“All stations report ready, sir,” Commander Duggan said. She looked over at the captain. “We are ready for transit.”
Roman looked up at the holographic display, shaking his head in awe. The Gateway was surrounded by enough fortresses to give anyone who tried to poke his nose into the Sol System a very bad day. During the First Interstellar War, every Asimov Point humanity had discovered was then heavily fortified—allowing them to be used as choke points to bleed the Snakes white—and the Federation had never relaxed its defense of Earth. Other Asimov Points in the Core Worlds might be unfortified—and barely charted Asimov Points along the Rim might not even be included in the Federation Navy’s database—but Earth itself would be protected. The logic hadn’t changed, even when the stardrive had opened inaccessible territories to human expansion. Asimov Points were still the quickest way to hop from star system to star system.
“Gateway Command confirms that we are clear to pass through the Gateway,” the communications officer, Lieutenant Nicolas, injected. Nicolas had served on one of the fortresses defending Earth before she’d been transferred to Enterprise as part of the Retribution Force. Roman rather liked her, although their paths rarely crossed outside of the mess. “They’re wishing us good luck.”
The captain settled back in his command chair. “Take us into the Gateway,” he ordered. “Spin up the transit drive and jump us out on my command.”
“Aye, captain,” the helmsman said. “We are within the Gateway.”
On the display, Enterprise crawled past the armored fortresses and entered the sphere they guarded. It crossed Roman’s mind—very briefly—that if the fortresses opened fire at effectively point-blank range, there would be nothing left of the massive carrier apart from free-floating atoms in space.
After all, they were currently in what amounted to a civil war. Who could you trust?
But, despite that thought, Roman still felt a thrill of anticipation as the captain issued the order.
“Jump.”
There was a faint flicker of unease—gone almost as soon as he noticed it—and the displays flickered. And little else. But, despite the lack of drama, they had just hopped thirty light years in a split-second. The scientists swore blind that the transit wasn’t actually instantaneous, but it took less than a picosecond, a time period that no human mind could measure. Roman was almost disappointed. Surely, his first jump as a commissioned officer should be more exciting.
But he knew he should feel fortunate. Only a handful of humans felt anything more than a brief shock when they passed through an Asimov Point, but those who did tended to do poorly in space. And if he’d wanted to stay in one place for the rest of his life, he would have stayed a RockRat.
“Jump complete,” the helmsman said. “Moving to fleet position now, sir.”
“Bring up the main drive and prepare to take us out,” the captain ordered calmly.
Roman sucked in his breath. Enterprise and the remainder of the Retribution Fleet had started their long crawl towards Harmony, a trip that would take more than a month. He looked forward to the journey, but he still felt a strange sense of foreboding. Who knew what was waiting for them out there?
“Madam Exec?” the captain asked, motioning toward Roman and Sultana.
Commander Duggan just shook her head, apparently understanding whatever it was the captain refused to say. “Come on, you two,” she said to Roman and Sultana. “Those tactical simulations won’t beat themselves, you know.”
Roman nodded and stood up, taking one last look at the holographic display. The mighty carrier wasn’t alone. Hundreds of starships followed, flickering through the Asimov Point and into formation. The massed power of the Retribution Force seemed unstoppable. And yet a chill ran down his spine.
“But if you think you’re unstoppable,” Kratman had said, years ago, “you won’t look for your own weaknesses.”
Marius sat in the sealed observation blister, half-wishing he could see outside, even though he knew it would be unpleasant. Stardrive had many advantages, but it was dangerous to look out into space when it was activated. Instead, he looked down at his terminal, yet his thoughts kept wandering. It was hard to concentrate on anything.
For the first one thousand years of interstellar exploration, the human race had been forced to follow the Asimov Points if they wanted to cross interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time. A star that possessed no Asimov Point—or no Asimov Point that linked into human-settled space—was unreachable, at least by Federation starships. Quite a few political renegades and RockRats had built STL colony ships and set out to found a colony somewhere well out of the Federation’s reach. The discovery of the stardrive—allowing limited FTL travel without an Asimov Point—had placed some long-lost colonies back in contact with the Federation, or created new mysteries where colony ships had simply vanished into the darkness of space. Every space cadet knew the stories—the lost treasure ship of Titan, or the daughters of the King of the Stars—and dreamed about finding them somewhere in the interstellar void. Like most such myths, they were impossible to prove one way or the other.
No one was permitted to use the Observation Blister when the stardrive was activated, moving the fleet through an effectively endless series of tiny gravitational distortions. Marius, like most humans, could not have explained how the drive worked to save his life, but he did know that watching the effects on the starlight could cause sickness, perhaps even madness. Instead, he peered down at the latest report from the training exercises and thought dark thoughts about politically-appointed officers. He’d been given command of the massed firepower of seventy superdreadnaughts, which wasn’t enough to deal with the potential problem.
Admiral Parkinson, to be fair, had agreed to continue with training exercises during the long flight to Harmony. During the first two weeks of transit, Marius had run every simulated drill in the book and several that had never been officially written down. He’d wanted to run some live-fire exercises as well, but Admiral Parkinson had vetoed the idea, citing concerns over cost and delays. But the results hadn’t been encouraging.
The Retribution Force was shaping up, albeit slowly, yet it wasn’t anything close to ready for combat. Given a few more months, he was confident that every unit would do its duty, but for the moment…he scowled and shook his head. He couldn’t make soldiers out of a bunch of ill-trained reservists overnight. Especially considering that quite a few of the officers had been in the Naval Reserve because a superior officer had wanted to put them somewhere harmless.
It was easy to understand why. Some of them actually made Admiral Parkinson look competent.
He glanced down at the latest report and made a face. There was one advantage of dealing with Admiral Parkinson: the man didn’t have the imagination to be dishonest, or even cook the files in his own favor. And Marius would have bet good money that he’d never heard of a Cover Your Ass code, allowing the files to be quietly reedited after the fact.
The Retribution Fleet had all the supplies it needed, locked up tight so some profiteering quartermaster couldn’t make a profit by selling them on the black market, yet some of the commanders were jerking Marius’s chain. The readiness reports on at least twenty superdreadnaughts would have been grounds for an immediate court martial during his first command. The commodore would have had the malefactors locked up and shipped home before they had known what hit them.