Free Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) by Evan Currie Page A

the ceramics from our hulls on arrival, I’ll give the order to try your idea. Otherwise, we’ll proceed as quickly as we can through normal routes.”
    “Aye aye, ma’am,” Jane MacKay replied seriously.
    *****
     
    HMS Hood
     
    Jane MacKay had come up the ranks through the science and research ladder, as had most of the people she worked with now. She’d spent years working under Alexi Petronov, one of the finest captains and men she’d known, and had been afforded many opportunities in his command to push the limits of jump space physics research.
    Most people who were partially familiar with jump points tended to assume they were like wormholes that interconnected star systems. In many ways, they were the precise opposite, however. Instead of direct roads from one point to another, a jump point was a point in space-time where the fabric of universal gravity was particularly…thin, for lack of a better term. A ship could punch through, like a fish jumping out of the water, and for as long as the ship stayed outside the effects of universal gravity, it wasn’t precisely contained by the laws of space-time.
    This gave ships an unparalleled ability to travel at FTL velocities relative to the known universe . Some of the mathematical concepts actually stated it as the ship holding still while the universe moved around it. It was a simplistic concept, but not entirely incorrect. It was more true to say that the ship moved one way while the universe moved another, and the two created a combined relative velocity that exceeded light by several times…something that couldn’t happen within the normal rules of space-time.
    Now, to return to the jumping fish analogy: what MacKay was trying to do was calculate the exact speed the taskforce needed to have, along with the precise angle of departure, in order for them to land back at a point of their choosing. In theory, it wasn’t a lot more complicated to work out than the simple ballistics trajectory of the aforementioned fish. In practice, again like the fish, the farther you were jumping, the more small factors came into play. Like making a sniper shot at better than three kilometers from a ballistic rifle, you had to factor in things that seemed infinitesimally small. Air temperature, gravity, wind speed, the rotation of the earth under the bullet…and so on. In this case, she was trying to land her bullets…the ships of Taskforce Five…on a point of space that roughly equated to getting that perfect headshot at five kilometers, or the proverbial fish jumping the length of two football fields and landing in a glass of water.
    And it had to be done right, the first time. Every time.
    Luckily, she had some advantages that fish and ballistic snipers didn’t have. For one, she knew to the kilo what the mass of each ship in the squadron was. Every piece of gear, every crewmember, even the waste products produced were carefully tallied and updated as needed. They didn’t keep track of what everyone onboard weighed, or anything that ludicrous, but it didn’t matter, either. What mattered was that she knew what they massed when they arrived onboard, and she knew precisely the mass of every item that had since left the ship…barring some escaping atmosphere that seeped through the hull as part of normal operations, and even that she had a good estimate of.
    Coupled with the precision control the VASIMR system provided over thrust, MacKay was confident she could meet the admiral’s requirements. There was no reason why it couldn’t be done. After all, the math was reasonably straightforward. It was just that no one had the power on tap until now, nor the specific need to take the chance.
    With the Cheyenne and Longbow class destroyers, and this current situation, they had both.
    She ran the numbers through the system, adjusting for all the variables she could find, and then told the computer to run the numbers twice to confirm the results. When they came back, she