At the Marine Academy, Captain Esteron had shown them a screen full of mathematics, telling them it best represented the warpspace view of a planet. He hadn't expected them to sort it out. He'd simply been making a point. He went on to discuss warpspace in non-mathematical terms. In a sense, you couldn't be in warpspace; warpspace has no material content. A ship "in warpspace" actually occupied an anomaly. Before generating warpspace, you're in F-space-familiar space-which is "permeated by the warpspace potentiality." The strange-space generator generates what can be thought of as a "bubble" of warpspace, which is free to move within the warpspace potentiality at "speeds" greater than light in F-space. And that "carrier bubble" of warpspace contains an inclusion-a bubble of F-space intimately surrounding the scout and its contents. A ship within a bubble within a bubble.
According to Captain Esteron, it could be understood only through the appropriate mathematics, and even that depended on what's meant by "understood." The bottom line was, you can leave Terra in warpdrive and arrive at Alpha Centauri in far less time than a photon could. And without inertia. In warpspace you're not only exempt from the light-speed limitation, your ship is stationary within its own little universe-its "carrier bubble."
Stoorvol had decided then not to worry about it. Accept it, yes. Get used to it, sure. Learn to control it, damn right! He'd quickly done all three, and become a competent warpspace pilot-not very difficult in routine circumstances.
Especially with the safekeeps built into shipsminds, to constrain warpspeeds in the vicinity of planetary bodies. For there, the "interfacing" of F-space and warpspace is more or less distorted, and pseudo-speeds must be moderate. Otherwise distortion could rupture your carrier bubble. Which could leave you abruptly in F-space, with momentum a function of your warpdrive pseudo-speed. If that happens at a pseudo-speed greater than c, ship and contents are converted instantly into energy. The resulting explosion is terrific.
Even at only a few-score miles per minute, a ruptured carrier bubble would convert a crew into strawberry jam.
Thus the crossing to Tagus took twenty-eight careful minutes. But they were also twenty-eight invisible minutes. The odds of a Wyzhnyny ship passing in warpspace near enough to detect your carrier bubble by chance were extremely low. While the prospect of being detected in warpspace by a ship in F-space was essentially nil.
The danger lay not in the crossing to Tagus. It lay in the fine maneuvering very close in. There, complex interface distortions made travel vectors tricky, and carelessness or clumsiness could easily be fatal.
So while the crossing took twenty-eight minutes, finding a suitable place to emerge required two hours of slow and careful sensor groping. Finally Stoorvol found what he wanted-a gorge. He recognized it by the nature of the grav-line distortions in the F-space potentiality, blurred though they were, and it was on the right part of the right continent. He groped his way almost to the bottom.
Emergence would cause a momentary surge of 80-kilocycle radio waves, a distinctive artifact that would hardly be misinterpreted. It was the primary reason he'd wanted to emerge deep in a gorge. A surge there would hardly be picked up by a ground installation, nor by any of the surveillance buoys, given their positions in space.
Once back in F-space, he keyed the gravitic matrix, and shipsmind gave him coordinates-0.65 degrees east of the Wyzhnyny settlement. The gorge was visible on the map the scout had generated during its surveillance from the lunar limb. It was one of the larger gorges leading down from a broad basaltic plateau to the ocean, and the Mei-Li had emerged only thirty feet from the bottom.
He turned the helm over to PO-1 Menges, who raised the craft almost to the rim. Then two of the Mei-Li's work scooters transferred the marines, plus Olavsdottir and the two entomology techs, to the plateau top. Stoorvol flew one of the scooters.
He left most of the marines on the rim with Gunnery Sergeant Gabaldon, to set up an inconspicuous defense point. Then, with Olavsdottir, two marines and a pair of hornet traps, Stoorvol left on one scooter. Three other marines and both entomology techs followed on the other, with four more traps. The scouts' gravdrives were designed to have a minimal EM signature, though even that might be picked up if they rose much above the rainforest canopy.
"Just tell me where to go," Stoorvol said. Olavsdottir scanned across the forest roof. "Take me higher," she said. "I can't see enough from here."
He glanced at the coordinate grid on his display, then raised the scooter straight up, while the planetologist looked around. At two hundred feet above the forest she spoke again, pointing. "There," she said. "There's a pretty good opening over there about half a mile."
He saw where she meant: a two-acre gap in the forest canopy, probably a blowdown patch. "Right," he said, and took the scooter down almost to the treetops before heading there, dodging the occasional emergent that loomed above its leafy neighbors.
The gap proved unsuitable, filled with a dense growth of young forest half as tall as the surrounding older stand. They traveled several miles and checked four more gaps before they crossed a long low ridge and saw what they needed. A mile ahead, on the far side of a smaller gorge, a sizeable area of forest had burned. As they drew near, Olavsdottir said, "That's it. Set her down there."
They landed near the center, away from the gorge. Clearly the fire had been intense. It seemed to Stoorvol he knew the place from Morgan's reports. This lesser gorge was the approach to the old pirate base. And the fire? The Wyzhnyny had razed the forest there after they'd traced Morgan to his bolt hole.
Olavsdottir wasn't speculating on the burn's origin. She was soaking in its ecology. The forest regrowth was still patchy; much of the ground was covered with herbage and low shrubs. Flowers were rampant, and "berries" abundant. Insects in quantity visited both, probing blossoms or tapping fruit juices with their proboscises. There would be hornets, she was sure. And if they were nearly as large as Morgan had described, they'd be predators, preying on other "insects."
She turned to the field entomologists. "This is it, people," she said. "Let's do it." From her small day pack she took something that, unfolded, proved to be a hat with a net rolled on its brim. Putting it on, she secured the net around her collar, then donned tough gloves. The techs did the same.
Then she turned to the scooters where the marines stood watching with their captain. "Stay here," she told Stoorvol, "and leave your repellent fields off. They disorient insect behavior over an area a lot larger than the repellent radius."
Stoorvol watched the hooded collectors walk off in different directions across the burn, heads swiveling slowly as they searched. Sergeant Haynes grunted. "She didn't need to tell us that. We know the drill."
"She's not used to the Corps," Stoorvol said, "and civilians generally need reminding. Otherwise no telling what they'd do."
He'd hardly said it when his radio beeped. He took it from his belt. Its transmitter was directional, so he pointed it east. "Stoorvol," he answered. "This had better be good. If I can read your signal, they can pick it up at the Wyzhnyny base."
"Captain, a bogie just passed over!" The voice was Menges'. "Crossed the gorge about two hundred yards north, headed west! If anyone on board was looking our way, he'd have seen us. Or if they had their sensors on… They shouldn't pick up our radio traffic though. Way different wavelengths."
Unless they're scanning. "What kind of bogey?"
"A smallish craft of some sort, sir."
A smallish craft. That could be different things, some armed, some not. "Thanks, Boats. Gabaldon, are you on?"
Sergeant Gabaldon answered from the rim. "Right, Captain."
"Okay. Listen up both of you. They probably didn't see you. Otherwise they wouldn't have gone right on like they did." I hope, he added silently. "Gabaldon, get your people back aboard the Mei-Li, now! Boats, as soon as they're on board, fly south down the gorge, a mile at least, and even with the rim. Find a place where you can fit that frigging barge back into the forest, between the trees. Far enough back that you can't be seen from the gorge. Or from the air." And let's hope the Wyzhnyny don't scan the forest with grav sensors. "Another thing: when you're in your hiding place, register your coordinates to four decimals. But don't send them till I ask. Keep radio silence. Got that?"