His heads swiveling, Janus briefly looked himself in the eyes. Sigmund would grasp the ironic laughter. “Apart from you, Sigmund, who on this world knows such things?”
“There is that.”
Silence stretched awkwardly. With a mind of its own, his left forehoof began tearing at the dirt. “What brings you, Sigmund?”
“To chat with Janus? Merely a social call. But if I were to speak with — ”
“A name none mention in this place.” The hoof dug more frantically. A head darted deep into his mane, tongue and lip nodes tugging and twisting at a stray lock of hair.
Sigmund took a computer from his pocket. “There is something I would show that one. Something that a former scout for the Fleet would find interesting.”
Janus willed the wayward hoof to rest — one runs fastest on obedient limbs. He released his mane, so that both heads could see. Alas, he understood too well Sigmund’s concept of
“Something interesting,” Janus echoed. “What manner of thing?”
“Call it an anomaly. A ripple in the continuum, such as ships make when entering or leaving hyperspace. Except…”
“Except that no mere ship would explain your unheralded visit.”
“A ripple from far away. A vessel departs New Terra soon to investigate.” Sigmund opened his comp. “Let me show you.”
A graphic sprang from the comp. Amid a scattering of stars, red and green lines crossed near an ordinary yellow sun. Janus quivered with horrible premonition, but the image used an unfamiliar coordinate system centered on New Terra. He could not be certain.
Until two binary stars and a red giant caught his eye, oriented him. In the shock of recognition, he was Janus no longer.
“I-I know this place,” Nessus stammered. “Have me delivered to, to, to the ship.”
Then he collapsed, catatonic with terror, onto the ground.
RINGWORLD
4
At the center of the bridge, to the howl of a klaxon,
“What do you think, Lieutenant?” Commander Johansson asked.
Tanya Wu stiffened in her seat at the comm console because, almost certainly, the question was a test. She was newly rotated aboard a ship long deployed. And posted as a lowly purser in a combat zone. And Wu being such a common name — unless she had somehow, without knowing it, pissed off someone in Personnel back on Earth — she had ended up serving under her own father as captain. Dad swore he had had nothing to do with her assignment to
Amid the orderly bustle of the bridge, she caught sidelong glances and heard yet another whispered reference —
“You
“Yes, sir.” External view ports showed only stars, and Tanya turned toward the bridge’s main tactical display. A supply ship as defenseless as its name suggested,
The local star was merely the brightest among dimensionless points in the display, and all these ships were outside its gravitational singularity. Out here, light had ceased to set the speed limit. Jump to hyperspace and back out: the nearer group of Kzinti could emerge within the ARM formation, laser cannons blazing, antimatter munitions spewing, within seconds. Still …
“Too many ships too close together,” she temporized, “but that’s always the case.”
“Business as usual, then?”
Definitely a test and the bridge crew knew it. In unending round-the-clock high alert, even lowly pursers took their turn standing watch.
Tanya said, “Let’s hope this never becomes the usual.”
Of the thousands of warships in and around this solar system, at any given moment
The tactical complexity was staggering. Hawking, the chief artificial intelligence aboard the task force’s flagship, and its distributed subsets in computers across the armada, continually integrated readouts across hundreds of ARM ships and tens of thousands of sensor-laden probes. It pondered every hyperspace-related ripple to triangulate its point of origin. It endlessly assessed evolving risks and opportunities, calculating new deployments for the task force.
Attempted to do all that, anyway.
“Thirty seconds to jump,” the pilot announced over the intercom.
Meaning that soon after thirty seconds, recently disappeared ships in threatening numbers could emerge in synch in and around Task Force Delta, to blast away at everything in sight and return to hyperspace faster than mere mortals could react. Or zip through the formation without shooting, just to rattle the ARM crews. Or stay in hyperspace a few seconds longer, to target another nearby formation.
Or remain in hyperspace for a long time, leaving this chaos behind. Nothing remained to fight over. Nothing tangible, anyway. To be the first to go would be to retreat, and
Too many possibilities and too little information to choose among them. Tanya said, “It looks like a routine precautionary fleet jump to me, Commander.”
A maneuver that would, in turn, unleash a torrent of new ripples, to which thousands more ships, in formations large and small, all around this solar system, must hurriedly react.…
Johansson left her hanging almost till the jump. “To me, too,” he finally allowed.
“Jumping in three, two, one…” the pilot announced over the intercom.
Across the bridge, view-port screens went dark. The human brain was not wired to perceive hyperspace. Lucky people so confronted sensed walls snapping together, denying the less-than-nothingness presented in a porthole or view port. Unlucky people got lost in the … whatever hyperspace was. The Blind Spot, starfarers called the phenomenon, and it had driven people mad.
“In three,” the pilot called. “Two. One. Dropout.”
On
