“that they’d be afraid we’d really screw things up by getting involved in whatever’s going on out at Alya A-VI.”
They were in the conference room set up as part of CONMILCOM’s Headquarters suite aboard the Rogue. There were no chairs present, but at the sky-el’s half-G level that was little more than a minor annoyance, and it did allow more men and women to crowd in next to the round, central desk with its holographic projector and AI interface pads. The low, gray-surfaced egg shapes of link modules lined the compartment’s bulkheads. Most were empty now, but a few were occupied by duty officers maintaining a communications watch with Argosport and with picket ships scattered across the Mu Herculis system.
Eighteen CONMILCOM staff officers were gathered in the room for the briefing, not counting Dev, Katya, and Sinclair himself. One civilian was present as well. Her name was Professor Brenda Ortiz, and she was a xenosophontologist, the closest thing to an expert on the DalRiss that the Confederation had. An attractive woman of perhaps forty-five standard years, she wore her dark hair long at the top and braided down her back but had shaved the sides of her head to give free access to the T-sockets behind her ears. Dev felt a sense of kinship with her; like him, she was from Earth.
“They are afraid of exactly that, Captain,” Sinclair replied. “That we’ll screw things up. But they’re more afraid of doing nothing, which is what will happen if we can’t break this deadlock of personnel, weapons, and supplies. Right now, Congress feels—and for once our intelligence sources tend to support the feeling—that we have five months, possibly six, before the Empire moves against our base here at Herakles. Our fleet is still no match for theirs, so if we first move against the Imperial forces at any of the other colony worlds we’re going to get slapped down, hard. If we stay here and wait, sooner or later we get slapped once and for all.”
“Damned if we move,” a short, dark-skinned man with silver hair and a major general’s rank tabs on his collar said, “and damned if we stay.”
“That’s about where we stand, General Chabra.”
“Well, there’s a problem then, sir,” Dev pointed out. “The Alyan system is one hundred thirty light-years from Sol, so that’s…” He consulted his personal RAM files, performing a quick calculation based on Mu Herculis’s distance from Sol and the angular separation between Alya and Mu Herc in Earth’s skies. “Make it one hundred five lights from here to Alya,” he said a second later, as the figure appeared in his mind. “That’s a three-and-a-half-month trip, minimum. I don’t care how glad the DalRiss are to see us, we’re not going to be able to travel there, kick the Imperials out and get solid DalRissan help, then make the voyage back here before that five- or six-month deadline. It’s impossible.”
Sinclair nodded. “Actually, we’ve had a thought on that, but it’s such a long shot we can’t realistically count on it. But the one DalRiss starship we’ve seen in action demonstrated instantaneous travel, all the way from Alya A to Altair in literally no time at all. If you succeed in your mission, you may find your trip back to Mu Herculis takes less time than you imagine. In fact, the single most important reason for establishing close ties with these people is the possibility that we can learn how to duplicate that.”
“Surely that’s what the Japanese have had in mind all along, Travis,” General Darwin Smith said. “They’ve had a presence at Alya A-VI since 2540, now, and they still haven’t found out how the DalRiss manage that trick. How is our expeditionary force supposed to do in weeks or days what the best Imperial scientists haven’t been able to accomplish in three years?”
Sinclair glanced across at the civilian. “Professor? You had some thoughts on that.”
“Actually,” Brenda Ortiz said, “we think
They were in the conference room set up as part of CONMILCOM’s Headquarters suite aboard the Rogue. There were no chairs present, but at the sky-el’s half-G level that was little more than a minor annoyance, and it did allow more men and women to crowd in next to the round, central desk with its holographic projector and AI interface pads. The low, gray-surfaced egg shapes of link modules lined the compartment’s bulkheads. Most were empty now, but a few were occupied by duty officers maintaining a communications watch with Argosport and with picket ships scattered across the Mu Herculis system.
Eighteen CONMILCOM staff officers were gathered in the room for the briefing, not counting Dev, Katya, and Sinclair himself. One civilian was present as well. Her name was Professor Brenda Ortiz, and she was a xenosophontologist, the closest thing to an expert on the DalRiss that the Confederation had. An attractive woman of perhaps forty-five standard years, she wore her dark hair long at the top and braided down her back but had shaved the sides of her head to give free access to the T-sockets behind her ears. Dev felt a sense of kinship with her; like him, she was from Earth.
“They are afraid of exactly that, Captain,” Sinclair replied. “That we’ll screw things up. But they’re more afraid of doing nothing, which is what will happen if we can’t break this deadlock of personnel, weapons, and supplies. Right now, Congress feels—and for once our intelligence sources tend to support the feeling—that we have five months, possibly six, before the Empire moves against our base here at Herakles. Our fleet is still no match for theirs, so if we first move against the Imperial forces at any of the other colony worlds we’re going to get slapped down, hard. If we stay here and wait, sooner or later we get slapped once and for all.”
“Damned if we move,” a short, dark-skinned man with silver hair and a major general’s rank tabs on his collar said, “and damned if we stay.”
“That’s about where we stand, General Chabra.”
“Well, there’s a problem then, sir,” Dev pointed out. “The Alyan system is one hundred thirty light-years from Sol, so that’s…” He consulted his personal RAM files, performing a quick calculation based on Mu Herculis’s distance from Sol and the angular separation between Alya and Mu Herc in Earth’s skies. “Make it one hundred five lights from here to Alya,” he said a second later, as the figure appeared in his mind. “That’s a three-and-a-half-month trip, minimum. I don’t care how glad the DalRiss are to see us, we’re not going to be able to travel there, kick the Imperials out and get solid DalRissan help, then make the voyage back here before that five- or six-month deadline. It’s impossible.”
Sinclair nodded. “Actually, we’ve had a thought on that, but it’s such a long shot we can’t realistically count on it. But the one DalRiss starship we’ve seen in action demonstrated instantaneous travel, all the way from Alya A to Altair in literally no time at all. If you succeed in your mission, you may find your trip back to Mu Herculis takes less time than you imagine. In fact, the single most important reason for establishing close ties with these people is the possibility that we can learn how to duplicate that.”
“Surely that’s what the Japanese have had in mind all along, Travis,” General Darwin Smith said. “They’ve had a presence at Alya A-VI since 2540, now, and they still haven’t found out how the DalRiss manage that trick. How is our expeditionary force supposed to do in weeks or days what the best Imperial scientists haven’t been able to accomplish in three years?”
Sinclair glanced across at the civilian. “Professor? You had some thoughts on that.”
“Actually,” Brenda Ortiz said, “we think
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