Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

was a problem, too. The backup was in idle mode, having two buffers removed. Sato was uncertain if it would stand up to more than a tiny nominal load. So uncertain, he’d never tested it.

“Well,” Sato said, powering down the tester and beginning to climb out of the tight access shaft above the hyperspace generator. “It shows spots with 78% degeneration. Should have been replaced years ago.”

“So we replace it at the next stop?”

“It’s a five-million-credit component, if we can locate the right size, and the gravy train hasn’t dried up.”

Rick nodded. A three-day layover at Karma Station had let them pick up more spares and reaction mass. They’d even found replacement buffers for the backup fusion plant. Four of them, leaving them still two short. The smaller plant apparently had much less margin for error.

“We left with the backup offline. A risk, but an acceptable one,” Sato explained. “I was confident we could find replacement parts on Karma, and we did. But only finding four was unexpected. That backup isn’t stable missing even one.” The parts had been paid for with the codes.

They’d tried at the next stop coreward, a Maki trading outpost. Not only had they not found more buffers, but their attempt to top off supplies and purchase a CID laser emitter caused the code to be denied.

“Much faster than I anticipated,” Sato said. “And now they know what direction we’re going. Just as well I took a sidelong route!” He grinned, quite proud of himself.

The emitter was bought with cash, 850,000 credits. Their reserves were down to under two million. Five million for a replacement Astatine-222 hyperspace wave generator was out of the question.

“So what do we do?” Rick asked.

“Every hour in hyperspace chews up a little of the Astatine. Some here, some there.” They floated back into main engineering, and Rick closed the accessway behind him. “The flux from the energy that anchors a ship in hyperspace is strange. It doesn’t follow the same rules of physics as conventional energy, or even particle physics. Sometimes it wears a wave generator evenly, a molecule at a time. Others it follows some line, a weakness, through the rod. One day—bang!” He snapped his fingers together. “Free one-way trip to 2nd Level Hyperspace, and no Pegasus to get you home.”

Rick shook his head. He had no interest in going back to the strangeness of 2nd Level Hyperspace. Regular hyperspace had taken long enough to get used to when he first left Earth. The unexplored realm of 2nd level was a study in opposites. Zero gravity existed, but you didn’t coast. It was like jumping through water, it slowed you to a stop. And that was just the beginning. Losing power in hyperspace was a nightmare story told to scare young spacers. Even so, ships disappeared all the time, never to be seen again.

The Winged Hussars’ flagship, Pegasus, was special in many ways. One of them was a powerful computer they used to get back from 2nd Level Hyperspace after losing power as the result of battle damage. He knew there were hostiles there. Unknown, powerful hostiles.

“We get to the system of those coordinates in one more jump,” Sato said. “We’ll monitor the degradation after each jump to make sure nothing is accelerating. It could last for another hundred trips.”

“Or one,” Rick said.

“Or one,” Sato agreed.

Leaving Sato to tinker around in engineering, Rick returned to the ship’s tiny central space, which served as mess, meeting room, and sickbay if needed. He programmed the tiny autochef for a turkey sandwich and water, which it delivered promptly. That machine, at least, had worked perfectly. Sato had uploaded a couple terabytes of Human food recipes.

As he ate, he tried not to think about what the meat might have begun as. The slightly gamey taste didn’t help his efforts. Even so, it didn’t taste bad. He finished the meal and traveled the short distance to the bridge. For a change, Dakkar wasn’t there.

The large forward window provided an impressive view of hyperspace. Endless pure whiteness in all directions. Many people said it was disturbing. He was among the minority who considered it calming, rather like watching the surf or being indoors on a rainy night.

Rick didn’t know how long he’d quietly floated in the bridge before Sato came in. “Everything all right in engineering?”

“Fine,” Sato affirmed. “I think we’ve done about as much as is practical.” The scientist used his pinplants to bring the bridge Tri-V online, showing the local star group, their location, and the ship’s destination. “Phi-Theta-Nine, by Human catalogue. The GalNet shows it as once being a way station before the Great Galactic War.”

“What’s a way station?” Rick asked.

“A place where you transfer cargo, refuel, etcetera.”

Rick examined the chart. “There’s a lot of stars not far from Phi-Theta-Nine,” he observed.

“Back during the war, it probably had strategic importance.”

“But why is there still a stargate there? I mean, there is a stargate, right?”

“Absolutely. We don’t have shunts, so we have to use a stargate. I would have loved to get a ship with them, but I doubt the codes we got would have allowed a hundred-million-credit transaction.” He smiled, then shrugged. “I almost tried. Anyway, the stargate is there because the Cartography Guild never got around to moving it, I guess.” He looked at the map and frowned.

“What’s wrong?”

“The stargate is a Class-9.” He noticed the confused look on Rick’s face. “Stargates go from class 1 to 10. The class 1s are barely big enough for a cruiser to go through, and are very rare. The Class-10 is kilometers across and can be configured about as big as you would want. A Class-9 isn’t quite that grandiose, but it’s still a big sucker.”

“What does that matter?”

“Class-9 stargates are in demand. There’s been a lot of growth in commerce hubs, even in