Intrepid Read Free

much as the other ones do. Something about their harmonic nature allows them to stay closer to a single point. Either that, or the fuzziness around them helps us follow them more easily.”
    “That should cut down on bad jumps,” Kris said.
    “Very likely.”
    “So what are we going to find behind these jump points? New territory opened up toward the end of the Three’s time,” Nelly said pensively, “or the center of their civilization, held together by the latest jump-point technology?”
    “A very good question that I can do nothing to answer while the princess here is busy chasing miscreants. Or maybe I can.”
    “Or maybe you can?” Kris asked, wondering what sort of trap the professor had set for her.
    “Since the jump points are more steady, we think we can send an automated probe to do an initial look behind them. You know there is a fuzzy jump point in this system?”
    Kris admitted that she did.
    “If we could send a remote probe to check out the other system, we could have it waiting here for us when we return and maybe save ourselves some wasted time.”
    “But merchant ships don’t launch probes. If a pirate ship enters a system and sees us and a probe in it, it will be a dead give-away that we aren’t what we’re trying to appear.”
    “Yes, but if you held off launching the probe until just before we jump out of this system. . .”
    “And since you’ve already readied the probe?”
    “Yes, there is that matter,” the professor admitted, his hands open, palms up, in polite supplication to Kris.
    “I’ll tell Captain Drago that you want to launch a probe,” Kris said.
    “Thank you very much,” Professor mFumbo said, and headed in the opposite direction from Kris.
    Kris watched his retreating back. New technologies. Not so much our cracking the secrets of the Three alien cultures that built the jump points, as our discovering this or that on our own as we bounced our heads off the lockbox of their still-unfathomable knowledge.
    Well, humans learned many ways.
    No, human scientists learned. Others, like pirates, might upgrade their equipment. But the pirates Kris hunted weren’t all that different from the cutthroats the Romans put down in the ancient Mediterranean Sea.
    “Two minutes to zero gravity,” the Wasp ’s MC-1 announced as Kris entered the bridge.
    “Morning, Lieutenant,” Captain Drago said.
    “Morning, Captain, any unknowns in system?”
    “The answer is the same as it’s been the last two days. No, ma’am, though of course a hostile could have entered the system from the other jump point an hour ago, but we’ll be another half hour finding out.”
    Kris repeated the old joke. “Captain, you really should do something about that speed-of-light lag time.”
    Drago gave the same answer. “Isn’t that a more proper job for those unemployed boffins of yours rather than this only slightly reformed pirate?” And it was true that the bridge crew of the Wasp did look more like pirates than respectable sailors. From the captain’s purple coat, gold earring, and white bell bottoms to his navigator in cutoff shorts and tank top, the crew appeared delightfully reprobate.
    And the Wasp had started life as a pirate ship. She now smelled much better. The crew might be flamboyant, but hygiene was a daily concern. And being the best former sailors Wardhaven’s spy master had ever contracted for, they knew their job backward and forward.
    Especially the twenty-four-inch pulse lasers the Wasp didn’t officially have.
    “Ah, Professor mFumbo tells me the project is impossible. Something about relativity. Oh, speaking of the good doctor, he has a probe he wants to launch.”
    “So he told me,” the captain said. “I told him if it was okay with you, it was okay with me.”
    “Hm,” Kris said. “I told him about the same thing, but I don’t remember him mentioning you.”
    “He must have been an impossible child to parent,” Sulwan Kann muttered from her place at the