Emerald Flight: “Star Wing” (continued)

“How long are they going keep us waiting?” Pryafox asked.

Devereux heard the deep concern buried in his tone. “As long as they like,” She replied quietly, her eyes fixed on the main bridge displays.

“The longer, the better, if you ask me,” the Chief added over the open intercom channel.

Devereux nodded slowly in agreement. The longer it took for the enemy forces to arrive, the closer their own Fleet would be. She was truly not that eager to go up against them alone, even in a stand-off.

Something burned in her stomach and she tried to remember the last time that she had eaten anything. Although begrudging the idea of taking any time or attention away from their current situation, she knew their enemy did not care whether she died with an empty stomach or not.

“Elizabeth,” she said, turning toward her First Officer. “Instruct whoever’s on duty on the galley to—“

“Captain!” Gho shouted. “Sensors are reading a massive transition horizon about two hundred thousand kilometers to starboard aft.”

“On the center screen,” Devereux told her.

A moment later, the area of space it showed jumped to a new perspective.

“Enhance,” Devereux ordered. She knew that the actual shifts in the spatial fields would be invisible to the naked eye, but she wanted to see what came out of it. “Put the gravimetric image on Screen One.”

The leftmost screen flickered, its image replaced by computer-generated, false-color representations of the gravitational shifts happening in space around them.

“Wait,” Gho called out again. “There’s a second one: about ten degrees to port.”

“The same size?”

Gho nodded, her eyes growing wide.

“Bring them both up,” Devereux said. “Keep monitoring them.”

The image on the first screen split into two, showing the charts of both slipstream events. The far left screen showed, for the moment, an empty region of space.

She’s right, Devereux agreed, feeling her stomach form knots. They’re massive.

She checked the bridge chronometer. It was too soon to be the Fleet vessels, no matter how many chances they took going into their jumps.

There’s only one reason for the transition effect to be that large, Devereux told herself with growing dread. They’re either sending through a massive fleet, or . . .

Even as the image on the center screen began to show clarity, Devereux knew what she would see. Within moments, the screen on the right would show her the same thing. Their new enemy was not bothering with small squadrons of fighters; they were sending in their destroyers.