“We’ll talk more when Nynca gets here,” Trystin added.
Van nodded in response, then turned to head back to the Joyau.
Chapter 71
The three commanders sat around the mess table in the Elsin. Nynca’s face was almost as drawn as Trystin’s although she didn’t have the dark circles under her eyes that Trystin did.
Van listened, trying not to think about what might be happening to his family with the unrest in the Republic, and whether anyone would trace his actions back to them.
“…the paired generators shoot out thousands of what might be called jumpholes—they’re miniature extrusions of nothingness—and inverted matter…”
“Antimatter?” asked Van.
“Inverted matter’s not quite the same,” Trystin explained. “It wouldn’t be stable even in an antimatter universe. The paired flows create massive surface disruptions to any sun’s fluxes and magnetic fields.”
“Massive solar storms, then?” Nynca’s voice was matter-of-fact.
Trystin nodded. “They’ll be strong enough to burn out the interior of all standard comm equipment inside the orbits of the gas giants. With the photon blasts, Orum and all the satellite bases and orbit stations will be blind for days. The underspace flux ripple effects will stop standing wave transmissions for several days, at least. Another effect will be that the jump distance will increase for several weeks, and that will delay ships entering and leaving the system.”
“How will this stop the Revenants from completing the conquest of the Keltyr systems?” Van asked.
An ironic smile crossed Trystin’s face. “A good portion of their reserve fleet is in the Jerush system.”
“How do—”
“I looked. It made sense. Theocracies are tightly controlled. Also, with the rest of their fleets in Keltyr territory, they’d certainly want to protect the capital system—home of the Prophet and the Temple.” He shook his head. “Too bad they didn’t keep listening to the latest incarnation of their Prophet.”
“People forget,” Nynca said quietly. “In time, even the strongest examples of a prophet are forgotten and pass into legend.”
“Legend.” Trystin snorted. “Legends have to be reinforced. Or replaced.”
Van sensed that he was missing something, but he didn’t know enough even to ask a general question.
“You’ve explained what this equipment will do,” Nynca said quickly. “How are you going to get it in place, and what do you want from us?”
“That’s simple enough. We use an escape pod, with its onetime jump generator. It translates the equipment, which has shields, into the sun—
“Into the system sun?” asked Nynca. “How long will the shields last under those conditions?”
“Five seconds, if my calculations are correct,” Trystin replied. “Twice as long as the ship’s shields would…”
Left unsaid were two facts. First was that a jump in-system would destroy the jump generators, and second that, even had the generators survived, nothing could jump out of a solar mass. So any trip was strictly onetime, one-way, and that meant that the escape pod had to be programmed and directed precisely.
“That’s if you don’t translate into the core, and that’s why the translation has to be made from as close to the sun as possible—just on the fringe of the density drop-off.”
“Can you get that kind of accuracy?” asked Nynca.
Van marveled at their cool discussion. He was still having trouble with the entire idea of sending an untested chunk of equipment into the sun of the Revenant home system to disrupt communications enough to leave the home system blind—and vulnerable to an attack, presumably by the Coalition.
“I’ve tested it. Burned out two generators. It works. Once you’ve got the hardware, it’s not all that difficult,” Trystin said, looking at Van. “Your cargo is the spare set. I wanted it here, in case something went wrong. It has a complete set of instructions inside.”
Van hadn’t even looked inside the boxes.
“What do you want from Van and me?” Nynca asked.
“Cover,” Trystin replied. “I’ll need some time to get the pod ready, and I can’t do it if I have to fight off Rev patrols. They’ll be there, probably not so far out…but that doesn’t mean they won’t come after us…”
“How long will it take?”
“Between thirty and forty-five standard minutes. We’ll be on the system fringe.”
Nynca nodded. “Thought as much.”
“Assuming…just assuming that we pull this off,” Van asked, “what do we do afterward? I can’t imagine we’ll be terribly welcome anywhere in the Arm, except perhaps Santonio or Silvium, or…” He shrugged.
“If it works as planned,” Trystin replied, “the Coalition and the Argentis will be too busy to worry about us, and we should regroup at Aerolis. But…if there’s any trouble, we should make for Dharel.”
“The Farhkans?” asked Nynca. “Why?”
“They like to look into how we mess things up,” Trystin said dryly. “Also, if there’s trouble, someone might try to find us. That’s one place where no one will think of—or want to follow.”
“You’re worried about how well this will work, aren’t you?”
“Not about how well it will work,” Trystin replied. “It will. What will happen afterward is another question. Also, we don’t know what sort of shape the ships will be in, either.”
“Because we might have to fight our way into position?” asked Van.
“That’s really a matter of luck.” Trystin shrugged. “They can’t have enough ships there to cover the entire system. No government can. What protects a system is the fact that an attacker has to come out of jump hours, if not days, away from the habitable zone, and that allows defenders to move into position. We don’t have to get anywhere near the habitable zone. We’ll have to work from the jump zone, and even if we come in close to a Revenant patrol, we’ll likely have a good twenty or thirty minutes.”
“Do you have the coordinates?” Nynca’s voice was resigned.
“You have a better idea?” asked Trystin.
“No. That’s the problem. No one listened to the better ideas—nor to you—when they would have worked.”
“And you took care of the messages?” Trystin looked to Van. “I asked her to have some messages sent on a delay basis to both the Argentis and the Coalition. They
