First Casualty (23 page)

And Ray learned that not all trade between planets went through customs. No surprise; everyone bought wine, whiskey, perfumes, silks, and vids with custom seals that would not stand scrutiny. This was the frontier. Thumbing your nose at Earth's laws was a duty solemnly observed by all. But entire factories!

“It can be done. Best by skipping the usual ports.”

“Dad, I'm a jump pilot. You come through a jump hole, you better stop at the nearest station and clear customs.”

“If you come through the usual jump points. Others are not so closely watched.”

Rita sat back to munch, her sandwich. Ray was no longer hungry. “Corporations, like armies, take inventory seriously. I can not lose a rifle or rocket. I can't imagine a corporation that takes no notice when an expensive plant vanishes.”

“Not a plant,” Ernest agreed, “but scrap metal, ah, that is another matter. Upgrade, improve, replace is the lifeblood of business. If you do not improve productivity, you are out of business. And what do you do with the inefficient machines?”

“Sell them to someone less efficient,” Ray said slowly.

“Yes, Major. If you are great Earth or one of her seven sisters, you sell off to one of the newer forty. But the forty developed planets are the end of the line. We frontier planets do not exist. No, on Pitt's Hope, the end of the line is worthless scrap, worth a few pennies a pound.”

“But...” Ray kept the door open. Ernest slowly turned around, his eyes on his watch. Ray hadn't heard that anti-listening devices could be fitted into a watch case. Then again, he was learning a lot today.

Ernest turned back to them, a grin on his face. He tapped the watch. “From a friend on Pitt's Hope. Very versatile. If you know the right people, you can get anything. Scrap metal, for example. A check for a few pennies a pound from a legitimate scrap dealer. A second check of equal value on another account to the right person, and look what you have!” His arms stretched out, taking in his domain like a proud king.

“But how do you get it here, Dad?” Rita's sandwich was down.

“Pitt's Hope is easy. Two jumps, one hardly noticed, the other hardly known but to a few smugglers.”

Ray and Rita looked at each other. Her eyes were wide.

“Dad, it's seven jumps to Pitt's Hope. It's four even by the shortcut through ELM what's-its-number.”

“You don't know all the jump points.”

“Dad, I've jumped into ELM. There are two jumps. We got one, they got the other.”

Ernest glanced at his watch. “There is a third.”

And it came to Ray why that hunk of rock was worth all the blood that had been and would be paid for it. It was not the jumping-off point to seize a fully developed planet. Earth had them by the dozen. No, it was the last line of defense between the Earthies and Wardhaven, one of the few planets the frontier had making ships and the heavy equipment war ate so voraciously.

Unity knew this. Had Earth learned yet?

* * * *

As Mattim left the wardroom, Sandy fell in step with him, a half dozen middies behind her. “We need another test jump.”

“What's up?”

“Velocity, sir.” One of the middies stepped on Sandy's line just as her mouth opened.

“All right, Chandra, you tell the captain.”

“Sorry, ma'am, but look at it. We hit that first jump point racing like a tiger. We went thirty thousand light-years. We tapped the same jump at a walk, and only go fifty light-years. At a crawl, we went even less. The more energy you have, the farther you go. We need some high-energy test jumps to see if it's acceleration or velocity.”

Mattim saw the point; testing would eat time. “Sandy?”

“That seems to be what we're learning, Matt. Speed never made a difference, but every jump point has a maximum posted speed. You don't exceed it, and no one makes money going slower. Damn, I wish we knew what we were doing, not just flopping around in the dark. But we ought to try some more test runs.”

Five days later, they headed into the jump with the same spin, velocity, and lateral displacement as on the sour jump. The stars looked familiar to Mattim as they exited, but not enough to say anything. While the bridge waited silently for Sandy and her team to do their search, Thor said, “It's a single star system.”

Sandy did her numbers, shushed a middie before he said something, then spent five minutes rechecking all the numbers again. “We're about one hundred light-years from Pitt's Hope.”

“I've found two, maybe three jump points,” a middie chirped in. “Maybe one of them will take us home.”

Mattim shook his head. “We know one jump point took us there and will take us back. We are not going to go chasing down every blind alley. Thor, turn us around and head us back.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Well, at least we know speed or acceleration does have something to do with reach,” Sandy sighed.

“Sir, would you please come look at this?” The speaker was Zappa, the guard, now midshipman, who'd started the whole crazy process with her offer to run tests for Mattim.

“The text book says the jump is instantaneous, right?”

“That's the way it's always looked to me,” Sandy agreed.

“For proof,” Zappa went on, “they offered the behavior of the atom lasers that keep the ship stable and spot jump point gravity fluctuations. They don't show any change, right?”

“Right.” Sandy nodded.

“I always wondered. Nobody's done any high-speed data recovery on the gyros recently.” Zappa smiled. “Everybody knows.” Mattim wondered if he'd put up with a boy doing this slow routine on him. Zappa was cute as a button; he kept listening.

“We hitched a computer to one gyro. Next couple of jumps didn't do much; the digital readout kept missing the moment of jump. We changed to analog this jump so we could choose just what point we wanted. Look at this.” The film's elapsed time in the corner was measured in nanoseconds. One showed the usual screen. The next showed a wavering. The third was all over the place. By the fifth shot, everything was back to normal.

“Does it usually do that?” Mattim asked.

“No,” Sandy answered slowly, pulling on her ear.

“Might be why I felt dizziness on the slow-speed jump.”

Zappa reran the five shots. “There's another question, sir, ma'am. Near graduation, what with a war coming on, the profs had us do some practical stuff, things that might help us land a safe job in a wartime economy. I tested explosives. They didn't come out right.” Mattim raised an eyebrow.

“Explosives should expand equally in all directions. That's what the manufacturers advertise. Mine didn't. It wasn't mixed properly, so it didn't explode evenly. Did the missile that missed us before we jumped explode evenly, or did its shrapnel hit us unevenly? What did it do to our spin?”

Mattim mashed the comm link at Sandy's station. “Guns, pull up those pictures from just before we jumped. Enhance them all you have to, but tell me exactly what our spin was.”

He turned to Thor. “Hold us at a gee and a half. Turn us around fast. We're going back through the jump. This time don't bother with lateral displacement, just spin and velocity.”

“Yes sir.”

Two days later they were back to the four-star system. It took another two days to get turned around. The explosion had changed their rotation. The tiny fraction of one percent spin had been a bear to hunt down. Still, it had been there, and they added it as they approached the jump. The stars twinkled, then changed.

“Two suns,” Thor shouted.

A moment later Sandy confirmed, “We're home.”

“Comm,” Mattim ordered, “get me the watch at Ninety-seventh Brigade.”

“Got them, sir.”

“Ninety-seventh Brigade, this is the
Sheffield
. Are there any colonial warships in system?”

“Hey,” came a surprised voice, “we lost the
Sheffield
a couple of battles back. Who are you? Uh, code Delta Alpha, one three seven. Respond.”

Mattim looked at Ding*. She glanced at the quartermaster of the watch. “We got any answer to that challenge?”

“No, ma'am.”

The exec raised an eyebrow. “You're on your own, Captain.”

“Ninety-seventh Brigade, this is
Sheffield
. We are not lost, just misplaced. Helm, begin a three-gee deceleration. Ninety-seventh, do you have a science officer of some kind?”

“Commander Miller on sensors was a college professor.”

“Please patch me through to him.”

“I shouldn't, but the longer you talk, the better targeting fix we get. It's your funeral.”

“Commander Miller here,” a woman's voice said.

“Commander, this is Captain Abeeb of the cruiser
Sheffield
. We sour-jumped thirty thousand light-years. It's taken us this long to get back. We have several new theories about how jumps work. Before we risk a jump to Pitt's Hope, I'd like to download them to you.”

“I imagine you would, colonial, but I don't want to crash our system nearly as much as you do.”

“Miller, all our codes are a month old. If you'll give us some calls that we can answer, we will.”

“And since New Canton was raped two weeks ago, you colonials got plenty of codes to answer with. Still no takers, you Unity bastard.”

Mattim glanced at Ding; apparently the war had taken a bitter turn since they left. He took a deep breath. “By now, you know it was Beta jump we used. I can convert our data dump into encapsulated packets. What's in them stays in them. Load them to a stand-alone computer and bring it up with no network attachment. It can't crash what it's not hooked to.”

Before any answer could come back, Mattim found Midshipman Zappa at his elbow. “Are you professor Elaine Miller? I studied under Professor Uxbridge at Nuevo Madrid University. He still speaks of you as his best student.”

“So how's Gimpy getting around? Does that beer belly still look like he's ten months pregnant?”

Zappa eyed the mike like she might a snake. “He's thin as a rail and jogs. Are you thinking of someone else?”

“Nope, and you do know the old prune. Captain, what is this data you want to send me so much?”

“I'd rather not go too deeply into it on voice. We've put it in our highest code. Is it enough to repeat that we've been halfway across the galaxy and are back?”

“The first ship back from a sour jump” came in awe from the speaker. “Yes. Yes, I do want that data! Send me your first packet. If it causes us any trouble, I swear . . .”

“It won't.”

Twelve hours later, the
Sheffield
had killed all its momentum and was heading back for the jump point when Commander Miller came back. “Sweet God, I can't believe it. This worked?”

“We're here.”

“Yes. Hey, is there any chance you could come down here? I'd love to go over this data with your specialist. What are you doing with a team of scientists on a combat cruise anyway?”

Mattim explained their brain trust.

“Jesus, this war is a waste. On second thought, when would a bunch of kids get a chance to cut loose and show what they can do in a situation like that? You lucky bunch.”

“We weren't so sure of our luck after three bum jumps.”

“Well, say hello to the new admiral. She's a real scrapper.”

“We got a new admiral?”

“We're on our fourth.”

“That bad?”

“Up there and down here both.”

The
Sheffield
jumped, ship steady as a rock, and moving at only a few klicks a second. Pitt's Hope never looked so good. ,

* * * *

Every jump point has a navigation buoy. It would go through before a ship did, announcing its pending arrival, avoiding a collision in space. Many buoys had a second duty, transferring speed-of-light messages from one side of a hole to the next side.

In wartime, buoys became listening stations.

The buoy at Alpha jump had acquired additional antennas, a faster computer, and more storage. The struggling colonial troops on the rock called it to order supplies. Intercepted messages among the Earthies were passed to it. Only very high-priority messages could cause the buoy to make a trip through the jump before it had filled its storage. The code the Earthie cruiser used raised a flag.

The buoy slipped through the jump, transmitted the contents of its storage to the next buoy, and then returned. The message passed from one buoy to another several times, each time its code raising a flag. Emotional surprise was not registered until a human downloaded the message on Wardhaven. “This must be a beauty. Let's see if any of the codes from New Canton like it.”

One did.

The technician knew a lot about communication protocols and a bit about the theory behind the codes he used. The rest of his education stopped at middle school. Still, what he saw made him whistle. “Worlds as numberless as the stars. Hey, Senior Tech, know anyplace I could get my hands on a ship?”

“They're either on guard or in the yard. Why?”