David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Thank you, Commander," Captain Terekhov replied calmly, never taking his blue eyes from the navigating plot deployed from his command chair. Hexapuma 's icon decelerated smoothly towards a stop on the plot, exactly on the departure line for the Lynx Terminus transit queue. As he watched, a scarlet number "19" appeared beneath her light code, and he nodded almost imperceptibly in approval.

It had taken them a long time to get here. The trip could have been made in minutes in hyper-space, but a ship couldn't use hyper to get from the vicinity of the star associated with a junction terminus to the terminus itself. The gravity well of the star stressed the volume of hyper-space between it and the junction in ways which made h-space navigation through it extraordinarily difficult and highly dangerous, so the trip had to be made the long, slow way through normal-space.

Helen Zilwicki sat at Lieutenant Commander Wright's elbow, assigned to Astrogation for this evolution. Astrogation was far from her favorite duty in the universe, but just this once she preferred her present assignment to Ragnhild's. The blond, freckled midshipwoman was seated beside Lieutenant Commander Kaplan, which was usually the position Helen most coveted. But that was usually, when the astrogation plot and the visual display didn't show the Central Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction.

The Manticore System's G0 primary was dim, scarcely visible seven light-hours behind them, and its G2 companion was still farther away and dimmer. Yet the space about Hexapuma was far from empty. A sizable chunk of Home Fleet was deployed out here, ready to dash through the Junction to reinforce Third Fleet at Trevor's Star at need, or to cover the Basilisk System against a repeat of the attack which had devastated it in the previous war. And, of course, to protect the Junction itself.

Once that protection would have been the responsibility of the Junction forts. But the decommissioning of those fortresses had been completed under the Janacek Admiralty as one more cost-saving measure. To be fair, the process had been begun before the High Ridge Government ever assumed office, for with Trevor's Star firmly in Manticoran hands, the danger of a sudden attack through the Junction had virtually disappeared. Perhaps even more important, decommissioning the manpower-intensive fortresses had freed up the enormous numbers of trained spacers to man the new construction which had taken the war so successfully to the People's Republic.

But now Manticore, and the diminished Manticoran Alliance, was once again upon the defensive, and threats to the home system-and to the Junction-need not come through the Junction. Yet there was no question of recommissioning the fortresses. Their technology was obsolete, they'd never been refitted to utilize the new generations of missiles, their EW systems were at least three generations out of date, and BuPers was scrambling as desperately for trained manpower as it ever had before. Which meant Home Fleet had to assume the responsibility, despite the fact that any capital ship deployed to cover the Junction was over nineteen hours-almost twenty-one and a half hours, at the standard eighty percent of maximum acceleration the Navy allowed-from Manticore orbit. No one liked hanging that big a percentage of the Fleet that far from the capital planet, but at least the home system swarmed with LACs. Any Light Attack Craft might be a pygmy compared to a proper ship of the wall, but there were literally thousands of Shrikes and Ferrets deployed to protect the Star Kingdom's planets. They ought to be able to give any attackers pause long enough for Home Fleet to rendezvous and deal with them.

Ought to , Helen thought. That was the operative phrase.

Almost stranger than seeing so many ships of the wall assigned to ride herd on the Junction, was seeing so many of them squawking Andermani transponder codes. For the entire history of the Star Kingdom-for even longer than there'd been a Star -Kingdom-Manticoran home space had been protected by Manticoran ships. But not any longer. Almost half of the superdreadnoughts on Ragnhild's tactical plot belonged to the Star Kingdom's Grayson and Andermani allies, and relieved though Helen was to see them, the fact that the Star Kingdom needed them made her feel… uncomfortable.

The number code under Hexapuma 's icon had continued to tick steadily downward while Helen brooded. Now it flashed over from "11" to "10," and Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri spoke again.

"We have immediate readiness clearance, Sir," he said.

"Thank you, Commander," Terekhov repeated, and glanced at Hexapuma 's helmswoman. "Put us in the outbound lane, Senior Master Chief."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Senior Master Chief Jeanette Clary responded crisply. "Coming to outbound heading."

Her hands moved gently, confidently, and Hexapuma responded like the thoroughbred she was. She nudged gently forward, accelerating at a bare fifteen gravities as Clary aligned her precisely on the invisible line stretching into the Junction's heart. Helen watched the heavy cruiser's icon settle down on the plot's green streak of light and knew Clary wasn't doing anything she herself couldn't have done… with another thirty or forty T-years of experience.

"In the lane, Captain," Clary reported four minutes later.

"Thank you, Senior Master Chief. That was handsomely done," Terekhov responded, and Helen looked back up at the visual display.

The Junction was a sphere in space, a light-second in diameter. That was an enormous volume, but it seemed considerably smaller when it was threaded through with ships moving under Warshawski sail. And there were seven secondary termini now, each with its own separate but closely related inbound and outbound lanes. Even in time of war, the Junction's use rate had continued to do nothing but climb. Fifteen years ago, the traffic controllers had handled one transit every three minutes. Now they were up to over a thousand inbound and outbound transits a T-day-one transit every eighty-five seconds along one of the fourteen lanes-and an astonishing amount of that increase moved along the Manticore-Lynx lane.

As she watched, a six-million-ton freighter came through the central terminus from Lynx, rumbling down the inbound lane. One instant there was nothing-the next, a leviathan erupted out of nowhere into here. Her Warshawski sails were perfect disks, three hundred kilometers in diameter, radiating the blue glory of transit energy like blazing mirrors. Then the energy bled quickly away into nothingness, and the freighter folded her wings. Her sails reconfigured into impeller bands, and she gathered way in n-space as she accelerated out of the nexus. She was headed away from the Manticore System, for the Lynx holding area, which meant she was only passing through-like the vast majority of Junction shipping-and was probably already requesting insertion into another outbound queue.

Hexapuma moved steadily forward, and Helen watched in fascination as the azure fireflies of Warshawski sails flashed and blinked like summer lightning, pinpricks scattered across the vast sooty depths of the Junction. The nearest ones, from ships inbound from Lynx, were close enough for her to see details. The most distant ones, from ships inbound from the Gregor System, were so tiny that, even with the display's magnification, they were only a handful of extra stars. Yet she felt the vibrant, throbbing intensity of the Junction, beating like the Star Kingdom's very heart. Her father had explained to her when she was very young that the Junction was both the core of the Star Kingdom's vast wealth, and the dagger against the Star Kingdom's throat. Not so much because of the possibility of invasion through the Junction, as because of the temptation it posed to greedy neighbors. And as she looked at that unending stream of merchantships, each of them massing millions of tons, each of them paying its own share of transit duties, and probably at least a third of them carrying Manticoran transponder codes, she understood what he'd meant.