Harvest Joy's Warshawski sails radiated the brilliant blue flash of transit energy as she continued to slide forward out of the far side of the terminus under momentum alone, and Zachary nodded in satisfaction.
"Transit complete," Hartneady reported.
"Thank you, Senior Chief," Zachary acknowledged. Her gaze was back on the sail interface readout again, watching the numbers spiral downward as her ship moved further forward.
"Engineering, reconfigure to—"
An alarm shrilled with shocking suddenness, and Zachary's head whipped around towards the tactical display.
"Unknown starships!" The professionalism of merciless training flattened the stunned disbelief in Lieutenant Keller's voice without making his report one bit less jarring. "Two unknown starships, bearing zero-zero-five by zero-seven-niner, range one-zero-three thous—"
Twelve battlecruiser-grade grasers, fired at a range of just over a third of a light-second, arrived before he could complete his final sentence, and HMS Harvest Joy, Josepha Zachary, and every man and woman aboard her ship disappeared in a single cataclysmic ball of incandescent fury.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
April, 1931
"But what could have happened to them?" asked Berry Zilwicki. The young queen's face was creased with worry.
Dr. Jordin Kare's face showed concern also. But he was doing his best to maintain a calm composure. "There could be any number of reasons they're not back yet, Your Majesty. I know TJ and I both emphasized how unlikely it was, but, frankly, the most probable explanation is that this time, for one reason or another, they didn't manage to chart the gravitic stresses accurately enough on their way through. Harvest Joy's instrumentation is damn good, but if they didn't get a good read when they make transit, it could take months for them to nail things down with sufficient accuracy for a return transit without additional support."
"For that matter, assuming they did fail to get a good map on their way through, they may have come out someplace close enough to Torch for Mike and Linda—I mean Dr. Hall and Dr. Hronek—to figure it'd take longer to do the survey than to come home the long way round, through hyper, and head back with better support," Dr. Wix interjected.
"In either of those cases," continued Kare, "then they've already begun returning through hyperspace. But that could take them some time, before they get back."
"How much time?" asked Berry.
Both physicists shrugged simultaneously. "There's simply no way to know," said Kare.
Berry shook her head. "Sorry, I said that stupidly. What I should have asked is what's the probable range of time, given past experience?"
Wix ran fingers through his long and thick blond hair. "At the short end, a few days. That'd be unlikely, though. At the other extreme . . . Well, the longest recorded voyage—well-documented, anyway—through hyperspace for a wormhole survey ship was a little under four months."
"One hundred and thirteen days, to be precise," said Kare. "That was the Solarian survey ship Tempest back in . . . what? 1843, TJ?"
Wix nodded, and Berry made a face. "Four months!"
Kare's look of concern was replaced by one of reassurance. A good attempt at it, anyway. "It's not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, there's not much danger involved. Like Captain Zachary said before they ever headed out, survey ships are designed with the possibility in mind that this might happen. They've got plenty of endurance and life support."
"Absolutely," Wix agreed with an emphatic nod. "The real thing to worry about on a trip that long is boredom, Your Majesty. It's not that big a ship, you know."
Their attempt at reassurance didn't help. Berry grimaced, as she imagined being trapped in such a vest-pocket world for almost four months.
"But of course survey ships are designed with that in mind also," Kare added, a bit hurriedly. "I can assure you, Your Majesty—I speak from personal experience here—that a survey ship has as much in the way of stored entertainment as even a big city. Well . . . not live entertainment, of course. But there's about all you could ask for in the way of reading material, vids, games, music, you name it."
"Sure is," said Wix. "I once took the opportunity on a long survey voyage—almost certainly the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity—to watch the entirety of The Adventures of Fung Ho."
Berry's eyes widened. The Adventures of Fung Ho had been the longest-running fictional vid series in human history—aside from soap operas, of course—with forty-seven continuous seasons.
"All of it? That's—" She had a knack for math, and did the calculations quickly. "That's over a thousand hours of viewing time. A thousand and thirty-four, to be precise, except that I think there were a couple of years when they had shortened seasons."
Wix nodded. "Three seasons, actually. 1794, due to an actors' strike, where they lost almost a third of the season. 1802, from a writer's strike—but that only lasted for a few weeks. And the biggest loss, over half the season in 1809, when Lugh came under severe bombardment and just about all activity on the planet had to be suspended for the duration of the emergency."
Lugh was the third planet of the star Tau Ceti, and was the location where most of the episodes in The Adventures of Fung Ho had been recorded. The planet was popular for a large number of vid series, especially those involving adventure, due to its flamboyant scenery and even more flamboyant biota. Unfortunately, the Tau Ceti system also had over ten times as much dust as did Sol's system and that of most inhabited solar systems. That massive debris disk meant the planet was subject to more in the way of impact events than all but a handful of other planets with permanent human settlements. The danger of bolides shaped everything about Lugh's culture, from the structure of its system defense force down to the fact that those same bolides were a regular feature in the adventure vids produced there.
Berry shook her head slightly, as she continued with her calculations. A thousand hours of viewing time translated into eighty-three consecutive days, assuming you sat and watched for twelve hours a day.
"Gah," she said. "All of it?"
"He cheated," said Kare. "He skimmed through all the episodes involving E.A. Hattlestad and Sonya Sipes."
"That has got to be the silliest sub-plot ever invented by the human race," groused Wix, "even allowing for the fact that it's supposed to be romance."
Berry chose not to argue the matter. She'd seen a large number of the episodes of the Fung Ho series herself—although certainly not all of it, nor even close—and had been rather partial to the romance between Hattlestad and Sipes. As much of it as she'd seen, at least. Granted, the premises were pretty extreme, starting with the size disparity between Hattlestad—who was practically a homunculus—and the eight-foot-tall giantess Sipes. But so were the premises of the entire series, when you got right down to it. That wasn't surprising, given that Fung Ho had been inspired by the adventures of Baron Münchhausen. Add asteroids, alien tempters and temptresses (whose temptations usually succeeded, Fung Ho being Fung Ho), and energy weapons.
"Still," she said, "I'm impressed. Or appalled, I'm not sure which."
Kare and Wix both chuckled. "To be honest," said Wix, "after it was all over and I thought about it, I was a lot closer to being appalled than impressed, myself. The series is addictive, but speaking objectively it's about as ludicrous an exercise in fiction as you can find in the record."