●II●
Midnight came midday with the curse of God.
Mountains took flame and valleys were clawed
By talons of fire and fountains of stone
As children died in the darkness alone
When light disappeared and Home was crushed
In floodtides of death and a torrent of dust.
Tumult, destruction, devastation, and fear.
And out of the darkness, silence.
— The Dark Fall Saga[/b].
* * * * * * * * *
PNS [i]Pilgrim
J-156-18(L) System
September, 1882 Post Disapora
“Ready to proceed, Sir.”
“Very good.”
Captain Thoreau acknowledged Engineering’s report, sat back in his command chair, and gazed around his light cruiser’s orderly bridge. It was just as neat, its personnel just as intent and focused, as always, yet he could almost taste the suppressed excitement humming about him, and he hid a smile of his own. It wasn’t often that someone with no Legislaturalist connections landed a plum like this one.
“Doctor Rendova?” he said.
“Ready whenever you are, Captain,” Doctor Danielle Rendova replied.
The brown-haired hyper-physicist sat surrounded by the additional instrumentation which had been installed on Pilgrim’s bridge. The light cruiser’s sensor suite had already been excellent —the Pathfinder-class had been designed from the keel out for survey work — but it had been beefed up for her current mission, and those additional sensors reported to Rendova’s consoles.
She’d done quite a lot of that beefing herself. Well, she and her graduate-student assistants. It was unfortunately true that the Peoples Navy wasn’t oversupplied with hyper-physicists. For that matter the People’s Republic as a whole wasn’t oversupplied with any sort of trained scientists. Its educational system didn’t produce a lot of those. Rendova – thank God — was the exception that proved the rule, and she knew it. She came from a powerful Legislaturalist family, but her frustration with the schools which had produced her almost despite themselves was apparent.
“You heard the Doctor, Lieutenant Zagorski,” Thoreau told his astrogator. “Are the transit vectors locked in?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“In that case,” Thoreau waggled his fingers at the maneuvering plot, “I believe we might want to get a move on.”
“Yes, Sir!” the lieutenant said with a huge smile and turned to his helmsman.
“Eight gravities, Chief.”
“Eight gravities on Astro’s programmed heading, aye, Sir,” Chief Coxswain Clouseau acknowledged, and Thoreau looked at the quadrant of his com display dedicated to Engineering.
“Prepare to rig foresail for transit on my mark, Ms. Glaston.”
“Standing by, Sir,” Commander Sarah Glaston replied formally.
“Threshold in one-five seconds,” Zagorski reported.
“On your toes, Chief,” Thoreau said quietly.
“Yes, Sir.”
Clouseau never took her eyes from her own displays as Pilgrim slid gently across the threshold of the unexplored hyper terminus. The survey ship tracked directly down the path Zagorski had programmed, based on Rendova’s painstaking survey of the torrent of gravitic energy cascading through the wormhole. If everything went as planned, Clouseau should have nothing to do until Pilgrim emerged on the far side of the terminus . . . wherever that might be. If things didn’t go as planned, she was about to find herself extraordinarily busy.
Briefly, at least.
“Threshold!” Zagorski’s tone was calm but more than a little crisper than usual.
“Rig foresail for transit,” Thoreau said.
“Rigging foresail,” Glaston responded instantly, and half Pilgrim’s impeller wedge vanished as her forward Beta nodes shut down. Her forward Alpha nodes reconfigured in the same instant, dropping their own share of the cruiser’s impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail — a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, three hundred kilometers in diameter — instead.
“Stand by after hypersail.” Thoreau watched the flickering numerals in the Engineering window of his plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone, inserting the foresail gently — gently — into the gravitational vortex.
“Standing by after hypersail,” Glaston said, and Thoreau knew she was watching the same numbers climb on her own displays as the sail moved deeper into the terminus. The rate of increase was slow, given the absurdly low speed of any first-transit through an uncharted terminus, but catching it at the right moment was still —
The numbers stopped flickering. The values kept climbing, but the digital display’s steady glow indicated the foresail was drawing enough power from the grav waves twisting eternally through the terminus to provide movement.
“Rig aftersail,” Thoreau said crisply.
“Rigging aftersail,” Glaston acknowledged, and Pilgrim shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail blossomed at the far end of her hull.
Chief Clouseau’s hands were calm and steady, but Thoreau’s stomach still twisted itself into a brief knot as the cruiser slid into the terminus’ interface. The queasiness always associated with crossing the hyper wall was substantially more intense in a wormhole transit. It was also briefer, however, and he ignored it, never looking away from his plot. The waterfall display along its right side rose sharply, climbing towards the transit point. It took longer than any wormhole transit Thoreau had ever before made, which wasn’t a good thing where the nausea quotient was concerned. On the other hand, it seemed to be tracking exactly along Doctor Rendova’s projected vector, and he could stand quite a bit of tummy upset as long as —
The universe hiccuped.
No one had ever been able to measure a wormhole transit’s duration, and this one was no different. One instant, PNS Pilgrim was just over five light-hours from the thoroughly useless red dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L). The next instant she was . . . somewhere else.
“I have a G4 star at three-niner-point-seven-five light-minutes!” one of Rendova’s assistants sang out.
Thoreau exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, but he never looked away from his plot as the numbers began spiraling downward once again.
“Prepare to reconfigure to wedge, Commander Glaston,” he said, then glanced at Zagorski. “And while we’re doing that, Astro, why don’t you start your observations. I think we should find out where we are, don’t you?”
The Octagon
City of Nouveau Paris
Haven System
People’s Republic of Haven
December, 1882 PD
“You’re kidding me, right?” Vice Admiral Amos Parnell said.
“I wish I was.” Admiral Adelaide Laforge grimaced sourly. “Unfortunately, Rousseau ‘s serious, and Harris has signed off on it.” She shrugged. “End of story.”
