And very likely would be critical to Kris getting to the M-688 system ahead of her brother.
“Then Captain Miyoshi, you may inform your command that we will be departing under sealed orders in four hours. I will inform you of our destination after the first jump.”
“One more thing, Your Highness,” Captain Miyoshi said. Kris wasn’t sure, but that might be the first time he addressed her as such. It was certainly the first time he said it and actually seemed to mean it.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Usually you travel with a Marine company for protection.”
“I like to think they are put to more uses than just protecting me,” Kris said.
Jack shot her a look.
“I have been asked to offer you the service of the Marine company that protected you at Fujioka House. Captain Montoya, you are familiar with them.”
“I found them to be the best,” Jack said.
“For the protection detail, the company was reinforced with two squads of MPs, two squads of sappers, and a squad of forensic experts. My superiors are willing to detach the reinforced company for service aboard the Wasp.”
Kris liked the offer but saw the problem. “And what will the chain of command for this look like?” she asked.
“For the Marines, Captain Montoya to Imperial Marine Captain Hayakawa Mikio. For the Sailors, Captain Drago to his division chiefs to the men and women. As for where you fit in, Your Highness . . . ?”
“I consider myself her flag captain,” Captain Drago said, barely keeping a grin off his face, “and we make do as best we can. I think I understand. If you can loan me a Command Master Chief to work with my Command Master Chief, I think we can fit things together on the fly.”
“Where there is a will, there is always a way,” Captain Miyoshi said, and departed.
Kris left her station and quickly covered the distance to navigation. “Nelly, sync with this station and load the new star map that we have.”
“Doing it as we speak,” Nelly said.
“Now, find me a way from Musashi to M-688.”
“There are several routes. What assumptions do we make?”
“Good point. Let’s take a step back. Show me M-688.”
It appeared on the nav screen. It wasn’t much of a system. Several planets large and larger were close in to the sun. Farther out were a mixture of rocky and gaseous ones in no particular order. Nothing worth a second look for human or Iteeche.
There were two jumps in the system. One led to and from human space. The other was marked in red. It led to an equally undesirable planet.
In the Iteeche Empire.
No wonder the system had been ignored.
But if the second jump was hit at a high speed, high acceleration, and a good twist on the ship, what might happen?
“Nelly, venture a guess for two hundred thousand klicks per hour, two gees, and twenty revolutions per minute from Jump Point Beta.”
A slice of possible results formed a twenty-degree arc stretching out five hundred to a thousand light-years.
“That would be well beyond the Iteeche Empire,” Kris muttered.
“And headed back to where there be sea monsters,” Captain Drago said.
“Nelly, I want to come barreling into that system via Jump Point Beta. Can we do that?”
“If we accelerate toward Musashi’s Jump Point Gamma at two gees, snap up to three gees at the jump, and put on twenty RPMs clockwise,” Nelly said, “that should take us to this system with two fuzzy jumps. If I can trust my estimates, we can get up to five hundred thousand klicks an hour and jump to this system.” A red line now connected Musashi to three distant systems.
“We decelerate after the next jump and come barreling in, as you say, to M-688 at two hundred thousand klicks per hour. I hope no one is in the jump, or even close to it.”
Kris took a step back, eyeing the course. Once more, she was piling on the risks. If Brother’s information was right, and Nelly’s guesses could be trusted she’d be coming in system a good four hours before the first merchant ship would be trying to make its jump.
How much did she trust Nelly’s course? Even the computer admitted that high-speed navigation was as much guess as science. And could she count on a fleet of merchant ships drawn from half a dozen different wealthy and powerful men, full of hubris, to follow a leaked schedule?
“Captain Drago, please tell me that you see a safer course of action,” Kris said.
Drago just shook his head. “You’re the one with the mouthy computer. Mine just does what I tell it to do.”
“Kris, I can’t guarantee any of what I’m showing you,” Nelly said.
“But it’s the best you have,” Kris said.
“It is the best I can come up with.”
Kris glanced at Jack.
He shrugged and smiled. “It looks like a good idea at this time.”
62
They were only a half hour late getting under way.
Then, as they backed out of dock, the first surprise arose.
“Pier Tie-Down 1 refuses to release.”
“Can you give me a picture of the problem?” Katsu was in full engineering mode. The picture appeared in a small window of the main screen. He studied it.
“Ah, some extra Smart Metal is clogging the tie-down. I can fix that.” He started tapping on his Smart Metal ControllerTM.
“The Sakura is having the same problem,” Senior Chief Beni, ret., called from sensors. He was sharing it with a much younger chief from Musashi who nodded in agreement but seemed a bit too shy to point out the failure of her elders.
“I’m sending the correction to Sakura,” Katsu announced.
There was a slight catch as each pier tie-down came up for release, but no further hang-ups. The undocking took only two minutes more than expected.
They quickly cleared the controlled space around High Kyoto station and went to two gees acceleration for Jump Point Gamma, with the Wasp ahead by a hundred klicks and the Sakura offset fifty klicks to port.
The trip should have taken four hours. It took more.
Guaranteed for five gees, things still broke loose at two. Four times they had to slow to one gee. Once, they even went into free fall. The captain was philosophical about it. “New ships need shakedowns. New designs really need a shakedown.”
Kris didn’t have time for a shakedown cruise. She didn’t have time for much of anything. Katsu was both her enemy and her hero at the same time. She demanded that he quit apologizing for everything that went wrong. “Don’t apologize. Fix it!”
She relented on her plan to go slow with Katsu and his new computer Fumio. Nelly helped sync Fumio with the Smart Metal ControllerTM, and things moved faster.
Kris wished she could have arranged for a better interface between her engineer and his new gadget, but there wasn’t time for that. When things slowed down, Kris would fix that.
No, when things sped up.
No, when they got where they were going, then she’d take time.
Right now, time was what she didn’t have enough of, and it was running away from her faster and faster.
Five hours into the four-hour trip, things seemed to have settled into their new normal. Kris turned to Captain Drago. “If we’re going to high gees after the jump, shouldn’t we be getting into our high-gee stations?”
“You’ll want to go to your quarters,” Katsu told Kris. “The new system works best as a second skin,” he said with a blush.
“Well, that should simplify the uniform of the day,” Kris growled, and headed for her room to find . . . something . . . waiting for her. It looked like an egg on tiny wheels. She tapped the OPEN HERE spot, and something that might have been a chair appeared. Stripping quickly, she settled herself into the egg, and it closed around her.
Just like that, the double weight she’d been feeling at two gees vanished. She wiggled, and the thing wiggled with her. She knew the thing was in touch with every inch of her body, but she didn’t feel that way. Her memories of a summer day at the lake in a bikini seemed more confining.