Against All Odds by Jeffery H. Haskell

Author:Jeffery H. Haskell [Haskell, Jeffery H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2022-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Nadia couldn’t remember the last time she was bored flying her ship. Perhaps there really was a first time for everything. It was bad enough that she was feeling restless, but worse, her crew was bored.

Professor Bellaits had them running around the fringes of Zuckabar, listening for space-time echoes in all the wrong places, according to everything modern astrophysics told her.

At least his assistant was interesting to talk with. Nadia was quickly approaching thirty and she had only her crew for company most days. It was nice to talk to another woman, even if she was a bit on the young and naïve side.

Compared to her adventures with ONI, her time on Dagher was downright geriatric.

“Coming up on another course correction, Nadia,” Barnes said from the helm. She nodded, waving her fingers nonchalantly in his direction. Days and days of course corrections. They were chugging around the system at a measly twenty-five gravities, allowed to go no faster than three thousand kilometers per second, using the massive gravity of the binary stars as a guide to swing around the ecliptic. They corrected the course, accelerated in the right direction, then shut the gravcoil down while the professor listened to his equipment. He wouldn’t say what he was looking for, other than it was space-time related.

The crew had a pool going. The leading bet was a new starlane... but to where? It made no sense to her. Zuckabar was a fringe system, but starlanes were loud and relatively easy to find. If there was another one of any use, someone would have found it already.

“Skipper,” Barnes said as he crossed from his station to kneel next to her.

“Yes?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him. Barnes had worked for her for over a year now. He was a fine pilot and astrogator and had probably saved her thousands of dollars on each run with how close he was able to ride the rail of a starlane.

“I don’t want to tell you your business, but whatever this professor is looking for, it isn’t out here.”

She nodded for him to go on.

“We’re too close to the suns for a new starlane, plain and simple. Gravity on a pulsar is a monster. Add in the white dwarf and there’s no way, none, that he’s going to find a new starlane this close. I don’t care what fancy equipment he bought. If he wanted a new starlane heading out of Zuck, we would need to find it out in the six billion klick range and then follow it back in. Not here.”

His opinion confirmed what she already knew. There were two reasons to listen for the drumbeat gravity did on space-time. The most common was listening for other ships in close proximity. The other was finding starlanes. But, as Barnes pointed out, they were far too close to the primaries to hear anything as muffled as a starlane... which, even if he was trying to find one, again, where could it possibly lead? The only places worth going already had strong lanes.

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