Many Words

Weatherby’s patrol cabin was only a few compartments away from the bridge, and it was there that he retired. They were officially at war now. What the Threshold front may have lacked in size it certainly made up for with ferocity, if the scuttlebutt was to be believed. The Confederacy was losing here, and Warspite was one of a handful of reinforcements the Naval Arm could spare.

Weatherby fiddled with the display on his desk until it showed a chart of the system. Warspite was approaching the trailing Trojan point of Threshold VI, locally known as Argo. Twenty years ago, during the Threshold Rebellion, the navy had towed an asteroid into place there, built a base on it, and called it Resolution. In the aftermath, they’d moved the Brenner gate back to Highland there as well to take advantage of Resolution‘s guns. There would likely be a few other warships there, either newly arrived or refitting. Weatherby hoped to put together a squadron before he had to sail for the real battlefield.

The real battlefield was the immediate neighborhood of Argo, the gas giant itself plus eighteen major moons (eleven inhabited, three with atmospheres, one regarded as a good long-term terraforming prospect), twenty-six minor moons (some up to a hundred and fifty kilometers diameter), and forty-one deep-space habitats and manufactories. The total population of Argo’s orbital system approached a quarter billion, but the Naval Arm was not there in force solely for the people. Traditionally, Threshold’s economy had been agricultural, exporting luxuries like real meat and fruits to barren worlds like Nexus and Basis, where the hydroponics gardens were taxed enough merely providing calories for everyone; that had changed after the Rebellion showed the Confederacy that such a single point of failure was ill-advised, no matter how good the economics may have looked, and Threshold had been forced to reinvent itself. Today, it was the largest producer of naval supplies after Basis, which had the benefit of the Fleet Yards to drive consumption, and the third largest industrial producer in the entire Confederacy.

Weatherby told the computer to replay the battles and territorial gains and losses since the Exiles had opened the Threshold front four months ago. It was a show he’d watched a hundred times on the long cruise across Highland, analyzing every tiny detail, but there was always another flash of inspiration to be found.

It was a very tactically interesting battlefield, in Weatherby’s opinion. The Exiles presumably had their base at the leading Trojan point; Intelligence was, of course, ‘uncertain’, but Exile ships had been spotted inbound on the right vector. It was large, as well. Many of the habitats were on very high orbits around Argo, the highest being almost a standard year and a half long, which put them about forty million kilometers apart at their furthest, a day and a half steaming at one gravity. It was unlikely that Warspite would spend much time at a full gravity, though; it was a two-week cruise from Resolution to Argo, and refueling options once she got there would be limited. The Confederacy held about half the population centers around Argo, losing them to the Exiles at a rate of one or two per month, and the navy wasn’t willing to risk its precious tankers in the warzone to refill the storage tanks on a habitat they might lose next month anyway.

Weatherby watched habitats change color as they changed hands. He paused the playback to zoom in on one point, footage he’d watched more than any of the rest. It came down to three ships: Retribution, Reprisal, and Vengeance, called protected cruisers in the Exile inventory but on par with a Confederate battlecruiser, and that made them the most powerful combatants over Argo since Reprisal had defeated NPAS Lindemannsstadt in the second month of the campaign. The Exile naval planners had cottoned to this fact very quickly, and since then the three Exile cruisers had only been sighted in company. Three Confederate squadrons had attempted to engage them, and all three had taken a sound beating. Since then, no Confederate ships had accepted combat; they simply couldn’t expect to win small actions, and if they gathered a larger fleet the Exiles would notice and take the opportunity to push their sphere of influence further.

The solution the Naval Arm had come to was to send more ships. As Weatherby rewound the recording again, he couldn’t shake a nagging sense of wrongness. One of his first commanding officers once told him that there was an elegant solution to every tactical problem. Weatherby resolved to find it.

The ship’s Combat Information Center was always crowded immediately prior to a Brenner transition. It was Naval Arm doctrine to go to action stations for jumps, and so thirty people were packed into a room much too small for them. All were seated, and all were secured in some fashion against acceleration. Warspite‘s spin had been taken off, and drifting as she was into the Brenner gate’s activation zone, there was nothing to hold the crew to the deck.

“Green board,” a sailor said.

“Very well. Sound jump warning, set the jump clock to 60 seconds, and signal my regards to the gatekeeper.”

The bridge talker’s voice echoed over the ship’s intercom. “All hands, stand by for Brenner transition.”

Seconds ticked away from the jump clock displayed on the CIC’s displays. A petty officer counted down. “Five, four, three, two, one, j—”

NPAS Warspite CRP-62 appeared in the Threshold system an unmeasurably short moment later. She was a cylinder, sixty meters from stem to stern and thirty across the beam. She was wreathed in radiators both port and starboard which made her look much wider. Dorsal and ventral turrets housed her main guns, the radiators cut away near them to give them a clear field of fire. She was, in short, a near-copy of every warship built in the last fifty years, and in spite of her unfortunate hull number, she was regarded as a fine fighting ship.

Her communications room was located in the outer part of the hull, the part that felt the full force of spin gravity. It was rigged for acceleration, however, and Ship’s Subensign Winston Hughes was seated at a workstation against the outboard wall, laboring with pen and paper under the watchful eye of a senior warrant officer. The screen in front of him showed the view from the ship’s telescope, which was aimed at Threshold IV, the system’s most populous world. From the bearing readout, navigational charts spread out before him, and the ship’s position he’d just worked out from star sightings, he was figuring out where Threshold IV was along its orbit, and from that the local time. Jumps were instant, but clocks never read the right time afterward; normally, a computer would have done what Winston was doing now in the first few seconds after a transition, but it was a subensign’s job to learn how everything worked, and here he was. He hurried through the last few calculations, referenced his numbers against the nav charts, and presented his result to the warrant officer.

“Five minutes off,” he grunted, “but good enough for doing it by hand, sir.” The phone mounted to the bulkhead rang. The warrant officer pushed off from his handhold and drifted over to answer. “You’re wanted on the patrol bridge, ensign.”

CIC was amidships and on the centerline, for maximum safety during battle. The patrol bridge, on the other hand, was outboard at the very bow, largely out of tradition. Winston had about twenty meters to go along the ship’s dorsal corridor. Had Warspite been rigged for microgravity, he would have taken it in one good leap—even though he was a very junior officer, on his first subensign cruise in his second year at the Naval Arm Officers’ Preparatory Academy, he still outranked enough of the ship’s company to pass while they yielded. As it was, the collapsible metal companionways and landings between them for use under acceleration that filled the corridor obstructed him.

An acceleration alarm chimed, and Winston felt himself sink to the deckplates as the ship’s engines slowly spun up. He bounced on his feet and guessed they were going at a little over a standard gravity. He reached the bow and turned along the rim corridor, and a few moments later was on the patrol bridge.

The hatch was on the curved inboard wall, and coming through it Winston was facing the room’s primary feature, the plotting board at its center. Past that were navigations and sensors stations, and to the left and right gunnery and engineering. Ship’s Commander Charles Weatherby stood over the plotting table. Winston snapped to attention and waited to be noticed.

Weatherby waved him over. “As you were, ensign. Stand down to watch stations.”

“Watch stations, aye,” the bridge talker repeated, and his voice then echoed over the intercom.

Winston tuned him out and stared at the plotting board. It had been an accurate jump. They were eight hours from NPAB Resolution, give or take.

“No surprises on the board, ensign. You have the watch; enjoy it, there won’t be many more for you now that we’re on the front. Call for me when we’ve arrived, and mind your exhaust vectors after the turnover,” Weatherby said, making for the inboard hatch.

“I have the watch, sir,” Winston replied, and turned to look to the plotting board again.