Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  "Your Majesty—" Kare began, but Berry shook her head.

  "Doctor," she said with a very slight yet undeniably impish smile, "you're grounded."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "Ready to proceed, Ma'am," Commander Samuel Lim, HMS Harvest Joy's executive officer reported crisply.

  "Thank you, Sam," Captain Josepha Zachary acknowledged, and glanced one last time around her bridge.

  Although she'd managed to hang on to Harvest Joy, she had an entirely different complement of officers from the one she'd had for the exploration of the Lynx Terminus. They were just as good a bunch, she thought, but there was a subtle difference this time around. Last time, everyone had been a newbie as far as wormhole exploration was concerned; this time, she was the experienced "Old Lady" whose calm, confident demeanor everyone else was trying to duplicate.

  The thought amused her more than a little, and she turned her attention to one of the half-dozen other veterans of the Lynx Terminus expedition who were back aboard Harvest Joy today. Dr. Michael William Hall was the third-ranking member of Dr. Kare's team, in terms of seniority, which made him the most senior scientist present, given Queen Berry's edict. Hall's shaved scalp gleamed as if it had been waxed, and with his swarthy complexion, broad shoulders, and generally muscular physique he looked far more like the stereotype of a rugby player (which he was) than of an extraordinarily well-qualified hyper-physicist (which he also was). At the moment, she suspected, Hall was finding it a bit difficult to restrain his own half-triumphant and half-sympathetic smile as he reflected upon what must be going through Jordin Kare and Richard Wix's minds about now. It was truly amazing how stubborn Berry Zilwicki could be when she set her mind to it, Zachary reflected.

  Or maybe not so amazing at all, given the stories about what she survived in Old Chicago before the Zilwickis came along, she thought much more grimly, then shook that thought aside.

  "If you're ready, Doctor?" she asked out loud, arching one eyebrow.

  "We're ready, Captain," Hall confirmed for the remainder of his team. He was the only one actually on the bridge; the others were assembled under Dr. Linda Hronek, the survey expedition's fourth ranking scientist, in the wardroom which had been transformed temporarily into the science team's command post.

  Lt. Gordon Keller, Harvest Joy's tactical officer, had made himself even more than normally useful helping them set up their equipment. Which was saying quite a bit, since Lt. Keller was always useful to have around. He was definitely on the young side for a cruiser's tactical officer, but Harvest Joy's combat days were well behind her now. Zachary and Keller kept her people well trained and well rehearsed—she was a Queen's ship, however long in the tooth she might be growing, and the possibility that she might yet be called to action always existed, however slight it might have become—but she'd sacrificed a quarter of her armament when she was converted for service with the Astrophysics Investigation Agency.

  At the moment, Keller was on the command deck, with his weapons crews closed up, but his attention—like everyone else's—was on the astrogation plot, and Zachary had no doubt that his extra efforts on the survey team's behalf had been his own way of getting his hands at least a little dirty. Missiles and energy weapons might not have anything to contribute to exploring a wormhole, but at least he could tell himself truthfully that he'd contributed.

  "Well, if everyone's all set, I suppose we should get started," Zachary said calmly now, and glanced at Lt. Karen Evans, her astrogator.

  "The transit vectors are locked in?" Zachary knew the answer to the question already, of course, but there were rules to follow, and those rules existed for very good reasons.

  "Yes, Ma'am." If Evans felt any irritation at being asked a question she'd already answered for the XO, her response showed no trace of it.

  "Very well." Zachary turned to her helmsman. "Ten gravities, Senior Chief."

  "Ten gravities on Astro's programmed heading, aye, aye, Ma'am," Senior Chief Coxswain Hartneady acknowledged, and Zachary looked down at the com display by her left knee as Harvest Joy began to creep slowly towards the terminus.

  "Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hammarberg," she told the face looking back at her from the com.

  "Aye, aye, Ma'am," Lt. Commander Jonas Hammarberg replied formally. "Standing by to rig foresail on your mark."

  "Threshold in two-zero seconds," Evans reported.

  "On your toes, Senior Chief," Zachary murmured.

  "Aye, Ma'am," Hartneady replied, never taking his eyes from his own displays as Harvest Joy edged into the terminus. The survey ship was tracking directly down the path Evans had programmed. If everything went the way it was supposed to go, she'd go right on doing that. If things decided not to go the way they were supposed to go, however, James Hartneady might find himself extraordinarily busy sometime in the next few seconds.

  "Threshold!" Evans said sharply.

  "Rig foresail for transit," Zachary ordered.

  "Rigging foresail, aye," Hammarberg responded instantly.

  Harvest Joy's impeller wedge fell abruptly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down. At the same moment, her forward alpha nodes reconfigured, dropping their own share of the cruiser's normal-space impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail's circular disk of focused gravitational energy, instead. The sail was perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis, and over three hundred kilometers in diameter.

  "Stand by after hypersail," Zachary said, watching the flickering numerals in the Engineering window opened in one corner of her own maneuvering plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone.

  "Standing by aft hypersail, aye," Hammarberg replied, and she knew he was watching the same flashing numbers climb steadily higher on his own displays as the foresail moved deeper into the terminus. They weren't climbing anywhere near as quickly as they could have been, given the absurdly low speed with which anyone but a madwoman approached a first-transit through an uncharted terminus, of course, but—

  The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They went on climbing, but their steadiness told Zachary the foresail was drawing enough power from the terminus' grav waves to provide movement.

  "Rig aftersail," she said crisply.

  "Rigging aftersail, aye," Hammarberg said, just as crisply, and Harvest Joy shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail spread its wings at the far end of her hull.

  Senior Chief Hartneady's hands moved smoothly through the tricky maneuver, and Zachary felt her stomach trying to turn over as the cruiser slid into the terminus' interface with equal smoothness.

  The inevitable queasiness of crossing the hyper wall was briefer but substantially more intense in a wormhole transit, and she ignored it with the practice of several decades' experience, never looking away from her maneuvering display. She watched it narrowly, eyes focused, and then it flashed again.

  No one had ever been able to measure the duration of a wormhole transit. Not from the inside of one, at any rate, and no chronometer aboard Harvest Joy managed to measure this one, either. For however long that fleeting interval was, though, the cruiser simply ceased to exist. One instant she was sixty-four light-minutes from the star called Torch; the next she was somewhere else, and Zachary felt herself swallowing in relief as her nausea vanished.

  Harvest Joy's Warshawski sails radiated the brilliant blue flash of transit energy as she continued to slide forward out of the far side of the terminus under momentum alone, and Zachary nodded in satisfaction.

  "Transit complete," Hartneady reported.

  "Thank you, Senior Chief," Zachary acknowledged. Her gaze was back on the sail interface readout again, watching the numbers spiral downward as her ship moved further forward.

  "Engineering, reconfigure to—"

  An alarm shrilled with shocking suddenness, and Zachary's head whipped around towards the tactical display.

  "Unknown starships!" The professionalism of merciless training flatte
ned the stunned disbelief in Lieutenant Keller's voice without making his report one bit less jarring. "Two unknown starships, bearing zero-zero-five by zero-seven-niner, range one-zero-three thous—"

  Twelve battlecruiser-grade grasers, fired at a range of just over a third of a light-second, arrived before he could complete his final sentence, and HMS Harvest Joy, Josepha Zachary, and every man and woman aboard her ship disappeared in a single cataclysmic ball of incandescent fury.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  April, 1921

  "But what could have happened to them?" asked Berry Zilwicki. The young queen's face was creased with worry.

  Dr. Jordin Kare's face showed concern also. But he was doing his best to maintain a calm composure. "There could be any number of reasons they're not back yet, Your Majesty. I know TJ and I both emphasized how unlikely it was, but, frankly, the most probable explanation is that this time, for one reason or another, they didn't manage to chart the gravitic stresses accurately enough on their way through. Harvest Joy's instrumentation is damn good, but if they didn't get a good read when they make transit, it could take months for them to nail things down with sufficient accuracy for a return transit without additional support."

  "For that matter, assuming they did fail to get a good map on their way through, they may have come out someplace close enough to Torch for Mike and Linda—I mean Dr. Hall and Dr. Hronek—to figure it'd take longer to do the survey than to come home the long way round, through hyper, and head back with better support," Dr. Wix interjected.

  "In either of those cases," continued Kare, "then they've already begun returning through hyperspace. But that could take them some time, before they get back."

  "How much time?" asked Berry.

  Both physicists shrugged simultaneously. "There's simply no way to know," said Kare.

  Berry shook her head. "Sorry, I said that stupidly. What I should have asked is what's the probable range of time, given past experience?"

  Wix ran fingers through his long and thick blond hair. "At the short end, a few days. That'd be unlikely, though. At the other extreme . . . Well, the longest recorded voyage—well-documented, anyway—through hyperspace for a wormhole survey ship was a little under four months."

  "One hundred and thirteen days, to be precise," said Kare. "That was the Solarian survey ship Tempest back in . . . what? 1843, TJ?"

  Wix nodded, and Berry made a face. "Four months!"

  Kare's look of concern was replaced by one of reassurance. A good attempt at it, anyway. "It's not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, there's not much danger involved. Like Captain Zachary said before they ever headed out, survey ships are designed with the possibility in mind that this might happen. They've got plenty of endurance and life support."

  "Absolutely," Wix agreed with an emphatic nod. "The real thing to worry about on a trip that long is boredom, Your Majesty. It's not that big a ship, you know."

  Their attempt at reassurance didn't help. Berry grimaced, as she imagined being trapped in such a vest-pocket world for almost four months.

  "But of course survey ships are designed with that in mind also," Kare added, a bit hurriedly. "I can assure you, Your Majesty—I speak from personal experience here—that a survey ship has as much in the way of stored entertainment as even a big city. Well . . . not live entertainment, of course. But there's about all you could ask for in the way of reading material, vids, games, music, you name it."

  "Sure is," said Wix. "I once took the opportunity on a long survey voyage—almost certainly the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity—to watch the entirety of The Adventures of Fung Ho."

  Berry's eyes widened. The Adventures of Fung Ho had been the longest-running fictional vid series in human history—aside from soap operas, of course—with forty-seven continuous seasons.

  "All of it? That's—" She had a knack for math, and did the calculations quickly. "That's over a thousand hours of viewing time. A thousand and thirty-four, to be precise, except that I think there were a couple of years when they had shortened seasons."

  Wix nodded. "Three seasons, actually. In 1794, due to an actors' strike, where they lost almost a third of the season. In 1802, from a writer's strike—but that only lasted for a few weeks. And the biggest loss, over half the season in 1809, when Lugh came under severe bombardment and just about all activity on the planet had to be suspended for the duration of the emergency."

  Lugh was the third planet of the star Tau Ceti, and was the location where most of the episodes in The Adventures of Fung Ho had been recorded. The planet was popular for a large number of vid series, especially those involving adventure, due to its flamboyant scenery and even more flamboyant biota. Unfortunately, the Tau Ceti system also had over ten times as much dust as did Sol's system and that of most inhabited solar systems. That massive debris disk meant the planet was subject to more in the way of impact events than all but a handful of other planets with permanent human settlements. The danger of bolides shaped everything about Lugh's culture, from the structure of its system defense force down to the fact that those same bolides were a regular feature in the adventure vids produced there.

  Berry shook her head slightly as she continued with her calculations. A thousand hours of viewing time translated into eighty-three consecutive days, assuming you sat and watched for twelve hours a day.

  "Gah," she said. "All of it?"

  "He cheated," said Kare. "He skimmed through all the episodes involving E.A. Hattlestad and Sonya Sipes."

  "That has got to be the silliest sub-plot ever invented by the human race," groused Wix, "even allowing for the fact that it's supposed to be romance."

  Berry chose not to argue the matter. She'd seen a large number of the episodes of the Fung Ho series herself—although certainly not all of it, nor even close—and had been rather partial to the romance between Hattlestad and Sipes. As much of it as she'd seen, at least. Granted, the premises were pretty extreme, starting with the size disparity between Hattlestad—who was practically a homunculus—and the eight-foot-tall giantess Sipes. But so were the premises of the entire series, when you got right down to it. That wasn't surprising, given that Fung Ho had been inspired by the adventures of Baron Münchausen. Add asteroids, alien tempters and temptresses (whose temptations usually succeeded, Fung Ho being Fung Ho), and energy weapons.

  "Still," she said, "I'm impressed. Or appalled, I'm not sure which."

  Kare and Wix both chuckled. "To be honest," said Wix, "after it was all over and I thought about it, I was a lot closer to being appalled than impressed, myself. The series is addictive, but speaking objectively it's about as ludicrous an exercise in fiction as you can find in the record."

  Kare's smile faded. "But to get back to the point, Your Majesty, I think it's much too early to start really worrying about what happened to the Harvest Joy. Yes, there are some explanations that involve real disasters. But they're not that likely."

  "Well, okay," said Berry. She cocked her head. "I'm presuming that until you know more, you have no intentions of sending another survey ship through the wormhole." That was a statement, not a question. Beneath the pleasant tone, there was the hint that Berry—Queen Berry, when push came to shove—would not permit any such foolishness.

  Kare shook his head. "Oh, no. Even if we had another survey ship with an experienced captain and crew at our disposal—"

  "Which we certainly don't," Wix said forcefully.

  "—we wouldn't do it, anyway. There's a standard procedure to be followed in cases like this. Stripping away the jargon, the gist of it is: remeasure, recalculate, and refigure everything, before you so much as breathe heavily on that wormhole."

  Berry nodded. "Okay. We'll just wait then. For now, at least."

  The very muscular woman named Lara appeared in the entrance to the small salon where Berry had been meeting with the two scientists. Jordin and Wix weren't quite sure what her formal duties were. She seemed to serve the queen as a combination bodyguard, personal handle
r and court jester.

  "The delegation from the pharmaceutical companies has now been waiting for twenty-five minutes," she said. "You're late, not them."

  The physicists, accustomed to the court of Manticore, were startled. Even now, after having spent two and half months on Torch, they still weren't really acclimatized to the planet's sometimes odd customs. It was inconceivable that anyone, much less a mere bodyguard, would speak that bluntly—no, rudely—to Queen Elizabeth. And if they did, there'd be hell to pay.

  But Queen Berry seemed to think it was simply amusing. "Lara, weren't you paying attention in your sessions on royal protocol?"

  "Slept right through the silly business. Are you coming, or do you want me to dream up some more excuses?"

  "No, no, I'll come. We're done here." She gave Kare and Wix a smile and a semi-apologetic nod of the head. "Sorry, but I'm afraid I've got to leave now. Please let me know immediately if anything further turns up."

  After she left, Wix let out his breath slowly. "Well," he said, "it is the most likely explanation."

  Kare made a face. He had not, in fact, lied to the queen. As Wix had just stated, the most likely explanation was that the Harvest Joy couldn't return through the wormhole, for whatever reason, and was now slowly making its way back to Torch via hyperspace.

  But . . .

  It wasn't the only possible explanation. He'd been honest enough when he stressed how uncommon it was—these days, at least—for ships to be lost during wormhole surveys. Statistically, the odds were very much against anything of the sort having happened to Harvest Joy. On the other hand, though, there was a reason he'd deliberately avoided getting into any details concerning the disasters that could happen to survey ships. However unlikely they might be, they could happen, and some of them were . . . gruesome. The fate of the Dublin and her crew was still something no one involved in survey work wanted to contemplate or talk about, even a century and a half later.