Dreadnaught

“Lieutenant Yuon,” Desjani replied, “if Master Chief Gioninni were in the escape pod with us, he’d somehow trick the rest of us into getting eaten until he and any remaining survivors sailed grandly into some safe harbor, perhaps a world where Gioninni would convince the inhabitants to make him their ruler for life.”

Geary was watching his fleet now, sparing only quick glances for the alien hypernet gate, which still showed no signs of beginning to collapse. None of the ships were lagging anymore, every one matching pace with the others. Two minutes remaining. The fleet would jump automatically when the maneuvering systems detected that it was in position, so he didn’t even have to order the jump this time, which might have cost a few extra, critical seconds.

“One minute to jump,” the maneuvering watch said.

“It takes the gates more than a minute to collapse,” Desjani said, “and we haven’t seen it start. We’re clear.”

“Yes,” Geary agreed. “We are.” He tapped his controls. “All units, the aliens may be using their faster-than-light comm capability to muster forces at Alihi. Be ready for a fight when we exit jump.”

Forty seconds later, the fleet jumped for Alihi.

Desjani sighed and stood up as the gray of jump space replaced the alien threat at Hina. “I’m tired, and for some reason I’m hungry. I’m going to get something to eat.” She leaned closer to Geary. “Next time you come up with something to distract everyone.”

“I won’t be able to equal you.”

“No, but you can do your best, Admiral.” With that parting shot, Desjani left the bridge.

JUMP space always tended to make humans uncomfortable. Humans didn’t belong in jump space. Maybe nothing really belonged there. Maybe the strange lights that came and went were reflections of something happening somewhere else. At some level beneath conscious thought, humans could never be at home in jump space, growing more irritable with every consecutive day spent there.

But whatever was bothering Geary during this jump to Alihi felt different from the usual jump jitters. Something that Desjani had said kept coming back, like a shadow half-glimpsed repeatedly. If you’ve got a knife . . . Why did the idea of the aliens wielding knives trouble him so?

Normal communications were impossible in jump, but between the time he had fought his battle at Grendel a century ago and when he had been found still alive in survival sleep, humanity had figured out how to send brief, simple messages between ships. On the fourth day of the jump, barely eight hours from exit at Alihi, a message came from Mistral for Geary.

Geary read it over again slowly, despite its necessary brevity. Regarding aliens—Watch your back. Lagemann.

He had asked Desjani to come down to his stateroom to look at it and talk about it, and now she frowned in puzzlement. “We know the aliens can’t be trusted. Is that all he’s saying?”

“I don’t think so. He and his fellows are supposed to be trying to guess how the aliens will fight.”

“This sounds more like a warning against a stab in the back.”

“What?” Geary whirled to stare at her.

She switched the puzzlement to his reaction. “I said it sounds more like a warning against them trying to stab us in the back.”

“A knife. In the back.”

“I wasn’t speaking literally.”

Geary made a fist and rapped it against the side of his head. “Damn! That’s what it means! That’s what’s been bothering me!” He called up a display showing the Alihi star system, or at least what that star system had looked like when the Syndics had outposts there. “They strike from hiding. From ambush. If your worms aren’t working anymore to conceal you from enemy sensors, where can you hide in a star system?”

Desjani shrugged. “Behind the star. Behind a planet or moon.”

“Behind a jump exit?”

“No!” She stabbed a finger at the display. “You’re talking about an ambush force positioned behind a jump exit to catch an arriving force in the rear? It doesn’t work. It can’t work. The physics are against you.”

“Why?” Geary asked.

“Because, one, you don’t know if or when someone is arriving at a jump exit. It’s hard to maintain a position close to one and even harder right behind one. You’re going to do that for days, weeks, months? Two, whoever shows up is heading out of the exit, away from you, at up to point one light speed. You’re starting from a dead stop relative to them, so you need to accelerate into a stern chase. Maybe you can catch them, but it’ll take a while. While they watch you coming. That’s not exactly a surprise.”

Geary nodded. “Those are the same reasons why we never planned for ambushes like that a century ago. But what if you have faster-than-light communications?”

She paused. “Someone at the star you left could tell someone at the star you were going to that you were coming.”

“And they’d know pretty accurately when you’d appear because jump physics are consistent. If you enter jump at x time here en route there, the journey will take y time.”