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.
7
“How far did we go?” Kris asked expectantly.
“I’ll tell you when we find out,” Nelly answered.
“What’s the new system look like? Any sign of life?” Kris added, eyeing the blank screen of her Tac Center.
“You will know when we all know,” Nelly snapped. “Now, will you quit juggling my elbow and let me process what’s coming in?”
“Nelly’s in a bad mood,” Kris said, glancing around at her team.
“Kris, things take time, even for a Longknife,” Jack said. His eyes were on the screen as it slowly filled up with a sun and three huge gas giants. It took a minute more for a half dozen small rock planets to blink onto the screen.
“The Kestrel is through,” Penny said, her breath coming out in a sigh. “Everyone made the jump.”
That was a relief to all. The Wasp had dropped its acceleration to half a gee. Until they spotted a jump point, there was no course for the fleet to follow. Throughout the ship, on the bridge and in boffin country, sensor teams pored over a whole raft of instruments. Slowly, the products of all that effort flowed onto the four screens that covered the bulkheads of Kris’s Tac Room.
They had jumped over 750 light-years.
None of the planets orbiting the soft yellow sun was in the life zone, where water could survive in all three of its lifegiving options: gas, liquid, and solid. Life as we knew it was unlikely here.
The usual telecommunication frequencies were silent. No one was transmitting radio or TV messages. Laser communications also seemed absent. The boffins would continue monitoring for a sudden change, but, for the moment, technology showed no evidence of ever having touched this system of cold rocks and colder gases.
Per the jump-point map Grampa Ray had found on Santa Maria, two jump points were supposed to be in this system. After ten minutes of searching, the bridge reported they had located both of them.
Kris reviewed the two options they offered. Some of the best astronomers and astrophysicists had been called in to develop a list for Kris to choose from. One jump led to an old red dwarf, slowly moldering away into a quiet death. The other led to a giant star, a prime candidate for something explosive like a nova ending its life. Not the thing Kris wanted her ships to find at the end of their next jump. The red dwarf also offered several jump choices that should be equally safe.
Or at least had been two million years ago, when the aliens blazed this trail across the stars.
To get long leaps between stars, you had to leap before you looked.
On Kris’s orders, the fleet set a course for the jump that led to the red dwarf. As luck would have it, it was the closer of the two.
As before, they accelerated until midcourse, then began the deceleration. Once again, they flipped at the last minute and hit the jump at what at any other time would have been considered a suicidal speed, with ships accelerating and spinning like delicately balanced tops.
In two weeks, they’d made ten nail-biting jumps, and were over fifteen thousand light-years from Santa Maria. They’d trotted through ten lifeless and uninteresting systems. For a Fleet of Discovery that had launched with such great expectations, they had very little to show for all their effort.
Then the eleventh jump changed everything.
8
“Your Highness, we need to spend a couple of days refueling in this system,” Captain Drago said as they shot into their eleventh new star system.
“You think so?” Kris answered.
“That last jump dropped the Wasp’s reaction tanks to below half-full, Kris,” the captain said. “I’d like to orbit a gas planet and have the courier ships do some cloud dancing.”
This was no surprise; they’d done it a week ago after the fifth jump. Every ship in the fleet needed reaction mass for acceleration and deceleration. Ships like the Wasp and the battleships, even the freighters, weren’t designed for the knocking around that came while trawling for fuel in the upper atmosphere of gas giants.
“Pick a big one and make it happen, Skipper. Once we’ve refueled the fleet, I want to dispatch one of the couriers back home to bring them up to date. All we’ve got to tell so far is a lot of nothing, but I suspect they’d like to know that.”
“We were lucky last time and only took two days, Princess. It could take longer this time.”
“I don’t have a problem, Captain. Whatever is out there will still be out there when we’re ready.”
A gas giant wasn’t too far from their jump point. The fleet decelerated toward it at 1.3 gees.
Kris was on the bridge as they approached orbit. The Mercury had already deployed a balloot and was dropping away for its first run at skimming the outer atmosphere of the planet.
At Sensors, Chief Beni shook his head. “There’s something wrong with my instruments,” he muttered.
“That would be unusual,” Kris said.
“Yes, and I’ve checked them. I can’t find anything wrong with them, but this can’t be right?”
“What can’t be right?” The chief now had Captain Drago’s attention.
“There are eleven decent-sized moons around this puppy. According to my readouts, they have wobbled a smidge farther away from the planet than they were just after we came through the jump.”
“They are in unstable orbits?” the captain said.
“If what I’m reading is right, they sure are. It’s not a lot, but then, we’ve only been observing them for a few hours. Let me check with the boffins. Just a minute.”
Kris was at her usual station, Weapons. She’d brought it up more out of habit than any expectation of a shoot. She doublechecked her board; all four of the Wasp’s 24-inch pulse lasers were locked and loaded.
“Hey,” the chief looked up in surprise. “One of the moons has a hot spot.”
“A volcano?” Kris asked.
“Maybe,” the chief muttered, his eyes studying his board. “What’s this? A bit of electromagnetic activity as well?”
“Talk to me, Chief,” the captain said.
“It just showed up as the moon’s rotation brought it into view. I’m on it, sir.”
“Stay on it, Chief.”
“I’ve got Professor mFumbo calling me. Could someone else take the call?” the chief said, not breaking concentration.
“I’ve got it,” Kris said. “Bridge here, Professor. We’re kind of busy just now.”
“I am answering Chief Beni’s call about these damnable orbits. Yes, all the moons orbiting this gas giant are dancing a very strange polka.”
“Any ideas why?” Kris asked.
“No idea. I’ve never heard of this happening before. It’s as if this giant used to have a lot more mass and lost it, and now its gravitational hold on its moons is adjusting to the sudden weight loss.
Captain Drago scowled at the forward screen. The Mercury was about to take away some more of the planet’s mass as it filled its balloot with gases that would be transferred to the ships of the fleet to use as reaction mass for their fusion reactors. The fleet would need a lot of mass to refuel.