“And the lights,” Charban added.
“And the lights,” Geary conceded. No one knew what the lights were. They came and went at no discernible intervals for no discernible reasons. Sailors tended to regard them with superstition, but given that their nature remained unexplained, perhaps superstition was too prejudicial a word. The lights could conceivably represent just about anything, or Anyone. “The distances in jump space are far smaller than in our universe, as if jump space is a small fraction of the size. It may be, but since we can’t see any distance in jump space, we don’t know if it has limits and how small or large those limits are. But on average it only takes a week or two to get from one star to an adjacent one using jump space, where it would take ten or twenty years at a minimum on average to make that same voyage in normal space using our best technology. The important thing in answer to your question is that the thin spots, the jump points, are stable around each star, so we can find them and know they will be there when we get where we are going and when we want to come back.”
“I see,” Charban said, nodding and frowning in thought. “What does that have to do with not going to binary stars? With two stars close together, shouldn’t they have lots of jump points?”
“Yes, and no.” Geary moved his hands around each other. “When two or more star masses are orbiting each other, the dimples in space-time they cause are constantly interacting. That makes jump points around them unstable. There might be one that vanishes suddenly, then another appears elsewhere. If you detect a jump point that leads to a binary star, it might vanish before you could even jump toward it. Worse, the jump point at a binary that you are heading toward might vanish before you get there, and if that happens you can’t come out of jump space.”
Charban shuddered. “Like the man the Dancers returned to Old Earth?”
“Like that, maybe, yes. The ship might eventually find another jump point and return to normal space, but you’ve been to jump space. You know humans don’t belong there and can’t manage more than a couple of weeks without developing serious problems.”
“Like that itchy, unnatural feeling that your skin no longer fits?” Charban asked. “Yes. The longest jump I was ever on was about two weeks, and I’m not sure I could have endured three weeks. I can understand why no one would want to risk being stuck there. That’s why we’ve never gone to that binary star?”
“Maybe never to any binary star,” Geary said. “I don’t know. You’d have to either risk losing the ships you send, and there’s a high probability of loss, or send the ships through normal space, which would mean a really long voyage even with current propulsion technology. There have been more than enough single stars for humanity. Hell, we’ve abandoned a lot of marginal star systems in the last decades because the hypernet made it easy to bypass them. With no shortage of stellar real estate, why go to the trouble of visiting a binary?”
Charban nodded. “I understand. Indulge me, Admiral. I’m not sure why, yet. What would it take to get to that particular binary star?”
Geary shrugged. “I can estimate that easily enough. Let’s see. The closest star to that binary is Puerta. There’s nothing much at Puerta. It’s a white dwarf, but you could jump there and have less than one and a half light-years to the binary. That’s pretty close as stars go. Load up on sufficient fuel, accelerate to better than point five light speed, then brake down before you get to the binary, and you could make the trip in ten years easy. Maybe significantly less than that.”
“What about a hypernet gate?” Charban asked, squinting at the representation of the binary star. “Would one of those work in a binary star system?”
“I think so. I don’t know why not,” Geary said. “I can ask Commander Neeson on Implacable. The hypernet gates work using something related to quantum entanglement, totally different from the jump drives. They shouldn’t be impacted by the interacting gravity fields of the two stars. But you’d have to get everything to build a hypernet gate to that star system. Aside from taking about a decade, it would be hugely expensive to build a gate to get to a place where there wasn’t anything worth going to. Why do you think the Dancers would have been interested in that binary?”
“Because the Dancers all but drew a bull’s-eye around that binary star! But you have no idea why they would do that?”
“No. Even they couldn’t get there, apparently.”
“Are we certain that there is not a hypernet gate there?” Charban asked.
“There isn’t a hypernet gate for that star in our hypernet keys,” Geary said. “I don’t think.” He touched his comm panel to call Desjani in her own stateroom. “Tanya, are any of the hypernet gates at a binary star?”
“A what?” Seated at her desk, her image focused on Geary as if trying to figure out whether he was serious. “Why would anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star? How could anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star?”
“You could send the hypernet gate components through normal space and use robotics to assemble them in the binary star system,” Geary said, wondering why he was justifying the outlandish idea. “You’d probably need some humans to do the oversight and final work and calibrations, but if they didn’t want to put up with a decade-long journey they could be frozen into survival sleep and then be reawakened to work on the gate. Once the gate was done, they would be able to come back immediately.”
“Why would we do that?” Desjani asked. “Do you have any idea how complicated and expensive that would be?”
“Tanya, I don’t know! But the Dancers seem to have tried to focus our attention on one particular binary, one that’s not too far from a white dwarf that could have been a launching point for a normal-space trip to that binary.”
She gave a long-suffering sigh, tapped in some commands, then shook her head. “No. There is no binary star in the destinations available to our hypernet key. Or among the destinations available to the Syndic hypernet key that we acquired.”
“Do you have any ideas why the Dancers would try to focus our attention on a binary like that?”
Another sigh. “Maybe they were looking for something and thought it was hidden there.”
Charban gave a derisive snort. “If someone wanted to hide something, it sounds like a binary star would be the perfect place.”
Geary stared at him. “What?”
“Um, a joke, Admiral. A binary would be a wonderful place to hide something, right? No one goes there. No one can go there. You space travelers don’t even think about them! I had to point that one out to you even though it was in plain sight on the display.”
Tanya was gazing intently at Geary. “What are you thinking?”
“What would the Dancers be looking for?” he asked her. “Something that we know of. Something that has apparently disappeared.”
“Big or little? Are we talking a person?”
“Maybe a person. Maybe something very big,” Geary said, his thoughts crystallizing. “What left Varandal, by hypernet gate, and apparently vanished from human-occupied space? Something that should have been impossible to hide no matter what star system it was taken to?”
Her face lit with understanding. “Invincible. The Kick superbattleship we captured. You think the government took it to that binary?”