9
Thirty-six hours later and the mood aboard the Beauregard was black despair. There had been no sign of either the existence or the destruction of the missing ships from the Corvallis pod. Yan had reported in several times using the longwave packet system, each time with no positive word on the arrival of the missing ships. No signals had been sent; no telltale signs had been found. The quantum tether returned nothing but static. It was like the Corvallis and her sister ships had simply vanished from the universe.
Clement had started rotations for each of the duty stations, with either he or Lubrov sitting in, but none of the crew really wanted to take any time away from their search. Clement was forced to order two hours rest out of every eight or no one would have taken a break. For his part, the admiral had not even gone to his cabin. He had raided the infirmary for stimulants to keep him going, but that was a ticking time bomb, and even though he had allowed others to take them he could tell from his own fatigue that they were all reaching a breaking point.
The Beauregard should have caught the Corvallis pod at sixteen hours, fifty-three minutes time since they had turned and reversed course. There had been no sign of them, though, and even Clement was beginning to feel but there was little hope left. Colonel Lubrov signaled to Clement as he sat bleary eyed in his command couch.
“Can I have a word with you, Admiral?” she said.
“Yes, Colonel,” he replied, motioning her over, his speech slow and slurry. She took a step away from her console then and toward his station. “In your cabin, if you please?”
Clement stared at her for a moment, feeling too fatigued to even get up. Finally, though, he struggled to his feet. His legs were sore and tired, and he had a pounding headache, most likely from the stims. He came around his command couch and walked unsteadily down the short metal steps to the captain’s cabin for the first time on this mission, gripping the handrail all the way. Lubrov followed him in and then shut the cabin door behind her. They stood in the entryway of the cabin, Clement refusing to go in any further to keep from being tempted by the sight of his bed.
“Yes, Colonel,” he said.
“Sir, I think you know that it’s my job to report what I see to you.”
“Of course it is.”
She nodded. “Sir, what I’m seeing is an exhausted crew and a search that has turned up nothing to give us any indication that we are close to finding those missing ships. Our water supplies are low, our food supply is nearly tapped out—”
“We can survive on half rations,” he snapped, interrupting her.
She bit at her lower lip in response, choosing her next words carefully. “I’m sure we can, sir. But I have to tell you that I think whatever solution there is to this mystery, those of us on this ship are not any closer to discovering what it is. My recommendation as XO is that we turn the Beauregard around again and return to the fleet in the Trinity system. We can then form another search and rescue mission, perhaps with multiple ships and larger crews.”
“I’d like to give it a few—”
This time she interrupted him. “Immediately, sir.”
Clement looked around the cabin and then took a few awkward steps and sat down in his cabin chair. “So you’re saying that, in your opinion, we’ve lost them, then?”
“I don’t know that, sir. But I believe that the search we are currently conducting will not yield an answer to this mystery. At this point, sir, you’re the only one of the crew who has yet to take any rest, and I’m prepared to order you to take that rest under the Five Suns Navy
fitness-for-command guidelines.”
“I see. And once you do that?”
“Then I will go to the bridge and turn the Beauregard around, sir.”
Clement looked at her, barely able to keep his eyes open as the softness of the thick leather chair began to warm around him. Defeat seemed inevitable now, and fatigue was demanding that he rest.
“So ordered, Colonel,” he finally croaked out.
“Thank you, Admiral,” she replied.
Then the room began to fade around him, and he couldn’t fight back sleep any longer. His last thoughts were of the ships of the Corvallis pod, drifting aimlessly across the ocean of space.
Lost forever.
Four hours later Colonel Lubrov was gently shaking Clement awake. His sleep had been fitful, elusive, and unrefreshing.
Clement, tired and confused, looked up at her through weary eyes. “Colonel?” he said.
“Sir, we have a contact on the quantum tether.”
Clement jumped to his feet, forcing himself awake. “The Corvallis?”
“It could be.”
He rushed out of the room and quickly ran up the four steps to his bridge, Lubrov following him. He called to Adebayor the moment he stepped on the bridge. “Kayla? Is it the Corvallis?”
She turned from her console. “Uncertain at this time, sir. It’s not a vocal communication; it appears to be a repeating beacon of some kind. It’s coming from an area of space that’s about half a light-year from Trinity, sir.”
“How long until we get there?”
Mika Ori turned from the helm station to answer him. “One hour, six minutes, sir, from our present position and maintaining our current course and speed.”
“Can we go faster?”
“That’s a question for the engineer, sir,” Ori said.
Clement tapped on his com button to call down to the reactor room. “Nobli, can we get any more speed out of the LEAP reactor?”
A female voice answered. “This is Tech Kim Reck, sir,” she said. “Mr. Nobli has been sleeping for about an hour. Do you want me to wake him?”
“Damn straight I do, Tech Reck,” said Clement. He waited anxiously for Nobli to come on the line. After about thirty seconds he heard the familiar scratchy voice of his chief engineer.
“Tech Reck tells me you have some sort of quantum communication incoming?” said Nobli.
“Lieutenant Adebayor tells me it’s a beacon of some kind. Is that something a stranded ship might send out?”
“Well you’ve got me on that, Admiral. It’s not something I would have ever thought of, but if it’s in LEAP space and giving off a signal then it must be artificial.”
“I agree. How much more speed can you give me on the reactor?”
“I can get you forty percent over standard cruising speed, but I’m not sure how long that can last.” There was an unintelligible conversation coming through from Tech Reck in the background and then Nobli covered the com with his hand. Clement heard cursing going both ways before Nobli returned to the line.
“Tech Reck says she can get you thirty-eight minutes at that speed, sir, and if she says that I believe her. That will give you about a three-minute cushion before I’d have to shut the reactor down completely. I can’t lean her out fast enough when she’s running that hot.”
Clement looked to Mika Ori. “Will that be enough time to reach the beacon?”
She nodded in reply. “It should be at that speed, sir. Maybe even with a minute or two to spare.”
“Do it, Nobli,” Clement ordered. “And tell your tech I’m going to give her a promotion.”
“I think she’d rather just have a pay raise, sir,” replied Nobli.
“Good enough. Signal the pilot when she can go to full max.”
“Yes, Admiral,” replied Nobli, then he cut the line. Clement swung around into the captain’s couch, feeling both optimistic and a bit rested for the first time in two days.
Thirty-one minutes later and they were right on top of the beacon as they reduced speed to its location. What it was, though, was still a mystery. From their longwave scans it was about a meter long, shaped like a cylinder, and emitting a steady pulse of proton energy into the quantum aether.
“From what I’m reading, the thing is stationary in LEAP space,” reported Lubrov. “I don’t know how that’s possible.”
“Neither does Nobli, but it’s clearly technology we don’t currently have,” said Clement. “I’m sure Nobli would love to get his hands on it.” He turned to his pilot. “Mika, is there any way we can pick this thing up? Bring it on board?”
The Beauregard’s pilot turned from her station and looked at the admiral incredulously. “At superluminal speeds? And with what would I grab it? No, sir. It would have to be in normal space to retrieve such a device.”
“Noted, Mika. If someone in the Corvallis pod designed this thing, I’m going to give them a medal. What’s your best estimate of what the beacon actually is?”
“It’s got to be a marker, sir. Most probably left by someone in the Corvallis pod to indicate where they exited LEAP space. That’s my best guess, anyway. I recommend we drop out of LEAP space at the marker location and start our search for our missing pod of ships in local space.”
Clement looked to Lubrov, who nodded concurrence. “So ordered, Pilot. Estimated time to normal space?”
“Seven minutes, sir.”
“Proceed.” Clement motioned back to get Lubrov’s attention again. “Tactical considerations, Colonel?”
Lubrov looked up from her station. “It would seem a stretch that this is our technology, sir. If it is then we have an unknown genius in the fleet, and I doubt that. I’ve read every crew bio for this mission and approved them myself. I’d know if we had a hidden genius like that.”
Clement contemplated her statement. “So, do you think this might be from . . . someone else?”
“I can’t know that, sir. But I think once we have affected our rescue that we should circle back and try to obtain it anyway we can.”
“I agree.”
Lubrov looked seriously at him, the only look she seemed to carry on her face. “There is one other consideration, sir.”
“And that is?”
“This could be a trap set by some other force, origin unknown.”
“Noted, Colonel.” Clement turned away then and called down to Nobli again on his private com. “Hassan, I’m going to need you to keep the reactor warm after we drop out of LEAP space.”
“Of course, sir. May I ask why?”
“We may have a bogey on our hands, an unknown. I don’t want to take any chances, if you get my meaning.”
“The MAD weapon?” replied Nobli.
Clement hesitated for a second. “I think it would be wise to be prepared, Hassan.”
“Understood, sir. When we drop out of LEAP space I’ll be sure she stays warm and that you have the weapon at your disposal. I sure hope you don’t have to use it, Jared.”
“I share your feelings,” said Clement, then signed off.
The ship quickly decelerated, dropping out of LEAP space just a few thousand kilometers past the beacon’s position.
“Lieutenant Adebayor,” said Clement, getting her attention. “I’m going to need your radio telescope to be deployed. Let’s use the forward-looking infrared scanner to look for heat signatures from the pod ships. Also, I want you to send out a longwave general contact signal, on repeat. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll hear us before we see them.”
“Aye, sir, engaging the FLIR,” replied Adebayor as she set about her tasks. Clement knew the process could be tedious, given the size of even local space, but he had confidence in the young officer. She had proven herself aboard the Beauregard before. Still the wait was nearly interminable, and Clement found himself pacing the deck as he waited for some news, any news.
It took nearly half an hour before Adebayor got a hit. “Picking up something now, sir,” she called from her station. “Appears to be a residual heat signature, possibly from a thruster. It matches the type of output we would expect from one of our destroyers.”
That got Clement’s attention. “Relay the location to the pilot, Lieutenant,” he said, retaking his captain’s seat. As Adebayor did the relay Mika Ori started logging the coordinates into her tracking computer.
“Eleven minutes from here on full thrusters, Admiral,” reported Ori.
“Go,” Clement said.
As they traversed the distance to the thruster sign, Adebayor began detecting other heat signatures. “I’m counting ten thrusters in various stages of cooling down, sir,” she reported. “It looks like they’ve been tracking back toward Trinity, but in normal space rather than using the LEAP drive.”
Clement looked to Lubrov “That’s concerning. Are they tracking back in normal space because the LEAP drives aren’t working?”
“That’s a possibility, sir. But at least we’ve found our missing pod.”
“That we have, Colonel. Kayla, try and raise the Corvallis, please.”
“Aye, sir.” It took a couple of minutes sifting through the crackling static of normal space, but eventually Adebayor got in contact with captain Samkange of the Corvallis. Adebayor put him on the ship-wide com so everyone could hear.
“Christ, am I glad to hear from you, Kayla!” said the relieved voice of Samkange over the com.
“Admiral Clement here now, Captain.”
“Sir! It’s good to hear from you too, sir! Our status is—”
“Hold on, Captain. Let me ask the questions for a minute.”
“Sir.”
“First, can you get your LEAP drives functioning?”
“I believe so, sir. When we dropped out of LEAP space and discovered we weren’t at the designated rendezvous point, I ordered the drives to be shut down. We’ve preceded back toward Trinity on our sub-light thrusters. I figured going in the general direction was better than just sitting there trying to figure out what went wrong with our FTL, sir.”
“Good. Next question: What time does your ship clock say?”
“Umm, 1620 hours, sir.”
“What day?”
“2517.086, sir.”
“Hold,” said Clement and then muted the line. He turned to Lubrov. “How far off are they?” he asked.
Lubrov punched in some calculations on her console, then: “By our ship clock, thirty-six hours twenty-two minutes discrepancy, sir.”
Clement nodded and turned on the com again. “Harry, please tell me how long it’s been since you dropped out of LEAP space?”
“About six hours by my watch, sir,” replied Samkange. “Is there something wrong?”
“Harry, I’ve got something to tell you, and you may not like it, I know I certainly don’t. We’ve been searching for you for more than forty-two hours. It’s been that long, and a little change that you’ve been missing. The Yangtze pod was thirty-plus minutes late coming out of LEAP space, but their clocks reported that they were on time and they were more or less on target for the rendezvous point. It appears your clocks are also not in line with ours, but by a much larger factor. That means we have a major discrepancy in time, apparently caused by the LEAP drive itself. It could bend both time and space, which is something we didn’t anticipate.”
“Holy shit,” said Samkange, then quickly apologized for his language. “Sir, at this distance, it could take us four weeks through normal space to make it back to Trinity. We thought we just overshot the rendezvous point. We didn’t think we lost time as well.”
“That’s the problem, Harry. As long as we don’t understand the consequences of using the LEAP drive we have to be cautious. So far the Beauregard has been working fine, like she usually does. My concern is that if we start you back to Trinity using the LEAP drive we may end up losing you again.”
“That would be my concern as well, sir. What are your orders?”
“Stay put. Let us come to you. My shuttle will dock with the Corvallis in . . .” He looked to Mika Ori. She held up seven fingers. “Seven minutes, Harry. I’ll come aboard with Nobli and we’ll see if we can figure this out.”
“Aye, sir,” replied Samkange. “We’ll roll out the red carpet.”
“That’s not necessary, Captain, but I appreciate the thought.” With that Clement signed off and signaled to Adebayor to keep the line open between the ships, all the way to their rendezvous. He called down to Engineering one more time, seeking Nobli.
“Hassan, get your slide rule ready. We’re going to board the Corvallis, and we’re going to need some serious math work from you.” Nobli acknowledged his call, and Clement shut down the line, thankful they had found their missing comrades, but worried about how they would get them safely to their new home.
Regardless of his orders, Captain Samkange did roll out the red carpet for Clement and his party. He came aboard to a Five Suns Navy anthem and a tribute squad, fit for a Fleet Admiral, but Clement quickly shut them down and got down to business. “I’d like to introduce my engineer, Hassan Nobli, and our shuttle pilot here is Lieutenant Tsu.”
“A pleasure,” said Samkange as he shook each of their hands.
“Now, let’s go to your conference room.”
“Aye, sir.”
The conference room was two decks up from the shuttle bay. Though this Five Suns destroyer was a veteran of the Rim Confederation War, she had been updated to the latest systems per Clement’s orders. He was glad he’d issued those orders now.
Samkange brought up a display screen at the far end of the room that showed the formation of his pod of ships. He introduced his chief engineer, a woman named Tyla Brown. They all shook hands before sitting down at the table. Clement nodded Tsu to one of the many chairs circling the back wall of the room before he started in.
“So, we have a problem, ladies and gentlemen. The LEAP drive, in a complication previously unknown to us, has both a space and time displacement ability. We’ve been lucky this time, but if the problem was more extreme, we could have lost all of you. We need to isolate the problem and come up with a working solution. If we can’t, I’m prepared to have this pod proceed back to Trinity on thrusters all the way, even if it does take four weeks. We can’t risk losing you, any of you, so for now we have to assume the LEAP drive is off the table until we can determine that it is one hundred percent safe for both the Navy ships and our migrants. Understood?”
There was a round of yes sirs and then Clement passed the meeting off to Nobli. He began with a series of questions for the Corvallis’ engineer, and he seemed satisfied with the answers, at least initially. After a few minutes, though, Clement got impatient.
“I need to know the consensus, right now. Can this flotilla return to Trinity under the LEAP drive, with a certainty of safety?” He looked to Nobli for his answer.
“Nothing can be verified with certainty, Admiral, especially when dealing with a new
faster-than-light technology. But I’m convinced we can solve this puzzle, at least for the moment, and guide this pod to the Trinity system.”
“And how will we do that, Hassan?” asked Clement. Nobli looked to Engineer Brown, who cleared her throat before speaking.
“From our brief exchanges here, Admiral, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the reactor energy output. I noticed a larger than expected output of both proton and electron particles from the reactor, but there was no indication it would have any effect on our final destination, either in space or time. I believe Engineer Nobli and I can work back from the reactor telemetry, and perhaps find our culprit,” said Brown.
Clement looked to Nobli.
“I concur, sir. I’m hopeful we can work out a reactor formula that will allow us to isolate and even resolve the problem.”
“Good. Please do so, unless you have some objection, Captain?” said Clement to Samkange.
“None I can think of, sir.”
“All right, I’m empowering the two of you to fix this. If there’s anything you need, just ask.”
“I’d like Tech Reck to come over from the Beauregard, sir,” said Nobli immediately.
Clement sat back in his chair, uncomfortable with that request. “I’d like to keep at least one engineer, even a tech, on board my ship for the duration, Nobli. Can’t you communicate via com?”
Nobli nodded. “We can, sir, but she’s pretty handy with a hammer.”
“I’ve seen that,” commented Clement, smiling. “Tell you what, I’ll let you borrow Mr. Tsu over there. Didn’t he used to work with you on the reactor?”
Nobli looked at Tsu. “He did, sir, on our last mission. I guess you’ll have to do, Lieutenant.” Tsu nodded and then the meeting broke up, Clement setting his people to their task while he and Lubrov headed with Samkange and his XO to the officer’s mess, there to wait out their miracle workers.
The officer’s mess cleared out pretty quickly when the captain and the admiral walked in. Not unexpected behavior, as no one wanted to be around if “volunteers” for dangerous work were required. Once they were alone, Samkange started in with a question.
“I’m curious about something, Admiral.”
“Ask away,” said Clement, taking a sip of his tea.
“You told Nobli he could have anything he needed, then you denied him his first request, I was wondering why?”
“Pretty much just as I stated. Under these circumstances I need at least one engineer on my ship, even a tech. Nobli has become increasingly reliant on this Tech Reck, who quite frankly is brilliant from what he tells me, but she’s a bit of a wild card.”
“You think he’s been relying on her too much?”
Clement took another sip of his tea. “I wouldn’t say that, but I’d like him to work with your chief engineer on this one. Nobli does some of his best theoretical work when he’s left to himself, and I wanted to get him back to that kind of thinking by taking him out of his element and not relying on someone familiar as a crutch. Let’s just say it’s an exercise in personnel management.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” replied Samkange.
Clement liked the young captain, a lot, and he wanted to do what he could to mold him into the kind of officer that could one day ascend to a higher position in the fleet, maybe all the way to the top.
The two men made small talk for almost ninety minutes before Clement grew impatient and called down to Nobli. The two engineers hadn’t worked out a solution yet, and apparently Tech Reck was a bit chapped at being left on board the Beauregard, but Clement couldn’t take her feelings into consideration. He reiterated that everyone had their job assignments, and they should get to them and find a solution.
As the afternoon stretched on into evening, Samkange gave Clement a tour of the refitted destroyer. The Corvallis was almost state of the art, and had become more of a missile destroyer than an all-around ship-of-the-line. Clement was impressed with the retooling job, which he’d never really had a chance to review properly or in detail prior to their departure from Kemmerine.
They had just sat down to dinner when Nobli chimed in from the reactor room.
“I think we’ve got it, sir,” he said.
“Please inform me, Mr. Nobli,” replied Clement.
“Well, sir, we’ve detected a quantum time-distortion side effect, something that could have easily gone unnoticed in our previous tests of the LEAP drive. It was really engineer Brown who detected it, sir. She ran the calculations and figured out that it’s a quantum energy flow problem. Basically, all of our ships have to be on the same reactor settings, the same energy output frequency if you will, if we want them all to stay on the same time scale. Now, from the simulations I’ve run based on her calculations, any ships in the pod will end up converting their reactor flow energy output to the same frequency as the ship expressing the primary LEAP bubble. So literally all the other ships were linked to the Corvallis by her reactor frequency, and it was the Corvallis whose energy output was off. So the Corvallis being off of her optimal frequency caused a cumulative effect that effectively distorted time, so they ended up overshooting our target rendezvous point, both in space and time.”
“That all sounds great, Hassan,” said Clement somewhat sarcastically. “I’m not sure what any of it means, but is it safe for me to assume you have a solution?”
“Aye, sir, we do. Basically we have to make sure all the ships in a single pod have their reactors turned off so that every ship is tuned to the same energy output of the ship providing the primary LEAP bubble. Everyone should then be synced to the same space-time clock.”
“So the amount of energy that was being poured out by the Corvallis distorted not only space but time as well?” asked Clement.
“Exactly, sir. We have to keep all our reactor frequencies within a limited range to keep them all on the same time schedule, sir. I would suggest that we link all the reactors to the Beauregard’s frequency and that we provide the primary bubble for the trip back to Trinity.”
“I’ll take that recommendation, Hassan. I’ll have you coordinate with captain Samkange here on the Corvallis. How long until you estimate that we can get the fleet restarted on our journey?”
“I’ll ask for a couple more hours, sir, until Engineer Brown and I can work out the exact calculations that we want to run.”
“Very good, Engineer. I’ll leave you two to it. Send Lieutenant Tsu on up. I’ll be heading back to the Beauregard presently. We’ll set a tentative schedule of four hours from my departure for the return trip to Trinity. Is that enough time?”
“It should be, sir.”
“Thank you, Nobli.”
“Just doing my job, sir.”
“Of course.” Clement closed the com and looked across the table to Samkange. “It looks like we’ve solved our problem.”
“It does, Admiral. You’ll be returning to the Beauregard?”
“No reason for me to be here any longer at this point, Captain. I appreciate your hospitality. before I go, though, there is one more question I’d like to ask you. We found the pod because someone put some sort of beacon into the quantum fluid. It acted as a ‘postmark’ of sorts for where the pod’s location was. I just want to know if it was some genius in your fleet that came up with that idea.”
Samkange shook his head. “I’m sure it wasn’t anyone from the pod, sir. We were all busy just trying to figure out where we were and what had happened. If someone left a ‘beacon,’ as you call it, in the quantum fluid, then I’m sure I have no idea who it was.”
“Thank you, Captain, I had to ask. I’ll be taking Beauregard back out to try and retrieve the beacon so we can get a look at the technology. If you could watch over the pod for the next four hours I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
At that point Clement stood and shook Samkange’s hand, then made for his shuttle, there to go back to his ship and set about retrieving the mysterious beacon.
Once he was back aboard the Beauregard, Clement sent the shuttle and Lieutenant Tsu back to the Corvallis to be ready when Nobli was done with his reactor tweaking. In the meantime, whoever had left that beacon in the LEAP space quantum fluid was still a mystery he wanted to solve. He ordered Lieutenant Adebayor to use the infrared telescope to look for the beacon’s heat signature. When she was unable to locate it, which was concerning, he ordered Mika Ori to take the ship back into LEAP space on a direct course for the last known location of the beacon.
However, when they arrived at the designated coordinates they were in for an unpleasant surprise. The beacon was nowhere to be found.
“Any signs of who might have taken it?” Clement asked Lubrov, his concern over the beacon mystery growing. “I mean, this thing has just appeared and then disappeared without a trace. Please tell me you have something to report?”
Lubrov looked at her console readouts and checked out multiple telemetry returns before giving her answer. “Nothing more than a dispersed wave of protons, sir. The trail isn’t thick enough to determine a general direction, or even the size of the vessel that might have retrieved it. The best I can guess from this data, or should I say lack of data, is that the thing must have been self-propelled in some way, quite possibly automated. Our passing near it could possibly have triggered its programming to return to its original point of origin, whatever that is.”
“I think that’s even a more disturbing prospect than finding it in the first place. This is clearly not technology anyone in our fleet possesses. So the question becomes, whose is it? And why did they help us find our missing people and ships?”
“Maybe they’re just friendly neighbors,” said Mika Ori from her helm station.
“Someone we haven’t met yet?” contemplated Clement. “That seems implausible, but if that isn’t the answer then I’m getting more concerned over who it might actually be.”
“Earth-ship fleet?” asked Ori.
“My first thought was that it might be Admiral DeVore,” said Lubrov.
Clement took in a deep breath at that notion. “That’s a possibility I hadn’t wanted to consider. I did my best to make sure when I left them on Alphus that she and her crews had very little technology to work with. But if I know her as well as I think I do, she always had a backup plan, not to mention a backup for the backup. I wouldn’t put it past her to have set up safeguards in case her first invasion of Trinity failed. As to why she’d leave us a beacon to help us find our people, her enemies, I don’t know why she’d do that. It’s certainly a question that merits further investigation at this point.” Clement turned to Adebayor. “Kayla, please activate the long wave and get me Captain Yan on the Agamemnon.”
“Sir,” responded Adebayor. Less than a minute later Yan was on the line. Clement shared the latest about recovering the missing pod of ships, then turned to the problem at hand.
“What’s your status, Yan?”
“We’re all comfortably in orbit around Bellus, sir, waiting on your orders to go down to the surface. Everyone is anxious to be there and get started colonizing. I’ll need your go-ahead to start that process, though, sir,” replied Yan over the scratchy quantum com line.
“It’s given. Please proceed as soon as you’re ready, Captain. There is one other thing I need you to do for me.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
“Send one of the gunships to Alphus. I want them to do a survey on the status of the exiles and their camps and provide me with an update as soon as possible.”
“Understood, sir. I can spare the Antietam without too much problem. It will probably take them the better part of a day to go there and back.”
“That’s fine, Captain. This is of the highest importance.”
“Understood, sir,” said Yan, then hesitated a second. “Um, should I put the Bellus fleet on high alert?”
“No. Alert status two, please. No need to scare the migrants. Just proceed as you normally would, but I want all military ships on standby alert. And have the Antietam report directly to me once they get to Alphus.”
“Understood, sir. What’s your ETA to Trinity?”
“Well, we seem to have solved our time/space displacement problem, at least for the moment. We will be heading back your way under LEAP power in a little more than three hours. That should put us back at the rendezvous point about nine hours from now.”
“Acknowledged, sir. It will be good to have you back.”
“I’m sure we’ll all be happy to be back, Yan.” At that point they said their pleasantries and Clement signed off, ordering the Beauregard back to return to the Corvallis pod.