“The question is whether or not we value that secrecy, those Protocols, above a hundred million sentient lives. If we do not, sirs, then this is not the service I volunteered for.”
Harold smiled.
“That does put it all in perspective, doesn’t it? Thank you, Commander Masters.” He turned to Vong. “Captain, it’s your ship. I’d hate to order you to let an alien reengineer your primary FTL systems.”
Bellerophon’s Captain laughed aloud.
“But you’d do it anyway,” he pointed out. “Because anything less would be a dereliction of duty. No, sir, I won’t pretend I’m comfortable with it—but I agree completely that it needs to be done.
“Let secrecy hang. If we’re prepared to sacrifice this ship to protect Asimov, we cannot then refuse to sacrifice her secrets.”
Harold turned back to Casimir, who was trying not to look like she was about to melt into her seat in relief. Unfortunately for the young officer, however, Harold had known her on and off since she was barely more than a toddler.
Almost as importantly, Harold Rolfson knew Morgan Casimir’s parents. He could see through her attempts at controlling her emotions.
“Vong will talk to Engineering and get everything in place. You’re temporarily reassigned as liaison between Coraniss and Bellerophon’s engineers until this is done.”
He held up a hand to forestall her superior’s complaint.
“Don’t worry, Commander Masters; you can have her back as soon as she’s helped get us to Asimov in time. We need the Lieutenant Commander at the tactical console when we get there.”
Harold grinned.
“After all, no one else has fired these hyperspace missiles at a live target before. We’ll all need her experience before this is over.”
“It’s done.”
Bellerophon’s Chief Engineer, Commander Batari Made, sounded exhausted. Harold felt a twinge of guilt over that—the battleship’s engineering team had gone from a rush job to prepare to move out to a rush job to try and get the task force to Asimov in time.
While he was certain that the junior officers and techs had been given the breaks they needed, Harold was grimly certain that Made had been up and working for at least thirty hours at this point.
“Will it work?” Harold asked.
The Indonesian engineer snorted an exhausted excuse for a laugh.
“Ask the Mesharom,” she suggested. “I don’t understand half of what we’ve done. All I can tell you is that our exotic-matter emitters are now arranged in a pattern that definitely won’t open a hyperspace portal, linked directly to the matter-conversion plants, and under Coraniss’s control.
“If the modulator does what they say it does, I think it will work. It’s a rush job, but I’ve built in breakers and safety measures. If it doesn’t work, we’ll wreck the hyperdrive but the ship will be fine.”
“Well done, Commander,” Captain Vong told her. “I’d love to tell you to go sleep, but I need you to stick around for another half-hour or so while we bring this monster online. Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m going to sleep until we reach Asimov once this is done, but yeah, I can stand up for a while yet,” Made responded.
Harold noted that she did not say she was actually okay or able to contribute usefully. Hopefully, the woman would get the day or so of sleep she was going to need after this.
“Lieutenant Commander Casimir.” He brought the assistant tactical officer into the channel. “Does Coraniss think we’re good to go?”
There was a few seconds’ pause.
“Yes,” Casimir confirmed. “They’re prevaricating now, but that’s because parts of this are as far beyond them as they are beyond us. It should work. If it doesn’t…”
“Commander Made has secured the ship against failure of the device,” Harold told her. “If Coraniss has done everything they think they can, we may as well fire it up. If you’d like the honors?”
“I think I’ll leave that to Coraniss,” the Lieutenant Commander confirmed. “Hold on.”
Harold waited, watching the hologram at the heart of the flag deck patiently until it lit up with power signatures.
“Whoa,” Made breathed. “We’re live. Power is flowing to the exotic-matter emitters… Damn, I didn’t think those arrays were rated for this much power.”
They probably weren’t, Harold reflected, which meant there was a decent chance that even if this worked, Bellerophon was about to destroy her hyperdrive.
“I have a gravitational singularity forming at the edge of the visibility bubble,” Ling Yu reported.
Sensors could only see about one light-second in hyperspace, and gravity was a rare thing to see as anything except the point sources of stars and black holes.
“Vong?” Harold asked quietly.
“We’ve never seen anything like it, but I’m vectoring towards it…dear gods.”
“Captain?”
“I honestly wasn’t sure it was going to work, but our sensors confirm it. We have a new hyperspace current, heading directly towards Asimov.” Vong paused. “Do we know how long it will last?”
“Casimir?”
“Coraniss says we’re projecting it ahead of us and it will collapse behind us,” the Lieutenant Commander replied. “They’re estimating that the current is only ever going to be about sixty thousand kilometers long and roughly two thousand across.”
Ling Yu tossed a model of that into the hologram before Harold could even ask and he studied it for a long moment.
“It’ll be tight, but we should be able to fit everyone in. Captain Ling Yu, I suggest you get on issuing movement orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harold considered the situation for a moment, then turned to the channel linking him to Casimir as he made a decision.
“And Lieutenant Commander Casimir?”
“Sir?”
“You’re back on bridge duty, but stop by the quartermaster on your way up.”
“Sir?” It was amazing how much confusion a single word could convey.
“You’ll need to get your uniform updated…Commander Casimir.”
Her willingness to listen to and ability to talk to Coraniss might have just saved a hundred million lives. That was worth an early promotion to Rolfson.
Chapter Forty-Three
The silver oak leaf on Morgan’s collar felt like it was stabbing into her neck far more than the bronze one it had replaced. So far as she could tell, they were the same size, so that was impossible, but it still felt that way.
She hadn’t even been a Lieutenant Commander for two months, though her lack of seniority as a Commander meant she still reported to Commander Masters for now. She’d probably get moved to another ship as soon as they had time.
Right now, however, the promotion didn’t really change anything. Her date of rank would be on record as of the impromptu promotion, though, which would impact her seniority and salary. It hadn’t even increased the number of shifts she was on watch—though previously, her watches would have specifically excluded having even non-line Commander-ranked officers on duty while she held the command.
Of course, right now, she wasn’t sure the navigator had left the bridge since Coraniss’s device was turned on.
“We will be arriving within the next half-hour,” Commander Kumari Hume reported. “Modulator is holding steady.”
“Guesses on whether or not we get our hyperdrive back after this?” Morgan asked.
“From the feed I’m getting from Engineering? Not a bloody chance,” Hume told her. “They’re barely holding everything together back there. I think Dr. Lehman might have slipped the Chief a medical mickey, too, since she only just got back on duty.”
“Her team seems to have managed well enough without her,” Morgan noted. “We’re still here, after all.”
They’d managed to cram a hundred and fifty-five warships into the artificial current Coraniss’s bastard hybrid device had created. Every ship on Morgan’s plo
t was marked with flashing orange icons denoting that they were violating their recommended interface-drive safety distances, but they were all still there.
“You’re running the numbers on our genocidal acquaintances, Casimir,” Hume pointed out. “Are we going to beat them?”
Morgan had been running a constantly updated plot of the likely location of the Taljzi Return for days now. She didn’t even need to look at it to answer the navigator’s question.
“The most likely worst case, where hyperspace decided that it liked them or they suddenly turn out to have modulators of their own, is that they arrive a little over five hours after us,” Morgan told the other woman. “I won’t taunt Murphy; they could get there as we do or even be a bit ahead of us.
“But if they’re far enough ahead of us that we can’t ram an entire fleet’s worth of hyperspace missiles up their tailpipes to get their attention, I’ll have to reassess my whole stance on God—because she’d definitely be on the Taljzi’s side!”
Hume forced a small laugh, but the thought clearly bothered her.
Which was fair. It bothered Morgan, too. They’d just done everything they could.
Captain Vong rejoined them on the bridge a few minutes later, and Morgan moved back to the main tactical console. Masters, it seemed, was leaving this to her for now. He was apparently in his office, which meant he was actively and intentionally trying to show trust.
It was better than half-consciously undermining her, that was for certain.
“Emergence in five minutes, flag is advised,” Hume reported. “We are relying on Perseus to open the portal. Vice Admiral Rolfson sends his regards and we are to shut down the modulator.”
“Understood,” Vong replied. “Made, did you get that?”
“On the ball, skipper,” the chief engineer replied. “Stand by. We’re coordinating with Coraniss.”
The entire ship suddenly jerked, as if it had collided with a brick wall, and the lights flickered. Then the lights went down and Morgan could feel the interface drive go offline.
They had just enough time to start to panic before the lights and the interface drive came back up. Morgan’s sensors showed them badly out of position with the fleet but still inside the visibility bubble.
Barely.
“Commander Made?” Vong asked, his voice sounding somewhat strained.
“We’re still here,” the engineer replied. “But remember those safety cutouts I told you I’d put in?”
“I’m guessing I’m very grateful for them.”
“Yeah.” The engineer paused.
Morgan had access to the damage reports, and she could guess what was coming next as the automated systems calmly updated their data codes and internal scans.
“We no longer have a hyperdrive,” Made finally told the bridge. “Or exotic-matter emitters, for that matter. We had to eject them as part of the safety measures—the final overload triggered every single failsafe I included and still forced a hard reboot of the ship’s main power systems.”
“Can we fight?” Vong demanded.
“That’s why I had failsafes, skipper,” the engineer replied. “Our hyperdrive is trash and space debris, but that’s it. You’ve got engines, guns, power, coms. Everything. You just can’t open a hyper portal yourself anymore.”
“What about the Hotel batteries?” Morgan asked. “I’m getting some odd warning reports flashing in from my systems.”
“Ngentot,” Made swore. “That has to be some kind of harmonic interference with their exotic-matter emitters. We’ll get on it.”
“We need those launchers, Commander,” Vong said calmly. “But that said, well done. I know we made a mess of your engineering spaces, but unless something’s gone very wrong, it was worth it.
“You carved two and a half days off our trip, chief. That’s going in your record. Now go make sure I still have my superweapons, will you?”
Herakles went through the hyper portal first as Perseus slowed in space to let her abused sister catch up. Cruisers and destroyers streamed through into reality in a steady line as Bellerophon caught up with the task force and made her own transition into the Asimov system.
Perseus was the last ship out of hyperspace, but even by the time Bellerophon made transition, they knew they’d beaten the Taljzi there. Hyperfold communications were flying back and forth with Rear Admiral Sun as TF 77–1 inserted themselves into orbit above Isaac.
Morgan’s main focus was on linking in to the sensor network laced throughout the system. Her drones weren’t really necessary there, but she allocated several of them to fill in gaps she noticed as she went over Asimov’s data.
Sublight civilian ships were streaming toward the planet from the various spaceborne industry platforms, and dozens of stations that Morgan remembered from Bellerophon’s brief stopover there were now dark. With power and life support systems shut down and the stations placed in hibernation, the hope was that the Taljzi would miss them.
Their crews were either evacuating to Isaac or evacuating the system entirely. New hyper portals were opening for civilian ships every few minutes as the last ships still in the system took the arrival of Vice Admiral Rolfson’s fleet as a sign it was time to be somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
Updated information from Division Lord Peeah’s squadron fed into Morgan’s calculations. The most recent data was two days old—and including the note that Dark Sun itself had been destroyed, with the Division Lord aboard.
With only two ships left to shadow the Taljzi fleet and the Taljzi’s course nailed down, the remaining captains had chosen to withdraw toward Sol. Morgan didn’t blame them. Fourteen ships and over three thousand sentients had given their lives to get Asimov the warning and the data they had.
It was enough.
“Captain, I’ve got a time locus,” she announced. “We’ve got fourteen hours. The Taljzi will arrive at some point in a six-hour window starting then.” She shrugged. “That’s the ninety-nine percent probability interval, anyway. Small chance we’ll see them before or after that, but…most likely within the next twenty hours.”
Vong nodded slowly, closing his eyes.
“Make sure you’ve passed that on to the Admiral’s staff,” he ordered. “We were hoping for more time, but we’ll make do.”
The rest of Seventy-Seventh Fleet was at least two days out. Possibly as much as five—and there was no way for Fleet Lord Tanaka to update them and let them know where she was.
Their task force would have to hold the line for at least thirty-six hours.
“We’ll be ready, sir,” Morgan promised.
Chapter Forty-Four
Vice Admiral Harold Rolfson was not a happy husband. He wasn’t a particularly surprised husband, not really, but he wasn’t going to pretend he was happy to see Ramona Wolastoq on the planet the Taljzi were expected to attack.
Or, as was actually the case, walking onto his new flagship from the orbital station refueling the warship.
“Shouldn’t you have been on the first transport out?” he asked bluntly. “Or the second? Or the third? Or even the last goddamn transport?”
Said last transport was still close enough that he could, he supposed, recall her and throw his wife aboard. Assuming his Ducal Guards were stupid enough to obey the Admiral’s orders to do so, anyway.
“There are a lot of people who needed to be off-planet more than I did,” Ramona said cheerfully with a smile. “Plus, you should have seen the rates some of the ship captains were charging to haul people off-world. I hope they won’t get away with that!”
“They won’t,” Harold said grimly. “The last half-dozen transport captains were spoken to by Rear Admiral Sun personally.”
With Ducal Guards looming behind the Admiral. In power armor.
For some reason, the captains had been more than willing to listen to the Admiral’s impassioned pleas to their compassion and better nature.
And to give the merchant captains credit, the extorti
onate rates had been a minority. Many captains whose ships had not been designed to carry passengers at all had opened up their cargo bays for a pittance per person that probably didn’t even cover fuel and a sleeping bag.
“There are,” he continued, “at least three organizations that had a moral, legal and contractual obligation to get you out of this star system. Do you really mean to tell me that neither the University of Asimov, the planetary government nor the Militia got you a ticket out-system?”
His wife shrugged.
“I stopped paying attention to who had bought the tickets after the third or fourth,” she admitted. “People kept buying me tickets out-system. I gave them to my students. Even grad students couldn’t afford the rate to get out-system on anything more than cold floor.”
Harold stared at Ramona for several long seconds in sheer shock.
“How…” He coughed. “How many of your students did you get out?”
“Both of the students left over from my expedition, all twelve of the grad students in the xenoarchaeology department at U of A, and about a third of the impromptu five hundred–level course I was teaching. So, um, thirty or so?”
He took a second to make sure they were alone in the corridor as they headed to his quarters, and then face-palmed.
“The Militia and others bought you thirty tickets out-system…and you gave them all away?”
“Something like that, yeah,” she admitted.
“Why?!”
“Love, I’m sixty,” she pointed out. “The oldest of those students was thirty-two. I’ve lived a damn successful life—yeah, I’ve got another couple of centuries in me, best case, but those kids haven’t even started.
“If I could evacuate every kid in the system, I would.”
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 25