“No,” Kris said, mentally taking the bull she wanted to by the horns and ignoring the stampeding elephant in the room. “Professor mFumbo, I need your astronomers and astrophysicists to earn their keep. I know they’ve enjoyed stargazing. Now I need them to help us plot a course that’s both fast and safe. Four courses.”
Kris paused to let the full impact hit all present. With their focused attention, she went on. “I want each of the four corvettes to make its own fast, long-range reconnaissance swing. Five planets out. Four different planets back if we can manage it. One jump from here, the Wasp came across a system with six jumps. Let’s move the fleet there. At least as many as will follow us. We can leave the battleships swinging around there while the scouts take a gander at what things look like three to five thousand light-years from here along a wide search pattern.”
That got a few low whistles.
“You’re not going for halfway measures,” Jack said.
“Someone asked me why we were out here, and I was dithering. The admirals want to pull up their skirts and run for home. Now Grampa has sent me the best three weapons in his quiver with the hope I won’t use them.
“I admit the idea of running into something that drains gas giants for its reaction fuel took some of the wind out of my sails for a while. But running home with nothing more to report than what we’ve seen? No. That’s not why I came out here. I’m not sure how I feel about Grampa’s latest contribution to our mission, any more than I was all that excited about the big old battlewagons everyone else thought to send along with us. What I do know is that we came out here to see, so let’s go see what there is to see.”
Kris paused. Faces that had been locked down lit up with smiles. Clearly, she’d just given them the pep talk they wanted to hear. She knew she should leave it at that, but, being a Longknife, she let her mouth add one more thought.
“And, while we’re zooming from star to star, we can set our reactors to capturing all the antimatter we put out. Then, if we find we need it, we will have it.”
Jack snorted. “Spoken like a true Longknife.”
Kris gave him the best shrug she could manage, then flipped her face into a smile. “Shall we now go see what our friends in the Forward Lounge have to say about where they’re going?”
20
There were no surprises in the Forward Lounge. Admiral Krätz was waiting for her like a panicked nanny eager to tell his young charge the error of her ways.
Kris took a deep breath as the words washed over her. The ship’s repair crews had done their usual efficient job. There was no evidence of the explosion except for the smell of fresh paint.
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.”