“Have you tried it on anything organic yet?”
Romano’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “Yes, we safely transported a chicken sandwich about two hours ago. Everything survived, even the pickle.”
Cookie frowned. “Anything living? I need to know what’s going to happen if we send soldiers through this thing.”
Romano’s grin vanished. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t have any animals on board, so the only living thing to try it with is a person…and I’m not going to ask anyone to volunteer.”
“What’s the range? How far away can you be from your target and still transport onto it?”
Romano shrugged. “We have to run some tests to calibrate it, but we can get a firm lock out to five thousand miles. I suspect that the accuracy suffers with distance, so we want to start a lot closer in.” She turned to a small holo display and pushed several buttons. Almost immediately a three dimensional display came up showing a detailed ship’s schematic. Cookie could see rooms and corridors.
“This is the New Zealand,” Romano explained. She adjusted the control and the picture zoomed in closer. “Do you see this scarlet line here and here?” she pointed. “That’s the width of the transport zone. This is set to transport forty people, so we need a large room to fit them in.” Another adjustment and the scarlet hash marks grew closer together. “That’s set to transport five people. You can see we could send them to a much smaller space and they’d fit.” She rotated the holo display so Cookie could see the hash marks were actually a box. “We can play with this until we are sure they people being transported fit inside the space and don’t end up rematerializing inside a bulkhead.” She made a face. “That would be really, really nasty.”
Cookie looked at the holo thoughtfully. She wondered idly just how many of those air rifles they now had on board the Yorkshire. Over a hundred, easy. And swords, of course. She didn’t have one hundred Marines on the Yorkshire, but Atlas would have a lot…
Her comm beeped to signal an incoming call. She looked at the screen: Personal and confidential to her from the Captain of the New Zealand. Huh? She thumbed it and the message appeared:
Cookie, Hiram is safe and on board the Atlas. Believe it or not, he is on the Queen’s personal staff. He misses you. Come visit me after you’ve seen him…if you have the strength. Emily
Cookie read it again, and then a third time. He was alive! She felt a groundswell of emotion and pushed it back for fear it would overwhelm her.
“What is it?” Romano asked.
Cookie looked up, confused. Had she missed something? “What?”
Romano looked at her impatiently. “What is the message? You’ve been staring at it for minutes.”
Cookie felt foolish. “Nothing. Just a message.”
“Sure.” Romano peered at her. “So why are you crying?”
“I’m not!” Cookie retorted, conscious for the first time of her wet cheeks.
“Of course not,” Romano agreed sarcastically. “How silly of me to think that a hard-case Marine like you would ever cry.” She took out her communicator.
“Who are you calling?” Cookie demanded, suddenly nervous.
“Environmental. Need to fix the humidity controls in here because it’s raining all over your face…”
Chapter 62
In Victorian Space, Approaching Refuge
It was a small ship.
It drifted on the far edge of the Victorian and Dominion forces, observed by neither of them. Despite its size, its passive sensors were sensitive enough to pick up all of the Victorian forces and the forward edge of the Dominion’s. It also had a set of sensors specially designed to monitor worm holes, and other special equipment as well.
“You’re sure?” Jong asked the Singer, a petit, dark haired woman named Lin.
“Yes, Brother. It has spoken most clearly.”
Jong could not suppress a groan. Why now, of all times?
“When will it start?”
“It has already started, Brother. The Victorians do not have sensors such as we do, otherwise they would have seen it already.”
“But when they see it, they will see it move to their left as they approach?”
“Yes, Brother.”
Jong wanted to weep. The Victorians would see the worm hole begin to slide to the left and would frantically turn to the left to keep on target. But then…
“And you are sure that it will turn and then go to the right, go past its starting point and continue.”
Lin looked at him with a hint of reproach. Jong sighed. Of course she was sure. This wormhole was her life’s work. She had studied it since she was a child and knew it better than any other in The Light.
“Perhaps we could-” he began, but Lin was shaking her head.
“It is very young, Brother Jong.” She spoke of it protectively, as if a mother of her rambunctious but much loved child. “I think this is how it plays.”
All God’s creatures are beautiful to Him, Jong reminded himself. He sighed.
“If we cannot change its path, then we must change the Victorian’s,” he said, and was rewarded with a hint of a smile from Lin.
But would the Victorians believe him?
Onboard the Atlas, the flow of radio messages was so great that it had been divided into two streams. All the tug boat messages coordinating the movement of the Atlas went to the commercial traffic controllers. All of the military traffic went to the First Fleet communications center, which had been moved to Atlas from the Lionheart and was now housed in a large room immediately next to the Fleet Intelligence Center run by Hiram Brill. Hiram had an open circuit to the Fleet communications center so that he could loosely monitor the general traffic, or lock into any one conversation.
One of the ratings monitoring traffic suddenly stiffened in his chair, then slapped the red button on his desk to summon a supervisor.
“What is it, Catino?” the supervisor asked.
“Just in, Lieutenant,” he said, handing her a slip of paper. “Message header says it is for Queen Anne and for Lieutenant Hiram Brill.” His forehead wrinkled. “Who is Brill?”
The supervisor scanned the message, the blood draining from her face. “Gods of Our Mothers,” she muttered, then reached for the comm.
Admiral Mello nodded in satisfaction; Kaeser’s Second Attack Fleet had finally caught up. The battles with the damn Vickies had been hugely more expensive than he could have imagined. Of his original eighty five ships, Mello had only forty seven left fit to fight, but with Kaeser’s ships finally on line, he now had one hundred and seventeen, more than enough to overwhelm the battered Victorian defenses.
He gave the orders to reposition the Fleet in preparation for the final attack. It would take some time to put into place, but once in place they would be unstoppable. And for the Vickies, there would be a little surprise.
“Captain, we are being hailed by a picket ship,” Partridge reported.
“Put it up, Toby.” Emily had finally learned his first name and was using it to make sure she didn’t forget again.
“Unknown ships, activate your beacons and identify yourselves.” The voice was clipped and brusque; Emily could almost see the unknown captain’s hand in the air, ready to order their laser batteries to fire.
“Who are they, Chief?” she asked Chief Gibson.
“Merlin reads them as several destroyers from the Queen’s Own. Cape Town, Oxford, Southampton and Coventry. The communication came from the Cape Town, captained by Captain Melissa Wyman.
Emily glanced at Rudd. He smiled and nodded: Atlas was nearby. Emily breathed a sigh of relief. “Tell the other ships to activate their beacons, and open a channel to the Cape Town.