Chapter 3
Conference Room 1 in Circe Base was an island of calm compared to the consternation that raged all around the rest of the headquarters building. The entire base was in a state of uproar, for that matter.
But the Conference Room was calm. Because Major General Peter ‘Tank’ Sherman was quite firm that panic in a briefing was uncivilized, and the Terran Hegemony in Exile was quite civilized, thank you very much.
When you are 6’10”, played inside linebacker for the Academy football team, and were rumored to be able to bench press a Locust, people tended to do what you said even faster than when they knew you had the little golden stars on your shoulders that meant you were in command.
Intimidation factor. May not be nice, but it was useful on occasion.
He was seated in the catbird seat, with aides and deputies flanking him.
A rumpled looking petite woman wearing a (rumpled) labcoat and a (rumpled) professional dress stood at the podium, waiting for some of her minions to finish loading her presentation.
Dr Kerry Stevens barely topped 5 feet in height, if she stretched out a little before being measured, and even the most crisply pressed outfits became rumpled within seconds of her putting them on. Even her glasses were just a slight bit askew, her hair looked like she hadn’t combed it all day, and would look like that 2 minutes after leaving a hairdresser. She was quite informal in manner, telling anybody who insisted on calling her Dr Stevens that that was her mother, and she hated taking credit for another woman’s work.
But she was as brilliant as she was rumpled, a polymath with about as many degrees as she had rumples in her clothing.
More relevantly, she was the Director of the Advanced Communications Research And Development Center here on New CIrce, in many ways the reason for the existence of Circe Base and the colony in the first place.
The ACRDC (in the logo the ‘R’ is so small as to be almost indistinguishable from a lightning bolt. Kerry was also a fan of ancient rock bands after all) specialized in in-depth research into the Hyperpulse Generator, and had managed under Kerry’s leadership to almost triple the bandwidth available through an HPG pulse.
“OK, Tank. I got bad news, bad news, worse news, and good news.” she began as soon as her chief minion signalled that the projector was ready. “So you better all be ready and don’t waste my time with moaning and groaning.”
Informal, yes, but her gaze was quite intimidating in her own way as she looked over the room. Sherman was the only one completely unaffected by it. Then again, it wouldn’t do for him to be intimidated by his own fiance, now would it.
“First bit of bad news. It really happened, a 50 ton vessel of some sort, betting it’s a shuttle of some kind, fucked realities ass without benefit of a reach around away from not only a standard point, but way the hell away from even a transitory pirate point. What this means is that our jump point defenses are fucking useless against these people. Live with it, our lives just got more fucking complicated.”
Did I mention that she swore like a sailor?
“Second bit of bad news. They then jumped their happy fucking asses out in less than 5 minutes, with no sign they misjumped or that the ghosts of Kearny and Fuchida hauled them into hell. So not only can these clowns jump anywhere they want, they can jump out again whenever the fuck they want as far as we know.”
“Worse? We haven’t the foggiest fucking clue how they pulled this shit off. There was a bright spark on the Artemis that remembered his fucking basic science class and did a quick and dirty spectrograph of the area where the thing was and picked up, get this, Germanium salts that had way too fucking many nitrogen molecules bonded to them. But how the fuck they are doing this, why the fuck they’re burning Germanium like some sort of fuel, and why the fuck they showed up now, ignored every comm request, then didimaued out of here like a scalded cat is currently a total fucking mystery with extra mystery sauce.”
She paused, then smirked. “Now for the one bright bit of good news in this shit sandwich. They pulled this bullshit around an HPG research facility, and we had the main scanners up and running in preparation for a test. So we recorded every last little bit of data there was to record of the KF signature of that joker. And it behaved like a fucking HPG pulse and was directional. Weak as fuck, but we picked it up, and we got a bearing. Couldn’t have been a more than 3 light year jump at most, based on the signature I’d say more like 2.8 or so. But we got an absolute bearing, and I’m pretty fucking sure about that distance.”
Her smile was sharklike. “So if you Navy pukes want to earn your fucking pay out here, I can give you the coordinates and you can go and take a look see. It’s deep space, but that’s what fucking lithium-fusion batteries are for.”
The Hegemony Navy commodore seated next to Sherman snorted, looking more amused than offended at the ‘disparagement’ of his service. “I’ve got a Black Prince and two Cossacks ready to jump at your say so, Tank.” he said instead.
“Send ‘em. And tell ‘em to try ‘talk talk’ rather than ‘shoot shoot’, OK?”
Commodore Giorgos Papadopoulos chuckled. “They didn’t bother to do any talking so far, but that was facing a few militia birds. They might be more talkative with a cruiser saying hi. I’ll tell Captain Hansen to try and make nice before converting targets into scrap.”
Sherman laughed at that. “Potente has the latest mobile HPG, right Kerry?”
Kerry nodded. “Oversaw the upgrade myself, Tank. You thinking keeping a real time link up?”
Sherman just grinned, and his fiance grinned back. They knew how each other thought. “I’ll stay in the comm center then.”
