A Rising Thunder

there was no sign of it in her rock-steady hands. They moved with complete confidence, taking Otter through the conversion with scarcely a quiver, holding her dead center as she gathered way forward.

The maneuvering plot blinked again, and — for an instant no one had ever succeeded in measuring— Otter ceased to exist in Agueda and then, equally suddenly, began to exist somewhere else. She reappeared in a dazzling burst of azure brilliance as transit energy radiated from her sails, and Powell nodded in satisfaction.

“Transit complete,” she announced.

“Thank you, Helm. Well done!” Talmadge said, but most of his attention was back on the sail interface readout, watching the numbers twinkle downward even more rapidly than they’d risen. “Engineering, reconfigure to impeller.”

“Aye, aye, Sir. Reconfiguring to impeller now.”

Otter folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward more rapidly, accelerating steadily out of the Stine Terminus, five and a half light-hours from the G5 primary of the Stine System.

“Five hundred gravities, Senior Chief,” Talmadge said.

“Five hundred gravities, aye, aye, Sir,” Powell acknowledged crisply, and Talmadge’s lips twitched as he waited for Stine Astro Control to react to his ship’s abrupt appearance.

* * *

“Sir, they’ve noticed as,” Lieutenant Jordan Rivera announced, and Commodore Magellan raised an eyebrow at his staff communications officer.

“Put it on the main display, Jordan.”

“Yes, Sir.”

An officer in the uniform of Stine Astro Control with a captain’s insignia appeared on the main com display. He had a dark complexion, a shaved head, a thick mustache, and an irate expression.

“Unknown ship!” he snarled. “Reduce acceleration immediately!”

“My, he does seem a bit unhappy,” Magellan murmured.

“Well, Sir,” Commander Wilson observed, “we are exceeding the terminus acceleration limit by about four hundred and eighty gravities. I imagine that could account for a bit of unhappiness.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the commodore conceded.

“God damn it, reduce your accel right now!” the shaven-headed captain shouted. “What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?!”

“I think he’s going to get even more unhappy just about…now,” Lieutenant Commander Sarah Tanner, Magellan’s ops officer, remarked dryly as Malcolm Taylor, his squadron’s second ship burst out of the terminus behind Otter.

Malcolm Taylor peeled off on a sharply divergent vector, accelerating just as hard as Otter, and Magellan nodded in satisfaction. Although even a relatively small terminus was an enormous volume of space, trying something like this into or out of the Manticoran Junction would have been extraordinarily dangerous. Despite the separation between inbound and outbound lanes, there was so much traffic through the Junction that the probability of a wedge-on-wedge collision would have been only too real. In Stine’s case, however, there were only a single inbound and a single outbound lane, and traffic was sparse, to say the least. He saw a single freighter’s icon on the tactical display, swinging wildly away from the terminus, even though Otter was a good forty thousand kilometers clear of her. But that was fine with him.

“Deploy the Ghost Rider platforms, Sarah,” he said. “Let’s get some eyes out there.”

“Yes, Sir. Deploying now.”

The icons of half a dozen Ghost Rider recon platforms arced away from Otter’s larger, stronger light code on the tactical plot, and he saw HMS Tiger Cub, the squadron’s third cruiser emerging from the terminus behind Malcolm Taylor.

“Who the hell are you people?!” the astro control captain on the com demanded furiously.

“Better go ahead and put me through to him, Jordan,” Magellan said.

“Yes, Sir. Live mike in three…two…one. Now.”

Magellan saw the dark-faced captain’s expression change abruptly as his own image appeared on the other man’s display. For a moment, the Solarian looked blank, but then his eyes first widened and then, almost as quickly, narrowed again as he recognized Magellan’s black-and-gold uniform.

“Commodore Sean Magellan, Royal Manticoran Navy,” Magellan said calmly.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” the captain challenged. “This is Solarian space!”

“Really?” Magellan replied. “Imagine that.”

The astro control officer’s complexion turned darker than ever and his jaw muscles quivered as he glared incredulously at the commodore. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it, as if the sheer power of his fury had paralyzed his vocal cords, and Magellan gave him a thin, cold smile.

“Actually, Captain, I’m quite aware of where I am. And I’m quite aware that the Solarian League claims sovereignty over this terminus. Unfortunately, things like that are subject to change.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?!” the captain managed to get out after another three or four seconds of rage-inspired muteness.

“I mean that jurisdiction over this terminus has just changed hands from the Solarian League to the Star Empire of Manticore,” Magellan told him flatly.

“You’re out of your fucking mind!”

“No,” Magellan responded as the fourth and fifth ships of his squadron emerged from the terminus and shifted their vectors outward to englobe it. “I’m afraid not, Captain.”

“You are if you think you can get away with this kind of crap!”

“Excuse me for asking this, Captain, but why do you think I can’t ‘get away with this kind of crap’?”

“Because—” the captain began furiously, then stopped abruptly.

“That’s what I thought,” Magellan said much more gently. And glanced back at the tactical display as HMS Wolf, the last of his cruisers emerged from the terminus…closely followed by HMS Selkie, his remaining CLAC. He didn’t know what the Solarian captain thought Selkie was, but she sure looked like a ship-of-the-wall.

“Allow me to explain this to you, Captain—?”

Magellan paused, raising both eyebrows, and waited patiently until the Solarian shook himself.

“Palffi, Captain Cyrus Palffi,” he grated.

“Thank you, Captain Palffi.” Magellan nodded courteously. “I’m sure you’re well aware of the tension between the Star Empire and the League. My Empress and her Foreign Ministry have tried from the very beginning to get someone—anyone—in the League’s government to show even a modicum of willingness to find a nonmilitary way to resolve that tension. You may have noticed that we haven’t had a great deal of success in that respect.” He smiled, showing his teeth. “So Her Majesty’s Government has decided that since we can’t seem to get the League’s attention through normal diplomatic channels, it’s time to try another approach. This one.”

“What do you mean?” Palffi asked in a tone which was at least marginally closer to normal.

“I mean that this terminus is now closed to all Solarian-registry shipping, except for courier vessels and those registered to recognized interstellar news services. It will remain closed to all Solarian traffic until further notice.”

“This is never going to stand,” Palffi said, almost conversationally. “You and your pissant cruisers are going to need a hell of a lot more than one waller to stand up to what’s going to be headed your way as soon as Sol finds out about this.”

“By the strangest coincidence, Captain Palffi, there’s quite a lot more headed this