Dreadnaught

He listened, feeling growing discomfort, as the new rulers of Atalia fell over themselves offering greetings to the fleet in general and to Admiral Geary in particular. It was glaringly obvious that they feared him, they needed him, they wanted the protection of the fleet he commanded against their former Syndicate masters, and the barely concealed pleas from them left Geary unhappy. I’m not the master of this fleet. Ultimate authority rests with my government. Don’t they understand that? I can’t do what they want, what they need. The Alliance has a courier ship here, and, while that in itself offers no defense capability, it is a symbol of the Alliance’s interest here. Or at least the Alliance’s interest in knowing what happens here. That might not be much of a deterrent, but it’s something.

After several hours of postponing a reply, he sent another message, telling the rulers of Atalia that his fleet was proceeding on a mission elsewhere, and that their requests for further assistance would be passed to the Alliance government. Next time I guess I should let the emissaries talk to the Syndics, or used-to-be Syndics.

Aside from some wishes for a safe journey and swift return sent in answer to Geary’s last message, nothing else of note happened for the rest of the transit. The jump for Kalixa brought a different kind of dread, a reluctance to view that ruined star system again. He wondered if it would be easier to see it the second time.

It wasn’t.

The exit from jump at Kalixa still felt curiously abrupt, as if the impact of the hypernet gate’s collapse there had strained even the structure of space itself. A few moments’ observation confirmed that the star’s intensity continued to fluctuate rapidly. The storms had subsided a bit in the thin atmosphere, which was all the formerly inhabited world had left, but that just made it easier to see the lifeless and almost waterless landscape. Men and women on the bridge of Dauntless muttered prayers to themselves as they gazed on the destruction, and Geary believed crews were doing the same on every ship in the fleet.

He ramped the fleet up to point two light speed through Kalixa, cutting the amount of time spent there in half. It cost in fuel cell usage, but the benefit to morale was worth it.

Indras hadn’t offered any problems the last time the fleet had been through there, and as long as its hypernet gate was still in existence, the fleet wouldn’t linger at that star. “Do you think we should try out one of the copies of the Syndic hypernet key?” The original key aboard Dauntless had been painstakingly reproduced, but only a few copies were still available when the fleet had left. One had been installed on Warspite and the second on Leviathan.

Desjani shrugged. “If you want. The copies should work fine. But I’d advise against it.”

“Because?”

“The Syndics should be able to tell which ship used a key at the gate. They already know about the key on Dauntless. Keeping them in the dark about which other ships now have keys might be a good idea.”

He nodded in agreement. There might formally be peace at present, but trust would be a very long time in coming.

INDRAS and Hasadan had once been military objectives, enemy star systems to be attacked. Now they were simply waypoints, occupied by former enemies who could only watch the Alliance warships passing through their star systems. The hypernet transit from Indras to Hasadan was . . . boring, Geary decided. Jump space felt like a place even though it was a place with nothing there but the mysterious lights, which gave it a sense of being occupied by something unknown and perhaps unknowable to humans. A place humans didn’t belong, and felt increasingly uncomfortable being in the longer they were in jump space.

But for a ship conducting a hypernet transit, there was only an absence of everything, the feeling that the ship was nowhere, something Captain Cresida had once painstakingly tried to explain to him might be literally true. Our best theory is that as far as the outside universe is concerned, ships inside a hypernet have been transformed into probability waves that don’t really occupy any point. They really were nowhere.