The Wasp’s crew was also augmented by quite a few Sailors from the old Wasp. That included the old Marine company at full strength, leaving Kris with two Marine companies on board. While Captain Drago grumbled and had Katsu expand his ship, Abby was quite happy to have Sergeant Bruce in easy reach. Nelly was also glad; Bruce brought Chesty with him.
Now all six of her surviving kids were home.
Two days later, the frigates got under way for Jump Point Beta at two gees while the U.S. cruisers herded the merchant ships toward Alpha at one gee.
The Wasp and the Sakura hit the jump at two hundred thousand klicks, spinning at thirty-five RPMs clockwise and goosed up to 3.5 gees. Nelly was quite pleased with the results.
“We jumped right over the Iteeche Empire and we’re within five light-years, both in azimuth and range, of my projections. This system has three of the new jumps. Aim for the middle-distant one and let’s hold four gees. We’ll take this one at thirty-five RPMs counterclockwise and tack toward the edge of the galaxy.”
Nelly guided them on a course that first headed them toward the edge, then more inward of the galaxy. After the next jump, they were up to seven hundred thousand klicks, and they made their way to the next two jumps at a pleasant one gee.
The Wasp had started out at thirty-five thousand tons. The Hellburners had added thirty thousand tons; these were slightly smaller than the first ones. Tests had showed that the antimatter hadn’t gotten to all the neutron material, and rather than waste three thousand tons of the stuff, these missiles were smaller. At sixty-five thousand tons, the two frigates had then added thirty thousand tons of reaction mass spread around in a whole lot of medium-size tanks. A conventional ship could never have done that.
More and more, as the Wasp grew and shrank around Kris, she was sure she was riding the wave of the future.
On the far side of the galaxy, Nelly ordered them to four-gee deceleration, and they came to rest in a system closer to the rim but only one slow jump from where the Intrepid had located the new civilization.
Kris ordered the two frigates to a gas giant. The Sakura Jr. headed down to do some cloud dancing and capture needed reaction mass. The Wasp Jr. trotted over to the jump that should take them to the bird people and poked the periscope through.
Everyone held their breath while Senior Chief Beni went through the electromagnetic spectrum. “There’s radio and TV signals from there. They’re in the bird format. None of that impenetrable space-raider crap. I think you folks did it.”
That brought a cheer and a sigh and a lot of other hard-to-name feelings. Too many good men and women had died so the people in that next system could live.
Kris found herself whispering a prayer of thanksgiving to any god listening.
“Kris,” Nelly said. “My kids and I have been going over the original traffic that came back with the Intrepid. Yes, I know we should have done this sooner, but we’ve been kind of busy until now.”
“Spit it out, Nelly,” Kris said.
“The Intrepid thought they’d just made their first space launch. I’m not sure that’s entirely right. They may have been returning to space. And the rig that they used. There were no close-ups of it. And what we saw was very grainy. Optics is not their strong suit.” A picture appeared in a window of the bridge’s main screen.
It was way past blurry. “Can you clean that up, Nelly?”
“We’ve tried, Kris. The bottom is clearly an old-fashioned liquid-fuel rocket, obsolete since before humans got serious about leaving Earth. It’s what’s on top that has us puzzled.” Nelly zoomed in, and the picture got even worse.
“I can’t tell anything about that,” Kris said.
“Yes, I know, Kris, but it’s about the right length and width for the kind of gigs they knocked together during the Iteeche War to move a few people from ship to ship or ship to planet.”
“Do we have a picture of one of those gigs?” Jack asked.
“Yes, but not really,” Nelly said. “It’s from an archive that no one thought we’d ever need. It’s been compressed six or seven times. The metadata is vague.”
“So is the picture,” Kris said. She looked at the two pictures and could tell nothing about either. She told Nelly so.
“Yes, Kris, I know they don’t look like much, but our analysis says there is a fifty-percent chance that they are one and the same. Usually, I don’t bother you with fifty-percent probabilities, but this one . . .”
It was unusual for Nelly to be at a loss for words. Very unusual.
“Let’s get this fueling over with and see what’s over there,” Kris said.
Twelve hours later, they took the last jump at dead slow with the frigates rock steady.
Once in system, they put on one-gee acceleration toward the source of all their curiosity.
65
“Nelly, how’s the translation business going?”
“Better than you have any right to expect but not nearly as well as you clearly want,” Nelly shot back. Kris noticed that Jack and Penny and all the others with one of Nelly’s kids had been leaving their computers alone.
Kris decided to leave Nelly to her work.
An hour later, Nelly said, “Kris, we have identified references to three kinds of people. There are The People, and then there are the Old People and the Heavy People. The difference between the Old and the Heavy is a slight inflection in what sounds like the same word to me. Worse, the Old ones appear to be more mythical, although they are referred to a lot.”
“Gods?” Jack asked.
“That’s possible. The Heavy People are spoken about in the present tense, we think, but not a lot.”
With little more than that, they continued to close on the planet.
It was the old chief who made the next discovery. “I’m getting a beeper. It’s not much of anything, but it sounds like a ship’s navigational warning signal.”
“Have you interrogated it?” Kris shot back.
“I’ve tried, but it doesn’t respond. It could be something entirely different from what I’m taking it for.”
“We’ll see,” Kris said, and settled into her Weapons station. All four lasers were charged and locked. Beside Kris, Penny was shrinking the Wasp down to fighting trim, Condition Baker. Not enough to make staterooms disappear, but empty spaces were getting smaller as the hide of the ship thickened, and reaction mass was sent to cool the honeycombed places beneath the armor.
The chief reported that the Sakura was doing the same.
Halfway to the planet, they flipped ship and began to decelerate at a bit more than one gee. That put most of the sensors pointed away from the planet, but Kris’s Navy folks weren’t the only ones ready to work Smart MetalTM. Several of the boffins’ sensors slithered over the hull to get a better view of the planet.
They made the next discovery.
“There’s a ship or station in orbit around that planet,” Professor Labao reported. “Our optical scopes are clearly picking up a large platform of some sort.”
“Pass it through to our screen,” Kris snapped, beating Captain Drago to the order by a hair. The planet was a lovely blue-green orb, just what a living planet should look like. The visual zoomed in. It lost its focus, then regained it. There was a dot moving across the face of the planet. It reached the night terminator and vanished into the dark.
“We estimate an hour before we reacquire it,” the professor said.
“That’s the source of my signal,” the chief added.
“It’s going to be a long hour,” Kris said. “Can you show me anything?”