“But we should be able to find a system where we can kick you out into space for a few hours to test them out. No one wants you to be flying them in a crisis on pure sim time.”
Henry unconsciously touched the pair of red-enameled wings on his own chest. He would need to get his own realspace flight hours soon enough to keep those. So long as he remained a qualified pilot, the uniform violation inherent in their color would be ignored.
Given what the red wings represented, he’d probably get away with wearing them even after his pilot qualifications lapsed, but he wasn’t going to do that.
Staying qualified as a pilot was as much a part of respecting the pilots who hadn’t come back from the first campaign against the Kenmiri as painting the wings red. Of the pilots who’d flown in that campaign, only thirty had survived…and most of those were dead now.
It had been a long war.
“All departments, report ready for skip,” Henry ordered calmly. Between the two-sided screens surrounding the command pit, the repeater screens on his chair, and his internal network’s interface with the starship, he knew the status of the departments.
But verbal confirmation made sure nothing was missed—and the Book called for it anyway.
His officers’ responses were as rote as the question, repeats of the responses he’d asked for when they first left Base Fallout.
“We are on target vector and approaching the skip point now, ser,” Bazzoli reported once the chorus had died down.
“Understood,” Henry acknowledged. “Commander Bazzoli, you have the ship.”
He could feel the tensions as everyone on his bridge prepared themselves for the blow. The skip drive was never a pleasant ride. It was named for the metaphor used to describe the effect: they were a three-dimensional rock skipping across the surface of a twenty-dimensional lake.
And no rock enjoyed the sensation of hitting the surface of that lake.
“Shutting down main engines,” Bazzoli continued. “Power to icosaspace impulse generators. Transit in one hundred seconds.”
An alert was automatically going out to the internal networks of every member of Henry’s crew, warning them to make sure they were seated and that their gear was secured. It wouldn’t be the first skip for anyone board the battlecruiser, but humans were forgetful creatures.
Some people even claimed they could get used to the sensation of a skip. Henry hadn’t met any of them himself, but he’d heard about them.
He didn’t believe them.
“All hands, this is your final skip alert,” Bazzoli said sharply, Henry’s internal network confirming her words were going out across the starship. “Entrance in ten seconds. If you aren’t strapped in, get strapped in now.”
A skip had to be between stars, and a ship traveled faster the larger the stars were. Zion was a red giant and so was RX-54R3, their most immediate destination. That meant they were making a twenty-two-hour skip that would take them fifteen light-years. From RX-54R3, they’d skip to another numbered star and then to Ra-1.
It was a nine-day journey to La-Tar, a sign of just how far away from the former Kenmiri Empire the UPA truly was.
“Skip…now,” Bazzoli announced.
Raven had internal compensators that allowed her to accelerate at fifty gravities without pulverizing her crew. Those compensators couldn’t keep up with the speed of the change as Raven bounced through seventeen dimensions her crew could only barely recognize.
The moment of impact was always bad. Without the compensators, humans would need acceleration tanks to survive skip entry. With them, it merely felt like someone had dropped three large men on Henry…from beneath him.
Raven fell up. Then down. Then alternated through seven different versions of sideways. Each shift was enough to leave Henry’s inner ear screaming objections.
It lasted twenty seconds—or a few eternities, depending on your opinion. Then it finally stopped, and Henry slowly breathed a sigh of relief. Things still felt slightly odd, even with the compensators and artificial gravity plants doing everything they could to create normality aboard the ship.
“All hands, hear this,” Bazzoli said into the PA. “Skip insertion complete. Initial skip complete. First secondary skip will be in four hours, thirteen minutes. Set your alarms.”
Chapter Eight
Sylvia was bored.
She wouldn’t dream of letting her staff or Shaka’s crew realize that for even one second, but their limbo-esque status with the Drifter Convoy was frustrating. After their initial visits, they had been politely but firmly informed they were to remain on Shaka unless they had new business.
That meant she was left sitting in the guest quarters of a destroyer, watching six hundred Drifter ships go about their daily business, ignoring her.
“Em Ambassador?” Captain Chavez greeted her from the door of her tiny office. “May I come in?”
“Certainly. How may I help you, Captain?”
Chavez gave her a salute he technically shouldn’t and leaned against the wall opposite her desk. There was a chair concealed in a compartment on that wall, Sylvia knew, but she suspected Chavez was more comfortable standing than trying to fit himself into the collapsible seat.
“I was hoping you could give me an idea of how much longer we’re going to be here,” the Spanish officer told her. “We’ve been sitting here for over a week, and some of my people are getting antsy. I can run virtual exercises all I want, but so long as we just…sit here, well.”
“I understand, Captain,” Sylvia allowed. “Unfortunately, I can’t say for certainty. One of our drones could get to Kozun in just over seven days, but a ship…” She shrugged. “Shaka would take twelve. My understanding is that a Drifter should take ten.”
“They have Kenmiri compensators,” Chavez allowed. “We don’t.”
Sylvia nodded. Shaka could accelerate at one kilometer per second squared if her crew went into acceleration tanks against the twenty pseudogravities that leaked through. A Drifter ship—or any Vesheron vessel, for that matter—could reach the same acceleration with full compensation.
The Kenmiri had been known to push their ships to one point one KPS2 in combat, but even they had recognized that as risky. Few Vesheron powers would risk losing one of their ships. None of them could replace ships as readily as an empire of ten thousand stars had been able to.
“Why don’t we?” Sylvia asked Chavez. There was no urgency to their conversation, which made it a perfect time to ask random questions that bothered her. “I know we dragged samples of everything the Kenmiri had back to the UPA.”
One of her more challenging tasks during the war had been to negotiate with several Vesheron for the UPA to take possession of a wrecked-but-potentially-repairable Kenmiri dreadnought, after all. The UPA had access to samples of everything from energy shields to plasma guns to compensators.
“Same reason we don’t use their energy shields, as I understand it,” Chavez told her. “They interfere with the grav-shield. Our compensators aren’t as good, but if we use theirs, the gravity shield loses an unacceptable level of efficiency.”
Sylvia nodded her understanding. The gravity shield was humanity’s key advantage over everyone else they’d encountered outside their borders, but it was also a fragile technology in several ways.