Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [36]
“Where are we headed, sir?” Jackson asked.
“This will be the longest jump we’ve ever made. Something over a thousand light-years. We’re meeting the Pangaea and the Troy at a star called Arcton. It’s not visible from our solar sytem. And it’s a lot farther from the center of the galaxy than any place humans have visited before.”
Eight: Rendezvous with Nothing
The Pegasus vaulted out of the Alpha Centauri system almost twenty-four hours after the SEALS and their prize had come back aboard. Captain Carstairs had plotted as direct a course as possible, but their beginning position in the star’s asteroid belt required some nifty maneuvering before he could unleash the full power of the engines. Furthermore, since the jump required the ship to be accelerating directly away from the star, the frigate had been forced to spend more than a day simply racing in an orbital pattern around the star. Only when her position was oriented with the direction of the jump had she been able to kick in the full power of the engines and streak toward the launching point for the interstellar vault.
The next destination on the path to the Orion conference was a star named Arcton. It was a remote body, well out near the rim of the galaxy, though not as far away as the constellation itself. Humans never had visited it before, but it was well cataloged in the galactic directory that the Shamani had provided to humankind shortly after they first had established contact with the peoples of Earth.
After the brief period of weightless limbo that was the jump itself, the ship emerged into the Arcton system, exactly as the captain and his navigational computers had plotted her course. Swiftly she pivoted into a stern-first orientation, and then once again the powerful engines fired. The massive deceleration provided a solid sense of gravity as the ship “backed” toward another fiery star.
Jackson, Consul Char-Kane, and Sanders were standing on the viewing deck in the after con, looking “down” through the Plexiglas surface under their feet, watching the star called Arcton. The SEALS’ commanding officer already had researched the system on the ship’s encyclopedic directory of the galaxy. It was a common jump junction for travel around the rim of the galaxy, with a variety of outposts controlled by all three empires and the thriving free trade city called Arcton V.
It was a large star, some five times more powerful than the Earth’s sun, and even at this great distance—they were the equivalent of Neptune’s orbit away from the fiery body—the immense energy radiated by Arcton was apparent to both men. The effect was amplified by the relative dearth of stars beyond the gas giant. From there, even farther toward the rim of the galaxy than Earth’s own position, they were looking at a few sparse stars and then the whole vastness of intergalactic space, the void so big and so deep that no ship, not Shamani, Eluoi, Assarn, or human, ever had made the jump to the next massive cluster of stars.
“You see those seven stars arrayed in a twisting line beyond Arcton?” Consul Char-Kane asked. “That is the constellation known as the Winged Serpent, a creature rather like your humankind’s dragons, which I understand are mythical, though in fact such animals actually exist on several planets. But the constellation is visible only from a very few stars in this remote corner of the galaxy.”
To Jackson the stars didn’t look anything like a dragon, but then, he’d never been able to spot the bears in Ursa Major and Ursa Minor when he’d been stargazing back on his home planet, so that wasn’t particularly surprising. As to the fact that such creatures actually existed on some planets, he fervently hoped those worlds weren’t on the itinerary of this or any other mission.
“There are several planets orbiting Arcton,” Jackson reminded his junior officer. “None of them are habitable—they have something