by David Weber
But now that transit had been completed, she found herself beginning to envy Ragnhild after all. Astrogation's maneuvering plot wasn't as good as Tactical's for displaying information on other ships, and there were a lot of other ships out there.
This terminus of the Junction was less conveniently placed than most of the others in at least one respect. The closest star, a little over five and a half light-hours from the terminus, was a planetless M8 red dwarf, useless for colonization or for providing the support base a wormhole junction terminus required. Every bit of the necessary infrastructure had to be shipped in, either direct from Manticore or from the Lynx System—sixteen hours of flight for a warship in the Zeta bands, and thirty-two hours for a merchantship in the Delta bands. That wasn't very far, as interstellar voyages went, but it was far enough that it would be difficult for anyone to make a day-trip for a few hours' visit at a planet suited to human life.
Moreover, Lynx was a Verge system, with very limited industrial infrastructure and even less modern technology. There was a distinct limit on anything except raw materials and foodstuffs which it could provide, and its labor force would have to be entirely retrained on modern hardware before it could make any significant contribution to the development and operation of the terminus.
Which didn't mean there wasn't a great deal going on, anyway. Even with the limitations of her astrogation display, as opposed to the tactical plot, Helen could see that.
Although the Star Kingdom had opted not to reactivate the fortresses around the Junction's central terminus, there were at least a dozen of them under construction at the Lynx Terminus. They wouldn't be as big as the Junction forts, but they were being shipped in in prefabricated chunks, and unlike the Junction forts, they were being built with the latest in weapons, sensors, and EW systems. And they were also being built using the same manpower-reducing automation which was a feature of the most recent Manticoran and Grayson warship designs. When finished, each would mass about ten million tons, significantly larger than any superdreadnought, and with far less internal volume devoted to impeller rooms. Bristling with missile tubes and LAC service bays, they would constitute a most emphatic statement of the Star Kingdom's ownership of the wormhole terminus.
Purely civilian installations were also under construction at a frantic rate. The mere existence of the terminus, especially in light of all of the other termini of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, was acting on merchant shipping less like a magnet than a black hole. The Lynx Terminus cut distances—and thus time—between, say, New Tuscany and Sol from over five hundred light-years to less than two hundred and fifty. That was a savings of over twelve T-weeks for a typical freighter, and the interlocking network of the Manticoran Junction and a handful of smaller ones allowed similar time savings around almost three-quarters of the Solarian League's huge perimeter. And, Helen thought grimly, when the annexation was completed, that terminus would also move the Star Kingdom's border far around the Solarian frontier and five hundred light-years closer to places like Mesa.
As she gazed at the display, she could see construction crews working on freight terminals, repair facilities, crew hostels, and all the dozens of other service platforms the wormhole's through-traffic was going to require. And she could see the long line of ships, waiting patiently for their turns to transit to Manticore, just as she could see the merchant vessels which had preceded Hexapuma moving steadily away from the terminus. Most of them appeared to be headed away from the Talbott Cluster, towards busier, wealthier, more important planets deeper into the Shell systems of the League. Some of them, however, were obviously bound for Talbott, and she wondered how much of that traffic would have been here if the terminus hadn't effectively reduced shipping distances so drastically.
She was still gazing at the display, listening with one ear as Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri reported their arrival to the control ship serving as temporary home for Manticoran Astro Control's Lynx detachment, when something else occurred to her.
The forts were under construction, the civilian infrastructure was growing almost literally as she watched, and hordes of merchies were streaming through the terminus . . . and the Royal Manticoran Navy's total presence—aside from Hexapuma, who was only visiting—were two relatively modern destroyers and one elderly light cruiser.
Well, she thought, I suppose Home Fleet is on call at the central terminus, but still . . .
The sight of that grossly understrength picket—almost as weak as the one the first Janacek Admiralty had assigned to Basilisk Station before the First Battle of Basilisk—made her feel even queasier than the wormhole transit had. She knew the Navy couldn't be strong everywhere, but she also knew the Talbott Station task force was far more numerous than anything she saw here. Surely, Rear Admiral Khumalo could have spared something more to watch over the billions of dollars worth of fortresses and service platforms under construction. Not to mention the trillions of dollars worth of merchantships and cargo passing through the terminus itself every single day.
But I'm only a snotty, she reminded herself. If Earl White Haven wants my opinion on his deployment policies, he knows where to send the e-mail.
Her mouth quirked wryly at the thought.
"Ms. Zilwicki."
Helen twitched in her chair, all temptation towards humor vanishing as Captain Terekhov's calm, cool voice addressed her.
"Yes, Sir!" At least she managed to avoid sounding as if she'd been daydreaming, despite the fact that she had been, but she felt her cheekbones heat as she heard the trace of breathless scared rabbit in her own voice. Fortunately, the naturally dark complexion she'd inherited from her father wasn't one that showed blushes easily.
"Plot us a least-time course to the Spindle System, if you please, Ms. Zilwicki," Terekhov requested courteously, and Helen swallowed hard. She'd calculated endless courses to all sorts of destinations . . . under classroom conditions.
"Aye, aye, Sir!" she said quickly, giving the only possible answer, and began punching data requests into her console.
Lieutenant Commander Wright sat back, elbows propped on his chair's arm rests, with a mildly interested expression. Part of her resented his presence, but most of her was deeply relieved he was there. He might not intervene to save her from herself if he saw her making a mistake during her calculations. But at least she could count on him to stop her at the end if she'd plotted a course to put them inside a star somewhere on the far side of the League.
The computers began obediently spewing out information, and she plotted the endpoints of the necessary course, feeling grateful that Hexapuma was already outside the local star's hyper limit. At least she didn't have to crank that into her calculations!
Next she punched in a search order, directing the computer to overlay her rough course with the strongest h-space gravity waves and to isolate the wave patterns which would carry them towards Spindle. She also remembered to allow for velocity loss on downward hyper translations to follow a given grav wave. She'd forgotten to do that once in an Academy astrogation problem and wound up adding over sixty hours to the total voyage time she was calculating.
She felt a small trickle of satisfaction as she realized the same thing would have happened here, if she'd simply asked the computers to plot a course along the most powerful gravity waves, because one strong section of them never rose above the Gamma bands, which would have required at least three downward translations. That would not only have cost them over sixty percent of their base velocity at each downward translation, but Hexapuma's maximum apparent velocity would have been far lower in the lower bands, as well.
She punched in waypoints along the blinking green line of her rough course as the computer refined the best options for gravity waves and the necessary impeller drive transitions between them. The blinking line stopped blinking, burning a steady green, as the waypoints marched along it. Helen knew it was taking her longer than it would have taken Lieutenant Commander Wright. Still, she decided, she didn't have m
uch to feel embarrassed about when the numbers finally came together.
"I have the course, Captain," she announced, looking up from her console at last.
"Very good, Ms. Zilwicki." Terekhov smiled slightly, and waved one hand in Senior Master Chief Clary's direction.
"Helm," Helen said, "come to one-one-niner by zero-four-six at five hundred and eighty gravities, translation gradient of eight-point-six-two to h-band Zeta-one-seven. I'm uploading the waypoints now."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Clary replied. "Coming to one-one-niner by zero-four-six, acceleration five-eight-zero gravities, translation gradient eight-point-six-two, leveling at Zeta-one-seven."
Helen listened carefully as the senior master chief repeated her instructions. Under any conceivable normal circumstances, there was no way a petty officer of Clary's seniority was going to get them wrong. Even if she did, she almost certainly would have caught any error when she checked her actual helm settings against the course data Helen had loaded to her computers. But even improbable accidents happened, which was why the Navy insisted orders be repeated back verbally. And just as it was Clary's duty to repeat her orders, it was Helen's duty to be certain they'd been repeated correctly.
Hexapuma turned to starboard, climbing relative to the plane of the ecliptic of the local star, and moved ahead with ever gathering velocity as she accelerated at her maximum normal power settings.
"Thank you, Ms. Zilwicki," Terekhov said gravely, then he looked at Commander FitzGerald. "I believe we can secure from transit stations, XO. Set the normal watch schedule, if you please."
"Aye, aye, Sir." The executive officer turned to Lieutenant Commander Wright. "Commander Wright, you have the watch."
"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the watch," Wright agreed. "Third Watch personnel, man your stations," he continued. "All other watches, dismiss."
There was an orderly stir as the other three watches' bridge crew, including Helen and Ragnhild, but not Aikawa, turned their stations over to the Third Watch. As they did, Wright seated himself in the command chair at the center of the bridge which Captain Terekhov had just surrendered to him. He pressed the stud on the arm rest which activated the ship-wide intercom.
"Now hear this," he said. "This is the Officer of the Watch. Third Watch personnel, man your stations; all other watches, dismiss."
He settled himself more comfortably in the chair and leaned back as HMS Hexapuma bored steadily onward into the Talbott Cluster.
Chapter Nine
Abigail Hearns watched Chief Steward Joanna Agnelli remove the dinner plates. The meal had been first rate, and so was the wine, although if the Captain had chosen it himself, his palate didn't quite match that of Captain Oversteegen or Lady Harrington. But whatever his qualifications as a wine expert, he—or someone—had certainly shown excellent taste when it came to furnishing his quarters.
The decksole was covered with gorgeous, handwoven mats of velvety-soft, superbly dyed silk-sisal from her own home world—probably from Esterhaus Steading, judging by their stylized lizard-hawk motif. She doubted anyone else in Hexapuma's company had the knowledge to realize just how rare and expensive those mats were. Abigail did, because her nursery back home had been floored in them when she'd been a child, and just looking at their rich-toned patterns made her want to kick off her boots and run barefoot across them.
The bulkheads bore a few paintings. All of them, from what she could see, were excellent. Most were holo-portraits, although there was one breathtaking original neo-oil of a red-haired woman with laughing green eyes. In some ways, she reminded Abigail of Commander Lewis, although this woman was probably older (always difficult to be certain in a prolong society), with a rounder face. It was an extraordinarily attractive face, too. Not beautiful, but brimming with life and character . . . and wisdom. Abigail thought she would have liked her.
The rest of the day cabin carried that same combination of taste, quality, and comfort—from the crystal decanters on the sideboard to the hand-rubbed polish of the ferran wood table and chairs. But despite its air of welcoming graciousness, there was also an edge of rawness. Newness. None of the furnishings had been with the Captain long enough to slot comfortably into the spaces of his life, she thought.
Probably because everything he'd surrounded himself with before had been destroyed with HMS Defiant at the Battle of Hyacinth. She wondered how that must feel, when he looked at the new paintings, the new furniture.
Abigail wasn't certain what to make of the dinner itself, either. Terekhov wasn't one of the RMN officers who followed the tradition of dining regularly with his officers. In Abigail's native Grayson Space Navy, every captain was expected to follow that practice, a legacy of Lady Harrington's indelible imprint upon their service, and Abigail had to admit it was the tradition she preferred. But Hexapuma's Junction transit lay over two T-weeks behind them, and this was the first time Captain Terekhov had invited anyone—aside from Commander FitzGerald and Commander Lewis—to dine with him.
When she'd learned of the dinner, and that she was on the guest list, Abigail had more than half-dreaded a boring evening, an ordeal to be suffered through while a captain who disliked parties pretended he didn't. But Terekhov had fooled her. It might be true he didn't care for parties, and he might not have been entirely comfortable at this one. But if that were the case, no one could have guessed it from watching him or listening to him. He'd remained the cool, slightly distant man he'd been from the beginning, yet he'd managed somehow to make every guest feel individually welcome. He'd been just as pleasant to Midshipman Kagiyama and Midshipwoman Pavletic as to Commander FitzGerald or Surgeon Commander Orban, even as he had maintained precisely the right distance from each of his juniors. In many respects, it had been a genuine tour de force, and yet that inner barrier, that sense of being one step removed from everyone about him, remained.
Abigail couldn't help wondering what hid behind that barrier. Strength, or weakness? Part of her was tempted to assume the former, yet she remembered only too well how drastically she had misjudged her own first captain. And so she remained undecided, feeling as if there were a shoe poised to drop somewhere just out of sight.
All of the toasts had been drunk. Aikawa, as the junior officer present, had gotten through the loyalty toast to the Queen with admirable composure, and the Captain himself had called for the Protector's Toast from Abigail. She'd appreciated that, just as she'd appreciated and admired the fashion in which he'd discharged all of his host's responsibilities, and now she watched him lean towards Lieutenant Commander Kaplan at his left elbow. Abigail couldn't hear what they were saying from her own place at almost exactly the other end of the table, but Kaplan grinned suddenly, then actually laughed out loud. Terekhov straightened back up with a small smile of his own, but then his expression sobered, and he picked up his knife and rapped gently on the side of his wineglass with the back of the blade.
The musical chime cut through the buzz of low-voiced after-dinner conversation, and all eyes turned towards him.
"First, Ladies and Gentlemen," he said, "allow me to thank you all for joining me tonight. It's been an even more pleasant evening than I'd anticipated."
A low, inarticulate murmur answered him, and he smiled, ever so slightly. No doubt he was thinking exactly what Abigail was—that only a complete lunatic would even contemplate trying to turn down a dinner invitation from her commanding officer.
"And secondly," Terekhov continued, "I must confess I had at least a minor ulterior motive in inviting you. Commander FitzGerald and I have discussed our orders at some length, and I have no doubt the ship's grapevine has been buzzing with more or less garbled versions of those orders for weeks now. Since we'll be arriving in the Spindle System in less than three T-days, I thought it would be as well to take this opportunity to give all of you the official version of our mission."
Abigail straightened in her chair, and a quiet stir flowed up either side of the long table as every other officer present did the same thing. Terekhov
saw it, and his smile grew a bit broader.
"There are no real mysteries here, Ladies and Gentlemen. I'd be surprised if the grapevine version of our orders isn't at least mostly accurate. Basically, the Nasty Kitty has been assigned to Talbott Station, under the command of Rear Admiral Khumalo."
Abigail saw Ragnhild Pavletic and Aikawa Kagiyama go absolutely rigid. Their eyes were suddenly huge, and she rather thought they'd both forgotten to breathe. The Captain seemed totally unaware of their reaction, but Abigail saw the faint twinkle in his eyes and recognized Naomi Kaplan's frantic effort not to erupt into laughter all over again. So that was what he'd been saying to the Tac Officer!
Most of the others at the table seemed to take it in stride. Commander FitzGerald's mouth twitched ever so slightly, and Commander Lewis grinned broadly. Most of the rest at least smiled, and Abigail felt herself doing the same as she realized the nickname had just been rendered official.
"Admiral Khumalo's primary mission," the Captain continued, still without so much as a glance at the paralyzed snotties, "is to assist Baroness Medusa, Her Majesty's Provisional Governor for Talbott, in overseeing the smooth integration of the Cluster into the Star Kingdom."
Then his smile faded, and his expression became very -serious.
"I know many of our people, including, no doubt, some of the officers in this room, have been disappointed by our assignment to Talbott. They believe, with reason, that every Queen's ship is needed at the front. They believe that in some involuntary fashion we are shirking our duty to our Queen and the Star Kingdom by being assigned to a mere flag-showing mission six hundred light-years from home.
