Kaplan sat back in her chair, her expression suddenly thoughtful. Forty-five hours was two Manticoran planetary days.
"May I ask if we were given any reason for expediting our departure?"
"No, we weren't. Of course, there could be any number of reasons. Including the fact that Hephaestus obviously needs our slip. We've got ships with combat damage coming back from the front. I wouldn't blame the yard dogs a bit if they wanted to see our back just because they've got somebody else with a higher priority waiting in line behind us. And, of course, it could also be that Admiral Khumalo needs us in Talbott more badly than we'd thought."
"He's certainly got his hands full," Kaplan agreed. "Although, from the intelligence summaries I've been reading, the situation in Talbott's a lot less tense than the situation in Silesia right now."
"Admiral Sarnow is 'living in interesting times' in Silesia, all right," FitzGerald agreed. "On the other hand, he's got a lot more ships than Khumalo does, too. But whatever our Lords and Masters' logic, what matters to us is that we're pulling out in three days, not five."
"Agreed." Kaplan's expression was pensive, and she drummed on the arms of her chair. Then she glanced at FitzGerald and opened her mouth, only to hesitate and then close it again. He gazed at her, his own face expressionless. Knowing her as well as he did, he knew just how concerned she must be to have come that close to voicing the unthinkable question.
Do you think the Captain is past it?
No serving officer could ask a superior that. Especially not when the superior in question was the ship's executive officer. The captain's alter ego. The subordinate charged with maintaining both the ship and the ship's company as a perfectly honed weapon, in instant readiness for their commanding officer's hand.
Yet it was a question which had preyed upon FitzGerald's own mind ever since he'd learned who would be replacing Captain Sarcula.
He didn't like that. He didn't like it for a lot of reasons, beginning with the fact that no sane person wanted an officer commanding a Queen's ship if there was any question about his ability to command himself. And then there was the fact that Ansten FitzGerald was an intensely loyal man by nature. It was one of the qualities which made him an outstanding executive officer. But he wanted—needed—for the focus of that loyalty to deserve it. To be able to do his job if FitzGerald performed his own properly. And to be worthy of the sacrifices which might be demanded of their ship and people at any time.
There was no one in the Queen's uniform who had more amply proven his courage and skill than Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov. Forced into action under disastrous conditions which were none of his fault, he'd fought his ship until she and her entire division were literally hammered into scrap. Until three-quarters of his crew were dead or wounded. Until he himself had been so mangled by the fire that wrecked his bridge that the Peep doctors had been forced to amputate his right arm and leg and regenerate them from scratch.
And after that, he'd survived almost a full T-year as a POW in the Peeps' hands until the general prisoner exchange the High Ridge Government had engineered. And he'd returned to the Star Kingdom as the single officer whose command had been overwhelmed, destroyed to the last ship, however gallant and determined its resistance, at the same time Eighth Fleet, in the full floodtide of victory, had been smashing Peep fleet after Peep fleet.
FitzGerald had never met Terekhov before he was assigned to Hexapuma. But one of his Academy classmates had. And that classmate's opinion was that Terekhov had changed. Well, of course he had. Anyone would have, after enduring all that. But the Terekhov his classmate recalled was a warm, often impulsive man with an active sense of humor. One who was deeply involved with his ship's officers. One who routinely invited those same officers to dine with him, and who was fond of practical jokes.
Which was a very different proposition from the cool, detached man Ansten FitzGerald had met. He still saw traces of that sense of humor. And Terekhov was never too busy to discuss any issue related to the ship or to her people with his executive officer. And for all his detachment, he had an uncanny awareness of what was happening aboard Hexapuma. Like the way he'd singled out d'Arezzo as a potential assistant to Bagwell.
Yet the question remained, buzzing in the back of FitzGerald's brain like an irritating insect. Was the Captain past it? Was that new detachment, that cool watchfulness, simply an inevitable reaction to the ship and people he'd lost, the wounds he'd suffered, the endless therapy and the time he'd spent recuperating? Or did it cover a weakness? A chink in Terekhov's defenses? If it came to it, did the Captain have it in him to place another ship, another crew, squarely in the path of the storm as he had done in Hyacinth?
Ansten FitzGerald was a Queen's officer. He was past the age where glory seemed all important, but he was a man who believed in duty. He didn't ask for guarantees of his personal survival, but he did demand the knowledge that his commanding officer would do whatever duty demanded of them without flinching. And that if he died—if his ship died—they would die facing the enemy, not running away.
I suppose I'm still a sucker for the "Saganami tradition." And when you come right down to it, that's not so bad a thing.
But, of course, he couldn't say any of that any more than Kaplan could have asked the question in the first place. And so, he simply said, "Go enjoy your dinner with Alf, Naomi. But I'd like you back aboard by zero-eight-thirty hours. I'm scheduling an all-department heads meeting for eleven-hundred hours."
"Yes, Sir." She rose, her shuttered eyes proof she knew what had been going through his mind as well as he knew what had gone through hers. "I'll be there," she said, nodded, and walked out of his office.
* * *
"We have preliminary clearance from Junction Central, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri announced. "We're number nineteen for transit."
"Thank you, Commander," Captain Terekhov replied calmly, never taking his blue eyes from the navigating plot deployed from his command chair. Hexapuma's icon decelerated smoothly towards a stop on the plot, exactly on the departure line for the Lynx Terminus transit queue. As he watched, a scarlet number "19" appeared beneath her light code, and he nodded almost imperceptibly in approval.
It had taken them a long time to get here. The trip could have been made in minutes in hyper-space, but a ship couldn't use hyper to get from the vicinity of the star associated with a junction terminus to the terminus itself. The gravity well of the star stressed the volume of hyper-space between it and the junction in ways which made h-space navigation through it extraordinarily difficult and highly dangerous, so the trip had to be made the long, slow way through normal-space.
Helen Zilwicki sat at Lieutenant Commander Wright's elbow, assigned to Astrogation for this evolution. Astrogation was far from her favorite duty in the universe, but just this once she preferred her present assignment to Ragnhild's. The blond, freckled midshipwoman was seated beside Lieutenant Commander Kaplan, which was usually the position Helen most coveted. But that was usually, when the astrogation plot and the visual display didn't show the Central Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction.
The Manticore System's G0 primary was dim, scarcely visible seven light-hours behind them, and its G2 companion was still farther away and dimmer. Yet the space about Hexapuma was far from empty. A sizable chunk of Home Fleet was deployed out here, ready to dash through the Junction to reinforce Third Fleet at Trevor's Star at need, or to cover the Basilisk System against a repeat of the attack which had devastated it in the previous war. And, of course, to protect the Junction itself.
Once that protection would have been the responsibility of the Junction forts. But the decommissioning of those fortresses had been completed under the Janacek Admiralty as one more cost-saving measure. To be fair, the process had been begun before the High Ridge Government ever assumed office, for with Trevor's Star firmly in Manticoran hands, the danger of a sudden attack through the Junction had virtually disappeared. Perhaps even more important, decommissioni
ng the manpower-intensive fortresses had freed up the enormous numbers of trained spacers to man the new construction which had taken the war so successfully to the People's Republic.
But now Manticore, and the diminished Manticoran Alliance, was once again upon the defensive, and threats to the home system—and to the Junction—need not come through the Junction. Yet there was no question of recommissioning the fortresses. Their technology was obsolete, they'd never been refitted to utilize the new generations of missiles, their EW systems were at least three generations out of date, and BuPers was scrambling as desperately for trained manpower as it ever had before. Which meant Home Fleet had to assume the responsibility, despite the fact that any capital ship deployed to cover the Junction was over nineteen hours—almost twenty-one and a half hours, at the standard eighty percent of maximum acceleration the Navy allowed—from Manticore orbit. No one liked hanging that big a percentage of the Fleet that far from the capital planet, but at least the home system swarmed with LACs. Any Light Attack Craft might be a pygmy compared to a proper ship of the wall, but there were literally thousands of Shrikes and Ferrets deployed to protect the Star Kingdom's planets. They ought to be able to give any attackers pause long enough for Home Fleet to rendezvous and deal with them.
Ought to, Helen thought. That was the operative phrase.
Almost stranger than seeing so many ships of the wall assigned to ride herd on the Junction, was seeing so many of them squawking Andermani transponder codes. For the entire history of the Star Kingdom—for even longer than there'd been a Star -Kingdom—Manticoran home space had been protected by Manticoran ships. But not any longer. Almost half of the superdreadnoughts on Ragnhild's tactical plot belonged to the Star Kingdom's Grayson and Andermani allies, and relieved though Helen was to see them, the fact that the Star Kingdom needed them made her feel . . . uncomfortable.
The number code under Hexapuma's icon had continued to tick steadily downward while Helen brooded. Now it flashed over from "11" to "10," and Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri spoke again.
"We have immediate readiness clearance, Sir," he said.
"Thank you, Commander," Terekhov repeated, and glanced at Hexapuma's helmswoman. "Put us in the outbound lane, Senior Master Chief."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Senior Master Chief Jeanette Clary responded crisply. "Coming to outbound heading."
Her hands moved gently, confidently, and Hexapuma responded like the thoroughbred she was. She nudged gently forward, accelerating at a bare fifteen gravities as Clary aligned her precisely on the invisible line stretching into the Junction's heart. Helen watched the heavy cruiser's icon settle down on the plot's green streak of light and knew Clary wasn't doing anything she herself couldn't have done . . . with another thirty or forty T-years of experience.
"In the lane, Captain," Clary reported four minutes later.
"Thank you, Senior Master Chief. That was handsomely done," Terekhov responded, and Helen looked back up at the visual display.
The Junction was a sphere in space, a light-second in diameter. That was an enormous volume, but it seemed considerably smaller when it was threaded through with ships moving under Warshawski sail. And there were seven secondary termini now, each with its own separate but closely related inbound and outbound lanes. Even in time of war, the Junction's use rate had continued to do nothing but climb. Fifteen years ago, the traffic controllers had handled one transit every three minutes. Now they were up to over a thousand inbound and outbound transits a T-day—one transit every eighty-five seconds along one of the fourteen lanes—and an astonishing amount of that increase moved along the Manticore-Lynx lane.
As she watched, a six-million-ton freighter came through the central terminus from Lynx, rumbling down the inbound lane. One instant there was nothing—the next, a leviathan erupted out of nowhere into here. Her Warshawski sails were perfect disks, three hundred kilometers in diameter, radiating the blue glory of transit energy like blazing mirrors. Then the energy bled quickly away into nothingness, and the freighter folded her wings. Her sails reconfigured into impeller bands, and she gathered way in n-space as she accelerated out of the nexus. She was headed away from the Manticore System, for the Lynx holding area, which meant she was only passing through—like the vast majority of Junction shipping—and was probably already requesting insertion into another outbound queue.
Hexapuma moved steadily forward, and Helen watched in fascination as the azure fireflies of Warshawski sails flashed and blinked like summer lightning, pinpricks scattered across the vast sooty depths of the Junction. The nearest ones, from ships inbound from Lynx, were close enough for her to see details. The most distant ones, from ships inbound from the Gregor System, were so tiny that, even with the display's magnification, they were only a handful of extra stars. Yet she felt the vibrant, throbbing intensity of the Junction, beating like the Star Kingdom's very heart. Her father had explained to her when she was very young that the Junction was both the core of the Star Kingdom's vast wealth, and the dagger against the Star Kingdom's throat. Not so much because of the possibility of invasion through the Junction, as because of the temptation it posed to greedy neighbors. And as she looked at that unending stream of merchantships, each of them massing millions of tons, each of them paying its own share of transit duties, and probably at least a third of them carrying Manticoran transponder codes, she understood what he'd meant.
Senior Master Chief Clary held Hexapuma's place in the queue without additional orders, and as the number under her icon dropped to "3," Terekhov glanced down into the com screen connecting him to Engineering. Ginger Lewis looked back at him, her green eyes calm.
"Commander Lewis," he said, with a tiny nod. "Stand by to reconfigure to Warshawski sail on my command, if you please."
"Aye, aye, Sir. Standing by to reconfigure to sail." Terekhov nodded again, then gave Senior Master Chief Clary's maneuvering plot a quick check. The number on it had dropped from "3" to "2" while he was speaking to Lewis, and his eyes switched briefly to the visual display as the Solarian freighter ahead of Hexapuma drifted farther forward, hesitated for just an instant, and then blinked into nothingness. The number on Clary's plot dropped to "1," and the captain turned to cock an eyebrow at Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri.
"We're cleared to transit, Sir," the com officer reported after a moment.
"Very good, Commander. Extend our thanks to Junction Central," Terekhov said, and turned his chair slightly back towards Clary.
"Take us in, Helm."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
Hexapuma accelerated very slightly, moving forward under just over twenty-five gravities' acceleration as she slid flawlessly down the invisible rails of her outbound lane. Her light code flashed bright green as she settled into exact position, and Terekhov looked back at Lewis.
"Rig foresail for transit."
"Rig foresail, aye, Sir," she replied. "Rigging foresail—now."
No observer would have noticed any visible change, but the bridge displays told the tale as Hexapuma's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes were no longer generating their part of the wedge's n-space stress bands. Instead, her beta nodes had shut down, and her alpha nodes had reconfigured to produce a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over a hundred and fifty kilometers in every direction.
"Stand by to rig aftersail on my mark," Terekhov said quietly, his eyes focused on his own maneuvering plot as Hexapuma continued to creep forward under the power of her after impellers alone. A new window opened in a corner of the plot, framing numerals that flickered and changed, dancing steadily upward as the foresail moved deeper into the Junction. The Junction was like the eye of a hyper-space hurricane, an enormous gravity wave, twisting forever between widely separated normal-space locations, and the Warshawski sail caught at that unending, coiled power. It eased Hexapuma gently into its heart, through the interface where grav shear would have splintered an unprotected hull.
&nb
sp; The dancing numbers whirled upward, and Helen felt herself tensing internally. There was a safety margin of almost fifteen seconds on either side of the critical threshold, but her imagination insisted upon dwelling on the gruesome consequences which would ensue if that window of safety were missed.
The numbers crossed the threshold. The foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the tortured grav wave spiraling endlessly through the Junction to provide movement, and Terekhov nodded slightly in satisfaction.
"Rig aftersail now, Commander Lewis," he said calmly.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Rigging aftersail now," she replied, and Hexapuma twitched. Her impeller wedge disappeared entirely, a second Warshawski sail sprang to life at the far end of her hull from the first, and a wave of queasiness assailed her entire crew.
Helen was no stranger to interstellar flight, but no one ever really adjusted to the indescribable sensation of crossing the wall between n-space and h-space, and it was worse in a junction transit, because the gradient was so much steeper. But the gradient was steeper on both sides, which at least meant it was over much more quickly.
The maneuvering display blinked again, and for an instant no one had ever been able to measure, HMS Hexapuma ceased to exist. One moment she was seven light-hours from the Star Kingdom's capital planet; the next moment, she was four light-years from a G2 star named Lynx . . . and just over seven light-centuries from Manticore.
"Transit complete," Senior Master Chief Clary announced.
"Thank you, Helm," Terekhov acknowledged. "That was well executed." The captain's attention was back on the sail interface readout, watching the numbers plummet even more rapidly than they had risen. "Engineering, reconfigure to impeller," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Reconfiguring to impeller now."
Hexapuma's sails folded back into a standard impeller wedge as she moved forward, accelerating steadily down the Lynx inbound lane, and Helen permitted herself a mental nod of satisfaction. The maneuver had been routine, but "routine" didn't mean "not dangerous," and Captain Terekhov had hit the transit window dead center. If he'd been off as much as a full second, either way, she hadn't noticed it, and she'd been sitting right at Lieutenant Commander Wright's elbow, with the astrogator's detailed readouts directly in front of her.