“Now we wait sixty seconds,” Captain Drago announced.
On the wall of Kris’s Tac Center, Nelly opened a small window with a countdown clock. Sixty seconds went quickly.
As did another sixty seconds.
And another.
“I don’t think that puppy’s coming home to momma,” Abby observed, as the timer hit +154 seconds.
“Ah, Captain, what’s Plan B?” Kris asked.
“I was kind of counting on you and your brain trust to come up with one for us,” the captain drawled.
“We’ll get back to you in a minute,” Kris said. “Or maybe ten.” She looked around the table and met blank stares. “Or an hour,” she said, and broke the connection.
“Okay, crew,” Kris said, “why would a jump buoy not come back?”
“Maybe someone on the other side of the jump was waiting for it and shot it to bits,” Jack said.
Kris nodded. That was her first guess. One she suspected that some big ugly was doing to Iteeche scouts. “I don’t recall anything like that being tried during the war,” Kris added.
“No one was all that interested,” Commander Fervenspiel said. He raised his hand with all fingers and thumb showing. “First, you have to float around a jump point, spending all your time in zero gee,” he said, pulling in his thumb. “Second, you have to worry just a little bit about what would happen if the jump point suddenly decided that where it wanted to be was where you are.” He pulled in his pointer at that and made a fist. “Between those two, you don’t need any more. It’s a tactic that sounds brilliant to a lubber. Not so brilliant to the sailor who has to do it. Better to fight it out orbiting some planet once you’ve got a bit of notice.”
Kris nodded. So did Jack. “One ship standing blockade suddenly facing a couple of dozen coming through. Not such a good idea.”
“But we do have this missing buoy,” Abby pointed out. “Did somebody give it a better option and take it out for a beer?”
Chief Beni looked like he’d be glad if someone offered him a beer. “Should we spin off a nanoscout and send it through?”
A few months earlier, Kris had gotten just such a request from an Iteeche friend. She’d passed on it. If there was something big and mean on the other side of the jump, she didn’t want to make it a present of humanity’s best tech before we had any idea what we faced.
In theory, the jump in front of them was several thousand light-years away from where the Iteeche were losing scouts. One would think they were not connected. However, never having been a galactic overlord bent on conquering the universe, Kris wasn’t yet ready to conclude she knew exactly where the bad guy’s realm was and wasn’t.
“Good idea, Chief,” Kris said, “but let’s hold that one in reserve for the time being.”
“What’s that leave us?” Abby asked.
“I hate to open my mouth,” Professor mFumbo said, clearly reluctant. This was a totally new aspect of his personality and one that Kris had never seen before. “However, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum do have some expert thoughts on just this problem.”
“Tweedle Dee and Dum?” Kris echoed, not willing to admit that she had given them the same names but not surprised that someone else had.
“You know, the two particle physicists I introduced you to earlier. We call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but never to their faces, I assure you. No question they are strange, but also no question they are brilliant.”
“And if we talked to them,” Kris said, “what would they tell us?”
“It’s better that I let them tell you themselves.”
“God help us,” Abby remarked.
“Really it is,” the professor said. “May I call them?”
“Do so,” Kris said. “I’m dying with curiosity.”
A few minutes later, the two drifted in, righted themselves, and began.
“How big,” one began, “is a jump point?” the other ended.
“Look at your own ship, the Wasp . . . When we came aboard it, the ship was much thinner . . . but you added several layers of containers . . . and the ship grew wider.
“Yet every time it entered a jump point . . . no matter what its beam . . . the jump point takes it in.”
The two of them paused to examine the reception their dissertation was getting. Kris saw round eyes, glazed over, staring back at them. Her own eyes probably weren’t any better.
Undaunted, they continued.
“The same goes for the length of ships . . . Take a battleship. It enters the jump point . . . and it exits the jump point . . . At no time is the ship half-in . . . or half-out . . . No matter how long a ship is . . . one has never had its bow sticking out of one jump point . . . and its stern still entering from the other side.”
Kris eyed Jack, who was eyeing her right back. “They’ve got a point,” she whispered. He nodded agreement.
The two scientists beamed.
“We call them jump points . . . and a point is supposed to have zero dimensions, just coordinates . . . but our jump points do a very poor job of staying at their coordinates . . . and swallow ships with much larger than zero dimensions.
“More interesting . . . is their attitude toward . . . the ships . . . A ship is either in the point . . . or out of it . . . in this system . . . in the point . . . and then in the next system . . . Never two . . . only one.
“Before the point . . . in the point . . . through the point . . . no matter how large . . . or long.”
“So,” Kris said thoughtfully, “if we were to attempt to push a fiber-optic cable with a camera on it through a jump point . . .”
“That experiment . . . was actually attempted . . . in the early days of space travel.”
“I never heard of it,” Jack said.
“You aren’t . . . a physicist . . . and since it failed . . . we don’t like to talk . . . about it.”
“What happened?” Kris asked.
“The experimenting ship . . . pushed a fiber-optic camera cable toward . . . the jump point . . . The cable never . . . went through the jump . . . It just kind of . . . bent itself . . . around the jump point . . . and ended up showing . . . the space on the . . . other side of the jump . . . in the same system.”
“No jump,” they said together.
“So are you again telling me that you have a very interesting bit of science, but you can’t help me a damn bit with my problem today.” Princesses were not supposed to talk like that. Whoever made that rule had never had a day like Kris was having.
And they’d never listened to these two.
“We might be able to do something,” they both said
“What?”
“We’ve been wondering . . . if Smart Metal™ . . . might allow us to . . . outsmart the jump points.
“We’ve never had . . . access to any Smart Metal™ . . . but we wonder . . . if we made a single-molecule camera . . . attached it to a different type of Smart Metal™ . . . optimized to carry the signal . . . a kind of wire . . . and had a single- . . . molecule receiver at this end.
“Maybe that would trick . . . the jump point . . . into seeing the first molecule . . . as a separate unit . . . the wire as also separate . . . and the last molecule the same.
“One would be . . . on the other side . . . the wire in the point . . . and the transmitter here.”
“Give these folks some Smart Metal™ and get the best minds on programming Smart Metal™ working with them,” Kris ordered.
Smart Metal™ was an invention of Grampa Al’s Nuu Enterprises. It allowed naval starships to be large with comfortable private quarters one day and shrink down into a small, heavily armored man-of-war the next. Kris had once seen a spaceship converted into an air vehicle and landed on a planet . . . and had a miserable time getting everything back in order on the spaceship. The material was programmable, but programming it just right was often the problem.
Oh, and it had almost killed Kris on at least one occasion. Several times if you counted the sudden-onset, engineering casualty problems that the initial class of Smart Metal™ ships were prone to.