Free Six Bits by Laurence Dahners

to be support ships incoming. Look sharp! Stay passive. Don’t, I repeat, DON’T, let them get the drop on us like we got the drop on them.’”
    At the back of the bridge, the president and General Price blinked their eyes in the wake of the brilliant flash that had just lit so many of the holocubes in the bridge. “My God, Mallor, what’s happening out there?”
    The ensign blinked. “Well, I’m pretty sure we just cut the carrier’s shift-ring mid transit, sir.”
    “We heard that part! What’s it mean ?”
    The ensign stared at them, seemingly at a loss to explain. A small voice began to whisper in the general’s and the president’s ears with a back-translation into Mallor’s ears. “This is the ship’s computer speaking in translator mode. ‘Shift-ring’ is a term I coined from two of your words to designate the ring shaped devices which we use to open wormholes from one position in the space-time continuum to another. The krane carrier had opened a wormhole and was passing a shift-ring over itself in order to jump to a new location when Exceltor successfully cut the ring and collapsed the wormhole. Collapsing a wormhole transects any objects within the shift-ring orifice and thus should have cut the enemy ship into two pieces. The rear segment would be left in its original orbit while the front segment would be where it had arrived at the other end of the jump.”
    “Was that big flash an explosion from it being cut in half?”
    The ensign, having heard the computer’s translation message seemed at last to comprehend his audience’s lack of basis for understanding. The ensign said, “No sir. Opening a 10 meter wormhole to pass the carrier requires a huge amount of energy. About one per-cent of that power leaks away as light and other lower frequency radiation.” He looked away to one of the holotanks, “We estimate the flash at one megawatt, indicating an attempted jump of approximately one light second’s distance, perhaps to the other side of your world.”
    “Only ten meters in diameter? You told us the thing was 700 meters long!”
    “That’s correct. Energy requirements to open a wormhole vary as the square of the diameter of the hole. This makes it most efficient to build ships that are very long yet slender. Exceltor at 7.1 meters diameter, is barely wider than the 5.3 meter width of the bridge you see before you, but she’s nearly 200 meters long.”
    “Wait a minute. You said that one megawatt flash represented one percent waste? You’re claiming it took 100 megawatts of energy to jump to the other side of the planet?”
    “Correct. Actually that is an incredibly small amount of energy to move such a large mass such a distance at near instantaneous speed.” Even the translation managed to sound huffy. “Without Vinzearian physics it couldn’t be done.”
    “How did you cut the shift-ring?”
    “Captain Leis is brilliant! He had small weapon locating port-rings located on the surface of the krane carrier as soon as we found it. He had them set to automatically transfer in weapon-rings and destroy the shift-ring if the krane tried to move.”
    “Weapon locating port-rings?”
    The ensign said, “Port-rings are small versions of the shift-rings that can be held open for observation. We call rings that are used to attack the enemy weapon-rings.”
     
    At the front of the bridge, the captain wasn’t feeling brilliant, just incredibly lucky and still damned scared. He turned to Azimus. “Lieutenant, the locals aren’t lighting us up with their radar are they?”
    “No sir. With our shift-flash shielded by the moon I don’t think they know we’re here yet.”
    “OK team. Have we got sets of sensor-rings behind that moon and on the far side of P3 to pick up any incoming jumps?”
    “Yes sir.”
     
    BRIDGE—KRANE DESTROYER ZOADEN—MARS ORBIT
    1000 EST
     
    Captain Quinjot read with dismay the three messages from Commander Kinjie on Xajion. The first detailed the arrival