Season of the Wolf (The Lunar Free State Book 6) by John E. Siers

Author:John E. Siers [Siers, John E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Theogony Books
Published: 2022-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

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LFS Werewolf, Inbound for New Eden

Lorna Greenwood nibbled at her lower lip—a habit acquired from her grandmother, and one she kept promising herself she would break.

Something wasn’t right in the Rothstein system, but it was nothing she could put her finger on. Werewolf had dropped out of hyper without incident, her systems had recovered promptly, and she had set course for New Eden.

Per fleet protocols, she had transmitted an arrival notice to New Eden Command, but that notice wouldn’t arrive for some time yet—the planet was far away in its orbit from Werewolf’s entry point. As a rule, LFS warships ignored planetary positions for hyperspace travel and followed a direct star-to-star course, unless a system had one or more giant planets whose mass could affect the position of the system’s hyper limit.

Werewolf’s mission called for her to survey a direct course from Sacagawea to Rothstein, and if that wasn’t convenient for a quick normal-space run to New Eden, so be it. Lorna wasn’t expecting a quick response to her arrival message.

Where the hell is the system picket, she wondered.

She had started in-system at a modest 100 gees—protocols called for her to proceed that way until her arrival was acknowledged—and they’d been inbound for three-quarters of an hour. If New Eden Command was following standard system defense procedures, the picket should have been waiting somewhere out at the hyper limit, should have gotten an FTL message when Werewolf arrived, and should have made a fast hyperspace trip around the system to drop in near the arrival point.

If they were on the ball, that should have happened by now. The picket should have come out of hyper behind Werewolf and issued an IFF challenge. If they didn’t show up soon, Commodore Sanchez would no doubt be having issues with the picket’s SO. While that wouldn’t be Lorna’s problem, she didn’t want her arrival to be the source of another captain’s discomfort.

She let another five minutes pass, then decided that, maybe, somebody needed a wake-up call.

“Ms. Jennings, set us up for an FTL transmission to New Eden,” she ordered. “Our number and ‘inbound New Eden’ should be enough. Let me know when you have it set up, and we’ll shut down the drive.”

Coded gravity-pulse FTL messages took time to send, and the ship’s gravity drive had to be shut down for the duration, which was why they were normally only used when the message was urgent enough to require faster-than-light delivery. Lorna wasn’t particularly concerned, since this one would only require Werewolf’s drive to be down for less than a minute.

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