Jack Campbell - Leviathan

“Maybe never to any binary star,” Geary said. “I don’t know. You’d have to either risk losing the ships you send, and there’s a high probability of loss, or send the ships through normal space, which would mean a really long voyage even with current propulsion technology. There have been more than enough single stars for humanity. Hell, we’ve abandoned a lot of marginal star systems in the last decades because the hypernet made it easy to bypass them. With no shortage of stellar real estate, why go to the trouble of visiting a binary?”

Charban nodded. “I understand. Indulge me, Admiral. I’m not sure why, yet. What would it take to get to that particular binary star?”

Geary shrugged. “I can estimate that easily enough. Let’s see. The closest star to that binary is Puerta. There’s nothing much at Puerta. It’s a white dwarf, but you could jump there and have less than one and a half light-years to the binary. That’s pretty close as stars go. Load up on sufficient fuel, accelerate to better than point five light speed, then brake down before you get to the binary, and you could make the trip in ten years easy. Maybe significantly less than that.”

“What about a hypernet gate?” Charban asked, squinting at the representation of the binary star. “Would one of those work in a binary star system?”

“I think so. I don’t know why not,” Geary said. “I can ask Commander Neeson on Implacable . The hypernet gates work using something related to quantum entanglement, totally different from the jump drives. They shouldn’t be impacted by the interacting gravity fields of the two stars. But you’d have to get everything to build a hypernet gate to that star system. Aside from taking about a decade, it would be hugely expensive to build a gate to get to a place where there wasn’t anything worth going to. Why do you think the Dancers would have been interested in that binary?”

“Because the Dancers all but drew a bull’s-eye around that binary star! But you have no idea why they would do that?”

“No. Even they couldn’t get there, apparently.”

“Are we certain that there is not a hypernet gate there?” Charban asked.

“There isn’t a hypernet gate for that star in our hypernet keys,” Geary said. “I don’t think.” He touched his comm panel to call Desjani in her own stateroom. “Tanya, are any of the hypernet gates at a binary star?”

“A what?” Seated at her desk, her image focused on Geary as if trying to figure out whether he was serious. “Why would anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star? How could anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star?”

“You could send the hypernet gate components through normal space and use robotics to assemble them in the binary star system,” Geary said, wondering why he was justifying the outlandish idea. “You’d probably need some humans to do the oversight and final work and calibrations, but if they didn’t want to put up with a decade-long journey they could be frozen into survival sleep and then be reawakened to work on the gate. Once the gate was done, they would be able to come back immediately.”

“Why would we do that?” Desjani asked. “Do you have any idea how complicated and expensive that would be?”

“Tanya, I don’t know! But the Dancers seem to have tried to focus our attention on one particular binary, one that’s not too far from a white dwarf that could have been a launching point for a normal-space trip to that binary.”

She gave a long-suffering sigh, tapped in some commands, then shook her head. “No. There is no binary star in the destinations available to our hypernet key. Or among the destinations available to the Syndic hypernet key that we acquired.”

“Do you have any ideas why the Dancers would try to focus our attention on a binary like that?”

Another sigh. “Maybe they were looking for something and thought it was hidden there.”

Charban gave a derisive snort. “If someone wanted to hide something, it sounds like a binary star would be the perfect place.”

Geary stared at him. “What?”

“Um, a joke, Admiral. A binary would be a wonderful place to hide something, right? No one goes there. No one can go there. You space travelers don’t even think about them! I had to point that one out to you even though it was in plain sight on the display.”

Tanya was gazing intently at Geary. “What are you thinking?”

“What would the Dancers be looking for?” he asked her. “Something that we know of. Something that has apparently disappeared.”

“Big or little? Are we talking a person?”

“Maybe a person. Maybe something very big,” Geary said, his thoughts crystallizing. “What left Varandal, by hypernet gate, and apparently vanished from human-occupied space? Something that should have been impossible to hide no matter what star system it was taken to?”

Her face lit with understanding. “ Invincible . The Kick superbattleship we captured. You think the government took it to that binary?”

“Where else could they have taken it where no one could find it?” Geary demanded. “What else would the Dancers have been looking for and worried about?”

“The dark ships,” Desjani said pointedly. “We need to find their base, and we haven’t been able to find any clue—” She stopped speaking, looking stunned.

“A secret base?” Charban said, astonished. “A secret hypernet gate? I didn’t think something on that scale could be possible.”

“Neither would anyone else,” Geary said, gazing at the depiction of the binary in his star display. “You said it yourself. No one thinks about binaries. No one can go to binaries. A binary would be the perfect place to set up a secret base, a place to hide the captured Kick battleship, a place to hide the base for the dark ships.”

Tanya shook her head, holding out both hands palm forward. “Hold on. We’re talking about a project that couldn’t have been dreamed up in the last few years. There would have been a huge investment in time and money. They would have had to start work on this a long time ago.”

“Maybe they did,” Geary said.

“And kept it secret from everybody?”

“No,” Geary said, looking at her now. “They couldn’t keep it entirely secret. Rumors got out. People talked about it. But no one ever found it, so after enough years had gone by, it was labeled a fantasy, a project that had never actually existed.”

Tanya’s eyes met his. “Unity Alternate? Ancestors save us. You’re talking about Unity Alternate.”

“Yes. The supposedly mythical government project to build a secret, fallback base to continue the war if Unity itself fell to the Syndics. A project important enough to justify a huge expense and a construction time line of more than a decade.”

“In a place no one would ever think to look,” she continued for him. “A place the Syndics would never find and couldn’t reach if somehow they did find it.”

“And maybe more than that,” Geary said. A place to set up the most secret projects, a place to hide anyone that the government, or portions of the government, didn’t want found, as well as a place to homeport a secret fleet.

“How do they get there?” Desjani demanded. “There must be a way. The dark ships use the hypernet. Invincible disappeared after entering the hypernet. There must be keys with access to a gate at that binary.”

“If there are,” Geary said, “we’ll find them.” He turned to Charban. “General, you may have given us the most important piece of information that we needed to have. I’m in your debt.”

Charban still looked dazed. “How did the Dancers know it was there? They are the ones you should thank, Admiral. This is unbelievable. First Black Jack returns, and defeats the Syndics just as he was supposed to, then Unity Alternate turns out to exist. Myths and legends are coming to life all around us.”