Daring

by Mike Shepherd

  Admiral Krätz’s verbal assault began the moment Kris walked in the door. He didn’t even take a deep breath before launching into the topic at hand. The admirals had voted, and all three were for going home. Kris must follow their lead.

  Kris waited patiently and respectfully until he ran down . . . not something that happened quickly. Nobody reached his level of power without developing a great love for his own voice.

  Once Kris got a word in, she explained that she had no intention of going back. In fact, she had just decided to expand her scouting mission. “Even as I speak, my boffins are looking for low-risk solar systems so the four scouts can do a high-speed recon.”

  Admiral Krätz shook his head and pointed out that the vote was three to one to go home. Being a reasonable person, she should conform to the majority.

  Kris admitted that their opinions were all valid. However, no one had ever accused a Longknife of being reasonable. As a fine point, she was not in their chain of command. Therefore, their opinions, right or wrong, had no impact on her actions.

  Much discussion followed, with a plentitude of references to “those damn Longknifes” and “getting us all killed.”

  In the end, in an effort to present a unanimous front to exactly whom it was not clear, they all voted to follow Kris.

  Kris then told them that she had found a solar system with six jump points that was only one easy jump from where they were at the moment. She suggested that the entire fleet move there. The battleships could wait there while the scouts each took a different jump out as the first of their long-range scouting missions.

  Admiral Krätz demanded that they leave behind a small, silent jump buoy in this system so that anyone who came looking for them would know where they were.

  Since Kris figured she could get her scouts away before any courier ship got here from human space with orders she didn’t want to read, she agreed.

  Six hours later, the Fleet of Reluctant Discovery accelerated toward the one jump it had agreed to make. Construction personnel from the Vulcan were aboard the scouts as they did their jumps, measuring them for the new weapon. The time was well spent.

  Once in the new base system, the courier ships broke out their balloots and quickly topped off the scouts’ supplies of reaction mass from a nearby gas giant. While they went about a second session of cloud dancing for the battleships, Kris got PatRon 10 moving toward their separate jumps. All were making 50,000 kph as they hit the jump with three gees kicked in at the last moment and 20 rpms on the hull.

  As expected, the Wasp jumped over seven hundred light-years into a system centered on an old red dwarf. There were no gas giants around the star, only dead, airless rocks.

  The Wasp headed for the farther of the two other jumps in the system. The closest one might be safe, but it led to a large white sun that might or might not have gone nova in the seven hundred years it took the light to get from there to here. The next jump found them in a twin system. A warm orange star had somehow managed to pick up a neutron star in a wide elliptical orbit.

  The Wasp analyzed the double star system as they crossed to the next jump. Neither Chief Beni nor the boffins reported anything of interest. They departed that system twelve hours after they entered it, with much data but no hint that they shared this galaxy with life, benign or otherwise.

  The third jump yielded an unexpected surprise. They found themselves popping into a system with a huge blue giant.

  “That’s not supposed to be there,” Captain Drago said. “What are we doing in a system with a potential giant nova?”

  A call to boffin country brought a blended flood of both surprise and apologies. “That was not on the map Ray Longknife discovered on Santa Maria.” “We’d never tell you to jump to a blue giant.” And lastly, “Did you do the jump right?”

  The navigator, Sulwan Kann, was adamant that the Wasp had taken the jump exactly the way it had taken all others.

  Kris interrupted the various parties in full defensive mode to slip a question in sideways. “Folks, is there any chance that big blue hot thing in the sky might go nova on us while we’re debating how we got here?”

  That brought a pause. It grew, but before anyone got to full panic, Professor mFumbo’s calm bass voice boomed over the net. “No chance of that, Your Highness. This particular solar time bomb has a lot of ticking to do.”

  “How far did we come?” Kris asked next.

  That question also took a while to answer. After several minutes of pregnant absence, Professor mFumbo came back on net. “This jump also took us over seven hundred light-years. By our best estimates, we are now over twenty-two hundred light-years from where we started.”

  “Thank you,” Captain Drago said. “That’s nice to know.” So saying, he slipped out of his command chair and came to stand beside Kris’s offensive-weapons station. With his hand over his mouth, he said softly, “Those strange new jumps we’ve been talking about.”

  “You mean the fuzzy ones?” Kris asked.

  “Whatever you call them. Is there any chance this was one of them? One of the new ones that wasn’t on the Santa Maria map your great-grandfather stumbled upon?”

  “Nelly?”

  “No chance, Captain. That was a standard, old-fashioned jump.”

  “But it didn’t take us where Ray’s map said it would.”

  “No, Captain,” Nelly said firmly. “I’ve done a double check. We are not in the system Ray’s map says we should be in. I don’t know how or why. I just know that we are where we are, sir.”

  “Any suggestion how that might have happened?” the captain asked.

  “None that I want to speculate on,” Kris said.

  Humans had been studying the jump points for nearly four hundred years. So far, they were as much a mystery as they had been the first time three ships from Earth attempted the one jump point they had discovered orbiting out around Jupiter.

  The thought that who- or whatever was out here had mastered the ability to either make new ones or redirect the old ones was a terror Kris really didn’t want to give voice to. Certainly not until she and Professor mFumbo had spent a lot of brain sweat on it.

  “I don’t like this one bit,” the captain said, letting a momentary scowl cross his face. He was his usually intent but neutral self by the time he turned back to his chair.

  “Has anyone found us some jump points?” he demanded.

  “One, sir,” Sulwan reported.

  Only one?” the captain asked. There should have been three.

  “One, sir. It’s within nine hours of here if we go at two gee.”

  The captain glanced back at Kris.

  She gave him a slight nod.

  “Make it so, Nav.”

  Nine hours later, they crossed from one surprising star system to an even more troubling one.

  21

  “ That wasn’t what I expected,” Captain Drago said softly as the forward screen filled with four stars.

  If a star mariner was a poet, this would be the star system for him or her. Four stars, red, blue, yellow, and white hung in the sky. It took the boffins ten minutes to figure out the dance they did.

  The yellow and red ones swung around each other. The white and blue ones did the same. Somehow, the two pairs then did a jig around the center of gravity among the four. Since the blue and white pair greatly outweighed the other two, it must get very interesting.

  If they had still been on the course they’d plotted initially for the jaunt, they should have been staring at a single white dwarf, sister to humanity’s home star, Sol.

  Clearly, we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, Kris thought to herself.

  “Talk to me, folks,” the captain said softly. “Tell me about this system.”

  One thing Kris had come to count on from Captain Drago was a cool head when all hell broke loose. His voice was calm, but under it was clear agitation. Agitation in a tight grip.

  “There are planets around the stars,” Chief Beni said from his
station at Sensors. “Some small rocks orbiting each pair.” He paused, then went on. “A couple of more rocky planets orbiting the four of them.”

  “Jump points? Do we have any jump points?” Captain Drago demanded.

  The white dwarf they were supposed to have jumped to should have had three.

  “None that I’ve found so far,” Sulwan Kann said. “There are a couple of large gas giants well away from the stars. They could be concealing a jump point. One or two might be playing hide-and-seek with us down close to the suns. Captain, I’ll need a couple of hours before I can make a definitive statement, but for now, no, sir. There is no visible way out of this system other than the way we came in.”

  The captain leaned back in his chair, probably thinking the same thing Kris was. It wasn’t unheard of for there to be only one jump into a system. Earth herself had been at a dead end. Certainly, the wild dance these four suns did would make for a berserk jig for any jump point caught among them . . . even before you added in other star systems to the confusion.

  But there was no way this system could have been patched together in just two million years from the simple one-star system on the map Ray Longknife had discovered.

  “Sulwan, keep one gee on the ship.” He paused for a moment. That gee would give the crew weight. Still, the navigator needed a course. “ Aim us in the general direction of the nearest gas giant. If we have to turn around and head back, that will help.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Sulwan said.

  “Chief Beni, Professor mFumbo,” Kris said. “It sure would be nice to know something about this system.”

  “There is no activity on the radio spectrum,” the chief said immediately.

  A bit later, the professor added, “The second planet out from the yellow and red suns appears to have an atmosphere and water. I have no idea how much solar energy it gets during the course of a year, but the water is in liquid form, at present.”

  “Is that interesting enough for us to change our course and head in that direction?” the captain asked.

  “I don’t know,” the professor said.

  “I think I do,” Chief Beni said, looking up from his board. “Your Highness, I’m getting something that I’ve never seen before.”

  “Spit it out, Chief.”

  “That planet has a high radioactive background. It’s hot all over, but certain spots are a whole lot hotter.”

  He paused for a long moment. “Ma’am, this isn’t in any of our training, but if I had to guess what a planet looked like after it was bombarded with nukes, I’d say that it should look a lot like this.”

  “Sulwan, change course for that planet.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “How long to make orbit?”

  The navigator studied her board, tapped it several times. “Eighteen hours if we go to 1.73 gees, Captain.”

  “Make it so,” the captain said.

  “All hands, we will be going to 1.73 gees in ten seconds. Prepare for moderate gees,” the navigator announced.

  A quick countdown later, the ship put on acceleration. Kris found her weight going up, but not more than she could handle.

  “Chief, Professor,” Kris said. “I’d like to know a whole lot more about this system before we make orbit around that hot rock.”

  “I can think of at least one thing you might like to know in advance,” the professor announced on net.

  “What would that be?” Kris hated it when people played Twenty Questions with her. Didn’t anyone spit anything out?

  “We’re concentrating most of our sensors on the hot rock, as you call it. However we are looking at that large gas giant, Your Highness. It is too soon to tell for sure, but the moons around that planet appear to be in unstable orbits. We may have another gas giant that has recently lost a lot of weight.”

  “You think so?” was all Kris managed to get out.

  “It is too early to be sure, but it’s possible, ma’am. We’ll know more in a few hours.”

  Kris shared a glance with Captain Drago. It never rained but it poured.

  “Chief, I really need to know,” the captain said with an admirable calm. “Are there any ships in this system?”

  “I’m not getting any signatures from any fusion engines. From any reactors of any kind that are in my databases.”

  “We may not be looking for any that we’re familiar with, Chief,” Captain Drago said.

  “I know that, sir,” Chief Beni said. “I’m as scared as you are, sir, to have a planet that’s hot on the atomic scale. Probably more so. I’m bypassing my filters and taking the raw feed from the sensors. Still, sir, I’m getting a whole lot of nothing. I don’t have anything giving off an electromagnetic signature. Anything making noise like a nuclear or fusion reactor. Trust me, sir. I have no desire to get popped by whatever this bug-eyed monster is that the princess here is chasing. I intend to die in bed.”

  “You and me both,” Captain Drago said, and pushed the commlink on his command station.

  “All hands, this is the captain speaking. We have an unknown situation developing here. Look smart. I may be ordering you to battle stations with very little notice. Keep that in mind as you go about your duties. Be assured that as soon as I know something, I will pass it along to you. Captain out.”

  Finished, he turned to Kris. “Okay, Princess. We’ve been lugging around those boffins for you. Would you please see that they earn their pay today.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kris said. “Nelly, have my staff report to my Tac Center. Advise Chief Beni and Professor mFumbo that they may report or stay at their stations, depending on where they think they can be the most productive.”

  “Doing it, Kris.”

  “Oh, and Nelly, have Cookie bring around some lunch to my Tac Center. I’m past hungry.”

  “I already advised him. He said to tell you that he don’t do 1.7 gees all that well. But he’ll have one of the youngsters get your lunch.”

  “Thank the cook for me,” Kris said, and heaved herself to her feet. Her knee complained of the extra weight . . . the one that had taken the brunt of that last nearly successful assassination attempt. She walked carefully from the bridge. It wouldn’t do to have herself laid up in sick bay just when things were starting to get interesting.

  22

  As the hours passed, the picture grew more grim.

  The gas giant had indeed recently lost a lot of weight. Say ten percent. Say in the last two hundred years.

  Chief Beni chose to keep his eyes on his board, regularly having Da Vinci dig down with him beyond the standard human/computer interface to make sense of the raw feed coming in from the antennas.

  The one bit of good news was that no reactors showed up anywhere in the system. The bad news was that no other jump point was identified, either.

  Kris interrupted the chief’s work once for a question.

  “When that alien ship came charging off that moon intent on killing us all, you said your sensors couldn’t get anything off the ship. Are you sure that your sensors can pick up anything off these aliens?”

  “Ma’am, there is a difference between something being a big black hole of nothing in space and it being a charging bull of a ship that is doing its best to keep me from digging out interesting intel on it.

  “Yes, they were masking a lot of what was going on inside their boat. But there was no question in any of our minds that there was a big houseboat down there powered by a reactor of unknown design. I could also tell you it had lasers and was shooting at us.

  “Don’t worry, ma’ am. I may not be able to give you a readout of their captain’s battle board on one of these alien starships, but you can bet your last dollar that I’ll be able to tell you that they are there.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Kris said.

  Both the chief and the professor chose to stay at their posts. Kris’s main staff reported to the Tac Center; Jack walked in, followed by a high-gee station, which, now that Kris had been introduced to one
, looked very much like a wheelchair.

  “I don’t need a wheelchair,” Kris snapped.

  “It’s not a wheelchair,” Jack shot back, “it’s a high-gee station.”

  “I don’t need a high-gee station. We aren’t even making two gees.”

  “It will support your knee. Kris, you don’t want to twist that knee and end up back in sick bay.”

  “You’re sounding more like a mother hen than a security chief.”

  “I’ll cluck, cluck as much as I have to if it keeps you from doing something stupid,” Jack said, doggedly.

  “Humor him, Kris,” Abby said.

  “I do not need a high-gee station, thank you very much.”

  The station maneuvered itself up next to Kris’s elbow and showed no evidence of going away.

  “You are a stubborn old pig,” Kris said.

  “Oink, cluck, oink, cluck,” was all Jack said.

  Kris switched from chair to station. The staff gave Jack, or Kris, it was hard to tell, a ragged round of applause.

  Jack took the bow, one of his silly grins all over his face. Kris spread her hands like a reigning monarch and took a bit of a bow herself.

  “Now can we get down to business?” she said.

  Though once she was seated in the high-gee station, Kris did find that she was a lot more comfortable than she’d been in her usual chair. The station gave her bum knee support the chair didn’t.

  The hint that she might not be as young as she used to be was painful to contemplate.

  Before the team finished their light lunch, Kris rapped the table for their attention. “What does a planet look like that has been nuked from space?” she asked. “And can we tell the difference between that and a planet that just got nuked in the course of its own folks being disagreeable to each other?”

  Colonel Cortez cleared his throat. “One of the few agonies we humans have spared the human race is that of global nuclear war. Simply put, I don’t think there’s any way to tell at a distance whether the nuclear bombs came from some alien in orbit or from your neighbor’s bombers and rockets from across the way, so to speak.”