Dreadnaught

“Yes, Captain Desjani.” He nodded toward his display. “I was thinking about the fact that the aliens have superior maneuvering capability; but their weapons, the weapons we’ve seen in use, that is, are no better than ours and may be a little inferior. It’s an odd discrepancy.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Desjani said. “Imagine that you’re armed with a knife. Not a great knife, but it does the job. And you’re invisible, so even though your knife isn’t all that great, you have no trouble at all walking up to people and stabbing them before they even know you’re there.” She spread her hands with a questioning look. “Why worry about getting a new knife?”

“Because their real weapons were the worms, which allowed the aliens to be invisible on human sensors.”

“Those and that damned hypernet gate. How do we deal with that?”

“I’m still thinking.” Geary looked at his display once more. “Have we confirmed the Syndic information as to where the jump points are in this star system?”

“Just about.” She pointed. “One of the other ones is pretty close.”

Pretty close. But was it close enough?

THE fleet had continued to loiter near the jump point, close enough to it to jump out of this star system if they saw the hypernet gate beginning to collapse. But they couldn’t do that indefinitely, especially when it gave them no means of learning more about the aliens.

The fleet conference room had an air of uncertainty filling it. Fighting the Syndics, even with a peace treaty in force, was a fairly straightforward thing. Dealing with the enigma race seemed to produce an unending supply of questions and dilemmas.

“Uncrewed probes sent toward the planets to find out more and get better imagery would be easily intercepted and destroyed by the alien warships,” Badaya grumbled. The images of the other fleet commanders at the conference table nodded in agreement.

“There doesn’t seem to be any way to learn more here without being incredibly reckless and foolish,” Duellos said. “That hypernet gate pins us near this jump point.”

“Do we just leave?” Armus asked. “Why waste time just drifting here? Go back to Pele, find another way into alien space.”

“That would be a long way around,” Geary said. “And might just end up with us stuck the same way at Hua. There’s another option,” he continued, pointing to the display above the table, which currently showed the Hina Star System. “We’ve had time to confirm the Syndic data that there are four jump points in this star system. The one we’re already at, and these two way over on the other side of the star system, and this one.” He highlighted it.

“Close,” Tulev said. “Close enough to reach?”

“The alien hypernet gate is eleven light hours from us. The closest alien warships are one light hour away. Even if the aliens can instantaneously send messages and react, that gives us twelve hours.”

“That jump point is two point four light hours distant,” Badaya observed. “We’ll have to accelerate, but if we sprint up past point two light speed to the best velocity the auxiliaries could manage in that time, we could make it in almost twelve hours. There’d still be, hmm . . .” He ran some numbers. “Even if all ships attain optimal acceleration, there’d be a twenty-minute window in which we could be caught by the explosion of the hypernet gate.”

“Twenty minutes?” Captain Parr asked. “If we got caught in that blast, we’d be destroyed for certain. It’s a hell of a gamble. What are we waiting for?”

Geary smiled as the other officers signaled agreement with Parr’s sentiments. The thought of what would happen if the fleet was caught by the explosion of the hypernet gate chilled him, but he hadn’t expected to have much trouble getting them to agree to even a venture as dangerous as this would be. Rione, sitting silently, gave him a knowing look. She knew as well as he how this fleet thought. “Before we go,” Geary added, “our group of experts on nonhuman intelligent species”—he hoped he hadn’t sounded sarcastic—“has been analyzing what we’ve seen here so far and adding it to what was known before about the enigma race. They’d like to present a theory to us.”

A sort of sigh ran around the table, as if a group of college students had just been told they would have to listen to a boring lecture. “Let’s get it over with,” someone mumbled.

Geary keyed in the commands that brought several of the civilian experts suddenly to the table, all of them appearing in a small group. Dr. Setin stood up, his expression eager. “We can’t thank you all enough for this opportunity. It’s very dangerous to speculate too much on too little information, but my colleague Dr. Shwartz has come up with an interesting perspective that we think you’ll find very intriguing.”

Shwartz stood up as Setin sat down. She peered around the table, brushing a wisp of her short, dark hair aside, then she unexpectedly smiled. “Forgive me. Like my coworkers in this field, I’m not used to anyone paying much attention to our theories. This is a very unusual experience.”