So I was wrong. You were right. Sue me, Nelly shot back to Kris alone. Where had that come from? What had Kris set herself up for when she let one little twelve-year-old slip of a girl on board? That girl had to go.

You will not ship her off the Wasp. Cara is my friend. Cara is going to stay here as long as I do.

And was that a threat, Kris thought, careful to keep it to herself.

But before Kris could say anything, Professor mFumbo apparently mistook the silence between them to mean he was free to go on to a different subject, “We’ve found out something interesting about these fuzzy jump points.”

“Yes,” Kris said. “What?” Nelly demanded.

“They don’t wander as much as the other ones do. Something about their harmonic nature allows them to stay closer to a single point. Either that or the fuzzyness around them helps us follow them more easily.”

“That should cut down on bad jumps,” Kris said.

“Very likely.”

“So what are we going to find behind these jump points? New territory opened up toward the end of the Three’s time,” Nelly said pensively, “or the center of their civilization, held together by the latest jump point technology?” 

“A very good question that I can do nothing to answer while the princess here is busy chasing miscreants. Or maybe I can.”

“Or maybe you can?” Kris asked, wondering what sort of trap the professor had set for her.

“Since the jump points are more steady, we think we can send an automated probe to do an initial look behind them. You know there is a hairy jump point in this system?”

Kris admitted that she did.

“If we could send a remote probe to check out the other system, we could have it waiting here for us when we return and maybe save ourselves some wasted time.”

“But merchant ships don’t launch probes. If a pirate ship enters a system and sees us and a probe in it, it will be a dead giveaway that we aren’t what we’re trying to fake.”

“Yes, but if you held off launching the probe until just before we jump out of this system ...”

“And since you’ve already readied the probe?”

“Yes, there is that matter,” the professor admitted, his hands open, palms up, in polite supplication to Kris.

“I’ll tell Captain Drago that you want to launch a probe,” Kris said.

“Thank you very much,” Professor mFumbo said and headed in the opposite direction from Kris.

Kris watched his retreating back. New technologies. Not so much us cracking the secrets of the Three alien cultures that built the jump points, but us discovering this or that on our own as we bounced our heads off the lock box of their still unfathomable knowledge.

Well, humans learned many ways.

No, human scientists learned. Others, like pirates, might upgrade their equipment. But the pirates Kris hunted weren’t all that different from the cut-throats the Romans put down in the ancient Mediterranean Sea.

“Two minutes to zero gravity,” the Wasp’s MC-1 announced as Kris entered the bridge.

“Morning, Lieutenant,” Captain Drago said.

“Morning, Captain, any unknowns in system?”

“The answer is the same as it’s been the last two days. No, ma’am, though of course a hostile could have entered the system from the other jump point an hour ago and we’ll be another half hour finding out.”

Kris repeated the old joke. “Captain, you really should do something about that speed of light lag time.”

Drago gave the same answer. “Isn’t that a more proper job for those unemployed boffens of yours rather than this only slightly reformed pirate.” And it was true that the bridge crew of the Wasp did look more like pirates than respectable sailors. From the captain’s purple coat, gold earring and white bell bottoms to his navigator in cutoff shorts and tank top, the crew appeared delightfully reprobate.

And the Wasp had started life as a pirate ship. She now smelled much better. The crew might be flamboyant, but hygiene was a daily concern. And being the best former sailors Wardhaven’s spy master had ever contracted for, they knew their job backwards and forwards.

Especially the 24-inch pulse lasers the Wasp didn’t officially have.

“Ah, Professor mFumbo tells me the project is impossible. Something about relativity.

“Oh, speaking of the good doctor, he has a probe he wants to launch.”

“So he told me,” the captain said. “I told him if it was okay with you it was okay with me.”

“Hm,” Kris said. “I told him about the same thing, but I don’t remember him mentioning you.”

“He must have been an impossible child to parent,” Sulwan Kann muttered from her place at the Navigator’s station.

“That assumes he had parents, a fact not in evidence,” the captain muttered.

“Is there any problem with launching this probe of his just before we jump?” Kris said, trying to stay on topic. Despite his approach to getting their okay, if it was safe, the scientists deserved some research.

Captain Drago nodded. “I’ve had my crew check out the probe. Separation should be no problem. It won’t get underway until we are far from here. We’ll do it.”

“Weightlessness in ten seconds,” Sulwan announced. Kris scrambled for her station to the far left of the captain where she could keep an eye on offensive weapons and sensors.

At zero, the Wasp cut all power and did a flip to put the bridge head on as it drifted to a halt a thousand meters from where the jump point roiled in tortured space. To the naked eye, nothing was apparent, just a small section of space where the stars seemed to shine a bit strangely.

“Audrey, you got the nav beacon loaded.”

“It’s in Drop Bay 3. The scientists’ gadget is in 4.”

Kris didn’t ask about Drop Bays 1 and 2. If Jack was half the Marine she expected him to be, two Marine assault crafts were standing by. Fully manned and ready ... and armed.

“Launch the beacon,” Captain Drago ordered.

There was a slight rumble through the hull and then the nav buoy came in view on its way to the jump point. Bigger, blockier than a government beacon, this one looked to be using fifty-year-old technology. Just what a merchant skipper might use to probe a strange jump point and not damage a slim profit margin.

The jump buoy held station off the jump point for a few moments while a few more tests were run, then powered up and disappeared through the jump. Sulwan started a clock. At two minutes she’d take the Wasp through after the buoy had announced to anyone listening that they were coming through.

In nearly four hundred years, there had only been one instant of two ships using the same jump point at the same time, coming from opposite directions. The resulting mess had cured humanity of ever wanting to do that again.

Inside human space, every jump point had two buoys assigned to it. Out here, Kris and Captain Drago were improvising as they went along.

“Ten seconds until we jump” Sulwan announced.

and the jump buoy reappeared before them. “A ship will be coming through the jump in fifteen seconds,” it announced.

“That wasn’t the message I put on the buoy,” Sulwan said.

“Helm, reverse thrusters. Maximum power.”

“Reverse. Maximum. Captain,” the woman at the helm repeated, jamming the reverse thrusters knob all the way back.

“Helm, steer right fifteen degrees, down thirty degrees.”

“Right fifteen. Down thirty degrees, aye Captain.”

And Kris’s inner ear started doing slow rolls as her gut was slammed hard against the buckle of her seat belt. The Wasp shed all forward way and took off backwards. But even as her body went through the required contortions, Kris kept her eyes on the forward view port. The screen stayed blank for the longest time.

Then a ship twice the size of the Wasp materialized as if from out of nowhere to loomed over them.  

Three

“Engineering, give us everything you’ve got for reverse,” Drago said into his commlink. “Helm, keep us backing, but do not reverse ship. I will not give them a shot at my engines.”

“Aye sir. Get out of here but protect the engines.”

While Captain Drago handled his ship, Kris eyed the other. On screen, it looked like a medium size merchant. A bit big for a tramp freighter, doing catch as catch can business between the small ports on the rim and beyond. Still, its long central spine was loaded with containers. Forward, it broadened into a bridge and housing arrangement for the crew. Amidship was a disk containing whatever cargo didn’t do well in vacuum, and possibly some passengers. That was where the Wasp had its 24-inch pulse lasers. Aft was the engineering spaces, a rectangle for the fusion reactor, plumbing for the magnetohydrodynamics generators and huge bell-shaped plasma engines.

“Sensors, is that a single reactor,” Kris asked Chief Beni, her own man, who was running that station just now.

“Looks that way, ma’am,” he muttered, then did something to his board. “but I’m still looking.”

Kris slaved her board to his. Beni might be leadership challenge on liberty, but with anything electronic he was a wizard. Just now, he used only passives, listening but making no noise that would tip a pirate’s hand that the Wasp was anything but a soft, defenseless carrier of wood and drawer of water.

Then again, a pirate would be doing its own best to look as innocent as a lamb ... and hide the wolf beneath. At the moment, they were even in the lamb department. Or one might actually be what they claimed.

“Hm, ain’t she a might bit underpowered with a single Westinghouse 1500 series reactor?” Chief Beni mused to himself, and jacked up the gain on a couple of his short range sensors. “Seems like there’s a whole lot more neutrinos coming out of that single reactor ... and they’re spread out over a whole lot more space. Those engineering spaces looked a bit luxurious for just one teapot. Skipper, I make two Westinghouse reactors. And expect they’re 2200 series at that. You got a wolf trying to fake it in woolies.”

“Damn,” Captain Drago said.

“Straight,” Kris added.

“Your orders, Your Highness.”

So King Ray didn’t know these people nearly as well as Kris did. And this bunch had no problem following this Longknife into the mouth of hell. In a fast countdown to a fight, Drago wasn’t looking to Abby, he was asking Kris.

She swallowed the first thing that came to mind ... Let’s kick some pirate butt. Instead, Kris muttered a much more sedate, “Let’s make sure someone like Helvetia isn’t also trolling for pirates. Wouldn’t want Grampa Ray faced with a media blitz ‘cause two good guys shot each other up.”

Someone on the bridge snickered at Kris’s familiarity with a man everyone else knew as King Raymond of the United Sentients.

And somewhere on net came a “Damn, one of those Longknifes can grow up.” It sounded familiar.”

“That you, Jack?” Kris asked Captain Jack Montoya of the Royal United Sentient Marine Corps who now commanded the rump company aboard.

“Not me, ma’am, not a chance. Though I do admit sympathy for the conclusion.”

Further discussion was suspended as the ship looming over them opened communication channels. “Hello stranger, this is Compton Maru out of Orama. What ship are you and where you from? Where you bound?”

Captain Drago took the commlink. “This is the Lucky Seven Horse out of Hampton and I’ll tell you where I’m bound when you tell me where you been.”

That elicited a laugh, much as Kris expected. Profits were razor thin out here and a good way to go broke was to follow in the wake of another ship, trying to sell your cargo in an already satisfied market or buy up cargo that had already been shipped.

Kris might be Navy and Drago ... whatever he was ... but they’d spent enough time in bars among merchant captains to learn that much of the trade.

The laughing voice became serious. “You tell me something interesting, then I’ll tell you something more interesting.”

“Sounds fair,” Drago said. “Our last stop was Magda’s Hideaway.” It really had been. “They took all our agricultural implements and were still hungry. They didn’t touch our heavy machinery. Somebody got there first.”

“That little burg ain’t growing anywhere near as fast as its founding fathers thought it would. If they ain’t careful they’re going to get overextended on their loans,” the voice from the larger freighter observed.

Kris let them ramble; and took the ship above her apart layer by layer – as much as passive sensors allowed. If the ship had lasers, no capacitors were charged. Dead in space, the ship was no longer running plasma through its engines. Its only power source was a trickle off the racetrack of hot plasma. That kept the ship’s main battery charged.

“Could you power a laser directly from the main storage battery?” Kris asked the chief.

“You shouldn’t be able to, ma’am,” was the answer she expected. “Power cables aren’t designed for that surge. However, a small 3-incher might dribble something out. Couldn’t pierce much ice armor, but then, we’re just a thin skinned merchie.” He said with a wicked grin.

A knife might not be much, but in a fist fight, it could run the table. But a guy pulling a knife in a gun fight was in for a surprise. A big one.

“Where you been?” Captain Drago asked.

“We’re just coming back from Xanadu,” the other claimed.

“Trying to trade among those crazies?” Drago said.

They’d already learned about Xanadu, the supposed home of the Abdicators. They were a bunch of nuts that insisted all humanity had to go back to Earth and hide from the coming alien hordes that would wipe us out. They’d been noisy forty years ago, then had gotten kind of few and quiet. Kris now knew why.

By some twisted logic, the leader of the Abdicators had moved all his followers far out beyond the rim. Supposedly to hide. Considering how insanely crazy their beliefs had been before, Kris was none too sure she wanted to know what they’d become after being out on their own for half a century.

“They may be crazy, but they have money. They bought everything I had. I’m hauling my containers home empty except for some with wines and proto-pharms they sold me. If you got the range, they’re a good place to drop by. Where you headed?”

But whoever was doing the talking over there must have figured he’d done enough babbling to distract the captain of the Lucky Seven Horse.

On Kris’s board, a capacitor appeared, going from green to yellow to red as it sucked power from the ship’s main battery.

“Evade,” Kris shouted, but Nelly had already activated a jinks pattern in the helm. The Wasp danced left, right, up, down, and a feeble 3-inch laser burned empty space.

“What the hell,” came from the other ship on an open mike, then it went dead.

A red wash in the engineering spaces showed both reactors on the other ship coming to full life, over powering whatever cover they had been hiding behind. The pirate ship shot away from the jump point, following a twisting course that danced its engines in and out of a direct shot from the Wasp.

A half dozen laser capacitors went from not there to yellow to red as they sucked up a charge.

Then the sensor board got hazy.

“They’re trying to jam,” Beni observed, did something to his board and some of the jamming went away.

“Shields,” was Kris’s next order.

And she hated herself for it.

A slight bulge on the nose of the Wasp hid one of her two innovations. On order, Smart Metal ™ deployed like a huge umbrella, rotating as it went. It both hid the ship behind it and provided a defense against lasers.

During drills, Kris had first ordered, “Raise. Metal,” or “Raise. Defenses.” Someone on the back of the bridge had whispered, “Shields. Up.” quoting from a long running space opera. The bridge crew had a good laugh, but from then on, no matter what order Kris gave, the answer from Defensive Systems was always, “Shields. Up.”

“Shields. Up,” now answered Kris. No one laughed.

“Keep backing ship,” Captain Drago ordered. “Guns, let me know when you’re fully charged.”

That was the Wasp’s other secret. For three hundred years fusion reactors produced the plasma that rocket motors streamed out to move the ship. That plasma, on its way to the engines, passed through magnetohydrodynamic coils that generated electricity for the ship and its weapons.

The Compton Maru getting underway, risked the exposure of its vulnerable engines because otherwise it couldn’t charge its lasers.

The Wasp backed up, using only its maneuvering engines. By all rights, it couldn’t charge its pulse lasers off that dribble of plasma. But on Kris’s board, the four laser capacitors were rapidly moving from green to yellow, headed for full red. Thanks to new science and a recent refit, the Wasp stripped electricity directly from the plasma flux in the reactor.

The times they were a changing. And this pirate was about to find out.

Then Kris got her own surprise. The Compton sprouted a shielding umbrella from its own bow. This one had a leaping tiger on it. Its jaw’s agape, its claws dripping blood.

“Aggressive type, aren’t they,” Sulwan observed.

“Let’s see if they can walk the walk,” Kris said, mashing her commlink. “Ahoy, Compton Maru. This is the USS Wasp, and I am Lieutenant Longknife, Wardhaven Navy. You just fired upon me. Dump your core and prepare to be boarded.”

“You can go to hell,” shot back in reply, but in the background there was a startled cry of “Not a Longknife.” Followed by “Shut up.”

The two ships circled each other. Captain Drago kept the Wasp pivoting on its long axis, nose always to the Compton. The pirate, for her part, did her best to open the range while keeping her engines covered.

The range was point blank. Hand grenades in a broom closet.

But the Wasp stood between the jump point and the pirate, giving her only lousy choices. She could turn and run for the jump point across the system, giving Kris a easy up-the-kilt shot at her reactors. Or charge the Wasp hoping to slip past her into the jump point. Or fight it out.

“The hostile’s lasers are fully charged,” Chief Beni said.

“Any idea how strong they are?” Captain Drago asked.

“I’d guess 5-inchers. And weak for that,” the chief said.

“Your Highness, what are your orders?”

Kris thought about that for all of a second. “He’s not getting away from us, Captain. If he wants to dance, we dance, but he can’t run.”

“Yes, ma’am. Weapons are on line. They are yours, ma’am.”

The exact nature of the Wasp’s registry might be subject to debate. What Captain Drago and Kris had quickly agreed upon was her weapons policy. Laying aim and closing the firing circuits would be done by a serving Wardhaven officer. One must respect international law ... even if it was with a wink and a smile.

Lieutenant Kris Longknife, Wardhaven Navy, aimed Battery 1 for the tiger’s mouth. It was about the right distance out from the bow’s center to have the bridge behind it. Of course, if they were rotating their ship behind the shield, like Captain Drago was rotating the Wasp, burn through on the shield might hit anything – or nothing.

“Pirate ship Compton, this is your one and only warning. Dump your reactor or I will fire on you,” Kris said, voice cold with death.

Silence answered her.

“Prepare to change jinks pattern,” Kris announced. “All hands, prepare for radical evasion.”

On the bridge, people cinched in already tight seatbelts. “For what they are about to receive, may we be truly grateful,” some wag muttered.

“Pirate ship Compton, I will fire on you at the count of three,” Kris said into her commlink.

Obscenities were her only reply.

“One,” Kris said. Nelly get ready to implement radical evasion on my mark.

Ready Kris.

“Two,” Mark!

The Wasp shifted from a soft right climb to a hard left drop that left Kris’s stomach somewhere a dozen kilometers away in the cold vacuum of space.

Where it was being fried by three laser beams from the hostile.

“Fire One,” Kris said as she closed the firing circuit for the first of Wasp’s pulse lasers.

The mouth of the tiger glowed, then fumed, and finally gaped as the Wasp’s laser burned through the shield. To the void behind it. Yep, the ship was rotating.

And now it also started to jinks.