Prologue
The monitor Daffodil was fairly standard for her class: just thirty-seven crew, all packed into tight living conditions, with most of the ship’s space given over to mammoth tanks for both fuel and reaction mass. She hung in space well outside her Waypoint’s transit radius, far beyond the flotilla of security ships which patrolled the Waypoint’s perimeter.
Unlike the rest of the watch fleet, Daffodil possessed minimal weaponry. In the event that a hostile force emerged from the Waypoint, Daffodil had exactly one job: leave the flotilla to do the fighting, and hie to the planets of the inner system. If she were to be jammed or intercepted, Daffodil possessed a dozen high-gee launches which could sprint ahead of the mothercraft. All it took was for one launch to come within broadcast range of the command force, thus sounding the alarm.
Daffodil herself—and all of her crew—were deemed expendable.
The Constellar office of Deep Space Operations and Defense ensured that all of Daffodil’s crew were accorded commensurate hazard pay.
Moreover, to do the job right, Daffodil had that rarest and most expensive piece of equipment: a Key. The Key was the only way to alert the attendant security flotilla that their Waypoint was in use—gaining precious seconds of time which might make the difference between victory and defeat.
Presently, Daffodil’s on-shift Waypoint pilot was tucked into his gee chair. The half-meter-sized spherical Key itself was mounted in the center of a control console over the Waypoint pilot’s knees. Unlike the people actually flying Daffodil, the Waypoint pilot was oblivious to his ship’s relative attitude and velocity in relation to the orbital plane of the system’s primary sun. His mind was focused purely on the Waypoint itself, as well as the other Waypoints he could sense through Daffodil’s single Key.
His eyes were closed, and his hands moved across the Key’s impossibly smooth, alien surface. It was mentally exhausting work. Waypoint pilots took triple downtime as a result. Without sufficient sleep and recovery, constant use of a Key would drive most men mad. Likewise, the aptitude tests—for Key training—had a steep failure rate. Perhaps one individual in a hundred showed any ability for the vocation. Something to do with the Keys not being originally built to interface with human minds. Or so the schoolmasters said.
Daffodil’s on-shift Waypoint pilot was nearing the end of his day. As always at that hour, he had a headache, and his steel-blue one-piece spaceflight uniform was moist with perspiration. Pushing these discomforts out of his conscious awareness, the pilot concentrated on the skein of the Waywork proper—hanging like a spider’s web in his mind’s eye. If he took both hands off the Key’s surface, this mental picture of the Waywork blurred and disappeared. Keeping at least one hand on the Key at all times ensured that his perception of the Waywork remained clear. Like any properly schooled Waypoint pilot, he knew the Waywork intimately: fifty-six stars, spread across an irregularly shaped lump of interstellar space, each star joined to the whole by the filaments of the web.
The majority of that territory belonged to Starstate Constellar’s sworn enemy: Starstate Nautilan. Some of it also belonged to the other Starstates: Yamato, Sultari, and Amethyne. Only a few systems remained friendly: Constellar’s home territory—the last bastion of freedom in human space.
The extent of the Waywork had never changed. Not in the many centuries since people had initially stumbled across the first known Keys, during humanity’s long, desperate, slower-than-light exodus from Earth.
Earth, the Waypoint pilot thought, now there is a name straight from legend!
Where exactly the cradle of humankind could be found—in the vastness of the Milky Way—was unknown. No records had survived the migration, nor the battles which had ensued thereafter. Human space was defined by the Waywork, and the Waywork defined human space. Earth was somewhere outside. Perhaps far outside? Lost, orbiting one of the countless number of other suns, all burning silently across the galaxy—systems humanity could not hope to reach without a prohibitively monumental investment in time, blood, and treasure.
As if on cue, a new Waypoint suddenly manifested in the pilot’s mental map.
Audibly gasping, he yanked his hands off the Key, and rubbed at his eyes with balled fists—the throbbing in his head becoming especially pronounced.
“You okay, Herreta?” asked a nearby voice. The Daffodil’s lone surgeon spent the bulk of her time in the ship’s command module, keeping an eye on the Waypoint pilots during duty hours. Like himself, the surgeon wore a standard one-piece space duty uniform, only her shoulders were decorated with the insignia of a medical officer.
“Affirmative,” he replied, still rubbing at his face with his hands, then wiping the sweat and oil on his thighs.
“Twenty more minutes, then you’re done for forty-eight hours,” the surgeon said reassuringly.
“I’ll be okay,” Herreta said, more to bolster his own confidence than to reassure the medical officer presently peering at him over the back of her gee chair. Hallucinations were a known sign that a Key user was about to tip over the edge. But Herreta was young. Too young, yet, to file his medical papers. Besides which, Constellar was still at war—and needed every able-bodied trooper it could get.
The Waypoint pilot gently put his hands back onto the surface of the Key. When his mental map of the Waywork steadied, Herreta quickly counted up the Waypoints…and held his breath. The fifty-seventh Waypoint hung apart from the familiar, ageless shape of the Waywork proper.
Exhaling slowly, then taking several deep breaths, Herreta opened his eyes, stretched his neck from one side to the other, cracked his knuckles, then reapplied his hands to the Key’s surface…and again counted fifty-seven Waypoints.
“Do you need someone to jump in early?” the surgeon asked.
“Maybe,” Herreta replied. “But get the captain over here first.”
In a command module so small, with so few crew, the skipper of the Daffodil heard every word the Waypoint pilot said, and was out of his gee chair almost instantly—floating over to the Waypoint pilot’s station.
The light from multiple displays and holograms glowed across the air-circulation ductwork which composed the command module’s ceiling. There was precious little direct illumination. It would have interfered with the readouts. And was superfluous, when every switch, touchpad, knob, dial, and lever was backlit.
“Incoming?” the captain said, his voice grim. “We’d better alert Commodore Iakar, aboard the Comet.”
“Nossir,” Herreta said. “Something else. Something I thought I’d never see—not in my whole life.”
Now the entire population of the command module were turned in their gee chairs, staring quietly at the Waypoint pilot.
“Go on,” ordered the captain.
“It’s a new coordinate on the Waywork map, sir.”
“I beg your pardon?” the captain blurted.
“A new Waypoint, sir.”
“But…that’s not possible.”
“Yessir. Nevertheless, it’s there. Plain as day.”
“Get the other Waypoint pilots down here,” the captain ordered firmly. “We need confirmation.”
“But they’re sleeping—” the surgeon began to protest.
“Do it,” the captain barked. “Now.”
In short order, the entire ship’s compliment of Waypoint pilots were clustered around the gee chair where the Key was integrated into Daffodil’s architecture. One by one, they took turns in the seat, each of them applying his or her hands to the Key’s surface. And one by one, each of them repeated what Herreta had said.
“What do we do now?” Herreta asked, swallowing hard. He still couldn’t believe it.
“Put Commodore Iakar on my chair’s secure channel,” the captain ordered his communications officer. “Then sound the ship-wide underway alarm. We’re breaking station as soon as the reactor is ready.”
“What for?” the surgeon asked. “We’re not under attack!”
“If our Waypoint pilots can see it,” the captain said loudly, returning to his seat, “that means every other Waypoint pilot in the Waywork can see it too. Including those of Starstate Nautilan. We dare not let them reach the new Waypoint first!”