“Good,” Kris said, through a dry throat and a pounding pulse. “I’d like that. You have some good points I should really take to heart.”
Jack raised an eyebrow at that.
“Engineering has solved the problem with the Wasp’s new reaction mass. We should be settling down to a reliable halfgee acceleration,” Sulwan announced to all hands. “Now you can safely get some serious repair work under way. Sorry about asking for volunteers when it was too hazardous to do anything. Now, if you really are interested in some messy work, let us know.”
Jack eyed Kris.
“I’ll pass on that,” she said.
49
The Wasp approached the next jump at over 150,000 kilometers an hour. She could have put on more speed, but she hadn’t; they’d been forced to spend time in free fall.
Quite a few of the patches needed to be reworked. Several more hull sections showed strain. They had made it through the refueling pass, but Captain Drago feared they’d fail on him when he could least afford it.
Likely at the worst of times and worst of places.
But just as the Wasp was a good ship taking care of her crew, so she had a good crew to take care of her. Every day Kris realized that Captain Drago knew so much more about running a ship in space than she did.
It was humbling.
All Kris could do was be glad she’d made the right choice and not done what she oh so wanted to do. There were reasons why it took years of hard work to make a good ship driver.
She hadn’t put in those years. She would be as big a fool as Hank Peterwald to think that she could fill those shoes just by tying up the shoelaces.
The jump point was one of Nelly’s new fuzzy points. That meant that they didn’t have to worry about it taking a zig or zag at the last minute and making them miss.
Or rather, they had less to worry about. A jump point was a jump point, and they all wanted to kill you.
At least that was what Sulwan insisted.
Kris was at her Weapons station as they took the jump. At Nelly’s suggestion, they reduced their rotation to the more traditional twenty revolutions per minute clockwise. The transition from one point in space to another point went smoothly.
Then came the little matter of where had they gotten to.
First things first. “The system is quiet,” Chief Beni reported. “All sensors report nothing but normal radiation. We’re sharing this system with a pleasant yellow dwarf.” Mother Earth had survived in the warmth of a pleasant yellow dwarf for several billions of years. They should have no problems as they transited the system.
“Jump points, Chief?” the skipper asked.
“Give me a moment,” he said, still concentrating on his instruments.
“We went about nine hundred light-years,” Nelly reported. “We’re still going counterclockwise around the rim of the Milky Way, but we edged in a bit, just like I expected.”
“Very good, Nelly,” Captain Drago said, but it was the chief he concentrated on.
“Sorry, sir. For a minute there, I thought I was picking up something in the radio spectrum. If I was, I can’t get a bearing on it. Maybe it’s something from a nearby solar system. Da Vinci, make a note for future reference, there may be an intelligent species close to this system.”
“It’s done, Chief,” his computer, a son of Nelly, replied.
“Chief, I sure would like to aim this tub at a jump point, and I don’t have a lot of reaction mass to spare.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I kind of don’t want to get bushwhacked without warning, sir, but I understand where you’re coming from, sir.” The chief paused for a moment, ignoring the skipper’s scowl. Then he went on.
“There are three jumps in the system. Only one of them is a new type. It’s also the closest. Sulwan, here come the coordinates.”
“I got them.”
“You know,” the chief went on, “is it just me, or don’t the new points seem to be closer together than the old ones? Do you think the Three alien species that built them figured out they were wasting a lot of time traveling from one jump to the next and did something about that with the new jumps?
“I tend to agree with Chief Beni,” Nelly said. Kris’s eyebrows shot up, to be quickly joined by all those around the bridge at this unusual agreement between the two rivals. “However, I don’t yet think we have a sufficiently large test sample to be too confident of that conclusion, but it’s a good possibility.”
“Thank you, Nelly,” the chief said.
“I have adjusted our course,” Sulwan reported. “If we maintain one-gee acceleration, we can expect to jump in fifteen hours. We should be close to three hundred thousand klicks an hour by then.”
Once they were sure they had the system to themselves, Kris secured the Weapons Division to a minimum watch and dropped down to the wardroom for chow. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to run into Jack or had better avoid him.
He cares for me. Maybe as much as I care for him. What did that mean? Did it mean anything that mattered?
Kris was no high-school kid walking the halls blinded by her first puppy crush. She was the commander of PatRon 10, or at least what was left of it. She had a report to make to the king concerning the death of billions of aliens, the loss of just about all of her first command and the likelihood that the whole human race was now at war with an alien race they knew nothing about.
Yes, that was all true. Still, it was wonderful to know that someone in general, and Jack in particular, cared about her.
Kris scrupulously avoided even thinking the word “love.”
Until she heard more from Jack about the actual extent of his feelings for her, that word was strictly off-limits.
But it was nice to think about the possibility that the word had some application to the present situation.
Down, girl. Remember, that word is strictly out of your vocabulary. Not available for usage. He said he is glad you’re still alive and wants you to stay that way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that L word.
Kris was saved from further ruminations on that word when Abby, Cara, and Penny joined her for dinner. It turned out, Cara had her own problem to share with them.
Once she was settled at the table, she leaned toward the three adults, and whispered, “Is it true? Could we become another Flying Dutchman, just like in the vids?”
“Which one?” Penny asked. “I’ve seen three remakes of that horror show.”
Kris knew the classic story of the Flying Dutchman, back when he sailed a windjammer on Earth’s oceans. Clearly, Cara was all wound up about the recent adaptation of the story to starships and jump points.
“I don’t know,” Cara gushed. “We’ve got enough alcohol on board. I guess no one would have to go into the reactor without something to numb them.”
“No one is going into the reactor,” Kris said. “Drunk or otherwise.”
“Which version of the movie do you like the best?” Cara asked the three women.
Kris hoped this topic of conversation would go nowhere, but unfortunately, Penny did have to encourage the girl.
“I loved the one where the actress, what was her name, bravely went into the reactor herself, after she’d fed in the body of her boyfriend who died when, oh, what was the accident that killed him?”
“You clearly remember the movie very well,” Abby said dryly.
“Well, it was a while back,” Penny admitted. “I was an impressionable young thing, and it seemed oh so romantic.”
Kris suppressed a groan at the word, but kept her silence.