Subject: Liars!

Subject: You ******* ********! You knew this all along! (Comments moderated.)

Subject: You should be strung up by your ***** and shot. (Comments moderated. Security investigation initiated.)

I scrolled down the list of messages, refusing all requests for real-time communication, but I still heard their anger. Quite a few came in the form of outraged video recordings. After the first frothing diatribe I had the messaging system only display the transcripts. And these were my SCs! I could only imagine what was going on with the lower ranks. Things were certainly different back in the regular military. A fact I was only beginning to appreciate.

I spent the morning crafting a general "why this is really a good thing and let's focus on all the opportunities here" message. I sent it out to everyone in my wing and copied Phil and his sub-commanders on it. Minutes later, Phil thanked me and asked if he could use it as the basis of a message to the rest of the fleet. Chris just forwarded it to his wing.

I scrolled through the list deleting all that were merely abusive and answering the handful where I thought I could say something helpful. Most of the rest got an abbreviated form of my message to the wing, but more messages came in faster than I could answer. Finally, I decided to sneak out and go hide in trooper country.

What I really wanted to do was to jump in my suit of powered armor, turn off the safety governors and just smash things, but Kouvaras wasn't around and I would probably just get into trouble on my own. After looking the armor over, I closed the locker door with a reluctant sigh and found Redburn and Marcello in the weapons locker room. They were sitting on a bench playing some sort of complicated game involving both cards and dice. They had stopped rising to attention every time I walked into the room, instead they saluted me with a nod of the head. Coming from them it was a gesture of respect more meaningful than traditional formal gestures.

"Why aren't you running around panicking like everyone else?" I asked.

"Panicking? Why?"

"I assume you've heard we will be attempting to conquer the Cack Moiarchy?"

Marcello threw down a card in front of Redburn. "Told you so."

Redburn rolled a die and grimaced. "Yeah, we saw that coming."

"And that doesn't concern you?"

Marcello looked up at me. "Show us a ship you want attacked and we'll attack it. Show us a man you want killed and we'll kill him. It doesn't matter what planet they're from."

Redburn shrugged. "We leave those sorts of things for you big brain types to worry about."

I snorted. "I wish my SCs felt that way."

* * *

I left the troopers and found myself wandering near Cathrine's quarters. As I approached, I noticed a S2C standing outside her door with arms laden by bags. Her door was open, but I knocked on the bulkhead to get her attention.

Cathrine bent over a stack of plastic bins slapping RFID labels across each side. "Oh, Ken. Come to see me off?"

"Er, yes. I guess you're already packed up?"

"Yeah, there's not much to pack, I'm afraid. That's life on shipboard."

I wanted to tell her I'd miss her. I wanted to tell her not to go, how I was attracted to her and how I thought we might have a chance at a real relationship if only we had more time. But as I stood there searching for words, looking into her expectant face the only thing I could think to say was, "Need an escort to the shuttle?"

She hesitated as if expecting something else, puzzlement flickering across her face. "Uh, sure, though my shuttle won't leave for a little while. I still have some out-processing to do."

I shrugged and pulled my netpiece from a flightsuit pocket. "I'm avoiding work right now."

"I take it your SCs are taking the surprise very well?"

"Not exactly. Yours?"

She held up her own netpiece. "Fortunately, I'm largely incommunicado, due to the move and all."

I spent the rest of the day following Cathrine from one office to the next as she finished her out-processing. It wasn't exactly romantic, but I was never so glad for the slow inefficient pace of military red tape. Even so, we ended up at the shuttle flight deck entirely too soon. We lingered, chatting about anything that could delay the moment of her departure. Eventually, a S1C doing flight attendant duty stuck his head out of the boarding tube connecting to the shuttle. "You need to board now or we're going to miss our departure time."

Cathrine started to move toward me, then stopped. I wanted to kiss her, but I had no idea if she thought we had that kind of relationship. We had enjoyed the occasional conversation in the C&C, one and a half training sessions in the gym and one aborted date. Out of reflex, I started to shake her hand, realized how hopelessly stupid that was and shifted to a one-armed hug. She smiled, let go of her hand-hold, wrapped both arms around me and gave me a squeeze. "Perhaps we can finish that date sometime?"

"Oh, so it was an official date then?" asked.

"It was if you want it to be."

I smiled. "Good, then let's schedule another one as soon as possible."

The attendant grew impatient. "Excuse me?"

"Let me know next time you're about to schedule leave," Cathrine said, then with a hand to my chest, pushed off. With a brief smile and wave, she flipped around and slipped into the boarding tube.

* * *

By the end of the day, I started noticing many of the complaints were about contract violations, risk assessments and appropriate levels of compensation. It started when one ship commander observed that the last time Sunshine took Innman's Pilgrim's with him on a visit to the Cack home world he had paid them more and there had been no question of combat then.

Once money came up, it ceased to be a revolt and became a negotiation. In the end, no one was very surprised who the real target was, though it didn't ease the sting of the deception. The SCs debated back and forth throughout the night, filling the message queues with demands before finally choosing a group to go before Shines Like the Sun to negotiate a new contract. As they were nailing down the terms with the Cacks, Moony decided to pull a fast one.

Moony held a closed-door meeting with his SCs which someone secretly recorded and posted on a video server.

"Guys, listen to me. If you do what I say, you'll be able to get on Sunshine's good side without any risk at all. Right now, he is begging the Solarian fleets to go with him to the Cack homeworld. I say we go ahead and transit to the next system now while the ship commanders are still haggling over the contract.

"If the contract is approved, ol' Sunny will credit you for swaying the vote and will gratefully reward you as only he can. And if the contract is rejected... we just return home. Even then, he'll remember how you alone out of the entire fleet followed him faithfully—evenly enthusiastically. After this, he'll give you preferential treatment on all the best contracts. In fact, whatever you ask, he'll gladly give you anything in his power to give—and that is quite a lot."

In the end, they followed Moony's plan. Not having seen the video until later, we were stunned by his ships' sudden departure. Some even thought he might be running away while others thought Shines Like the Sun might have sent him on a special mission as when he had outflanked Doggedly's forces. Moony's ships seized control of the nearest gate and sent a taunting message back to Sherman, "The enemy is this way."

Messages flew back and forth across milnet as the various commanders tried to find out what was going on, then Shines Like the Sun sent out a message to the entire group. "Warriors of Moony, you are having only my gratitude now, but soon you will having gratitude for me or I am not Shines Like the Sun." The Cack fleet followed Moony's fleet into Good Passage and, not wanting to be left behind, the other Solarian ships joined them. The contract was approved after the fact.

The combined fleet had grown so much it took hours to transit a gate. Once on the far side, we formed up in a defensive sphere formation. Traveling through Good Passage was like walking down a hall of mirrors. Hundreds of transit stations circled the system's star allowing access to nearly any system in the sphere.

More than the gates, I was amazed by the number of ships passing through the system. Because of the traffic, it was possible for Shine Like the Sun's entire force to pass through the system unnoticed. Even more stunning was the discovery that this nexus was just one in a chain of such systems stretched across the middle sphere linking the outer worlds to the Cack homeworld. The volume of trade and traffic was truly incomprehensible and I was only now beginning to get a feel for how vast the Cack Moiarchy really was.

I thought back to the two kairograms Dr. Swiftly had shown me back in his lab on space station L5. The red and blue lines had implied that the Solarian future would overshadow the Cack Moiarchy. I just couldn't see how the Cacks might ever fade away or how the Solarian worlds could possibly grow to anything like this in size.

Our scouting drones had already confirmed that Faded Glory had left the middle sphere, but we had no idea what awaited us through the next gate until we reached it. We traveled across the system under H-drive, stopping 1AU short of the opposite gate to give us a chance to re-establish our communications and fleet formations before approaching possible hostile forces. We proceeded the last AU using the matter-antimatter drive to maintain communications. We thought we were ready for anything. We almost didn't notice what had happened until we were within close visual range of the transit station. Staring into the giant ring-shaped station, we didn't see the distant stars of the inner sphere.

Somehow, they had turned the gate off.

* * *

"Is that even possible?" Chris's voice sounded clearly over the milnet connection as if he were in the empty C&C with me.

"As far as I know, this has never been done before." Brian sounded distracted as if he were searching the milnet database. "It's always been assumed that attempting to turn one off would cause the station to collapse into the singularity."

"Are there any other gates to the inner sphere?" Cathrine asked.

"Three," Phil answered. "But they are so far apart, that it might actually be faster to travel to the inner sphere under H-drive than go around to another gate."

A long moment of silent furious thinking followed.

"I don't suppose Shines Like the Sun keeps any transit station engineers on the payroll?" I asked.

"I don't think he anticipated this." Phil looked grim.

"Any chance he can call back the jumpships?" Cathrine asked.

"That's an option," Phil said. "But he'd never get enough to move the entire fleet in one jump. Then there's the cost. It is actually cheaper to buy some colony worlds than to operate even one of those ships for one jump."

I called up the portions of the transit network the Cacks had shared with us and tried super-imposing it on a map of actual star systems. The transit map was an abstract map of connected stations whose arrangement had nothing to do with their nearness in real space. Two connected stations could appear directly next to each other on the network map while having dozens of other stations between them in real space.

Of course, the gate to the inner sphere was a double gate and nobody knew where the connecting system between them was physically located. But as I compared the two maps—something no one had probably ever bothered to do before—I realized that the borders of the inner sphere and the middle sphere were not that far apart. A string of dense nebula, the remains of an ancient chain-reaction of exploded stars deep in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy, seemed to form the physical boundary between the two economic systems.

"Hey boss, I think I may have something." I shared my display with Phil and flagged the two worlds I found.

"What am I looking at?"

"System A is in the middle sphere just two jumps away. System B is in the inner sphere. They're about a quarter light-year apart. We could cross that distance under H-drive in just a few weeks."

"I don't know, that's a pretty thick nebula. I don't think the QWEGs could handle that much mass."

"So, we just build up some momentum with the reaction drives before going super-luminal then, when the collected mass builds up too much, we cut the drive and let extra mass slough off."

"Let's run this by the Cacks first. Perhaps they can find some locals who know of a passage through the nebula."

It took two days of arguing before the Cacks decided my plan was the only viable option. They found some locals that knew of a path through the nebula. It passed by a research station where we could stop for repairs if necessary. Considering how hard we were going to have to run the drives, we would probably need it.