The Lost Fleet – Dauntless

“No. The only reason someone will go to them now is if they have personal reasons or because the system has something special. But if the system does have something special, it’ll be on the hypernet.”

He had a vision of many broken branches withering away even as the main tree flourished. “What’s happened to them?”

She shrugged. “Some have put their resources into trying to get hypernet gates, but few have succeeded. Some have tried to make themselves special in some way so others would lobby for a gate for them. Again, few have managed that. Most were never that wealthy to begin with and have been slowly declining as trade bypasses them and they lose touch with technological and cultural developments being shared through the hypernet. The best and brightest people from such systems always seek to emigrate to hypernet-linked systems as well, of course.”

“I see.” A bit like me. Isolated and increasingly outdated. Bypassed by the hypernet and by history. I wonder how some of these Syndic systems will react when I bring the Alliance fleet through? At least they’ll be part of history again.

We’ll exit jump at Corvus in another week and find out just how that system has fared since being bypassed by the Syndic hypernet. I’d better work on my speech to the ship commanders, and keep praying that the Syndic plan wasn’t devious enough to include setting a trap inside Corvus for any Alliance ships that managed to jump out of their home system.

FOUR

THE star known to humanity as Corvus glowed like a tiny, bright coin against the star-dappled black of normal space as the Alliance fleet leaped out of jump. Geary, trying hard not to show how tense he was, looked down toward his armchair controls and saw his hand gripping the chair so tightly his fingers were white. He took a deep breath and stared at the display, willing it to produce the information he needed.

“No mines,” Captain Desjani reported.

Geary just nodded. If there had been a minefield laid at the jump point exit they’d have already found it the hard way. But he’d felt safe in gambling that there wouldn’t be mines here. Even when system jump drives had been the only way to get from star to star, there hadn’t been many jump points guarded by minefields because they were as much a hazard to friendly shipping jumping back into normal space as they were to enemies. Deep inside Syndic territory, or Alliance territory for that matter, resources never would’ve been wasted on deploying and maintaining minefields.

Which was the only nice thing Geary could think of about being trapped so deep inside Syndic territory.

“No nearby shipping detected on initial scans,” a watch-stander reported.

Geary nodded again. The report didn’t mean much. They’d exited the jump point about a billion kilometers from Corvus, but Geary had long ago stopped thinking in terms of kilometers when it came to space navigation. Instead, he paid attention to the light-distance readout that reported they were eight and a half light-hours from the star. If the very old records they were relying on had been accurate, the main inhabited world orbiting Corvus was about 1.2 light-hours from its star. That meant whatever the fleet’s sensors were now seeing and analyzing around that world was a picture well over seven hours old.

Aside from that single habitable world, Corvus boasted only three other satellites worthy of the name planet. One was a battered rock in a slightly eccentric orbit less than a light hour from the star, another a gas giant about six light-hours out, and farthest out a frozen snowball of a world, the orbit of which had it not much more than a half light-hour away from the jump point. Which meant that frozen world was also about a half light-hour away from the Alliance fleet.

“Captain Desjani.” She turned to look at him. “It used to be routine for the Syndics to maintain defensive bases near jump points. The same sort of thing we did. I understand the Syndics have kept a lot of those bases active.”

Desjani scowled. “We always assume the old bases remain active. If a hypernet gate is built, that gets new defenses. But for stars without hypernet, Alliance policy has been that if defensive bases are to be kept in-system, then it’s not worth the cost of moving them. The Syndics seem to have followed the same policy.”

“That makes sense. Why waste money? The question is whether they’ll have bothered with maintaining a base this far inside their territory.” Geary rubbed his forehead, watching the display where a slowly expanding sphere around the fleet’s ships marked the area where something like a real-time picture could be established. The sphere still looked ridiculously small against the size of the star system they were invading. Fortunately, it would soon cover the orbit of the frozen world. “That means if they still have a base here, it’ll be there,” he added out loud.