Six Rungs

The frigate Lantern had been silent for eleven days, and Lieutenant Dara Voss had stopped pretending it was a relay fault.

She stood at the plot table on the flag deck of the Cinder Crown, the dreadnought that carried the Ninth Fleet's flag, and watched the last known position of the Lantern blink at the edge of the Halden system. Halden was an outpost, the lowest rung of the four tiers the Empire used to sort its worlds: outpost, colony, core world, throne world. Vesper, where the fleet was anchored now, was a core world. Aurum, where the Empress sat, was the throne world. Nobody sent a frigate to an outpost without a reason, and nobody had told the lieutenant what the reason was.

"Lt. Voss." The voice came from behind her, dry and unhurried. "You are staring at that marker as if it owes you money."

Admiral Ilse Brannock did not look like the woman the newsfeeds called the Hammer of Vesper. She was small, grey at the temples, and wore the plain black of the fleet without a single ribbon. Ilse Brannock, the Hammer of Vesper, had broken the Severance line at this very system nine years ago, and the war had ended three weeks later with the Concord of Vesper. She commanded the Ninth Fleet, every hull in it, and she had done so since the day the Concord was signed.

"It does owe me, Admiral," Dara said. "Eleven days. A frigate carries ninety crew."

"Ninety-two." Brannock joined her at the table. "I signed the roster."

Dara had served under Brannock for four years, long enough to know the six rungs of the fleet by heart and to know exactly where she stood on them. An officer began as an Ensign, rose to Lieutenant, then Commander, then Captain, then Commodore, and at the top, Admiral. Six ranks, no more, no fewer. The Empire had tried adding a seventh once and the Admiralty had refused to use it. Dara had been a Lieutenant for three years. The next rung was Commander, and the gap between the two was wide enough to drown in.

"The Lantern was a frigate," Brannock went on, "which means she could jump, run, and fight a little. Not enough to hold off anything bigger." She tapped the table and four silhouettes bloomed above it, smallest to largest. "Corvette. Frigate. Cruiser. Dreadnought. That is the whole of the line, Lieutenant, in order of size. If something at Halden ate a frigate, it was a cruiser or better, or it was a station."

"Halden Station," Dara said.

"Halden Station," the admiral agreed, "which stopped answering fleet traffic four months ago and which the Admiralty, in its wisdom, has only now decided to call rogue."

Across the flag deck, Captain Reyes Okafor was arguing quietly with the drive section. Okafor was the captain of the Cinder Crown, a tall man with a shaved head and a voice that never rose. The ship was his. The fleet was Brannock's. Dara had learned early that those were two different things, and that confusing them in Okafor's hearing was a short route to a bad posting.

"Ensign Okonkwo," Okafor said, not turning round. "The jump tables. Now, please."

A young woman with a tight braid hurried across the deck with a slate held against her chest. Ensign Reyes Okonkwo was nineteen, two months out of the academy at Aurum, and had the misfortune of sharing a given name with her captain. The crew had already started calling her "the other Reyes", which she hated, and "Little Okafor", which she hated more. The two of them had no relation at all. Okafor came from the shipyards of Vesper; Okonkwo's family farmed on the colony world of Serrat. The names were a coincidence and the captain had said so, flatly, on her first day, to stop the jokes. It had not stopped the jokes.

"Tables, sir," Okonkwo said.

"Thank you, Ensign." Okafor took the slate. "Chief Oyelaran, your drive."

Mark Oyelaran, the dreadnought's chief drive engineer, was a broad man with burn scars up both forearms and a habit of patting the bulkheads as he walked, the way a rider pats a horse. "The Crown runs on a Four," he said. "Same as she did last week, same as she will next week. Which is to say she can make the Halden jump in one leg if we start from clear space. A Three would take two legs. A Five..." He shrugged. "A Five would do it in a breath, but nobody outside the Aurum yards has a Five, and they are not sharing."

Dara knew the drive ladder as well as the rank ladder. Jump drives were built in marks, Mark I through Mark V, and each mark cut the jump time of the one before it roughly in half. The Mark I drive was a museum piece. The Mark II still pushed cargo haulers between colonies. The Mark III drive was the fleet's workhorse. The Cinder Crown carried a Mark IV drive, the best the Ninth Fleet had. The Mark V was a rumour with a budget line.

"One leg, then," Brannock said. "From clear space. Which brings us to the rule, Captain."

"No jump within a gravity well," Okafor said. "I have not forgotten it, Admiral. Nobody who has watched a ship try it has forgotten it."

That was the first law of the drive, older than the Empire. A jump drive opened a door, and a planet or a star leaned on that door until it broke. A ship that jumped inside a gravity well came out somewhere else as a cloud. Every midshipman learned it in their first week; every captain carried it like a stone in their shoe. To jump to Halden, the Cinder Crown would have to crawl out past Vesper's well on thrusters, a day and a half of boredom, and jump from the dark. To jump home again, the same.

"Then we crawl," Brannock said. "Set course. Lieutenant Voss, you have the plot."

"Aye, Admiral."

The deck came alive around her. Commander Petra Lindqvist, the flag operations officer, took the fleet channel and began calling the escorts in by name: two cruisers, four frigates, a screen of corvettes. Her husband, Lieutenant Jonah Lindqvist, ran the sensor section on the deck below and answered her on the open channel with a formality so exact that it was obviously a private joke. The Lindqvists had married in the last month of the war, and the fleet had long ago stopped finding it strange that a commander gave orders to her own husband.

Near the hatch, a young officer in an ensign's single bar stood a little too straight. Ensign Tomas Brannock had the admiral's grey eyes and none of her stillness. He was her son, posted to his mother's flagship by an Admiralty clerk with either a sense of humour or none at all, and every officer aboard knew it. Brannock treated him exactly as she treated every other ensign, which was to say she barely looked at him. Dara thought that must be worse than shouting.

"Ensign Brannock," Dara said. "Pull the Lantern's last manifest for me."

"Aye, Lieutenant." He almost ran.

Crewman Ode Sayer brought her a cup of tea she had not asked for. Sayer was a deckhand in the plot section, forty, bald, with a ten-scrip coin he turned over his knuckles whenever his hands were free. He had told Dara once that the coin was the first money he had ever earned, on the docks at Serrat, and that he kept it to remind himself what fifty scrip was worth. Fifty scrip made one credit. A crewman's monthly pay was forty credits, which was two thousand scrip, and Sayer liked to say he had counted every one of them.

"Tea's hot, Lieutenant," he said. "You'll want it. Day and a half to the jump line."

"Thank you, Sayer."

Below the flag deck, in the drive hall, Oyelaran's crew were sealing the coil housings with Vashti resin. The Vashti were the only other people the Empire had ever met in the dark, tall and slow, with skin like wet slate, and they did not fight and did not trade in anything except the amber resin their colonies grew. Vashti resin took heat better than any alloy the Aurum yards could forge. There was not a jump drive in the fleet that did not depend on it. There was not an officer in the fleet who had ever seen a Vashti in person. Dara had seen one, once, as a child on Serrat, and remembered mostly how still it had stood.

The Cinder Crown turned her nose toward the dark.

Dara looked at the Lantern's marker one more time before she cleared the table. Ninety-two crew. A frigate. An outpost that had gone rogue and a station that had gone quiet. And a question nobody on the flag deck had asked aloud yet, though she could see it in the set of the admiral's shoulders: what had the Lantern been sent to Halden to do?