The Jump Line

The coil failed four hours short of the jump line.

Dara felt it before the alarm sounded, a stutter in the deck plates like a missed heartbeat, and then the flag deck lighting dropped to amber and Chief Oyelaran's voice came through the ship channel, calm in the way that meant he was not.

"Drive hall to flag. Number three coil housing has cracked. Mark IV is down. Repeat, the Four is down. I need forty minutes and I need nobody to jump anything."

"Nobody is jumping anything, Chief," Captain Okafor said. "You have your forty minutes. Lieutenant Voss, hold the fleet at the line. Commander Lindqvist, tell the escorts."

"Aye, Captain."

Dara held the plot. The two cruisers, the Sable and the Ninefold, fell back into station on either side of the dreadnought. The frigates spread. The corvettes, too small to carry anything better than a Mark III drive, had been straggling anyway and were glad of the rest. She watched them settle and tried not to think about the Lantern, twelve days silent now, and about what forty minutes meant to ninety-two people who might be counting air.

Below her feet, Oyelaran's crew were cutting the cracked housing away. Dara went down to watch, because the lieutenant who did not know what her ship's drive looked like inside was a lieutenant who would not be trusted with it. The drive hall was hot and smelled of scorched amber. Oyelaran stood over the open coil with a trowel in his hand and a block of Vashti resin on the bench beside him, honey-coloured, with a stamped mark on its side.

"Grade Three," he said, seeing her look. "Best I have aboard. The Vashti grow it in grades, One to Three, and only the Three will take a Mark IV coil at full heat. Grade One is for sealing hatches. Grade Two will hold a Mark III if you are gentle with it. Nothing but Three for a Four." He laughed, short. "Don't let the numbers confuse you, Lieutenant. The grade is the resin. The mark is the drive. The Admiralty has got them muddled in a supply order more than once and I have had to send the stuff back."

"And you? Mark the man?"

"Mark the man will be a Mark the man until the day I die, and the drive will still be a Mark IV." He patted the housing. "My mother named me after a saint. The Admiralty named the drive after a filing system. We get along."

He worked the resin into the new housing with the trowel, pressing it into the seam, and the smell of it went from scorched to sweet as it took the heat. In twenty minutes the housing was sealed. In thirty, the coil tested green. In thirty-eight, the amber light on the flag deck went white again and Oyelaran's voice said, "The Four is up. You may jump whatever you like," and Dara heard the admiral say "Thank you, Chief" over the ship channel in exactly the tone she used for everything.

That was the whole of the crisis: a crack, a block of resin, forty minutes. The fleet had lost nothing but time. Dara went back up to the flag deck and found that time was the thing they could least afford.

"Lieutenant Voss." Admiral Brannock was waiting at the plot table with a slate in her hand. Commander Lindqvist stood at her shoulder, and so, unusually, did Ensign Tomas Brannock, who looked as if he had been told something and did not know where to put it. "Sit down."

Dara did not sit. "Admiral?"

"The Admiralty has sent us Halden Station's crew list as of the day it went rogue." Brannock set the slate on the table. "I am told you have a brother."

The flag deck did not go quiet. Petra Lindqvist kept the fleet channel open; her husband Jonah's voice came and went from the sensor section below, reading ranges. Nobody stopped working. But Dara felt the attention of the deck slide over her like a tide coming in.

"Caius," she said. "Caius Voss. He was a Lieutenant on the Meridian, Admiral. The Meridian was decommissioned two years ago. I have not heard from him since."

"The Meridian's last posting was the Halden picket. Half her crew took their discharge there instead of coming home. Your brother was one of them." Brannock turned the slate so Dara could read it. "He is listed as Halden Station's second officer. Under Oriel Dask."

Dara knew the name. Everyone in the Ninth Fleet knew it. Oriel Dask had been a Captain in the war, had taken a cruiser through the Severance line at Vesper a day before Brannock broke it, and had been refused a Commodore's star afterward for reasons the Admiralty had never written down. Dask had gone to Halden to run the station and the station had gone quiet, and now it was rogue, and the thing people were calling it on the fleet channel was the Halden Compact, as though it were a government.

"My brother is not a traitor," Dara said.

"Your brother is a second officer on a rogue station that may have taken an Imperial frigate," Brannock said. "I do not know what that makes him. Neither do you. I am telling you so that you hear it from me and not from the deck." She held Dara's eyes. "You keep the plot, Lieutenant. If I thought you could not, I would say so."

"Yes, Admiral."

"Good. Ensign Brannock. You will stop looking at the lieutenant as though she has grown a second head. Go and help Ensign Okonkwo with the jump tables."

"Aye, Admiral." Tomas went. His mother did not watch him go.

Commander Lindqvist waited until he was out of hearing before she spoke. "The Shield wants a word, Admiral. On the priority channel."

Brannock made a face that on anyone else would have been a sigh. "He would."

Dara had learned that one the hard way, her first week on the flag deck. People who did not know better sometimes called Brannock the Shield of Vesper, because she had saved the world and the two names went together in the newsfeeds. Brannock corrected them every time, without heat. The Shield of Vesper was Commodore Ivo Strand, who had held the Vesper picket for the whole of the war and held it still, and who had earned the name by never once leaving the system he was told to keep. The Hammer and the Shield. The newsfeeds liked the pairing. The two officers did not like each other.

Strand's face came up on the priority channel, long and pale, a Commodore's single star at his collar. "Admiral Brannock. I am told you have lost a coil."

"I am told you have lost a frigate, Commodore," Brannock said. "The Lantern was on your picket roster before the Admiralty detached her. Where was she sent, and why?"

"The Lantern's orders were sealed above my star, Admiral. I passed them on. I did not read them."

"You have never passed on a thing you did not read in your life, Ivo."

Strand's expression did not change. "Find the frigate, Admiral. The Admiralty wants her crew home and the station answered for. The rest is not your concern, or mine." The channel closed.

Brannock looked at the dark screen for a long moment. "He is lying," she said, to no one in particular, "or he is frightened. I have never seen him frightened." Then she straightened. "Lieutenant Voss. Time to the jump line."

"Three hours and fifty minutes, Admiral. We lost forty."

"Then we have three hours and fifty minutes. Commander Lindqvist, I want every hull at the line and clear of Vesper's well before we open a door. If one corvette captain decides to shave a minute and jump inside the well, I will have him for it, if there is anything left of him to have."

"Aye, Admiral."

Crewman Sayer appeared at Dara's elbow with tea again, the ten-scrip coin walking over his knuckles. "Brother at Halden, Lieutenant?" he said, very quietly. "Heard it on the deck."

"Everyone heard it on the deck, Sayer."

"My sister went to Halden too, after the war. The Compact pays in scrip, you know. Not credits. Fifty of their scrip to one of ours, same as the docks, and they print it themselves." He turned the coin over. "Pay a man in paper he can only spend on your station and he will stay on your station. That is all a Compact is."

Dara took the tea. "Is your sister still there?"

"Don't know, Lieutenant. Haven't heard in two years." He went back to his station.

The Cinder Crown crept the last hours to the jump line on thrusters, out past the edge of Vesper's well, into the clear dark where a door could be opened without a star leaning on it. Dara stood the plot and did not think about her brother, and failed, and stood it anyway.

Three hours and fifty minutes later, Chief Oyelaran said "Four is green," Captain Okafor said "Jump," and the Ninth Fleet went to Halden.