6
“That’s Santa Maria’s star field. We made it,” Nelly announced. Only then did Kris and everyone in her Tac Center start breathing again.
Grampa Ray had strongly encouraged Kris to take the twoweek-long, dozen-jump route to Santa Maria. Since he didn’t actually make it an order, she’d chosen to lead her fleet through the wild, two-jump route that had first accidentally taken Grampa Ray to the lost colony of Santa Maria. That sabotaged jump had been intended to kill him and everyone on the ship carrying him.
Instead, he’d discovered a couple of million lost humans and the first map of the jump-point system.
“Longknifes aren’t easy to kill” was Grampa’s usual ending to that story.
Kris watched as the jump point rapidly coughed out more ships. Once through, each ship dampened its spin to a steady course but did not slow down. When the count reached twenty-two ships, Kris finally relaxed. For a recon mission best done by a scurrying mouse, this fleet was rapidly becoming very much like an elephant.
Just how much of a zoo it would end up remained to be seen.
A day’s trip sunward was Santa Maria’s inhabited planet. On any normal cruise, Kris should go there, if for no other reason than to pay her respects to Tommy Lien’s folks. Tommy had been her first friend in the Navy. She hadn’t seen his parents since his wedding to Penny.
Or his funeral three days later.
Kris glanced at Penny; she was busy taking reports from each ship as it came through the jump. Penny had not mentioned Tommy in months.
Kris would respect her silence.
“Where to next, Princess?” Captain Drago, the contract skipper of the Wasp, asked.
“Jump Point Beta,” Kris ordered. “See that we get there with the same velocity on the boat. Please have maintenance take a good look at the ship’s stabilization system.”
“Already doing it. Nothing wrong with it and I want it to stay that way.”
The jump points built by the aliens two million years ago had opened space to humanity. Well, the Iteeche, too, and maybe someone else.
That didn’t mean the jump-point system was without its problems. The jumps connected several stars, all of which could be accessed if you knew how and were willing to take the risks. What this meant was that the orbit that any particular jump point took around any individual star tended to be a bit erratic as the impact of the other star system’s accumulated gravity had its effect as well.
In addition to the tendency to wander, there was also the question of which star system your ship jumped to. If you entered the jump at a safe, dead-slow pace and with your ship stabilized rock-solid steady, you exited into a star system not too far from the one you left. Always the same one.
That was nice and dependable. Insurance companies liked that.
Enter a jump at high speed, or under acceleration, or with a spin on your hull, and the results could be spectacularly different.
For the last four hundred years it had been human practice to do the nice and slow and steady thing at jump points. Owners, shippers, and high commands like the dependable results.
Ship captains who took chances were frequently never heard from again. Grampa Ray’s ship was one of the first to recover from a bad jump. The Sheffield had been outfitted as an exploration ship, and instruments had recorded all the motion on the ship. That allowed them to double back.
The news of the Sheffield’s return had been greeted wildly, not the least by Great-gramma Rita, eight months pregnant with Kris’s grandfather Al.
Other folks had also been excited about exploration prospects. Ships were quickly fitted out.
And they bumped right into the Iteeche.
One thing about a war, it concentrates the mind. It also sucks up all available cash. Exploration funds vanished from the budget.
Once peace came, Grampa Ray made sure human exploration of space was measured and careful.
Now Kris Longknife, Ray’s great-granddaughter, was wadding up the restrictions of his beloved Treaty of Wardhaven and tossing them in the trash can.
And taking a small battle fleet with her.
How was that for the new generation trashing its elders?
In a few weeks . . . maybe months . . . Kris would know whether all Grampa Ray’s caution had been a good idea.
Kris’s Fleet of Discovery stayed well out; few people on Santa Maria would even know they passed that way. And those few had been sworn to secrecy. With any luck, this secret would last long enough for Kris to go and come back.
Kris suspected that whatever information they brought back could be kept secret for, oh, maybe twelve seconds.
Following behind the Wasp, PatRon 10 accelerated at one gee in echelon with Kris’s flagship: the Fearless, and Intrepid in close, the resupply ships Surprise and Surplus . . . already rechristened by the fleet Misplaced and Misfiled, formed a square with the messenger packets Hermes and Mercury. Kris had no intentions of leaving a trail of communication buoys behind her at every jump point she used. Once the fleet took leave of Santa Maria, communications back to human space would be by ship.
The rest of the fleet trailed behind PatRon 10. The four battleships of Greenfeld’s BatRon 12 followed in a fighting square, their four auxiliaries trailing them in a square of their own. The Musashi and Helvitican warships formed another fighting square, the Haruna and Chikuma to the right, the Swiftsure and the Triumph to the left. Behind them came the two supply ships they had contracted for at Wardhaven once they’d realized what they were getting into.
Lieutenant Commander Taussig’s Hornet pulled up the rear with a message packet that was also a last-minute addition, the Kestrel. This rear guard was responsible for riding herd on any of the trailing ships. If their jump point did a last-second juggle, and the large, lumbering battleships couldn’t find where the jump had gotten to, the Hornet would see that they got through.
All of the battleship admirals assured Kris this really wasn’t necessary. The sensor suites on all their ships were just as upto-date as anything Wardhaven had.
Maybe that was true. Still, Taussig was back there with the Hornet just in case.
Matters went well as the fleet quickly crossed Santa Marian space. They accelerated for the first half of the trip, then flipped and decelerated for the rest. They were making fifty thousand kilometers an hour, with twenty clockwise revolutions a minute down the long axis of the ship as they sped toward Jump Point Beta.
With thirty seconds to go, the navigator goosed the Wasp up to three gees acceleration.
One after another, twenty-three ships vanished into the unknown.