A warrior showed no weakness.
“Fifteen seconds,” Captain Thule Nygren announced over the JumpShip’s 1MC circuit, his gravelly voice echoing through the long, wasp-bodied vessel and likely though each of the four DropShips being carried by the Star Hunter. He spent a glance toward Torrent and the other two Steel Wolf warriors. All three stood on the bridge observation platform, leaning forward with hands locked tight on the upper rail, levering their upper body strength against the JumpShip’s null gravity. He was obviously debating whether or not he should offer them seats again, or perhaps insist that they accept them this time.
Torrent shook his head ever so slightly, brown eyes hard with resolve. The captain shrugged his own concerns aside.
“Off by thirty thousand klicks or more,” Star Captain Nikola Demos offered from her place next to Torrent, making a wager on the accuracy of the jump. Her dark hair glistened like the wing feathers of a raven. Her midnight blue eyes glanced between her colonel and Star Commander Yulri. She shuffled forward, hooked her feet under the lower rail, which ran only ten centimeters above the deck. “Anyone care to risk their first take of isorla?” she asked, putting her own battle spoils at risk.
Captain Nygren made a face at the idea of any Clan warrior, even a Bloodnamed one, making book on his crew’s competence. Torrent saw it, and knew that only decorum kept the man quiet. Nikola, like Torrent, was a Steel Wolf rising star—she in the tactics of armored vehicles, and he a Mech Warrior. It was not wise to come up against a ristar too often, especially on the downhill side of one’s career. It would also be improper for Torrent to accept the wager, but he caught the eye of Star Commander Yulri and gave him a commanding nod.
“Aff,” Yulri agreed to the wager on Torrent’s behalf. “Done.”
And the Star Hunter jumped.
Having stored up massive amounts of energy while laying at the Tigress system zenith, the Odyssey-class JumpShip now poured all it had through the Kearny-Fuchida drive at its core. The KF field burst outward, wrapping itself about the Star Hunter and its DropShip payload, isolating the vessels from time and space as the drive tore a hole through reality and briefly connected two star systems. A JumpShip could leap up to thirty light years at a jump. The entire event lasted only a matter of seconds in real time, during which the vessel was no longer a part of the natural universe. Subjectively, by shipboard time, it was instantaneous. Or it was supposed to be.
It never felt that way to Torrent. He sensed the Kearny-Fuchida field unfold, rushing up from behind and roiling over his earlier determination. It caught the large man in between breaths, and the dying hiss of his last exhalation echoed inside his ears, falling and rising and then falling again.
Sweat beaded over Torrent’s shaved head as time stood still around him. Drops fell away, swept forward by the field’s current, spattering against JumpShip’s forward view screen where Tigress’ sun shone as nothing more than an exceptionally bright star. Where each bead of sweat struck it ate away a pinprick of reality. Those added up until great holes of nothingness pockmarked the frozen tableau, and finally Torrent stared forward into a veil of pitch-black.
Far in the distance, a single point of extremely bright light pierced the abyss. It hung there, motionless for a moment, and then suddenly rushed up at him growing into a blue-white sun far larger than it should be as seen from either a zenith or nadir jump point. Torrent recalled why. For this B-type star, DropShip travel time from a standard jump point would have been somewhere on the order of one hundred days. Not exactly a surprise strike. Fortunately such systems inside The Republic tended to be so exactly modeled, down to the smallest gravity fluctuation, that JumpShips could make fairly safe use of non-standard jump points deep within the system’s gravity well.
The Star Hunter’s crew had calculated a null gravity point in between the one inhabited planet and its moon, Ahir al Nahr. That would cut reaction time down to twenty-four hours.
Or so the local defenders would believe.
Reality snapped back into place with a violent shudder and the metallic groan of the Star Hunter’s gravity-stressed hull. Nikola slumped forward ever so slightly, but straightened up again before anyone besides Torrent likely noticed. Yulri lost his footing and drifted up from the deck, shaking away a sudden attack of vertigo. The JumpShip crew fell to their tasks with a new fury, shifting in between various workstations, confirming the vessel’s position and making the usual round of damage control checks.
Captain Nygren ordered the station-keeping drive fired. A dull roar vibrated up through the deckplates and gravity returned at point-two Gs. Yulri sagged back to the deck, getting his feet beneath him.
Torrent smoothed one broad hand back over his shaven pate, wiping away a light sheen of sweat, which he brushed against the side of his uniform. On the view-screen, the blue-white sun swung out of view as the ship turned. A large, dark body replaced it.
Achernar.
“Star Commander Yulri.” Torrent’s deep voice betrayed nothing of his own strained nerves. He swallowed down the dryness in his throat, washing away the memory of the jump. “See after the Lupus.”
Dismayed by his show of weakness, Yulri nodded at the bridge deck. “Aff, Star Colonel.”
Nikola waited until the access door was dogged shut after their comrade. “They say that everyone suffers some degree of TDS.” Transit Disorientation Syndrome. Bad cases could not even think about jumping, not unless they wanted to spend several days afterward in sickbay.
“They would be wrong.” Torrent glanced at the sealed door. “Yulri is of the Carns Bloodname house. They never adapted well to space travel. Inferior genes.”
“Not like us, quiaff?”
Torrent remembered her slouch, saw the white-knuckle grip she still held on the observation rail. He smiled, skinning tight lips back from white, white teeth. “Aff,” he agreed. “Not like us.”
Then, with a show of his own adaptation, Torrent shoved himself off the rail, gliding backward in the low gravity as if falling away from the observation platform. When his rear foot touched the deck he spun lightly and lunged for the door, caught the handhold and reanchored himself in a standing position. He undogged the door with his left hand, sliding back the rocker-bar with one smooth pull. Metal creaked and popped, and the door swung open.
Before he exited the bridge, however, Torrent first caught Thule Nygren’s attention with an upraised chin. “Captain. What is our exact position?”
Although Torrent still lacked his own Bloodname, Nygren remained properly respectful to Achernar’s mission commander. Torrent’s victory would also win honor for him and his crew. “We are thirty-seven thousand eight hundred klicks and change inside the orbit of Ahir al Nahr, two point seven degrees above the ecliptic ray drawn between Achernar and its sun.” He could not help the touch of pride, reporting, “We are only eighteen thousand klicks off our intended jump station.” A hairbreadth, considering the large numbers involved in space flight.
Nikola Demos gave them both a fake smile, taking her lost wager in good form. Torrent laughed, once, loud and deep, sketched a salute to Captain Nygren, and then squeezed through the narrow hatch.
He was well aware of the stares he drew in his wake—from the bridge personnel, from crewmen he passed in the ship’s corridors—and the hopes and desires which chased after him. His impressive size had little to do with it, though filled out at two hundred ten centimeters he so obviously carried the blood of Elementals, the Clans’ genetically augmented infantry, in his veins. Everyone, even Bloodnamed officers, paid deference to him because of his heritage. Rather than feed his vanity it only fueled his drive to succeed. That, too, was part and parcel to his legacy.