Redoubtable

30

Kris woke well before Jack came to wake her. She’d read a story about what happened before Grampa Trouble and Gramma Ruth were married. They’d been captured by slavers.

Twice.

Gramma Ruth said she never claimed her husband was smart. She did say she’d trust him with her life. Apparently, among those scumbags, Grampa Trouble had earned Gramma’s respect.

Anyway, Kris had read the story when she was a kid. It had sounded exciting and romantic. Later, in college, she’d come across a mature-rated media version of the same experience. She’d watched half of it before she turned it off. Maybe her great-grandparents had gone through something like that. Still, watching people you shared flesh and blood with suffer through brutal captivity . . .

It wasn’t something Kris Longknife wanted to watch.

It also wasn’t something she wanted a twelve-year-old girl to live through.

Better to stay awake and not dream.

“Stand by for zero gravity,” the M1C announced to all hands.

“We going to send through a jump buoy first?” Kris asked the bridge watch.

“Yes,” Captain Drago answered. “But one that squawks very weakly that a ship will be coming through in a minute. Any ship nearby will get our message. No need to blast it all over the system.”

It had only happened once, that two ships had tried to share the same jump point at the same time. Once had been enough. Within the realm of human space, a network of buoys marked each jump. Before any ship jumped, a buoy went through to announce it was coming. As a scout ship, the Wasp carried a load of buoys to expand that network.

A small object launched out from the Wasp. Without slowing down, it boosted straight for the small bit of twisted and twisting space that was the jump point. Without halting, it went right through.

“Now we wait sixty seconds,” Captain Drago announced.

On the wall of Kris’s Tac Center, Nelly opened a small window with a countdown clock. Sixty seconds went quickly.

As did another sixty seconds.

And another.

“I don’t think that puppy’s coming home to momma,” Abby observed, as the timer hit +154 seconds.

“Ah, Captain, what’s Plan B?” Kris asked.

“I was kind of counting on you and your brain trust to come up with one for us,” the captain drawled.

“We’ll get back to you in a minute,” Kris said. “Or maybe ten.” She looked around the table and met blank stares. “Or an hour,” she said, and broke the connection.

“Okay, crew,” Kris said, “why would a jump buoy not come back?”

“Maybe someone on the other side of the jump was waiting for it and shot it to bits,” Jack said.

Kris nodded. That was her first guess. One she suspected that some big ugly was doing to Iteeche scouts. “I don’t recall anything like that being tried during the war,” Kris added.

“No one was all that interested,” Commander Fervenspiel said. He raised his hand with all fingers and thumb showing. “First, you have to float around a jump point, spending all your time in zero gee,” he said, pulling in his thumb. “Second, you have to worry just a little bit about what would happen if the jump point suddenly decided that where it wanted to be was where you are.” He pulled in his pointer at that and made a fist. “Between those two, you don’t need any more. It’s a tactic that sounds brilliant to a lubber. Not so brilliant to the sailor who has to do it. Better to fight it out orbiting some planet once you’ve got a bit of notice.”

Kris nodded. So did Jack. “One ship standing blockade suddenly facing a couple of dozen coming through. Not such a good idea.”

“But we do have this missing buoy,” Abby pointed out. “Did somebody give it a better option and take it out for a beer?”

Chief Beni looked like he’d be glad if someone offered him a beer. “Should we spin off a nanoscout and send it through?”

A few months earlier, Kris had gotten just such a request from an Iteeche friend. She’d passed on it. If there was something big and mean on the other side of the jump, she didn’t want to make it a present of humanity’s best tech before we had any idea what we faced.

In theory, the jump in front of them was several thousand light-years away from where the Iteeche were losing scouts. One would think they were not connected. However, never having been a galactic overlord bent on conquering the universe, Kris wasn’t yet ready to conclude she knew exactly where the bad guy’s realm was and wasn’t.

“Good idea, Chief,” Kris said, “but let’s hold that one in reserve for the time being.”

“What’s that leave us?” Abby asked.

“I hate to open my mouth,” Professor mFumbo said, clearly reluctant. This was a totally new aspect of his personality and one that Kris had never seen before. “However, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum do have some expert thoughts on just this problem.”

“Tweedle Dee and Dum?” Kris echoed, not willing to admit that she had given them the same names but not surprised that someone else had.

“You know, the two particle physicists I introduced you to earlier. We call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but never to their faces, I assure you. No question they are strange, but also no question they are brilliant.”

“And if we talked to them,” Kris said, “what would they tell us?”

“It’s better that I let them tell you themselves.”

“God help us,” Abby remarked.

“Really it is,” the professor said. “May I call them?”

“Do so,” Kris said. “I’m dying with curiosity.”

A few minutes later, the two drifted in, righted themselves, and began.

“How big,” one began, “is a jump point?” the other ended.

“Look at your own ship, the Wasp . . . When we came aboard it, the ship was much thinner . . . but you added several layers of containers . . . and the ship grew wider.

“Yet every time it entered a jump point . . . no matter what its beam . . . the jump point takes it in.”

The two of them paused to examine the reception their dissertation was getting. Kris saw round eyes, glazed over, staring back at them. Her own eyes probably weren’t any better.

Undaunted, they continued.

“The same goes for the length of ships . . . Take a battleship. It enters the jump point . . . and it exits the jump point . . . At no time is the ship half-in . . . or half-out . . . No matter how long a ship is . . . one has never had its bow sticking out of one jump point . . . and its stern still entering from the other side.”

Kris eyed Jack, who was eyeing her right back. “They’ve got a point,” she whispered. He nodded agreement.

The two scientists beamed.

“We call them jump points . . . and a point is supposed to have zero dimensions, just coordinates . . . but our jump points do a very poor job of staying at their coordinates . . . and swallow ships with much larger than zero dimensions.

“More interesting . . . is their attitude toward . . . the ships . . . A ship is either in the point . . . or out of it . . . in this system . . . in the point . . . and then in the next system . . . Never two . . . only one.

“Before the point . . . in the point . . . through the point . . . no matter how large . . . or long.”

“So,” Kris said thoughtfully, “if we were to attempt to push a fiber-optic cable with a camera on it through a jump point . . .”

“That experiment . . . was actually attempted . . . in the early days of space travel.”

“I never heard of it,” Jack said.

“You aren’t . . . a physicist . . . and since it failed . . . we don’t like to talk . . . about it.”

“What happened?” Kris asked.

“The experimenting ship . . . pushed a fiber-optic camera cable toward . . . the jump point . . . The cable never . . . went through the jump . . . It just kind of . . . bent itself . . . around the jump point . . . and ended up showing . . . the space on the . . . other side of the jump . . . in the same system.”

“No jump,” they said together.

“So are you again telling me that you have a very interesting bit of science, but you can’t help me a damn bit with my problem today.” Princesses were not supposed to talk like that. Whoever made that rule had never had a day like Kris was having.

And they’d never listened to these two.

“We might be able to do something,” they both said

“What?”

“We’ve been wondering . . . if Smart Metal™ . . . might allow us to . . . outsmart the jump points.

“We’ve never had . . . access to any Smart Metal™ . . . but we wonder . . . if we made a single-molecule camera . . . attached it to a different type of Smart Metal™ . . . optimized to carry the signal . . . a kind of wire . . . and had a single- . . . molecule receiver at this end.

“Maybe that would trick . . . the jump point . . . into seeing the first molecule . . . as a separate unit . . . the wire as also separate . . . and the last molecule the same.

“One would be . . . on the other side . . . the wire in the point . . . and the transmitter here.”

“Give these folks some Smart Metal™ and get the best minds on programming Smart Metal™ working with them,” Kris ordered.

Smart Metal™ was an invention of Grampa Al’s Nuu Enterprises. It allowed naval starships to be large with comfortable private quarters one day and shrink down into a small, heavily armored man-of-war the next. Kris had once seen a spaceship converted into an air vehicle and landed on a planet . . . and had a miserable time getting everything back in order on the spaceship. The material was programmable, but programming it just right was often the problem.

Oh, and it had almost killed Kris on at least one occasion. Several times if you counted the sudden-onset, engineering casualty problems that the initial class of Smart Metal™ ships were prone to.

Kris was glad the problem of producing a Smart Metal™ probe for the jump point before them was someone else’s problem.

Two hours later, a tiny object jetted away from the Wasp. It paused just short of the jump point and appeared to do nothing.

The screen on the wall of Kris’s Tac Center changed to show a black-and-white picture of wavering space.

“The bandwidth . . . between the camera . . . and the transmitter . . . is very narrow.”

“Sorry about that,” both the scientists said together.

“Now let’s see . . . what we get.”

The picture didn’t show much change for a few seconds. Then suddenly the roiling view of twinkling stars disappeared. In its place was . . . not much of anything.

“I always wondered . . . what null space . . . looked like.”

“Null space?” Kris said.

Professor mFumbo, who had joined them again only moments before the probe was launched, smiled from ear to ear. “They are the first to get a picture of it. They can name it what they bloody well choose.”

Kris was not about to dispute that right.

“Ready to go . . . the rest of . . . the way?” the boffins asked no one in particular.

Apparently they were asking each other, something that struck Kris as amazing if they actually needed to. With no further words, the picture changed.

Changed and vanished so quickly that if you’d blinked, you never would have known a different picture had been there.

“Nelly, get that picture back.”

“I’m already working on it,” Nelly snapped.

“What the hell is that?” Jack said, as a snapshot appeared on the screen. Wispy tendrils in different shades of gray formed all sorts of patterns that said very little to Kris.

“Have you ever seen the inside of a fusion reactor?” Professor mFumbo asked.

“Can’t say that I have,” Jack said.

“The inside of a sun, then?”

“Never even wanted to,” Kris said.

“I’ll wait for others to weigh in with their ideas,” the professor said, “but I think we ought to search the sky for a nova. I will bet you ten Wardhaven dollars that this jump will take you right into the heart of that nova.”

Kris leaned back into her high-gee chair, hardly necessary since the ship was in zero gravity. “You think someone knew that was waiting on the other side?”

“I doubt if anyone knew what was through that jump,” Commander Fervenspiel said. “I will bet you that they knew that nothing that went in there ever came out. Cunning, these scumbags.”

“Captain Drago, make best speed for Jump Point Beta.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Captain Drago said, “but I am one happy man that we did not go charging in there.”

“I think I’ve learned a good lesson. Look before I leap,” Kris said.

“Good lesson,” Jack said aloud. “Very good lesson.” To just Kris he added, YOU THINK THAT MAY BE WHAT IS EATING THE ITEECHE SCOUTS?

“Can we find the nova this jump leads to?” Kris asked aloud. To Jack she added, I HAVE NO IDEA. YOU REALLY WANT TO BET HUMANITY’S FUTURE THAT THE PROBLEM IS AS SIMPLE AS THAT?

Jack offered only a shrug for a reply.

Professor mFumbo and Commander Fervenspiel pushed off from their chairs to drift in front of the star map on the wall. As the Wasp slowly put on acceleration, they settled to the floor, their fingers roving from star to star.

“Nelly, please highlight the star this jump point is supposed to go to.”

“Kris, I don’t know which star it goes toward. I know where the star was that it went to.” A dot began flashing on the map, about equal distance between three different stars.

“None of them look like novas,” Kris said.

“They’re fifty to a hundred light-years from here,” the commander pointed out. “One of the problems with instantaneous transportation is that what you look at may be quite a few years out of date from what you leap to.”

“At least two of these suns are very old,” Professor mFumbo noted.

Kris nodded at them. To Jack and Nelly, she thought, I THINK I’VE DISCOVERED HOW TO GET A PEEK AT WHATEVER IS BEHIND THOSE KILLER JUMPS THE ITEECHE HAVE FOUND. NELLY, GET A COPY OF THE DESIGN FOR THOSE PROBES. GET SEVERAL COPIES AND SAVE THEM IN A WHOLE LOT OF PLACES.

I AM ALREADY DOING IT, KRIS.