Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

A graphic sprang from the comp. Amid a scattering of stars, red and green lines crossed near an ordinary yellow sun. Janus quivered with horrible premonition, but the image used an unfamiliar coordinate system centered on New Terra. He could not be certain.

Until two binary stars and a red giant caught his eye, oriented him. In the shock of recognition, he was Janus no longer.

“I-I know this place,” Nessus stammered. “Have me delivered to, to, to the ship.”

Then he collapsed, catatonic with terror, onto the ground.

At the center of the bridge, to the howl of a klaxon, Koala ’s jump timer reset from a bit longer than five minutes to just less than one. New destination coordinates popped onto the pilot’s console.

“What do you think, Lieutenant?” Commander Johansson asked.

Tanya Wu stiffened in her seat at the comm console because, almost certainly, the question was a test. She was newly rotated aboard a ship long deployed. And posted as a lowly purser in a combat zone. And Wu being such a common name — unless she had somehow, without knowing it, pissed off someone in Personnel back on Earth — she had ended up serving under her own father as captain. Dad swore he had had nothing to do with her assignment to Koala, but oh, how pathetic the situation made her look.

Amid the orderly bustle of the bridge, she caught sidelong glances and heard yet another whispered reference — damn this ship’s name — to marsupial pouches and helpless offspring.

“You do think?” Johansson prompted.

“Yes, sir.” External view ports showed only stars, and Tanya turned toward the bridge’s main tactical display. A supply ship as defenseless as its name suggested, Koala, one vessel among hundreds, huddled near the middle of ARM Task Force Delta. Scattered around the periphery of the holo: two small clusters of Kzinti warships. A Trinoc battle group. An ARM squadron, perhaps patrolling, perhaps returning from, well, Tanya did not try to guess its assignment. Apart from fellow ships of the task force, even the closest icons registered as farther from Koala than Saturn from the sun.

The local star was merely the brightest among dimensionless points in the display, and all these ships were outside its gravitational singularity. Out here, light had ceased to set the speed limit. Jump to hyperspace and back out: the nearer group of Kzinti could emerge within the ARM formation, laser cannons blazing, antimatter munitions spewing, within seconds. Still …

“Too many ships too close together,” she temporized, “but that’s always the case.”

“Business as usual, then?”

Definitely a test and the bridge crew knew it. In unending round-the-clock high alert, even lowly pursers took their turn standing watch.

Tanya said, “Let’s hope this never becomes the usual.”

Of the thousands of warships in and around this solar system, at any given moment someone was jumping from or reentering Einstein space. Even within formations ships shifted, the fluid configurations yet another complication for anyone contemplating a sneak attack.

The tactical complexity was staggering. Hawking, the chief artificial intelligence aboard the task force’s flagship, and its distributed subsets in computers across the armada, continually integrated readouts across hundreds of ARM ships and tens of thousands of sensor-laden probes. It pondered every hyperspace-related ripple to triangulate its point of origin. It endlessly assessed evolving risks and opportunities, calculating new deployments for the task force.

Attempted to do all that, anyway.

“Thirty seconds to jump,” the pilot announced over the intercom.

Meaning that soon after thirty seconds, recently disappeared ships in threatening numbers could emerge in synch in and around Task Force Delta, to blast away at everything in sight and return to hyperspace faster than mere mortals could react. Or zip through the formation without shooting, just to rattle the ARM crews. Or stay in hyperspace a few seconds longer, to target another nearby formation.

Or remain in hyperspace for a long time, leaving this chaos behind. Nothing remained to fight over. Nothing tangible, anyway. To be the first to go would be to retreat, and honor remained to fight over.…

Too many possibilities and too little information to choose among them. Tanya said, “It looks like a routine precautionary fleet jump to me, Commander.”

A maneuver that would, in turn, unleash a torrent of new ripples, to which thousands more ships, in formations large and small, all around this solar system, must hurriedly react.…

Johansson left her hanging almost till the jump. “To me, too,” he finally allowed.

“Jumping in three, two, one…” the pilot announced over the intercom.

Across the bridge, view-port screens went dark. The human brain was not wired to perceive hyperspace. Lucky people so confronted sensed walls snapping together, denying the less-than-nothingness presented in a porthole or view port. Unlucky people got lost in the … whatever hyperspace was. The Blind Spot, starfarers called the phenomenon, and it had driven people mad.

“In three,” the pilot called. “Two. One. Dropout.”

On dropout, stars refilled the view ports. Pale, translucent spheres popped up scattered throughout the tactical display. Each sphere centered on the most recent confirmed pre-jump coordinates of a ship; the sphere grew with the moment by moment uncertainty of where that ship had the potential to be now. One by one, like soap bubbles pricked, spheres vanished. Everywhere a ship had been definitively located, whether by Koala ’s instruments or in hyperwave downloads from remote sensors, a tiny icon replaced the bubble. Sometimes nothing replaced a bubble; that meant a ship had disappeared into hyperspace in the seconds while Koala had been disconnected from the familiar universe.

“Report,” Johansson ordered.

“Jump timer at three minutes and holding, sir,” the pilot said.

“No threatening deployments, Commander,” the tactical officer said.

“Hyperwave links opened to London and Prague ” — respectively the task force’s flagship and Koala ’s assigned escort — “sir,” Tanya said.

“What do you think?” Johansson asked her again.

She reached into the tactical display to point out a nearby proto-comet, a vaguely potato-shaped glob about five kilometers along its shortest axis. “I don’t care for the snowball,” she said. “We’re too close, and a decent-sized squadron could hide behind it.” If so, perhaps well stocked with nukes or antimatter.

The grating, prepare-to-jump tone blasted.

“Jump in twenty seconds,” the pilot called over the intercom.

At eleven seconds, another audible alarm, at the pitch that warned of a bogey. It morphed into the warble that identified the bogey as a hostile. A scattering of new icons, lens-shaped, manifested in the tactical display, from Koala ’s perspective lurking behind the snowball. The latest intel download from Hawking.

“I see some Kzinti agreed with you,” Johansson said, a rare touch of approval in his voice.

“Jumping in three. Two…”

The task force executed seven more micro-jumps before the watch changed and Tanya, exhausted, could shamble to the ship’s mess for a hurried meal.

TANYA TOSSED AND TURNED, suspended in midair between sleeper plates in her tiny cabin. As the intercom blasted alerts every few minutes, her thoughts churned. Could three navies, and armed observers from yet more military powers, converge like this without everything ending in disaster? How long until someone lost patience, or cracked under the unending pressure, or simply made an honest mistake?