That was a relief to all. The Wasp had dropped its acceleration to half a gee. Until they spotted a jump point, there was no course for the fleet to follow. Throughout the ship, on the bridge and in boffin country, sensor teams pored over a whole raft of instruments. Slowly, the products of all that effort flowed onto the four screens that covered the bulkheads of Kris’s Tac Room.
They had jumped over 750 light-years.
None of the planets orbiting the soft yellow sun was in the life zone, where water could survive in all three of its lifegiving options: gas, liquid, and solid. Life as we knew it was unlikely here.
The usual telecommunication frequencies were silent. No one was transmitting radio or TV messages. Laser communications also seemed absent. The boffins would continue monitoring for a sudden change, but, for the moment, technology showed no evidence of ever having touched this system of cold rocks and colder gases.
Per the jump-point map Grampa Ray had found on Santa Maria, two jump points were supposed to be in this system. After ten minutes of searching, the bridge reported they had located both of them.
Kris reviewed the two options they offered. Some of the best astronomers and astrophysicists had been called in to develop a list for Kris to choose from. One jump led to an old red dwarf, slowly moldering away into a quiet death. The other led to a giant star, a prime candidate for something explosive like a nova ending its life. Not the thing Kris wanted her ships to find at the end of their next jump. The red dwarf also offered several jump choices that should be equally safe.
Or at least had been two million years ago, when the aliens blazed this trail across the stars.
To get long leaps between stars, you had to leap before you looked.
On Kris’s orders, the fleet set a course for the jump that led to the red dwarf. As luck would have it, it was the closer of the two.
As before, they accelerated until midcourse, then began the deceleration. Once again, they flipped at the last minute and hit the jump at what at any other time would have been considered a suicidal speed, with ships accelerating and spinning like delicately balanced tops.
In two weeks, they’d made ten nail-biting jumps, and were over fifteen thousand light-years from Santa Maria. They’d trotted through ten lifeless and uninteresting systems. For a Fleet of Discovery that had launched with such great expectations, they had very little to show for all their effort.
Then the eleventh jump changed everything.
8
“Your Highness, we need to spend a couple of days refueling in this system,” Captain Drago said as they shot into their eleventh new star system.
“You think so?” Kris answered.
“That last jump dropped the Wasp’s reaction tanks to below half-full, Kris,” the captain said. “I’d like to orbit a gas planet and have the courier ships do some cloud dancing.”
This was no surprise; they’d done it a week ago after the fifth jump. Every ship in the fleet needed reaction mass for acceleration and deceleration. Ships like the Wasp and the battleships, even the freighters, weren’t designed for the knocking around that came while trawling for fuel in the upper atmosphere of gas giants.
“Pick a big one and make it happen, Skipper. Once we’ve refueled the fleet, I want to dispatch one of the couriers back home to bring them up to date. All we’ve got to tell so far is a lot of nothing, but I suspect they’d like to know that.”
“We were lucky last time and only took two days, Princess. It could take longer this time.”
“I don’t have a problem, Captain. Whatever is out there will still be out there when we’re ready.”
A gas giant wasn’t too far from their jump point. The fleet decelerated toward it at 1.3 gees.
Kris was on the bridge as they approached orbit. The Mercury had already deployed a balloot and was dropping away for its first run at skimming the outer atmosphere of the planet.
At Sensors, Chief Beni shook his head. “There’s something wrong with my instruments,” he muttered.
“That would be unusual,” Kris said.
“Yes, and I’ve checked them. I can’t find anything wrong with them, but this can’t be right?”
“What can’t be right?” The chief now had Captain Drago’s attention.
“There are eleven decent-sized moons around this puppy. According to my readouts, they have wobbled a smidge farther away from the planet than they were just after we came through