Torch of Freedom

Zachary and Keller kept her people well trained and well rehearsed—she was a Queen's ship, however long in the tooth she might be growing, and the possibility that she might yet be called to action always existed, however slight it might have become—but she'd sacrificed a quarter of her armament when she was converted for service with the Astrophysics Investigation Agency.

At the moment, Keller was on the command deck, with his weapons crews closed up, but his attention—like everyone else's—was on the astrogation plot, and Zachary had no doubt that his extra efforts on the survey team's behalf had been his own way of getting his hands at least a little dirty. Missiles and energy weapons might not have anything to contribute to exploring a wormhole, but at least he could tell himself truthfully that he'd contributed.

'Well, if everyone's all set, I suppose we should get started,' Zachary said calmly now, and glanced at Lieutenant Karen Evans, her astrogator.

'The transit vectors are locked in?' Zachary knew the answer to the question already, of course, but there were rules to follow, and those rules existed for very good reasons.

'Yes, Ma'am.' If Evans felt any irritation at being asked a question she'd already answered for the XO, her response showed no trace of it.

'Very well.' Zachary turned to her helmsman. 'Ten gravities, Senior Chief.'

'Ten gravities on Astro's programmed heading, aye, aye, Ma'am,' Senior Chief Coxswain Hartneady acknowledged, and Zachary looked down at the com display by her left knee as Harvest Joy began to creep slowly towards the terminus.

'Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hammarberg,' she told the face looking back at her from the com.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Commander Jonas Hammarberg replied formally. 'Standing by to rig foresail on your mark.'

'Threshold in two-zero seconds,' Evans reported.

'On your toes, Senior Chief,' Zachary murmured.

'Aye, Ma'am,' Hartneady replied, never taking his eyes from his own displays as Harvest Joy edged into the terminus. The survey ship was tracking directly down the path Evans had programmed. If everything went the way it was supposed to go, she'd go right on doing that. If things decided not to go the way they were supposed to go, however, James Hartneady might find himself extraordinarily busy sometime in the next few seconds.

'Threshold!' Evans said sharply.

'Rig foresail for transit,' Zachary ordered.

'Rigging foresail, aye,' Hammarberg responded instantly.

Harvest Joy's impeller wedge fell abruptly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down. At the same moment, her forward alpha nodes reconfigured, dropping their own share of the cruiser's normal-space impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail's circular disk of focused gravitational energy, instead. The sail was perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis, and over three hundred kilometers in diameter.

'Stand by after hypersail,' Zachary said, watching the flickering numerals in the Engineering window opened in one corner of her own maneuvering plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone.

'Standing by aft hypersail, aye,' Hammarberg replied, and she knew he was watching the same flashing numbers climb steadily higher on his own displays as the foresail moved deeper into the terminus. They weren't climbing anywhere near as quickly as they could have been, given the absurdly low speed with which anyone but a madwoman approached a first-transit through an uncharted terminus, of course, but—

The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They went on climbing, but their steadiness told Zachary the foresail was drawing enough power from the terminus' grav waves to provide movement.

'Rig aftersail,' she said crisply.

'Rigging aftersail, aye,' Hammarberg said, just as crisply, and Harvest Joy shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail spread its wings at the far end of her hull.

Senior Chief Hartneady's hands moved smoothly through the tricky maneuver, and Zachary felt her stomach trying to turn over as the cruiser slid into the terminus' interface with equal smoothness.

The inevitable queasiness of crossing the hyper wall was briefer but substantially more intense in a wormhole transit, and she ignored it with the practice of several decades' experience, never looking away from her maneuvering display. She watched it narrowly, eyes focused, and then it flashed again.

No one had ever been able to measure the duration of a wormhole transit. Not from the inside of one, at any rate, and no chronometer aboard Harvest Joy managed to measure this one, either. For however long that fleeting interval was, though, the cruiser simply ceased to exist. One instant she was sixty-four light-minutes from the star called Torch; the next she was somewhere else, and Zachary felt herself swallowing in relief as her nausea vanished.

Harvest Joy's Warshawski sails radiated the brilliant blue flash of transit energy as she continued to slide forward out of the far side of the terminus under momentum alone, and Zachary nodded in satisfaction.

'Transit complete,' Hartneady reported.

'Thank you, Senior Chief,' Zachary acknowledged. Her gaze was back on the sail interface readout again, watching the numbers spiral downward as her ship moved further forward.

'Engineering, reconfigure to—'

An alarm shrilled with shocking suddenness, and Zachary's head whipped around towards the tactical display.

'Unknown starships!' The professionalism of merciless training flattened the stunned disbelief in Lieutenant Keller's voice without making his report one bit less jarring. 'Two unknown starships, bearing zero-zero-five by zero-seven-niner, range one-zero-three thous—'

Twelve battlecruiser-grade grasers, fired at a range of just over a third of a light-second, arrived before he could complete his final sentence, and HMS Harvest Joy, Josepha Zachary, and every man and woman aboard her ship disappeared in a single cataclysmic ball of incandescent fury.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

April, 1931

'But what could have happened to them?' asked Berry Zilwicki. The young queen's face was creased with worry.

Dr. Jordin Kare's face showed concern also. But he was doing his best to maintain a calm composure. 'There could be any number of reasons they're not back yet, Your Majesty. I know TJ and I both emphasized how unlikely it was, but, frankly, the most probable explanation is that this time, for one reason or another, they didn't manage to chart the gravitic stresses accurately enough on their way through. Harvest Joy's instrumentation is damn good, but if they didn't get a good read when they make transit, it could take months for them to nail things down with sufficient accuracy for a return transit without additional support.'

'For that matter, assuming they did fail to get a good map on their way through, they may have come out someplace close enough to Torch for Mike and Linda—I mean Dr. Hall and Dr. Hronek—to figure it'd take longer to do the survey than to come home the long way round, through hyper, and head back with better support,' Dr. Wix interjected.

'In either of those cases,' continued Kare, 'then they've already begun returning through hyperspace. But that could take them some time, before they get back.'

'How much time?' asked Berry.

Both physicists shrugged simultaneously. 'There's simply no way to know,' said Kare.