's library; and as for Adele, she noted with a cold smirk that many of her plumper contemporaries carried as much weight every day of their lives.
Daniel, instead of using the ship's communication system, turned his head to say, "Adele? The Bremse up there's laying a defensive array. Can you find the command node so we can destroy it?"
Adele put down her wands. "The constellation hasn't yet been activated, but I'm changing our identification codes to mimic those of the Goetz von Berlichingen. That way we'll be safe if they switch it on."
"Yes, but can you spot the command node?" Daniel said. "We can destroy it with cannon or even a missile if you can just locate it."
Adele heard in his tone the ingrained irritation of a male trying to get information from a female too dense to understand a simple question. She didn't say: "Yes, if you're stupid enough to want to commit suicide that way I can help you do it."
Instead Adele said, "If the command node is destroyed each unit of the constellation will react to any ship within range except the Bremse. The command node is—"
She twitched a control wand without taking her eyes away from Daniel. An object on Daniel's visual display changed from an icon distinguished only by number to a pulsing ball as red as murder.
"—here."
"Ah," said Daniel. His face was blank as he assimilated what he'd been told: all the things he'd just been told, including the fact that he'd acted like a fool. "Adele—Ms. Mundy. My concern isn't so much for our own safety from the defenses, as for the safety of the Cinnabar force that retakes Kostroma."
His expression was momentarily that of an older man and a very hard one. "As one most certainly will."