Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  Briefly, at least.

  “Threshold!” Zagorski’s tone was calm but more than a little crisper than usual.

  “Rig foresail for transit,” Thoreau said.

  “Rigging foresail,” Glaston responded instantly, and half Pilgrim’s impeller wedge vanished as her forward Beta nodes shut down. Her forward Alpha nodes reconfigured in the same instant, dropping their own share of the cruiser’s impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail—a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, three hundred kilometers in diameter—instead.

  “Stand by after hypersail.” Thoreau watched the flickering numerals in the Engineering window of his plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone, inserting the foresail gently—gently—into the gravitational vortex.

  “Standing by after hypersail,” Glaston said, and Thoreau knew she was watching the same numbers climb on her own displays as the sail moved deeper into the terminus. The rate of increase was slow, given the absurdly low speed of any first-transit through an uncharted terminus, but catching it at the right moment was still—

  The numbers stopped flickering. The values kept climbing, but the digital display’s steady glow indicated the foresail was drawing enough power from the grav waves twisting eternally through the terminus to provide movement.

  “Rig aftersail,” Thoreau said crisply.

  “Rigging aftersail,” Glaston acknowledged, and Pilgrim shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail blossomed at the far end of her hull.

  Chief Clouseau’s hands were calm and steady, but Thoreau’s stomach still twisted itself into a brief knot as the cruiser slid into the terminus’ interface. The queasiness always associated with crossing the hyper wall was substantially more intense in a wormhole transit. It was also briefer, however, and he ignored it, never looking away from his plot. The waterfall display along its right side rose sharply, climbing towards the transit point. It took longer than any wormhole transit Thoreau had ever before made, which wasn’t a good thing where the nausea quotient was concerned. On the other hand, it seemed to be tracking exactly along Dr. Rendova’s projected vector, and he could stand quite a bit of tummy upset as long as—

  The universe hiccuped.

  No one had ever been able to measure a wormhole transit’s duration, and this one was no different. One instant, PNS Pilgrim was just over five light-hours from the thoroughly useless red dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L). The next instant she was . . . somewhere else.

  “I have a G4 star at three-niner-point-seven-five light-minutes!” one of Rendova’s assistants sang out.

  Thoreau exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, but he never looked away from his plot as the numbers began spiraling downward once again.

  “Prepare to reconfigure to wedge, Commander Glaston,” he said, then glanced at Zagorski. “And while we’re doing that, Astro, why don’t you start your observations. I think we should find out where we are, don’t you?”

  The Octagon

  City of Nouveau Paris

  Haven System

  People’s Republic of Haven

  December 1882 Post Diaspora

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Vice Admiral Amos Parnell said.

  “I wish I was.” Admiral Adelaide Laforge grimaced sourly. “Unfortunately, Rousseau ‘s serious, and Harris has signed off on it.” She shrugged. “End of story.”

  “But it’s frigging ridiculous!” Parnell scowled. He was due to replace Laforge as Chief of Naval Operations in less than a T-year, and he wondered how much of his irritation stemmed from the fact that when he did, it would be his ineffable joy to deal firsthand with their political masters.

  “I didn’t express myself quite that . . . concisely,” Laforge said dryly. She was his aunt by marriage, as well as his superior officer. As such, she habitually addressed him with a greater degree of frankness than she would have shown others. “Rousseau’s an idiot, but she’s got too much clout for that. I did suggest that any results would be . . . problematic. But I think she and the rest of her crowd just can’t accept that we can’t find some way to use it, now that we’ve got our very own hyper-bridge.”

  Parnell snorted, but stubborn self-honesty made him admit he felt much the same way. No one had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus barely seventy light-years from the Haven System. In fact, the discovery had come as a distinct shock to the survey crew which detected it literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the unprepossessing, planetless star with which it was associated. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off at the M3 dwarf en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) system to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

  J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. It had been very quiet excitement, however. Wormholes were rare and precious commodities, and the government of Hereditary President Harris had no intention of letting the rest of the galaxy learn about this one until it had decided how best to utilize it. Dr. Rendova, the PRH’s leading hyper-physicist, had been dispatched aboard Pilgrim, under the tightest possible security, within T-months. She’d completed her survey more rapidly than anyone had expected, and Pilgrim had discovered that J-156-18(L) was one terminus of a 653.17-LY hyper-bridge, twenty percent longer even than the fabled Manticore-Beowulf bridge.

  And that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

  KCR-126-04.

  Parnell’s mouth tightened, because that was one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe. That star system—also known as the Calvin System—lay at the heart of one of the tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

  Parnell had often wondered about the courage—or insanity—required to set out for the stars aboard the original sublight, multi-generation starships. He spent too much time aboard modern starships to contemplate an entire lifetime bounded by a ship’s hull with any sort of equanimity. Calvin’s Hope, though, had set forth on a longer journey than any which had gone before her, and the record made it clear that the colonists had invested not just money but intelligence and imagination in providing against their voyage’s risks.

  Unfortunately, no one’s imagination had included a dinosaur killer fit to dwarf the impact which had put a punctuation point to Old Terra’s Cretaceous period. From the available evidence, the monster which hit Calvin III—some experts theorized there might actually have been two of them in a short window, although the second crater (if it existed) had never been found—had struck less than fifty years before the colony ship should have reached its destination.

  No one knew if she actually had. What they did know was that even today, thirteen standard centuries later, Calvin III was a bleak, barren place whose shattered ecosystem had scarcely begun to heal. In fact, most climatologists and biologists leaned towards the theory that what they were observing wasn’t a recovery at all, simply the final throes and death rattle of an entire planet’s slow, lingering murder.

  In 402 PD, no colony could possibly have survived upon its surface.

  No trace had ever been found—in the KCR-126-04 System, or anywhere else—of Calvin’s Hope and her doomed passengers. The “slow-boat” colony ships had been designed for one-way trips, without the endurance and capacity to return to their destinations. The colonists who’d settled the planet Grayson had discovered the downsides of that, and Calvin’s Hope had departed the Sol System almost a century and a half earlier than Austin Grayson and his followers. Her design had been less capable to begin with, and she would have exhausted virtually all her planned endurance just reaching the Calvin System. There was no way she could possibly have taken her passengers home again, and no message had ever been received from her across the two light-centuries between Calvi
n and Old Terra. Perhaps she’d sent one which had never been detected, but none of her shipboard transmitters had ever been intended to reach across so vast a distance.

  Nor had there been any reason they should have been, for there’d been absolutely no point in sending out a cry for help seven hundred years before Adrienne Warshawski made hyper-space safe for colony ship-sized transports.

  Still, the colony ought to have been able to build the capacity to at least tell the rest of the human race it was there. It hadn’t, and when a survey ship with a hyper generator and proper Warshawski sails was finally sent in 1306 to see what had become of the expedition, it found no evidence Calvin’s Hope had ever even reached KCR-126-04. And so she had vanished into history, There were all too many interstellar “Flying Dutchmen,” like the Agnes Celeste, but Calvin’s Hope had the distinction of being the earliest of that long, long list of legendary shipwrecks and mysteries.

  For Bradley Thoreau and his crew, it had been like setting out for an exciting day in the galaxy’s biggest amusement park only to arrive in a bleak, desolate tomb. But the Cabinet, immune to the poignancy of the long-ago tragedy, had immediately started laying ambitious plans to utilize the warp point. After all, it lay only two hundred light-years from Old Earth and only a hundred and fifty from Beowulf. Surely that had to be useful!

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

  The nearest inhabited star system, Bryant, was little more than fifty light years from Calvin. It also had absolutely nothing to offer the People’s Republic in trade. The same was pretty much true of Conestoga and Yasotaro—the latter a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Office of Frontier Security—the next two closest star systems. And there weren’t any other candidates for human settlement in the vicinity. While KCR-126-04 might be only two hundred light-years from the Sol System, J-156-18(L) was most inconveniently placed from a lot of perspectives. Astronomers had given the area a close look long ago, but with universally negative results. Many of the stars and its vicinity were in complex multi-star systems, where planetary orbits were unlikely to be stable long enough for complex life to evolve on their surfaces even if they happened to be in a liquid water zone. There were several singletons or extremely distant components of multiple-star systems, but most of them were cool red dwarfs or orange dwarfs edging towards the bottom of their classification. Most of their planetary satellites were either tide-locked to them or frozen over. None of them had showed the spectrographs the presence of oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres, at any rate.

  And the problem wasn’t just at the KCR-126-04 end of the bridge, either. J-156-18(L) was seventy-two light-years from the Haven System, which meant ninety percent of the People’s Republic was closer to Trevor’s Star than to the PRH’s end of the new bridge. And the trip to Sol was a hundred and fifty light years shorter from Trevor’s Star via the Manticoran Wormhole Junction than it would have been from J-156-18(L) by way of Calvin.

  Of course, the People’s Republic and the Star Kingdom of Manticore weren’t on what one might call the best of terms. Roger III was not one of Haven’s great admirers. In fact, as crown prince, he’d been the driving force behind the Star Kingdom’s naval buildup for over a decade even before taking the throne twenty-five T-years ago. Which, Parnell admitted, indicated quite a bit of foresight on his part. The People’s Republic’s sights had been set on the eventual . . . acquisition of the Manticore Binary System—and its massive wormhole Junction—ever since it had first begun planning its expansion under the DuQuesne Plan over a T-century ago.

  At the moment, however, everyone on both sides was careful to smile politely in public and the Manticore Junction remained open to the PRH’s trade and even Haven-flagged merchantmen. That made the Trevor’s Star-Manticore route far more economically and logistically valuable than the Calvin System could ever be. And although very few people knew it, within the next year—two years, at the outside—Trevor’s Star would be an obedient member of the People’s Republic, which would simplify matters ever further.

  All of which meant KCR-126-04 was something of a white elephant. No doubt the hyper-bridge had a great deal of potential value, somewhere down the road. At the present, it offered very little.

  Now if only Ingeborg Rousseau would accept that minor point . . .

  “She genuinely thinks we should be using Calvin as a staging base against the Manties?” he asked, and Laforge shrugged.

  “Like I say, I think at least part of this is just that she can’t accept that our shiny new toy isn’t somehow of immense value. She thinks we should be building up a new base in Calvin, rather than plowing funds into Barnett. As nearly as I can understand her logic—I’m hampered, you know, because my brain actually works—she thinks it would let us set up a ‘strategic pincer’ when the centicred finally drops. It would let us attack Manticore from an ‘unexpected direction,’ you know.”

  “‘Unexpected direction’?” Parnell stared at her in disbelief.

  “That’s what she said.” Laforge raised both hands shoulder high, palms uppermost. “I did explain to her that approach vectors aren’t really a factor in assaults through hyper-space. Unfortunately, she seems to think a lookout in the crow’s nest will see us coming before we cross the alpha wall.”

  Parnell shook his head, then drew a deep breath.

  “Do you think we could find someone else to take over your job when you retire?”

  “No such luck,” his aunt told him. “Trust me, this is one job we want to keep in the family. And that means you’re going to have to deal with people like Rousseau for a long time. Get used to it now.”

  Parnell nodded glumly. The good news was that there weren’t very many Ingeborg Rousseaus. One was too many, of course, but most of Hereditary President Sidney Harris’ senior advisers had at least a vague notion of how hyper-space and simple physics worked. Rousseau, unhappily, did not. What she did have was an amazing amount of clout through her political alliances and family connections.

  “So what the hell do we do?” he asked finally.

  “What do you think we should do?” Laforge countered. “Think of that as a Socratic question.”

  “Wonderful.” Parnell sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

  “Look busy,” he said finally. Laforge raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “The last thing we need is to start diverting funding and resources from Barnett to pursue one of Rousseau’s boondoggles. So it seems to me what we need to do is nod gravely, take her suggestion seriously, promise to explore all the possibilities, and then send a half dozen or so survey ships through to do that exploring. Let me pick the right person to run the operation, and I’ll guarantee reports that keep us looking until even Rousseau gets tired and finds something else to amuse her.”

  •III•

  In blackness and terror hands clawed through the dust,

  Seeking in vain for the living

  As the lonely wail of a terrified child

  Called to ears that could no longer hear.

  And hearts turned to stone in the night of the soul

  As they cursed Death that he’d left them behind.

  —The Dark Fall Saga

  * * * * * * * * * *

  RHNS Tourbillon

  Sanctuary Orbit

  Refuge System

  March 1916 Post Diaspora

  “I can’t believe even Pierre and Saint-Just would have done something like this,” President Eloise Pritchart told Admiral Thomas Theisman. She thought about what she’d just said for a moment, then snorted harshly. “I suppose what I really mean is that I don’t want to believe it.”

  The two of them stood on the admiral’s bridge of Theisman’s temporary flagship, gazing at the main visual display as RHNS Tourbillon decelerated into Sanctuary orbit. Sanctuary was a gorgeous blue, green, and tan marble ahead of the battlecruiser and the feeble sunlight of the K8 star its inhabitants called Refuge gleamed from the vast sprawl of its orbital shipyards. The steadily growing skeletons of capital ships seemed
to be everywhere, long chains of in-system freighters trekked steadily towards them from the orbital smelters, the tiny dots of hard-suited construction workers glowed like twice a thousand fireflies, and she had to admit it was a tremendously impressive sight.

  “To be fair, although it feels distinctly unnatural to even try to be fair to the two of them, they didn’t start it, Madame President,” Theisman said. “We can thank President Harris and the Legislaturalists for that.”

  “And for so many other things, as well.” Pritchart’s magnificent topaz eyes darkened with memory and old pain. “But Pierre could damned well have done things differently once he took over. And what he should have done was go public, even if he didn’t want to give up the system’s exact coordinates! Damn it, these people deserved better than this! They should’ve at least had the rights he was prepared to let our own people have, and they didn’t get even that much!”

  “I can’t be sure, but I suspect from some of the file copies of memos between him and Saint-Just that he seriously considered going public immediately after the coup,” Theisman said. “That was before he realized they had to continue the war against the Manties if they were going to stay in power, of course. I think Saint-Just accepted that they would before Pierre did and that that’s why he argued against the idea of telling anyone who didn’t absolutely need to know that the place even existed, much less how it had come to exist.”

  “You’re not making it any better, Admiral,” Pritchart said, turning to look at him coldly.