Daring

30

The hurry up and wait lasted for eighteen hours.

Which is to say that nothing horrible happened for that length of time although quite a few working people spent the time sweating bullets.

Midway through her meal, in the middle of a long line of puns being bounced around the table like Ping-Pong balls, Kris sat bolt upright.

“Something wrong?” Jack asked.

“No, but I think I just figured how we can know whether the mother ship is coming through the jump with all her little monster ships tucked in or instead is sending out a swarm of monster ships to check things out first.”

“How?” the colonel asked.

Kris bopped herself on the forehead. “They are taking the jumps slow and easy. That means we can send through the periscope. Say we have one of the courier boats stand out up there, monitoring the view to the other solar system. We use the radio monitor first to let us know they’re coming. Then the visual one to see how they’re deployed.”

“We might want to trade off,” the colonel said. “We don’t know if they’ll go to some kind of EmCon blackout.” At the blank stare he got from Vicky and Ron, the colonel translated himself. “Emission Control. A smart cookie goes silent on the radio and radar as you get closer to your target.”

“We can balance using the radio and the light-frequencies spy,” Kris said.

“Do we know if they can tell that the jump is in use, even a little bit?” Ron asked. “I know that we usually know something has jumped into the system by the roar of their reactors, but does the jump itself give off a clue?”

That turned out to be a very interesting question. Several busy boffins said so when Kris interrupted them with it. Unfortunately, even the two scientists who had come up with the idea of the periscope had no idea if someone could know the jump was in use. Apparently, no one in the human race had yet succeeded in answering that question.

Yes, it had been asked, but getting anyone with money to pay for the lengthy research to maybe get an answer had never been made to happen. Was one of the Longknife foundations interested in correcting that oversight?

Kris allowed that it might be. “Write up a grant proposal when we get back.”

Once the boffins were back to their work, her team got back to their guessing.

“I hope no bug-eyed monsters ever asked that question, either,” the colonel concluded.

“Even BEMs that have spent their whole existence bouncing around in space, hardly ever touching down?” Jack said.

Kris’s crew fell silent.

“Okay,” Penny said. “I’ve got to say this even if no one wants to hear it. I don’t have the moral certainty that you have, Kris. Maybe the rest of you see nothing wrong with dragging the whole human race . . .”

“And the Iteeche race,” Ron interjected.

“Into a war with God only knows who or what or how many of these BEMs.” Penny shivered. “I’ve got a problem with it. And doing it without a word exchanged between us! We’re firing the first shot in what could be a long hell of a war. Maybe worse, I think we’re all hoping that those neutron torpedoes will wipe the mother ship out. Doesn’t that kind of sound like genocide?”

Done, Penny let out a long Irish sigh, one her late husband would have been proud of. For a moment, her words just hung in the air above the table.

Kris reflected on them. Did she feel the moral certainty that Penny had accused her of?

“Young lady,” the colonel said, “I respect both your words and the feelings from which they come. But I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse us of doing what we’re contemplating out of a feeling of moral superiority and certainty. There is the matter of what these people appear to have done to at least one other planet and its civilization and what they appear ready to do to another whole planetful of people. That also is genocide.”

“Oh Lord,” Abby said, “I am so hoping for the professor to come galloping in here to show us home movies of that little green grandmother with twelve thumbs. I do dearly want to shake her hand.”

“I, too,” Ron said, reaching out with all four hands and wiggling his fingers.

“Can I go on record, with what looks to be the majority?” Kris said. “I’ll kiss the green cheeks of this proverbial little green lady.”

Kris paused to take a deep breath. “Listen, folks, we all sat in the Forward Lounge for days, dissecting how my great-grandfathers and Ron’s chooser got us into the mess of the Iteeche War and kept it going even after it could have burned itself out.”

The crew nodded, except for Vicky. She looked really puzzled, which even on her face, came across quite beautifully.

“I’ll explain it later,” Kris said to her. “What I mean is that we really raked them over the coals in our hindsight.”

“I was thinking about that,” Penny put in.

“And now, here we are with a hot potato of nova temperature in our laps, and no one handy to toss it off to.”

“More’s the pity,” Abby said.

“And we don’t have a lot of time to decide what to do about it,” Kris said.

“Shame that the universe won’t allow for a time-out so that we can call home and get advice,” Jack said.

“Do you really think that endless debate from the dunderheads would give us a better answer?” Kris asked.

“There is that,” the colonel agreed.

“Aren’t we being a little arrogant?” Penny asked.

That hung in the air for quite a while before Kris broke the silence.

“Our cook at Nuu House had a saying. ‘Spit in one hand, wish in the other, and see which you get the most out of,’ ” Kris said. “We can think of a thousand reasons why we shouldn’t make a decision. We can wish all we want for the problem to go away.”

Kris leaned forward and looked each of her friends in the eyes. “The fact still remains that we have a horrible choice to make. Stand aside and let genocide happen or do something about it and, by doing that, commit the whole of our species to a fight until someone can somehow convince all of those involved to stop the killing.”

“Or we all end up dead,” Penny said.

That silenced the discussion for a while.

“You want to know one thing that really pisses me off,” Kris said into the silence.

“Just one thing, baby ducks?” Abby said.

“Well, the biggest thing from today.”

“I’m all ears,” Jack said.

“That neither I nor Phil Taussig was able to get these BEMs to talk to us.”

“And for that, we may well have a war,” Colonel Cortez said, with a sigh any Irishman would have respected.

After a respectful pause, Kris turned to Penny. “Would you mind if I went back to examining our options?”

“You might as well. I’m pretty sure the hand I’m looking at only has hope in it. Your hand, at least, has something substantial.”

That got a laugh.

“Nelly, if we find that a whole swarm of huge warships are heading for us ahead of the mother ship, can we break off and duck through another jump point before they get to us?”

“I don’t think so, Kris.”

“What’s the problem?” the colonel asked.

“I assume that you intend to establish your roadblock in either the system with the bird folk or the next system out,” the computer said.

“That’s my thinking,” Kris said. “We need time to prepare, then time to get there. I doubt we could get there any sooner.”

“Your problem,” Nelly said, “Your Highness, is that the jump point that the hostile aliens will be using is a dozen hours or more from any other way out.”

“That long, huh,” the colonel said.

“Yes,” the computer said.

“So if we station the three corvettes say ten thousand kilometers out from the jump and the battleships at thirty thousand, there’s no place to run to if things go bad.”

“It looks like that to me, Kris.”

NELLY, ARE THERE ANY OF THE NEW FUZZY JUMP POINTS IN EITHER OF THOSE TWO SYSTEMS?

KRIS, NO FUZZY POINTS IN THEM OR THE NEXT SYSTEM OUT. THERE ARE A FEW TWO JUMPS OUT, BUT YOU WON’T GET ANY HELP THERE.

“So,” the colonel summed it up. “If we go, we’re pretty much committed. I know if I was in charge of that mother ship, I’d never go through a jump point without ordering a couple of scouts through first and wait until at least one of them comes back to report all clear.”

The rumblings around the table pretty much agreed with him.

“Of course, I’m a human,” the colonel went on. “I’ve been raised on wars. I wonder how long it’s been since any of those BEMs met any real resistance?”

“I don’t think that’s a question we can answer,” Kris said, “but from what we’ve seen both in the ship that attacked us and the planet that somebody, person or persons unknown, I admit, Penny, massacred, it didn’t look like anyone was breaking a sweat.”

“An army gets slipshod if it doesn’t go up against a first-class fighting force every once in a while. At least human armies do. Lots of ways to get sloppy,” the colonel said.

“But that’s not something we’ll find out anytime soon,” Penny said. “Not before it’s too late.”

With that, they adjourned to the sundae bar. The Mess President had laid out all the trimmings to go with the steaks.

That brought a series of jokes about fattening the calf and last meals. Which ended when Kris noticed the looks her team was getting from the other officers dining in the mess.

Eighteen hours passed like eighteen endless days.