by David Weber
The door—it was much too splendid to be called a "hatch," even here aboard Hephaestus —opened exactly on schedule. That was not, Reynaud knew, the fault of Dr. Jordin Kare, who seldom got anywhere on schedule. Trixie Hammitt, Reynaud's secretary, on the other hand, was obsessively punctual enough to compensate for an entire regiment of Kares.
The admiral stood behind his desk, smiling and holding out his hand, as Trixie shepherded in the man whose work was at the core of the grandiosely titled Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency's current endeavors. Kare was a man of medium height, with thinning brownish hair and eyes which couldn't seem to make up their mind whether they were gray or blue. He was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than Trixie, and Reynaud's tall, red-haired secretary's compulsively fussy and overabundant energy seemed to bemuse the distinguished astrophysicist. Which was fair enough. It not only bemused Reynaud, it often intimidated him, as well.
"Dr. Kare is here, Sir," she announced with crisp authority, and Reynaud nodded.
"So I see," he observed mildly, and a glint of humor showed in his visitor's eyes as Kare gripped the admiral's hand and shook it firmly. "Could you see about ordering us some refreshments, Trixie?" Reynaud asked.
Hammitt gave him a hard, pointed look, as if to remind him that her duties were clerical, not catering. But then she nodded and withdrew, and he exhaled a deep sigh of relief.
"I don't think we're going to be able to get rid of her that easily much longer," he observed to Kare.
"We're both intelligent, highly motivated men," the physicist replied with a grin. "I'm sure that, given the alternative, between the two of us we'll be able to think of some way to . . . divert her."
"I should be ashamed of myself," Reynaud admitted. "I've never had a secretary or an assistant who worked harder or longer hours. I know that, and inside somewhere I appreciate it enormously. But the way she fusses over our meetings drives me stark, staring mad."
"She's only doing her job . . . I think," Kare responded. "Of course, the other possibility that occurred to me is that she's secretly in the pay of one of the Star Kingdom's commercial rivals and that her assignment is to permanently derail the project by pushing its directors over the edge."
"You're being paranoid again, Jordin," Reynaud scolded.
"Not paranoid, just harried," Kare corrected.
"Yeah, right." Reynaud snorted, and waved for his guest to be seated.
It was part of his ambiguous feelings about the entire project that he liked Jordin Kare as much as he did. Of course, the professor was a very likable human being, in his own, absentminded sort of way. He was also one of the more brilliant astrophysicists the Star Kingdom had produced, with at least five academic degrees Reynaud knew about. He suspected there were probably at least two or three others Kare had forgotten to mention to anyone. It was the sort of thing he would have done.
And much as Reynaud hated to admit it, in choosing him to head the scientific side of the RMAIA when they split the agency off from Astro Control, the High Ridge Government had found exactly the right man for the job. Now if they'd only get out of his way and let him get on with it.
"And what wondrous new discoveries do you have for me today, Jordin?" the admiral inquired.
"Actually," Kare said, "there may really be something to report this time."
His smile had vanished, and Reynaud leaned forward in his chair as the physicist's unexpectedly serious tone registered.
"There may?"
"It's too early to be certain, and I hope to God I can keep the bureaucrats out from underfoot while we follow up on it, but I think we may actually be about to crack the locus on the seventh terminus."
"You're joking!"
"No, I'm not." Kare shook his head vigorously. "The numbers are very preliminary, Mike, and we're still a huge distance from nailing down a definitive volume. Even after we do that, of course, we're going to be looking at the better part of a solid T-year, more probably two or three of them, before we get any farther than this end of the string. But unless I'm very mistaken, we've finally correlated enough sensor data to positively state that there actually is a seventh terminus to the Junction."
"My God," Reynaud said quietly. He leaned back once more and shook his head. "I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Jordin, but I never really expected us to find it. It just seemed so unlikely after all these years."
"It's been a bear," Kare agreed, "and I can see at least half a dozen monographs coming out of the hunt for it—probably more. You know the original theoretical math was always highly ambiguous, and it's only been in the last fifteen or twenty T-years that we've had Warshawskies sensitive enough to collect the observational data we needed to confirm it. And we've pushed the boundaries of wormhole theory further than anyone else has done in at least a century, in the process. But it's out there, and for the first time, I'm completely confident we're going to find it."
"Have you mentioned this to anyone else?" Reynaud asked.
"Hardly!" Kare snorted harshly. "After the way those publicity flack idiots went running to the media the last time around?"
"They were just a mite premature," Reynaud conceded.
"A 'mite'?" Kare stared at him incredulously. "They had me sounding like some egotistical, self-seeking crank ready to proclaim he'd discovered the Secrets of the Universe! It took me almost a full T-year to get the record straightened out, and half the delegates to last year's Astrophysics Conference at the Royal Society still seemed to think I was the one who'd written those asinine press releases!"
Reynaud started to say something else, then changed his mind. He could hardly tell Kare he was wrong when he was convinced the physicist was exactly right. That was the main reason Reynaud objected so strenuously to the government's involvement in RMAIA. The work itself was important, even vital, and the funding level required for the dozen or so research ships, not to mention the lab and computer time, certainly left it with a price tag very few private concerns could have afforded. But the entire thing was one huge PR opportunity as far as the current Government was concerned. That was the entire reason they'd created the agency in the first place instead of simply increasing the funding for the Astro Control's Survey Command, which had been quietly pursuing the same research for decades. The RMAIA had been launched with huge fanfare as one of the "long overdue peaceful initiatives" which had been delayed by the war against Haven, but the reality was just a little different from the shiny facade the Government worked so hard to project.
Nothing could have made the calculating reality behind the "peaceful initiative" more obvious than the blatant way the politicos scrambled to make political capital off of the work of the project's scientific staff. Official spokespeople who "forgot" to clear their copy with Kare or Reynaud were bad enough, but at least they could be thumped on for their sins. The project's political overlords, like High Ridge and Lady Descroix, were another matter entirely, and they were the ones who'd really infuriated Kare.
"I agree that we need to keep a lid on this until we have something definite to report," the admiral said after a moment. "I'm guessing that you told your staff people to keep their mouths shut?"
"On the research side, yes," Kare agreed. "The problem is going to come on the funding and administrative side."
Reynaud nodded. The scientists assigned to the project shared Kare's opinions about the PR people almost unanimously. Some of them might even have put it a little stronger than the professor did, in fact. But RMAIA was also awash in paperwork, which was the other main reason Reynaud felt the government would have been better advised to let someone else run it. It had been bad enough in Astro Control, which for all its military rank structure was actually a civil service organization. RMAIA was even worse. Not only did government bureaucrats with perhaps three percent of Dr. Kare's credentials and half that much of his intelligence insist on trying to "direct" his efforts, but they also insisted on exercising a degree of oversight which Reynaud privately estima
ted had probably doubled the project's time requirements. People who ought to have been attending to research were spending at least fifty percent of their time filling out endless forms, writing and reading memos, and attending administrative conferences that had damn all to do with finding the termini of wormhole junctions. Almost as bad, the project managers were not only scientific ignoramuses; they were also political appointees whose first loyalty was to the politicians who'd given them their prestigious, well-paid jobs. Like Dame Melina Makris, the Exchequer's personal representative on the RMAIA board. Although she was technically in the Countess of New Kiev's department, everyone knew she'd been appointed on the direct nomination of the Prime Minister. Even if there hadn't been any rumors to that effect, Makris herself would have made certain that every soul unfortunate enough to cross her path figured it out. She was officious, overbearing, arrogant, supercilious, and abrasive ... and those, in Michel Reynaud's opinion, were her good points.
But she also knew precisely how the bureaucratic infighting game was played. Better, in fact, than Reynaud himself did. And she had access to all of the agency's paperwork. Which meant that the moment Kare and his scientific team started requesting additional funds for sensor runs, she was going to go running to the Prime Minister—and the public relations department—with the news that Dr. Jordin Kare had once again discovered the ultimate secret of the universe.
In which case, that same Dr. Jordin Kare was going to shoot her. And not just in a kneecap.
"Let me think about it for a day or so, Jordin," Reynaud said after a moment. "There has to be a way to lose the funding in the underbrush." He swiveled his chair gently from side to side, tapping his fingers on his blotter while he thought. "I might be able to get Admiral Haynesworth to help us out," he mused aloud. "She doesn't like bureaucratic interference any more than I do, and she still resents the hell out of having the project stripped away from her own people. She's in the middle of a routine Junction beacon survey right now, too. Maybe I can coax her into letting us have a little bit of her budget for the extra sensor runs we're going to need if we collect her data at the same time."
"Good luck." Kare sounded skeptical.
"It's one possibility." Reynaud shrugged. "I may be able to come up with another. Or, much as I hate to admit it, there may not be any way to skate around it. But I promise I'll do my damnedest, because you're right. This is too important for premature release."
"I'd say that was a fairly generous understatement," Kare said seriously. Then he grinned. "On the other hand, and even granting what a tremendous pain in the ass all of this bureaucratic oversight has been, think about it, Mike. We're about to add another terminus to the Junction. And not one of us—especially not me—has the least damned idea where it leads!"
"I know." Reynaud grinned back. "Oh boy, do I know!"
Chapter One
"Steeeee-riiiiike onnnnne!"
The small white sphere flew past the young man in the green-trimmed, white uniform and smacked into the flat leather glove of the gray-uniformed man crouching behind him. The third man in the tableau—the one who had issued the shouted proclamation—wore an anachronistic black jacket and cap, as well as a face mask and chest protector like the crouching man wore. A rumble of discontent went up at his announcement, sprinkled with a few catcalls, from the crowd which filled the comfortable seats of the stadium to near capacity, and the man in white lowered his long, slender club to glower at the man in black. It didn't do him any good. The black-clad official only returned his glare, and, finally, he turned back towards the playing field while the man who'd caught the ball threw it back to his teammate, standing on the small, raised mound of earth twenty or so meters away.
"Wait a minute," Commodore Lady Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak, said, turning in her own seat in the palatial owner's box to look at her hostess. "That's a strike?"
"Of course it is," Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, replied gravely.
"I thought you said a 'strike' was when he swung and missed," Henke complained.
"It is," Honor assured her.
"But he didn't —swing, I mean."
"It's a strike whether he swings or not, as long as the pitch is in the strike zone."
For just a moment, Henke's expression matched that which the batter had turned upon the umpire, but Honor only looked back with total innocence. When the countess spoke again, it was with the careful patience of one determined not to allow someone else the satisfaction of a petty triumph.
"And the 'strike zone' is?" she asked.
"Anywhere between the knees and the shoulders, as long as the ball also crosses home plate," Honor told her with the competent air of a longtime afficionado.
"You say that like you knew the answer a year ago," Henke replied in a pretension-depressing tone.
"That's just the sort of small-minded attitude I might have expected out of you," Honor observed mournfully, and shook her head. "Really, Mike, it's a very simple game."
"Sure it is. That's why this is the only planet in the known universe where they still play it!"
"That's not true," Honor scolded primly while the cream-and-gray treecat stretched across the back of her seat raised his head to twitch his whiskers insufferably at his person's guest. "You know perfectly well that they still play baseball on Old Earth and at least five other planets."
"All right, on seven planets out of the— what? Isn't it something like seventeen hundred total inhabited worlds now?"
"As a trained astrogator, you should appreciate the need for precision," Honor said with a crooked grin, just as the pitcher uncorked a nasty, sharp-breaking slider. The wooden bat cracked explosively as it made contact and sent the ball slicing back out over the field. It crossed the short, inner perimeter wall which divided the playing field from the rest of the stadium, and Henke jumped to her feet and opened her mouth to cheer. Then she realized that Honor hadn't moved, and she turned to prop her hands on her hips with an expression halfway between martyred and exasperated.
"I take it that there's some reason that wasn't a— whatchamacallit? A 'homerun'?"
"It's not a homerun unless it stays between the foul poles when it crosses the outfield wall, Mike," Honor told her, pointing at the yellow and white striped pylons. "That one went foul by at least ten or fifteen feet."
"Feet? Feet?" Henke shot back. "My God, woman! Can't you at least keep track of the distances in this silly sport using measurement units civilized people can recognize?"
"Michelle!" Honor looked at her with the horror normally reserved for someone who stood up in church to announce she'd decided to take up devil worship and that the entire congregation was invited out to her house for a Black Mass and lemonade.
"What?" Henke demanded in a voice whose severity was only slightly undermined by the twinkle in her eyes.
"I suppose I shouldn't have been as shocked as I was," Honor said, more in sorrow than in anger. "After all, I, too, was once even as you, an infidel lost and unaware of how barren my prebaseball existence had truly been. Fortunately, one who had already seen the truth was there to bring me to the light," she added, and waved to the short, wiry auburn-haired man who stood in his green-on-green uniform directly behind her. "Andrew," she said, "would you be kind enough to tell the Commodore what you said to me when I asked you why it was ninety feet between bases instead of twenty-seven and a half meters?"
"What you actually asked, My Lady," Lieutenant Colonel Andrew LaFollett replied in a gravely meticulous tone, "was why we hadn't converted to meters and rounded up to twenty-eight of them between each pair of bases. Actually, you sounded just a bit put out over it, if I recall correctly."
"Whatever," Honor said with a lordly, dismissive wave. "Just tell her what you told me."
"Of course, My Lady," the commander of her personal security detachment agreed, and turned courteously to Henke. "What I said to the Steadholder, Countess Gold Peak," he said, "was 'This is baseball, My Lady!' "
"You see?" Honor said smugly. "There's a perfectly logical reason."
"Somehow, I don't think that adjective means exactly what you think it does," Henke told her with a chuckle. "On the other hand, I have heard it said that Graysons are just a bit on the traditional side, so I suppose there's really no reason to expect them to change anything about a game just because it's over two thousand years old and might need a little updating."
"Updating is only a good idea if it constitutes an improvement, as well, My Lady," LaFollet pointed out. "And it's not quite fair to say we haven't made any changes. If the record books are accurate, there was a time, in at least one league back on Old Earth, when the pitcher didn't even have to bat. Or when a manager could make as many pitching changes in a single game as he wanted to. Saint Austen put an end to that nonsense, at least!"
Henke rolled her eyes and sank back into her seat.
"I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Andrew," she told the colonel, "but somehow the discovery that the founder of your religion was also a baseball fanatic doesn't really surprise me. It certainly explains the careful preservation of some of the . . . archaic aspects of the game, anyway."
"I wouldn't say Saint Austen was a fanatic about baseball, My Lady," LaFollet replied in a considering tone. " 'Fanatic' would probably be much too mild a term, from everything I've ever read."
"I never would have guessed," Henke said dryly, letting her eyes sweep over the stadium once more. The huge sports facility seated at least sixty thousand in its tiers of comfortably upholstered chairs, and she hated to think how much the place must have cost. Especially on a planet like Grayson, where what would normally have been outdoor sports required stadiums with things like air filtration systems just to protect the local population from the heavy metal contents of their own atmosphere.
Not that any expense had been spared on more mundane considerations when James Candless Memorial Field was erected. The immaculately manicured playing field was a green jewel, broken only by white stripes of the traditional powdered lime and the bare, rich brown earth of the base lines. The colors of the field and the even brighter colors of the festively garbed spectators glowed brilliantly in the protective dome's filtered sunlight, and the crowd was liberally festooned with team pennants and banners exhorting the home team to victory. There was even a ventilation system carefully designed to exactly recreate the wind conditions outside the dome, and the Grayson planetary flag, with its crossed swords and open Bible, flew from the top of one of the two foul poles while the Harrington Steading flag flew from the other.