by David Weber
In this instance, however, with absolutely no way to judge how far from home they'd come, Lieutenant Thatcher and her assistants had to begin with a blank map. The first order of business was to isolate and determine the exact spectral classes of the most brilliant stars in the vicinity. Once that was done, the computers could compare them to the enormous amounts of data in their memory until they managed to positively identify enough of them to tell Thatcher just where the terminus had deposited them. In the immediate sense of this particular mission, Kare's and Wix's work was considerably more important than Thatcher's, since they might never get home again if the scientists failed to nail down their target. In the grand scheme of things, though, Thatcher's quest held far greater significance for the Star Kingdom as a whole.
The only true utility of the terminus was to go from one place to another, after all, and there was no point in going if one didn't know where one was after one arrived. Besides, while it was theoretically possible that they were so far from Manticore that return would be possible only by retracing their course through the terminus, that was also extremely unlikely. Harvest Joy had a cruising endurance of just over four months before she would have to rebunker. That gave her a radius of over eight hundred light-years even assuming she had to make the entire hyper voyage under impellers, instead of Warshawski sail, which ought to be enough to get her back to civilization somewhere, assuming that Thatcher could figure out where they were.
As for Zachary herself, she had absolutely nothing to do until one batch of hunters or the other, or preferably both, succeeded in their quest.
* * *
"So," Zachary said nineteen hours later. "What do we know?"
She sat at the head of the table in Harvest Joy's captain's briefing room and let her eyes run around the faces of the other people assembled around it. There were five of them: Lieutenant Commander Wilson Jefferson, her executive officer; Lieutenant Thatcher; Jordin Kare and Richard Wix; and Dame Melina Makris. Of that five, Zachary had discovered that she liked four, which was probably a bit above the average for any group of people. Unfortunately, the one member of the group she actively disliked—Makris—more than compensated for that happy state of affairs. To be honest, Zachary would have preferred to exclude Makris from this meeting (or anything else happening aboard Harvest Joy), but the immaculately coiffured blonde was the Government's personal representative. It was painfully obvious that in her own not so humble opinion, Makris also considered herself to be the true commander of this entire expedition, whatever the merely official table of organization said. She'd made that painfully evident from the moment she first came on board, and the situation had gotten no better since. The fact that she regarded the personnel who crewed Harvest Joy as the sort of menials who'd obviously joined the Navy because they were incapable of finding anything better to do with their lives was equally apparent.
Now Makris proceeded yet again to demonstrate her enormous natural talent for making any Queen's officer detest her. She cleared her throat loudly and gave the captain a pointedly reproving glare for daring to usurp her authority. With that out of the way, she officiously straightened the sheets of hardcopy in front of her, jogged them sharply (and nosily) on the table just in case anyone had missed the point of her glare, and turned her attention to Kare.
"Yes," she said in a hard-edged, slightly nasal voice which suited her sharp-featured face quite well. "What do we know, Doctor?"
It was remarkable, Zachary mused. Makris obviously had a detailed checklist of Things to Do to Piss Off Survey Ship Captains, and she was determined not to leave any of them undone. The captain couldn't decide which irritated her more: Makris' usurpation of her own authority . . . or the peremptory, almost dismissive, mistress-to-servant fashion in which she'd just addressed Kare.
"Excuse me, Dame Melina," Zachary said, and waited until the civilian turned to give her a look of pained inquiry.
"What?" Makris asked sharply.
"I believe that I was speaking."
Jefferson and Thatcher looked at one another, but Makris didn't know Zachary nearly as well as they did. She only tossed her head dismissively with a grimace of distaste.
"I hardly think—" she began.
"Regardless of what you may believe, Dame Melina," Zachary interrupted in calm, measured tones, "you are not in this vessel's chain of command."
"I beg your pardon?" Makris quite obviously couldn't believe she'd heard Zachary correctly.
"I said that you're not in this vessel's chain of command," Zachary repeated. Makris stared at her, and Zachary smiled thinly. "In point of fact, you're a guest aboard my ship."
"I don't believe I care for your tone, Captain," Makris said coldly.
"You may find this difficult to credit, Dame Melina, but I don't particularly care whether you do or not," Zachary informed her.
"Well you'd better!" Makris snapped. "I warn you, Captain—I'm not prepared to put up with insolence!"
"How odd. That's precisely what I was just thinking," Zachary replied, and something seemed to flicker in Makris' eyes. She opened her mouth again, but Zachary leaned forward in her chair before she could say anything more.
"I understand that you're aboard as the Government's representative, Dame Melina," the captain said flatly. "However, I am the captain of this ship; you are not. Neither are you the chairwoman of this meeting. That, too, is my role. In fact, you have no standing whatsoever in the chain of command aboard this ship, and I'm becoming rather tired of your manner. I think—"
"Now, see here, Captain! I'm not about to—"
"Be quiet." Zachary didn't raise her voice, but it cut through Makris' outraged splutter like a chill scalpel. The other woman closed her mouth with an almost audible click, her eyes wide with astonishment that anyone should dare to address her in such tones.
"That's better." Zachary's hard eyes considered the bureaucrat as if she were inspecting some particularly loathsome bacterium. "As I was saying," the captain resumed, "I think you would do well to practice a certain minimal courtesy while you're aboard my ship. So long as you do, I assure you, the members of the ship's company will reciprocate. If, however, you find that to be beyond your capability, I feel sure we could all dispense with your presence. Do I make myself clear?"
Makris stared at her, looking as if someone had just punched her. But then the paralyzing moment of shock passed and a dark red tide of outrage suffused her face.
"I'm not in the habit of being dictated to by uniformed flunkies, Captain!" she spat. "Not even by ones who seem to think they—"
Zachary's open palm cracked like a pistol shot when it landed on the tabletop. The sharp, explosive sound made more than one person jump, and Makris recoiled as if the blow had landed on her cheek instead. A stab of pure, physical fear chopped her off in mid-sentence, and she swallowed as the cold fury burning behind Zachary's eyes seemed to truly register at last.
"That will be enough," the captain said, very softly, into the ringing silence. "Since you obviously cannot comport yourself with anything like adult self-control, Dame Melina, I believe we can dispense with your presence. Leave."
"I– You can't—" Makris spluttered, only to chop off again under the searing contempt of Zachary's gaze.
"Yes, I can," the other woman assured her. "And I have. Your presence is no longer required here . . . nor will it be required at any other staff meeting for the duration of this cruise." Her impaling gaze nailed the Prime Minister's personal representative into her chair, daring her to open her mouth once more as she was exiled from any further direction of the survey mission.
"And now," Zachary went on after a two-heartbeat pause, "you will leave this compartment and go directly to your berthing compartment. You will remain there until I send word you may leave it."
"I—" Makris shook herself. "The Prime Minister will be informed of this, Captain!" she declared, but her voice was much weaker than before.
"No doubt he will," Zachary agreed. "For now, howeve
r, you'll obey my orders or I will have you escorted to your quarters. The choice, Dame Melina, is yours."
Her eyes were unflinching, and Makris' attempt to glare defiantly back shattered on their flint. The civilian's gaze fell, and, after one more awkward second, she stood and walked wordlessly through the compartment hatch. Zachary watched her go, then turned back to those still seated around the table as the hatch closed behind her.
"Please excuse the interruption, Dr. Kare," she said pleasantly. "Now, you were about to say– ?"
"Ah, you do realize she really will complain to the Prime Minister, don't you, Captain?" Kare asked after a moment, rather than answering her question, and she sighed.
"If she does, she does." The captain shrugged. "In either case, I meant every word I said to her."
"I can't disagree with any of them myself," the astrophysicist admitted with a wry grin. Then he sobered. "But she does have influence at the cabinet level. And a vindictive streak a kilometer wide."
"Somehow, I find that very easy to believe," Zachary observed with a wintery chuckle. "But while I also realize that she undoubtedly has a certain amount of influence even with the Admiralty—" that was as close as she was prepared to come to mentioning Sir Edward Janacek by name, not that anyone failed to recognize her meaning "—I still meant it. And while there may be repercussions, they may also be less severe than you expect. After all, we're all heroes, Dr. Kare!" She grinned suddenly. "I expect our towering contribution to the expansion of humanity's frontiers to provide at least a little protection against any winds of official disfavor Dame Melina can stir up. If it doesn't—"
She shrugged and, after a moment, Kare nodded. He was still unhappy, not least because a part of him thought he should have been the one to slap Makris down. But there wasn't much he could do about that now, so he returned to the matter in hand, instead.
"In answer to your original question, Captain, TJ and the rest of our Agency people may not have the exact vector information we need yet, but our preliminary readings have managed to nail down the terminus locus. In fact, we've managed to derive a much tighter initial approximation than anyone anticipated." He chuckled. "It's almost as if all the things that made our end of the terminus so hard to spot for so long were reversed at this end."
"So you're confident that at least we'll be able to go home again?" Zachary asked with a smile.
"Oh, yes. Of course, TJ and I were always confident of that, or we'd never have volunteered to come along in the first place!"
"Of course you wouldn't have," Zachary agreed. "But confidence aside, do you have any sort of estimate on how long it will take you to derive the approach vector?"
"That's harder to say, but I shouldn't think it will take a great deal of time. As I say, our instruments are doing a much better job with this terminus. And we have a great deal more information about its strength and tidal stresses now that we've been through it once from the other side than we had when we began calculating for the trip here. If you want my best guess, bearing in mind that a guess is mostly what it would be, I'd say that we ought to have the numbers we need within the next two weeks—possibly three. I'll be surprised, frankly, if we can pull them together much more rapidly than that. On the other hand, we've rather persistently surprised ourselves with how quickly things came together ever since we finally found this terminus."
"So I understand." Zachary nodded pensively, then pursed her lips as she considered the time estimate. It was considerably better than she'd anticipated, she reflected. Which ought to make everyone—with the possible exception of Dame Melina—happy. She suppressed a sour smile at the thought and turned her attention to Jefferson and Thatcher.
"Well, Wilson. The boffins seem to be holding up their end. Are we holding up ours?"
"Actually," the exec replied with what she suddenly realized was studied calm, "I believe we might reasonably say that we are, Skipper."
"Ah?" Zachary arched both eyebrows, and Jefferson grinned. He was obviously pleased about something, but Zachary had known him for quite some time. It was equally apparent to her that his pleasure was less than complete. In fact, she seemed to sense an undertone of what could almost be anxiety.
"You're the one who put it together, Rochelle," he told Thatcher. "Suppose you break it to her?"
"Yes, Sir," Thatcher said with a smile of her own, then seemed to sober slightly as she turned to her captain.
"Our people have done just about as well as Dr. Wix and his people, Ma'am. So far we've already identified no less than six 'beacon' stars, which has let us place our current position with a high degree of confidence."
"And that position is—?" Zachary prompted when Thatcher paused.
"At this particular moment, Ma'am, we're approximately six hundred and twelve light-years from Manticore. And we've been able to identify that G2 star at four light-years as Lynx."
"Lynx?" Zachary's brow wrinkled, then she shrugged. "I can't say the name rings any bells, Rochelle. Should it?"
"Not really, Ma'am. After all, it's a long way from home. But the Lynx System was settled about two hundred T-years ago. It's part of the Talbott Cluster."
"Talbott?" This time Zachary recognized the name, and her eyes narrowed as she considered the implications of that recognition.
The Talbott Cluster was the thoroughly inaccurate name assigned to one of several regions, most of them rather sparsely settled, just beyond the frontiers of the Solarian League. Whatever else the "cluster's" stars were, they were nothing which remotely resembled anything an astrophysicist would have considered a cluster, but that didn't matter to the people who'd needed to come up with a convenient handle for them.
Most such regions were relatively hardscrabble propositions. Many of them contained colonies which had backslid technologically, severely in some cases, since their settlement, and only a few of them contained star systems which anyone from the Star Kingdom would have considered economically well established. And eventually, all of them would inevitably be incorporated into the glacially expanding frontiers of the League. Whether they wanted to be or not.
No one would resort to anything as crude as outright conquest. Sollies didn't do things that way . . . nor did they have to. The Solarian League was the largest, most powerful, wealthiest political entity in human history. On a per capita basis, the Star Kingdom's economy was actually somewhat stronger, but in absolute terms Manticore's entire gross domestic product would disappear with scarcely a ripple into the League's economy. When that sort of economic powerhouse expanded into the vicinity of star systems which could scarcely keep their heads above water, the train of events leading to eventual incorporation extended itself with the inevitability of entropy.
And if it didn't, the League could be counted upon to give the process a swift kick, Zachary reflected sourly.
Josepha Zachary was scarcely alone among the Star Kingdom of Manticore's naval officers in her dislike for the Solarian League. Actually, a lot of people who had been denied the honor and privilege of Solly citizenship disliked the League. It wasn't because the League went around conquering people. Not officially, anyway. It was just that the towering sense of moral superiority which the League seemed to bring to all of its interstellar endeavors could be absolutely relied upon to irritate every non-Solly who ever experienced it. The antipathy was exacerbated for the Royal Manticoran Navy, however, and Zachary was honest enough to admit it. The embargo which the Cromarty Government had managed to secure on weapons sales and technology transfers to the belligerents in the Star Kingdom's war against the Peeps had irritated the hell out of an awful lot of Sollies. Some of them had been none too shy about making their ire known, and some of those who hadn't been were officers in the Solarian League Navy or Customs Service who had expressed their personal irritation by harassing Manticoran merchant ships in Solarian space.
Even without that, however, Zachary knew, she wouldn't have cared for the Sollies. When the Solarian League was created, the local governments
of Old Earth's older daughter worlds had already been over a thousand T-years old. Few of those planets had been prepared to surrender their sovereignty to a potentially tyrannical central government, so the League Constitution had been carefully designed to prevent that from happening. Like the founders of the Star Kingdom, the men and women who'd drafted that Constitution had limited the funding sources for the government they were creating as the best means of ensuring that it could never grow into the monster they feared. Unfortunately, they hadn't stopped there. Instead they'd gone on to give every member system of the League effective veto power in the League legislature.
That combination had created a situation in which the League effectively had no official foreign policy. Or, rather, what it had was a consensus so mushy that it was hopelessly amorphous. About the only clear and unambiguous foreign policy principle the League maintained was the Eridani Edict's prohibition against the unrestricted use of what were still called "weapons of mass destruction" against inhabited planets. And even that was only because the edict's proponents had used the Solarian Constitution's referendum provisions to do an end run around the Assembly and amend it to incorporate the edict into the League's fundamental law after the horrific casualties of the Eridani Incident.
But if the League had no official foreign policy, that didn't mean it lacked a de facto one. The problem was that the League Assembly as such had virtually nothing to do with that policy's formulation.
While the restrictions on the central government's ability to tax had indeed limited that government's power, the limitation was purely relative. Even a very tiny percentage of the total economic product of something the size of the Solarian League was an inconceivable amount of money. Despite that, however, the League was perpetually strapped for revenue, because the relative ineffectuality of the veto-riddled Assembly had resulted in the transfer of more and more of the practical day-to-day authority for managing the League from the legislature to bureaucratic regulatory agencies. Unlike laws and statutes, bureaucratic regulations didn't require the item-by-item approval of the entire Assembly, which, over the centuries, had led to the gradual evolution of deeply entrenched, monolithic, enormously powerful (and expensive) bureaucratic empires.