Could she go home when ordered, pursuing the same paths that duty had once demanded?
She still wore the uniform of the Alliance, but her loyalties were shifting. Not against the Alliance, but to include something else as well.
Jump space should have been tailor-made for meditation, Asima Marphissa thought. However wide across jump space was, the entirety of it was composed of gray nothingness. No human had ever detected anything else. In jump space, there was no external world to distract the senses.
There were the mysterious lights that came and went without any detectable pattern. The lights would flare into existence amid the gray nothing, then fade again. Human instruments could detect the visual light coming off them, but nothing else, no heat or radiation or other hint as to what caused the lights.
Marphissa had heard from Bradamont that Alliance sailors considered the lights to have religious meaning. The Syndicate, of course, had no use for metaphysics, so the Syndicate had officially declared the lights to be just illusions created by human senses.
Marphissa sat in her stateroom aboard the battle cruiser Pele, watching her display where the outside view showed grayness and the occasional flare of a light that could be a million light years away or within touching distance. No one knew. All she knew for certain was that the view of jump space brought with it no sense of peace or harmony.
Her living area aboard Pele was a ridiculously large and well-appointed stateroom intended for someone of CEO rank. Marphissa, rapidly promoted from a midgrade executive rank, thought it far too pretentious. She thought she had grown accustomed to her rank as Kommodor, but that had been mostly within the confines of the heavy cruiser Manticore. Nothing aboard Manticore had this much luxury to it. She felt out of place.
Maybe her discomfort wasn’t rooted in the fact that jump space made humans increasingly uncomfortable and uneasy as days went by. Maybe it was because she still did not feel qualified for her responsibilities. The fate of Midway Star System rested in her hands. It was not a comfortable feeling, no matter what kind of stateroom she might be occupying or what kind of space existed outside the hull of this battle cruiser.
“Kommodor.” The image of Kapitan Kontos appeared next to her display. “I wish to inform you that we will leave jump space in one hour. My ship will be at full combat readiness when we arrive at Iwa, per your instructions.”
Marphissa tried to rouse herself from her reverie. “Thank you, Kapitan. I will be on the bridge in one half hour.”
“Yes, Kommodor. I am sorry to have disturbed your planning for our actions upon arrival.”
She couldn’t help smiling at that. “All you disturbed, Kapitan, was my attempt to understand something.”
“Something related to this battle cruiser?” Kontos asked.
“No. Something related to us. To humans.” Marphissa took another glance at the outside display as another mysterious light bloomed. “Why is it, Kapitan, that no matter how long the journeys we humans take, no matter how strange the places we go, we always manage to take all of our baggage along with us?”
Kontos looked baffled, then his expression cleared. “You mean emotional baggage. Even the Syndicate never figured out a system inefficient enough to allow us to lose that in transit!”
“Well, I fully intend losing some of mine at Iwa,” Marphissa said. “I’m going to unload it on whatever is waiting for us there.”
A half hour later she was on the bridge, waiting through the final minutes before arriving at Iwa.
Marphissa had expected to find at Iwa Star System either a flotilla of Granaile Imallye’s warships laying claim to the star, or a force of enigma warships ready to defend their own possession of the star.
But as she shook off the mind-blurring effects of leaving jump space, Marphissa saw something else on her display, which was rapidly updating as the sensors on Pele and the other Midway warships tried to spot every change at Iwa since Manticore had left.
“Syndicate,” Kontos commented in wondering tones. “They didn’t care enough about Iwa to defend it when they controlled it, but now that they’ve lost it, they want it back.”
“Apparently they do,” Marphissa agreed. “And that is just like the Syndicate. The bureaucracy screws up and then they send citizens like you and me out to fix things.”
The Syndicate flotilla, which was about three light hours from the newly arrived Midway flotilla and barely twenty light minutes from the formerly inhabited world that was now the site of the hidden enigma base, contained an impressive mix of warships for the overextended Syndicate. Two battle cruisers, five heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and nearly twenty Hunter-Killers, plus three troop carriers and four freighters.
“Kapitan Kontos, the Syndicate flotilla came in from Palau Star System,” the senior watch specialist on Pele’s bridge announced. “Their vectors track right back to that jump point.”
“Why so much for Iwa?” Marphissa wondered. Before Kontos could reply, a call came from Iceni. “We have company, Madam President.”
“Yes,” Iceni said, looking unruffled by the unexpected development. “I doubt this was originally intended for Iwa. The Syndicate was probably marshaling forces at Palau to strike at either Midway or at stars controlled by Imallye’s forces. They might have even come here along a planned attack route to hit either Midway or Moorea, but are now moving to reestablish a Syndicate base on that planet.”
“How would they know about the underground enigma base there?” Marphissa asked. “Our sensors have been studying the planet and we can’t detect anything now even though we know where it is.”
“I seriously doubt that the Syndicate forces know about the alien facility,” Iceni said.
“Kommodor?” Kontos interrupted. “The Syndicate flotilla is maneuvering. It can’t be in response to us. They won’t see us for another two and a half hours.”
Both Marphissa and Iceni fell silent as everyone waited to see what the Syndicate forces had done. “They’re coming around hard,” Marphissa finally murmured.
“Maximum push on their thrusters,” Kontos agreed. “They must have seen something that we haven’t yet.”
“The Syndicate flotilla is accelerating at the maximum rate the freighters with it can manage,” the senior watch specialist advised.
“Heading back toward the jump point for Palau,” Kontos said. “Something scared them. Imallye?”
“I hope not,” Iceni said. “If Imallye has brought a big enough force to Iwa to scare a flotilla of that size, we’re going to have some trouble dealing with it ourselves.”
The image of Kapitan Mercia appeared beside that of President Iceni. “If the Syndicate flotilla had seen some force of Imallye’s arriving from Moorea, then we should have seen it by now as well. Whatever they saw is way on the far side of the star system from us.”
Kontos sucked in a sudden breath. “The enigmas. The jump point we saw that ship of theirs using is over there.”