“I’ve never heard of it,” Egan said.
“The last couple of decades it’s been largely dormant,” I said. “It’s had a basically caretaker staff of three or four scientists on a month-on, month-off basis, mostly to monitor some very long-term observations undertaken there, and to run the maintenance robots.” I popped up a map of the base on the monitor. “But the relevant thing here is that during its heyday, over a century ago, the base was far more active. At its peak of activity there were more than a thousand people there.”
“How do you know about it?” Hart Schmidt asked me.
“Well, and I’m not proud of this, back in the day I worked in the CDF’s research and development arm, and there was a staff member I thought was a real asshole,” I said. “I had him transferred there.”
“Nice,” Rigney said.
“He wasn’t the only asshole in that scenario, I realize that now,” I allowed.
Egan pointed to the base map. “We don’t have a caretaker staff there anymore?”
“No,” I said. “After Earth broke off formal ties with the Colonial Union in the wake of the Perry incident”—and here I allowed myself a small smile at the idea of my old friend precipitating the greatest political crisis the Colonial Union ever had—“we abandoned the base. Partly for political reasons, since we didn’t want the Earth to feel like we were lurking on their frontier. Partly because of economics.”
“So, a large, recently abandoned base, dead square in our blind spot,” Rigney said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s not the only large, recently abandoned base that the Colonial Union or the CDF has, or that’s out there generally. I’ll create a list of sites we should survey. But if I were going to lay my money down on a site, it would be this one. We should check that out right away. Discreetly, obviously.”
“Well, are you busy?”
“Yes, he is,” Abumwe said. “I have another immediate task for him. I need him on Earth, right away.”
Rigney turned to Abumwe. “And you were going to tell us about this when, exactly?”
“I just told you,” Abumwe said. “Prior to this I have been babysitting nine representatives, getting them to agree to our terms.”
“How is that going?” Egan asked.
“As well as can be expected. The representative from Huckleberry is complaining, but the representative from Huckleberry is a complainer. The others see the opportunity here and are working on him. We’ll have an agreement on time.”
“Good.”
“And you will need agreement on your end, Colonel.”
Egan and Rigney looked at each other. “It’s in process,” Egan said.
“That doesn’t sound as optimistic as I would like.”
“It will get done. Right now the question is how messy it will have to be.”
“I’d still like to talk about Lieutenant Wilson going to Earth,” Rigney said. “We can’t send a ship there. Not now.”
“I have a solution to that,” I said. “Well, sort of.”
“Sort of,” Rigney said.
“It involves a bit of technology that we sort of abandoned a few years ago.”
“Abandoned why?”
“When we used it there was a slight tendency to … explode.”
“Explode?” Hart said.
“Well, ‘explode’ maybe isn’t the most accurate term. What actually happens is much more interesting.”
* * *
As I floated over the surface of the planet Earth, a thought came to me: One day I’d like to visit this planet without having to toss myself down its atmosphere.
The small wire-frame sled I was currently sitting in was the size of a small buggy and entirely open to space; only my combat suit and a small supply of oxygen kept the vacuum of space from eating me whole. Behind me in the buggy was an experimental skip drive, one designed to take advantage of the relative flatness of space at the Lagrange points of two massive objects, say, a star and its planet, or a planet and its moon. The good news is that the theory behind this new type of skip drive checked out, which meant that, if this new drive was reliable, it could revolutionize how space travel happened.
The bad news was that despite our best efforts, it was only 98 percent reliable for masses under five tons, and the failure rate went up in chartable curve from there. For a ship the size of a standard Colonial frigate, the success rate dropped to a very unsettling seven percent. When the drive failed, the ship exploded. And when I say “exploded” I mean “interacted catastrophically with the topography of space/time in ways we’re not entirely able to explain,” but “explode” gets the gist of it, particularly with regard to what would happen to a human caught in it.