Galactic Thunder by Cameron Cooper (best book club books txt) 📗

Even though interstellar travel had transitioned from array gates to crescent ships, wormholes continued to defy good sense. The farther the end of the wormhole from the start, in normal space, the shorter the hole itself.

In my Ranger academy days, a physics professor had explained it by holding up a flexible polymer sheet with four orbs on it. A short line ran between two of the orbs, both hovering in the center of the sheet. They represented planets. A much longer line connected the remaining two planets, which were both on the farther edges from each other.

The professor had bent the sheet so the two shorter ends were together. “When you bend space as a wormhole does,” he said, “The farther apart your end points, the shorter the space between them.” He touched the two far apart planets, which were close to the ends of the sheet that were touching each other. There was barely a centimeter between them, now.

The sheet, viewed edgewise, made an upside-down teardrop shape. The two planets which were much closer to each other when the sheet was flat now sat at the top of the tear drop, and the space between them bowed out, putting nearly a dozen centimeters between them.

Not only did the physics of wormhole space-bending still hold despite no longer using array gates, but crescent ships had added another variable which hadn’t existed with the array gates. The faster you entered a hole, the quicker you transitioned through it.

I had been assured by the scientists at Sarov, who had developed the concept of crescent ships, that it was actually a function of both speed of entry and that crescent ships were pulling the front edge of the wormhole along with them the moment the ship entered the hole. With the array gates, it hadn’t mattered how fast you entered the hole. You traversed it at the same constant speed.

They were still unsnarling the physics of that at universities across the galaxy, nearly thirty years later, while us spacers just shrugged and souped up our ships to enter the wormholes as fast as possible to cut down our transition time. The lack of formulas didn’t take away the facts.

The Supreme Lythion had always been a fast ship, which was why we returned to normal space on the far side of the galactic arm away from where we had started only a few hours after we left.

We crowded around the viewscreen to look for the wildcatter ship, even though we all knew intellectually that the ship would be a dark pinprick against the nightside of the planet hanging behind it. Not even the far-away blue sun could reflect upon the ship and make its location known with a temporary twinkle.

Nearly a dozen craters on the lifeless sun-lit crescent of the unnamed planet were large enough to be seen from space, which probably explained why there was no atmosphere. An extinction-level-sized asteroid or two slamming into a planet would give it no chance to recover. A dozen of them would be a disaster for everything on the surface, not just the warm-blooded oxygen-breathers.

There were many reasons why I preferred to live in space. This was one of them.

I shook my head and moved away from peering hopefully at the screen. “Lyssa, can you overlay the view with a schematic and show us where the ship is? Have you located it?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Lyssa replied.

The screen built up with a series of pale lines and curves, showing the outer edge of the planet, and breaking the planet itself up into dozens of sections. One of the sections pulsed.

“Up close, please,” I murmured.

The section expanded until it filled the screen. A small circle in the top right corner pulsed.

“Can you get a better image from here?” Dalton asked

“Not visual.”

“Can we even confirm it is the Ige Ibas?” Fiori asked softly.

“I have scanned the exterior with a passive sweep. The dimensions and details confirm that it is the Ige Ibas,” Lyssa replied. “I have not yet attempted to contact them using human channels.” She glanced at me and raised a brow.

“Yes, go ahead,” I told her.

For a moment, the bridge was utterly silent. Lyssa did not vocalize her hail. I grew aware of a drumming sound to my right and glanced over at Fiori. She still leaned against her shell, but now her hand was trembling against the hard casing on the side, making it thrum.

She caught my glance and snatched her hand up and crossed her arms.

That was something she had learned from Dalton, that belligerent posture.

Dalton scowled at the screen as if his gaze could make this all go faster. Yet he knew the Ranger protocols for approaching a ship of unknown status as well as I did. There were steps to take, in the right order, that would maximize the safety of the crew aboard the approaching ship. The policies and protocols had been hammered out over centuries of experience in the field. Each step was there for a very good reason. Often those reasons had been learned through bloodshed and death.

This couldn’t be hurried.

“What’s happening?” Fiori demanded.

“Wait,” I murmured.

“But—”

“Wait, Fiori,” Dalton repeated.

She shut up.

I mentally reached toward the back of the ship and told Vara she could come to the bridge, and bring Darb with her, if they were quiet and careful not to smack anything with their tails. It was crowded in here with the shells, the dashboards and the banks of servers that ran everything on the bridge. The servers were backups for the main computer servers kept in a sterile room in the engineering compartments. If ever the ship was boarded, we could seal the bulkhead door at the top of the bridge ramp and isolate ourselves, then control the ship from here.

Wedekind had been an odd man, but he wasn’t stupid.

Two full sized parawolves, one of them male, took up a lot of room, but I suddenly wanted them with me. I didn’t question the impulse. A