"The next jump will take us into the system," Hammett said. "We'll still be a good hundred million kilometers from the Gate, so if the enemy is there, the odds of being spotted before we have time to bug out is infinitesimal. Nevertheless, we shall be ready."
He looked around the bridge. It was a much different place than it had been three weeks before. The telephones had proper handsets now, banana-shaped plastic handles with an earpiece on one end and a mouthpiece on the other, and they hung from the bulkheads on clips, or sat in cradles at bridge stations. The deck was clear of cables. The wires now ran under deck plates or made tidy patterns across bulkheads.
The system had built-in redundancies now. Breckenridge and his Baffin technicians had installed two relay stations, compartments with dozens of telephones and a patch panel, with a handful of crew standing by. Every key location on the ship was connected to the bridge by at least two routes. If a wire was cut, the relay crews could create a secondary connection in moments.
"Get me the shuttle bay," Hammett said. "I want to talk to Lieutenant Kasim."
Along the bulkhead a cadet named Sadiq nodded and lifted a phone to her ear. He was getting much better with names, mostly because he'd instituted a change to uniforms. There were too many cadets, and too many civilians working alongside them, for anyone to keep track, and he didn't want communication slowed by people stumbling over names. Now everyone, including himself, wore a strip of tape on their chest with their name in block letters.
"I've got him, Sir," Sadiq said, and he crossed the bridge to take her phone.
"Lieutenant Kasim. I want you to take the
Falcon
out for a test flight." The
Falcon
was the runabout from Baffin, now gutted and refitted with entirely manual controls. Breckenridge had made it his pet project, working day and night for a week and a half. Kasim and a handful of technicians, some from Baffin and some from the
Alexander
, had worked with him. Now they were stripping a shuttle and giving it the same modifications, but so far only the
Falcon
was spaceworthy.
Probably. As the ship jumped again and again they hadn't taken the time for a test flight.
"We'll be doing practice maneuvers," Hammett told him. "Make sure you signal the ship before you come back in." There wasn't a single working radio on the
Alexander
, so they had fitted the
Falcon
with signal lights. There were more signal lights in the shuttle bay to let him know it was safe to land.
"Aye aye, Sir," Kasim said, sounding cheerful. "I'll put her through her paces."
For the next hour the
Alexander
played tag with a comet. They swept in close to the flying snowball, matched velocities, then flew away. They raced past, almost close enough to touch the comet, then drifted in slowly, seeing how close they could come. Finally they parked a hundred kilometers off and tore the thing up with rail gun rounds.
"The new slugs are working fine," DeMarco reported. They had brought a small fabricator up from Baffin before abandoning the station. The machine had nowhere near the versatility of the big Level III replicator they'd left on Kukulcan, but it was adequate for making simple things like telephone handsets and control equipment for the
Falcon
. Solid rail gun slugs were no problem at all.
"The
Falcon
is coming in for a landing," Sadiq said. "Lieutenant Dixon requests that we maintain our position."
Hammett glanced at Cartwright, who nodded.
"Sound General Quarters again," Hammett ordered. Technically there were still at General Quarters, but the crew would have relaxed their vigilance somewhat. This would warn them that the
Alexander
was about to make its final jump.
"Spotters report no activity in the system," Cartwright said. "For what that's worth." They were a good light month from New Avalon. They would see nothing unless the aliens had been in the system for a long time.
"I guess we'll know shortly if they're waiting for us," Hammett said. He looked at Sadiq.
"The
Falcon
's back on board," she reported.
"Bring us about, if you please, Ms. Cartwright." Hammett waited as she spoke into three different telephones. "Ask Lieutenant Rani to jump us as soon as we're lined up."
Cartwright spent a minute or so getting the ship aligned with the nearby star, then announced, "We've jumped."
Cadets began chiming in with reports from the telescopes in various lounges and windowed compartments. The Gate was visible and looked intact. No other shipping was in sight.
Then the report he'd been dreading came through. A cadet named Murphy looked at Hammett with wide, alarmed eyes and said, "Several ships spotted near the Gate."
Aw, hell.
He didn't speak, just waited.
"At least five craft," Murphy said. "She says it's hard to count them at this range. They're stationary. No indication we've been spotted." There was a long, tense silence. "She can't be certain," Murphy said at last, "but it looks like the enemy."
For a moment Hammett clung to the idea that it could be Navy ships keeping watch on the Gate. The
Alexander
had no way to pick up transponders, after all. But every Spacecom vessel had a distinct profile. If the
Alexander
was close enough for the spotters to see the Gate, they were close enough to recognize military craft.
He sighed. "Lieutenant DiMarco."
The weapons officer looked up from his console.
"I'll need you to go to the missile bay and prepare me a nuke. It'll have to explode on impact. Where are you at with the guidance system?"
DiMarco had spent much of the last two weeks taking apart a missile guidance system, testing the components one at a time, and using the fabricator to replace what couldn't be salvaged. "I'm pretty confident," DiMarco said. "All the essential code is burned in. I'll have to be close when I launch it, though."
"Works for me," Hammett said. "How close do you need to be?"
"The closer the better. A couple of hundred kilometers would be great, but I know you're not taking us that close. Anything less than a hundred thousand should be fine." He considered. "The thing is, I know pretty much what the orbit of the Gate is. I could hit it from anywhere close to the planet, if we were in an equatorial orbit at a similar altitude."
Hammett nodded. "We should be able to manage that." He turned to Cartwright. "Bring us around, Ms. Cartwright. I want you to jump us pretty close to the planet."
She gave him a dubious look. "How close, Sir? Our range is pretty much an educated guess right now."
"We won't jump straight at the planet," he said. "I want to pop out on the far side of the planet from the Gate."
She nodded. "Okay, no collision risk, then."
"I want the planet between us and the Gate," Hammett told her. "That's the only place we've seen the enemy so far."
Cartwright closed her eyes, her lips moving as she did calculations in her head. When she opened her eyes there was a worried line between her eyebrows. "I can't guarantee anything, Sir. You would think an entire planet would be a big enough target, but at this range …"
"I understand. Just do the best you can."
She nodded and reached for a telephone.
The star known as New Avalon had extensive bands of asteroids and just one planet. The planet, an airless ball of rock orbiting far outside the Goldilocks zone, was unfortunately also known as New Avalon. It had been a source of endless confusion for decades. Gate Eight orbited New Avalon (the planet).
For many years the planet had been home to a vast mining operation, with a steady flow of cargo ships and personnel carriers going back and forth through the Gate. The mines had been abandoned long since, and there was no longer a human presence in the system. Hammett was grateful for that much. He wouldn't have to worry about any more civilians.
"Do you think it's happenstance?" said Carruthers.
Hammett raised an eyebrow.
"The aliens being here, I mean. It proves they don't need the Gates, doesn't it?" He grimaced. "Unless it means they've already conquered the Earth, and they came through the other way."
Hammett decided to ignore that idea. "It could be coincidence. Maybe they're spreading through the whole galaxy. Popping up everywhere." It was an unpleasant thought.
"Maybe they're following us." Carruthers rubbed his jaw. "Maybe they can track wormholes."
Cartwright set down a telephone. "They wouldn't need to. We were in view of alien ships when we jumped out of Deirdre. We were pointing straight at New Avalon when we jumped." She made a face. "I should know. I handled the maneuvers."
"New policy," Hammett told her. "When we leave here, we jump in a random direction. Then we turn and aim for Earth."
Cartwright nodded. "We're lined up for the next jump."
"You're getting faster," Hammett said, and she smiled. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the wormhole generator to cycle. Somewhere just ahead of the ship a ball of energy was forming, contained within a perfect sphere generated by force fields. The sphere would grow smaller and smaller, condensing that ball of energy into a point smaller than an atom. Eventually it would reach a critical threshold and a wormhole would open, sucking the
Alexander
through in the blink of an eye.
Hammett had cornered Rani and demanded to know why a process as complex as wormhole generation could still function when even simple timepieces no longer worked. She had shrugged and said, "Redundancy." The wormhole generator had the capacity to go utterly, disastrously wrong. Forward-thinking engineers had built endless layers of redundancy into the system. He didn't know what labors she'd gone through in the immediate aftermath of the first battle, but against all reasonable expectations the wormhole generator was working again.
The unmistakable sound of stomping feet came echoing in from the corridor beyond the bridge. Hammett looked up as Dalton Hornbeck came storming in. He was a small man, slender and not especially tall, but he seemed much bigger, transformed by outrage until he seemed to almost fill the bridge. He swept the compartment with a frosty eye, then fixed his gaze on Hammett. "Captain. I've been hearing wild rumors that you're planning to destroy yet another Gate."
Hammett sighed. "Yes, it's true. Now, this is my bridge, and—"
"You can't do it!" The administrator's arms came up in an agitated flapping motion. "It was the wrong choice back at Deirdre, and it's the wrong choice now. How many alien ships have you detected?"
The urge to simply throw him off the bridge was strong, but Hammett decided to be diplomatic. "Half a dozen."
"This ship has faced more of these aliens and survived!"
"It's not open for debate, Mr. Hornbeck."
"The Gate is right there!" Hornbeck pointed at the forward bulkhead. "We need to rush past these alien craft and jump through to Paradiso. From there we can be home in no time."
"It's too risky."
"Risky?" The man's voice was very nearly a screech. "And stranding us in deep space with hostile aliens isn't risky?"
"This isn't your station, Mr. Hornbeck." Hammett could feel his irritation rising. "It's the bridge of a warship. I'll need you to—"
"This is why the military need civilian oversight!" Hornbeck advanced on Hammett, one accusing finger raised like a weapon. "You're a lunatic, Hammett. You've been displaying criminally bad judgment ever since your arrival in Deirdre."
Hammett stood. "Now, look. I—"
Hornbeck stepped in close. "You can't keep making high-handed decisions that put everyone around you at risk. I won't stand for it, do you hear me? If you think you—" His finger jabbed toward Hammett's chest – and a hand closed around the administrator's wrist.
Hornbeck let out an indignant squawk and turned. Crabtree stood beside him, a dangerous glitter in his eyes. A twist of his elbow had Hornbeck's finger pointing at the ceiling. "Let's you and me have a chat in the corridor, shall we?"
"Let go of me, you oaf!"
Crabtree released him.
Hornbeck turned back to Hammett. "You can't be trusted to run this ship, you irresponsible—"
His tirade ended in a grunt of pain as Crabtree planted a fist in his stomach. Crabtree hardly seemed to move, but the punch had a devastating effect. Hornbeck sagged forward, his mouth hanging open. He would have dropped to his knees if Crabtree hadn't put a supporting arm around his shoulders. Crabtree marched him briskly to the hatch, then said, "Now, don't you come back until you're invited." A hard shove sent Hornbeck stumbling out of sight down the corridor.
Crabtree turned to face Hammett, planting his hands on his hips. He looked pleased with himself. "I beg your pardon for coming onto the bridge without permission, Sir. It seemed … expedient." He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the departed administrator. "Captains didn't have to put up with that sort of foolishness before the Corps was disbanded."