On Basilisk Station

world colony transports, private couriers and mail packets, warships of friendly powers—the volume of traffic was incredible, and avoiding collisions in normal space required unrelenting concentration by the controllers. The entire Junction was a sphere scarcely a light-second in diameter, and while that should have been plenty of space, each terminus had its own outbound and inbound vector. Transiting to the proper destination required that those vectors be adhered to very precisely indeed (especially when not even Junction Central knew exactly who might be inbound from where at any given moment), and that meant traffic was confined to extremely limited areas of the Junction's volume.

Chief Killian held Fearless's place in the outbound queue without further orders, and Honor punched up Engineering as they neared the departure beacon. Commander Santos appeared on her small com screen.

'Commander. Stand by to reconfigure to Warshawski sail on my command.'

'Aye, Ma'am. Standing by to reconfigure.'

Honor nodded, watching the freighter ahead of them drift further forward, hesitate for just an instant, and then blink out of visibility. The numeral on her maneuvering display changed to '1,' and she turned to Webster and quirked an eyebrow, waiting out the seconds until he nodded.

'We're cleared to transit, Ma'am,' he reported.

'Very good. Transmit my thanks to Junction Central,' she said, and looked back at Chief Killian. 'Take us in, Helm.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.'

Fearless drifted forward at a mere twenty gravities' acceleration, aligning herself perfectly on the invisible rails of the Junction, and Honor watched her display intently. Thank God for computers. If she'd had to work out the math for this sort of thing, she'd probably have cut her own throat years ago, but computers didn't mind if the person using them was a mathematical idiot. All they needed was the right input, and, unlike certain Academy instructors she could name, they didn't wait with exaggerated patience until they got it, either.

Fearless's light code flashed bright green as the cruiser settled into exact position, and Honor nodded to Santos.

'Rig foresail for transit.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now.'

No observer would have noted any visible change in the cruiser, but Honor's instrumentation told the tale as Fearless's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes no longer generated their portion of the normal space stress bands; instead, they had reconfigured to produce a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull. The Warshawski sail, useless in normal space, was the secret of hyper travel, and the Junction was simply a focused funnel of hyper space, like the eye of a hurricane frozen forever in normal space terms.

'Stand by to rig aftersail on my mark,' Honor murmured as Fearless continued to creep forward under the power of her aft-impellers alone. A new readout flickered to life, and she watched its numerals dance steadily upward as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. There was a safety margin of almost fifteen seconds either way, but no captain wanted to look sloppy in a maneuver like this, and—

The twinkling numbers crossed the threshold. The foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the tortured grav waves twisting eternally through the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply to Santos.

'Rig aftersail now,' she said crisply.

'Rigging aftersail,' the engineer replied, and Fearless twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail sprang to life at the far end of her hull from the first.

Honor watched Chief Killian closely, for the transition from impeller to sail was one of the trickier maneuvers a coxswain had to deal with, but the diminutive CPO didn't even blink. His hands and fingers moved with complete confidence, gentling the cruiser through the conversion with barely a quiver. She noted his competence with satisfaction, then turned her attention back to her maneuvering display as Fearless gathered still more forward way.

Killian held her rock-steady, and Honor blinked as the first, familiar wave of queasiness assailed her. Very few people ever really adjusted to the indescribable sensation of crossing the wall between n-space and hyper space, and it was worse in a junction transit, for the gradient was far steeper. By the same token, however, it was over sooner, she reminded herself, and concentrated on looking unbothered as the rippling nausea grew stronger.

The maneuvering display blinked again, and then, for an instant no chronometer or human sense could measure, HMS Fearless ceased to exist. One moment she was here, in Manticore space; the next she was there, six hundred light-minutes from the star named Basilisk, just over two hundred and ten light-years distant in Einsteinian space, and Honor swallowed in relief as her nausea vanished, disappearing with the transit energy radiating from Fearless's sails.

'Transit complete,' Chief Killian reported.

'Thank you, Helm. That was well executed,' Honor replied, but most of her attention was back on the sail interface readout, watching the numbers spiral downward even more rapidly than they had risen. 'Engineering, reconfigure to impeller.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reconfiguring to impeller now.'

Fearless folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward more rapidly, accelerating steadily down the Basilisk outbound traffic lane, and Honor gave an inner nod of satisfaction. Shiphandling was one of the very few areas in which she never questioned her own competence, and the routine maneuver had gone as smoothly as even she could have asked for. She hoped that might be a sign for the future.

The light codes were far sparser in the tactical display than they had been in Manticore, she noted. There were no fortifications at all, only a cluster of navigation buoys and the small (relatively speaking) bulk of Basilisk Traffic Control, almost lost in the clutter of merchantmen awaiting transit.

'Com, notify Basilisk Control of our arrival and request instructions.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Webster replied, and Honor leaned back and laid her forearms along the command chair's armrests. They were here. They'd hit rock bottom, for no less appealing assignment could have been devised, but perhaps she could turn that into an asset. Surely they had nowhere to go but up! And for all its indignity, Basilisk Station should give them time to put the disastrous maneuvers behind and settle down into the sort of ship's company she'd envisioned from the start.

She felt Nimitz's tail steal around her throat and hoped she wasn't just whistling in the dark.

'Message from Basilisk Control, Captain.'

Honor twitched herself up out of her thoughts and gestured for Webster to continue.

'We are instructed to proceed to Medusa orbit to rendezvous with the picket's senior officer aboard HMS Warlock, Ma'am.'

'Thank you.' Honor managed to keep any trace of derision out of her response, but Fearless had held her initial parking position two light-seconds from the terminus for almost forty minutes. In total, she'd been in Basilisk space for over fifty-three minutes, which seemed to indicate some pretty sloppy message traffic management aboard Basilisk Control. Fearless's routing instructions must have been transmitted to Control well before her arrival, given the current ten-hour-plus transmission lag between the terminus and Medusa, Basilisk's single habitable planet. The fact that Control had required the next best thing to an hour just to find them did not, she thought, augur well for its efficiency in other matters.

'Thank them for the information,' she went on after a moment, and turned her chair to face Lieutenant Stromboli. 'Do you have a course for Medusa, Lieutenant?'