20
There were no surprises in the Forward Lounge. Admiral Krätz was waiting for her like a panicked nanny eager to tell his young charge the error of her ways.
Kris took a deep breath as the words washed over her. The ship’s repair crews had done their usual efficient job. There was no evidence of the explosion except for the smell of fresh paint.
Admiral Krätz’s verbal assault began the moment Kris walked in the door. He didn’t even take a deep breath before launching into the topic at hand. The admirals had voted, and all three were for going home. Kris must follow their lead.
Kris waited patiently and respectfully until he ran down . . . not something that happened quickly. Nobody reached his level of power without developing a great love for his own voice.
Once Kris got a word in, she explained that she had no intention of going back. In fact, she had just decided to expand her scouting mission. “Even as I speak, my boffins are looking for low-risk solar systems so the four scouts can do a high-speed recon.”
Admiral Krätz shook his head and pointed out that the vote was three to one to go home. Being a reasonable person, she should conform to the majority.
Kris admitted that their opinions were all valid. However, no one had ever accused a Longknife of being reasonable. As a fine point, she was not in their chain of command. Therefore, their opinions, right or wrong, had no impact on her actions.
Much discussion followed, with a plentitude of references to “those damn Longknifes” and “getting us all killed.”
In the end, in an effort to present a unanimous front to exactly whom it was not clear, they all voted to follow Kris.
Kris then told them that she had found a solar system with six jump points that was only one easy jump from where they were at the moment. She suggested that the entire fleet move there. The battleships could wait there while the scouts each took a different jump out as the first of their long-range scouting missions.
Admiral Krätz demanded that they leave behind a small, silent jump buoy in this system so that anyone who came looking for them would know where they were.
Since Kris figured she could get her scouts away before any courier ship got here from human space with orders she didn’t want to read, she agreed.
Six hours later, the Fleet of Reluctant Discovery accelerated toward the one jump it had agreed to make. Construction personnel from the Vulcan were aboard the scouts as they did their jumps, measuring them for the new weapon. The time was well spent.
Once in the new base system, the courier ships broke out their balloots and quickly topped off the scouts’ supplies of reaction mass from a nearby gas giant. While they went about a second session of cloud dancing for the battleships, Kris got PatRon 10 moving toward their separate jumps. All were making 50,000 kph as they hit the jump with three gees kicked in at the last moment and 20 rpms on the hull.
As expected, the Wasp jumped over seven hundred light-years into a system centered on an old red dwarf. There were no gas giants around the star, only dead, airless rocks.
The Wasp headed for the farther of the two other jumps in the system. The closest one might be safe, but it led to a large white sun that might or might not have gone nova in the seven hundred years it took the light to get from there to here. The next jump found them in a twin system. A warm orange star had somehow managed to pick up a neutron star in a wide elliptical orbit.
The Wasp analyzed the double star system as they crossed to the next jump. Neither Chief Beni nor the boffins reported anything of interest. They departed that system twelve hours after they entered it, with much data but no hint that they shared this galaxy with life, benign or otherwise.
The third jump yielded an unexpected surprise. They found themselves popping into a system with a huge blue giant.
“That’s not supposed to be there,” Captain Drago said. “What are we doing in a system with a potential giant nova?”
A call to boffin country brought a blended flood of both surprise and apologies. “That was not on the map Ray Longknife discovered on Santa Maria.” “We’d never tell you to jump to a blue giant.” And lastly, “Did you do the jump right?”
The navigator, Sulwan Kann, was adamant that the Wasp had taken the jump exactly the way it had taken all others.
Kris interrupted the various parties in full defensive mode to slip a question in sideways. “Folks, is there any chance that big blue hot thing in the sky might go nova on us while we’re debating how we got here?”
That brought a pause. It grew, but before anyone got to full panic, Professor mFumbo’s calm bass voice boomed over the net. “No chance of that, Your Highness. This particular solar time bomb has a lot of ticking to do.”
“How far did we come?” Kris asked next.
That question also took a while to answer. After several minutes of pregnant absence, Professor mFumbo came back on net. “This jump also took us over seven hundred light-years. By our best estimates, we are now over twenty-two hundred light-years from where we started.”
“Thank you,” Captain Drago said. “That’s nice to know.” So saying, he slipped out of his command chair and came to stand beside Kris’s offensive-weapons station. With his hand over his mouth, he said softly, “Those strange new jumps we’ve been talking about.”
“You mean the fuzzy ones?” Kris asked.
“Whatever you call them. Is there any chance this was one of them? One of the new ones that wasn’t on the Santa Maria map your great-grandfather stumbled upon?”
“Nelly?”
“No chance, Captain. That was a standard, old-fashioned jump.”
“But it didn’t take us where Ray’s map said it would.”
“No, Captain,” Nelly said firmly. “I’ve done a double check. We are not in the system Ray’s map says we should be in. I don’t know how or why. I just know that we are where we are, sir.”
“Any suggestion how that might have happened?” the captain asked.
“None that I want to speculate on,” Kris said.
Humans had been studying the jump points for nearly four hundred years. So far, they were as much a mystery as they had been the first time three ships from Earth attempted the one jump point they had discovered orbiting out around Jupiter.
The thought that who- or whatever was out here had mastered the ability to either make new ones or redirect the old ones was a terror Kris really didn’t want to give voice to. Certainly not until she and Professor mFumbo had spent a lot of brain sweat on it.
“I don’t like this one bit,” the captain said, letting a momentary scowl cross his face. He was his usually intent but neutral self by the time he turned back to his chair.
“Has anyone found us some jump points?” he demanded.
“One, sir,” Sulwan reported.
Only one?” the captain asked. There should have been three.
“One, sir. It’s within nine hours of here if we go at two gee.”
The captain glanced back at Kris.
She gave him a slight nod.
“Make it so, Nav.”
Nine hours later, they crossed from one surprising star system to an even more troubling one.