by David Weber
"It sounds like an excellent idea to me, too," Marquette agreed. "Except, of course, that if there was a period of escalating tension between us and the Manties before we attacked Trevor's Star, then Kuzak would probably do what she's done before and close the Trevor's Star terminus to all nonmilitary traffic. Which would freeze our messenger out."
"I can think of two ways to solve that problem, Sir," Trenis said confidently. "One would be to use a diplomatic courier. If nothing else, the Silesians do maintain an embassy right here in Nouveau Paris and, let's be honest, if we offer a sufficiently toothsome bribe to their Ambassador, he'd be perfectly willing to make one of his official dispatch boats available to us. That would still allow us to send the orders to our Silesian commander with a forty-eight-hour head start over any message that could reach Harrington, and Kuzak would never close the junction to a vessel with diplomatic immunity. Not, at least, when no shots had actually been fired.
"The second solution would lose some of our head start time, but it would be even simpler than that. All we really have to do is to plant our courier in the Manticore System ahead of time. I'm sure that if we put our intelligence types to work on it, they could come up with any number of covers for an ostensibly civilian ship—probably one that doesn't even have a Republican registry—to hang around in Manticore for several days, or even a few weeks. If we attack Trevor's Star, it's going to be pretty damned obvious very quickly to everyone in the Manticore System that we've done so. If nothing else, there are going to be enough ship movements in and out of the junction to give it away. So as soon as the skipper of our courier knows that the attack has actually commenced, she goes ahead and transits through the junction to either Basilisk or Gregor and proceeds to rendezvous. She'll probably still have a little bit of head start, since no one in the Star Kingdom, especially with Janacek and his crowd running their Admiralty, is going to spare as much as a single thought for the possibility that we might be contemplating hitting them simultaneously someplace that far away. That means they'll probably be slow off the mark getting word of the attack to their Sidemore Station commander. And even if they're not, the fact that no one is going to be anticipating an attack that far from any of our bases should still give us tactical surprise."
"Well," Marquette said with a crooked smile, "that's knocked that objection on the head, too. You do seem to be in fine form today, Linda."
"Yes, you do," Theisman agreed. "Mind you, I'm still far from convinced that splitting our forces in the first place would be a good idea. Especially when we don't know which way the Graysons are likely to jump. But if we did decide to do any such thing, I think the arrangements you've sketched out would probably work."
"I'm fairly certain they would, Sir," Marquette told him. "And as far as the Graysons are concerned, at the moment Janacek and High Ridge seem to be almost as intent on pissing them off as they were on firing all of their best admirals! According to all our sources in the Star Kingdom, it's pretty obvious Janacek doesn't trust Benjamin Mayhew as far as he could throw him in a two-grav field. Which is uncommonly stupid even for Janacek, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth."
"Admiral Marquette is right about that, Sir," Trenis observed. "And for that matter, right this minute, Grayson has just sent a sizable chunk of its total navy off on some sort of long-term, long-range training deployment. According to NavInt's sources, they'll be gone for at least the next four to five standard months. If the balloon should happen to go up during that time period, well . . ."
She shrugged, and Thomas Theisman nodded slowly and thoughtfully.
Chapter Thirty-Four
"Harvest Joy, you are cleared to proceed. Good luck!"
"Thank you, Junction Control," Captain Josepha Zachary, commanding officer of the improbably named survey ship HMS Harvest Joy, acknowledged the clearance and the good wishes simultaneously, then turned to Jordin Kare and quirked an eyebrow.
"Junction Control says we can go now, Doctor," she observed. "Do you and Dr. Wix agree?"
"Captain, Dr. Wix and I have been ready to go for days!" Kare replied with an amazingly youthful looking grin. Then he nodded more seriously. "Our people are ready to proceed whenever you are, Captain."
"Well, in that case . . ." Captain Zachary murmured, and crossed the three paces of deck between her and her command chair. She settled into it, turned it to face her helmsman, and drew a deep breath.
"Ten gravities, Chief Tobias," she said formally.
"Ten gravities, aye, Ma'am," the helmsman confirmed, and Harvest Joy began to creep very slowly forward.
Zachary crossed her legs and made herself lean confidently back in her comfortable chair. It probably wasn't strictly necessary for her to project an aura of complete calm, but it couldn't hurt, either.
Her lips tried to twitch into a smile at the thought, but she suppressed it automatically as she watched the navigation plot repeater deployed from the left arm of the command chair. The com screen beside it showed the face of Arswendo Hooja, her chief engineer, and she nodded to the blond-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant commander. Arswendo and she had served together often over the years, and Zachary was grateful for his calm, competent presence at the far end of the com link.
She was just as happy to have avoided a few other presences, whether on the other end of com links or in the flesh. First and foremost among them was Dame Melina Makris, who had made herself a monumental pain in the posterior from the moment she came aboard. So far as Zachary had been able to determine, Makris had no redeeming characteristics, and the captain had taken carefully concealed but nonetheless profound satisfaction in banning all civilians—except Dr. Kare, of course—from Harvest Joy's bridge for the moment of transit.
Now she nodded to Hooja in welcome. Neither of them felt any particular need for words of a time like this, and in Arswendo's case, she was reasonably certain that calm was completely genuine. Which was more than she could say for most of the people aboard her ship. She could feel the tension of her entire bridge crew. Like her, they were all far too professional to be obvious about showing it, yet it was almost painfully evident to someone who knew them as well as she did. And not surprisingly. In the entire two thousand-T-year history of humankind's expansion through the galaxy, exploration ships had done what Harvest Joy was about to do less than two hundred times. It had been almost two T-centuries since the Basilisk terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had been mapped, and so far as Zachary knew, no living officer in the Star Kingdom, naval or civilian, had ever commanded the first transit through a newly discovered terminus . . . until her. And although she'd been a survey and exploration officer for the better part of fifty T-years, during which she'd made more Junction transits than she could have counted, no one had ever made this particular transit before. That would have been exciting enough, but, logical or not, the perversity of the human imagination persisted in projecting potential disaster scenarios to hone anticipation's edge still sharper.
The icon representing Harvest Joy on the astrogation plot slid slowly down the gleaming line of her projected transit vector. In some respects, it was exactly like a routine transit through one of the well-established Junction termini. And, as far as the navigation guidance from ACS and the pre-transit calculations from Dr. Kare's team were concerned, it might as well have been precisely that. But for all the similarities, there was one enormous difference, because in this case, the figures upon which those calculations were based had never been tested by another ship.
Stop that, she scolded herself. They may never have been tested by another ship, but Kare and his crowd have put over sixty probes into this terminus to compile the readings your precious numbers are based on! Which was true, as far as it went. On the other hand, she reflected with another almost-smile, not a single one of those probes has ever come back again, has it now?
Of course they hadn't. Nothing smaller than a starship could mount a hyper generator, and only something with a hyper generator could hope to pass thr
ough a wormhole junction terminus. The scientists' probes had reported faithfully right up to the moment they encountered the interface of the terminus itself, at which point they had simply ceased to exist.
Unlike them, Zachary's ship did have a hyper generator. Which mean Harvest Joy could pass safely through the hyper-space interface which had destroyed the probes . . . probably. Whether or not she would survive whatever lay on the other side of it was another matter, of course. After all, there were all of those deliciously terrifying, venerable legends about the rogue wormholes whose termini deposited doomed travelers directly into the heart of a black hole or some other suitably lethal destination. Not that anyone had ever actually found a wormhole where warships made transit in but never made transit out again.
As if anyone were about to let anything as boring as reality interfere with perfectly good legends, she told herself, and glanced sideways at Kare.
If the astrophysicist cherished any concerns of his own, they were admirably concealed. He stood at the astrogator's shoulder, blue-gray eyes intent as he watched Harvest Joy's progress with total concentration, and the mere fact of his presence ought to be reassuring. Certainly, the RMAIA would scarcely have allowed its chief scientist, his three senior assistants, and over two hundred of its other scientific personnel to depart aboard Harvest Joy if it hadn't been completely confident of their safety, Zachary thought.
Then she snorted. From what she'd seen of Kare and Wix, it would have taken armed Marines to keep them off Harvest Joy, danger or not. If a first transit was exciting for Zachary, it represented the culmination of Kare's entire academic and professional life, and the same was true for Wix.
"We're starting to pick up the eddy right on schedule, Ma'am," Lieutenant Thatcher reported from Astrogation. "The numbers look good."
"Thank you, Rochelle."
Zachary gazed intently at her display, and her nostrils flared as a bright crosshair icon ahead of Harvest Joy's light code blinked the sudden, brilliant green of a transit threshold. The survey ship was precisely where she was supposed to be, tracking straight down the precalculated vector into the frozen funnel of hyper-space which was all a wormhole junction truly was.
"Dr. Kare?" Zachary said quietly. She was the captain, and hers was the ultimate authority to abort the transit if anything looked less than optimal to her. But Kare was the one in charge of the entire expedition; the official organization chart in Zachary's orders from Admiral Reynaud made that clear, whatever Makris thought. Which meant he was the only one who could finally authorize them to proceed.
"Go ahead, Captain," the scientist replied almost absently without ever looking up from Thatcher's plot.
"Very well." Zachary acknowledged, and looked back down at the face on the small screen beside her left knee. "Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hooja," she said formally, precisely as if Arswendo hadn't been prepared to do just that for the last twenty minutes.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by," he replied with equally redundant formality.
"Threshold in three-zero seconds," Thatcher informed her captain.
"Stand ready, Chief Tobias," Zachary said.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Tobias responded, and Zachary consciously reminded herself not to hold her breath as Harvest Joy's icon continued to creep ever so slowly forward.
"Threshold!" Thatcher announced.
"Rig foresail for transit," Zachary commanded.
"Rigging foresail, aye."
To a visual observer, nothing about Harvest Joy changed in any respect as Hooja threw the switch down in Main Engineering, but Zachary's instruments were another matter entirely. Harvest Joy's impeller wedge dropped instantly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down and the matching alpha nodes reconfigured. They no longer generated their portion of the survey ship's normal-space stress bands; instead, they projected a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis and extending for over three hundred kilometers in every direction.
"Standby to rig aftersail on my mark," Zachary murmured, and Hooja acknowledged once again as Harvest Joy continued to creep forward under the power of her after impellers alone and another readout flickered to life. Zachary watched its flashing numerals climb steadily as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. The normal safety margin was considerably wider than usual because of the survey ship's relatively low acceleration and velocity, but that didn't make Zachary feel any less tense.
The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They continued to climb, but their steady glow told her that the foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the grav waves twisting down the invisible pathway of the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply.
"Rig aftersail now," she said crisply.
"Rigging aftersail, aye," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail flicked into life at the far end of her hull from the first.
Zachary looked up from her displays to watch Chief Tobias take the ship through the transition from impeller to hyper sail. The maneuver was trickier than the experienced petty officer made it look, but there was a reason Tobias had been chosen for this mission. His hands moved smoothly, confidently, and Harvest Joy slid through the interface into the terminus without so much as a quiver. He held the survey ship rock-steady, and Zachary grimaced around a familiar wave of queasiness.
No one ever really adjusted to the indescribable sensation of crossing the wall between n-space and hyper-space. Precisely what physical sense reported that sensation was debated. Everyone seemed to have his or her own opinion as to which one it was, but however much they might disagree about that, everyone agreed about the ripple of nausea that accompanied the transition. It wasn't particularly severe in a normal transit, but the gradient was far steeper in a Junction transit, and Zachary swallowed hard.
But if the nausea was sharper, it would also be over sooner, she reminded herself. The familiar thought wound its way through the groove decades of naval experience had worn in her mental processes, and then the maneuvering display blinked again.
For an instant, a fleeting interval no chronometer had ever been able to measure, HMS Harvest Joy ceased to exist. One moment she was where she had been, seven light-hours from Manticore-A; the next she was . . . somewhere else, and Zachary swallowed again, this time in relief. Her nausea vanished along with the brilliant blue transit energy radiating from Harvest Joy's sails, and she inhaled deeply.
"Transit complete," Chief Tobias reported.
"Thank you, Chief," Zachary told him, even as her eyes dropped back to the sail interface readout. She watched the numbers spiral downward even more rapidly than they'd risen, and nodded in profound satisfaction at their reassuring normality.
"Engineering, reconfigure to impeller now."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward, once again at the same, steady ten gravities.
"Well, Dr. Kare," Zachary said, looking up from her displays to meet the scientist's eyes. "We're here. Wherever 'here' is, of course."
* * *
"Here" proved to be a spot in space approximately five and a half light-hours from an unremarkable looking, planetless M8 red dwarf. That was disappointing, because the next nearest star, a G2 was just over four light-years away. That was a bit less than fourteen hours of travel for a warship, which wasn't really all that bad in a lot of ways. But the local star's lack of planets was going to deprive this terminus of any convenient anchor for the sort of infrastructure which routinely grew up to service wormhole traffic.
But if Zachary was disappointed by the absence of planets, the horde of scientists infesting her ship scarcely even seemed to notice it. They were too busy communing with their computers, Harvest Joy's shipboard sensors, and the reports from the expanding shell of sensor drones they'd deployed even before Zachary reduced velocity to zero relative to the di
m dwarf.
She was a bit amused by the fact that none of them seemed to have any interest whatsoever in the local star or even in determining where in the universe they might be. All of their attention was focused on their Warshawskis.
Actually, Zachary reflected, that was completely understandable—from their perspective, at least. And, upon more mature consideration, it was a focus she approved of heartily. After all, until they were able to nail down the precise location of this end of the terminus through which they'd come, it would be impossible for Harvest Joy to find her way home through it once more. Given how faint the readings which had guided them to the Junction end of the terminus had been, and how long and how hard the RMAIA had searched for it, Josepha Zachary was completely in favor of staying precisely where she was until Kare and his crew were totally confident that they'd pinned this one down.
But while they concentrated on that, the merely human hired help who had chauffeured them to their present location were busy with other observations. It was extremely rare—in fact, virtually unheard of—for any modern starship to be required to start completely from scratch in order to determine its location. Navigation through hyper-space depended heavily upon the hyper log, which located a ship in reference to its point of departure, since it was impossible to take observations across the hyper wall into n-space. In this case, however, even the hyper log was useless. There was no way to know how far Harvest Joy had come in Einsteinian terms, because a junction transit could theoretically be of literally any length. In fact, the longest transit "leg" for any known junction spanned just over nine hundred light-years, and the average was considerably shorter than that. Basilisk, for example, was barely two hundred light-years from the Manticore System, while Trevor's Star and Gregor were both even closer than that. Sigma Draconis and Matapan, on the other hand, were each the next best thing to five light-centuries from Manticore, while Phoenix was over seven hundred light-years away, although in terms of actual transit time all of them were equally close.