Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) by B. V. Larson Page A

there?”
    “I doubt it, sir. The chamber was depressurized. It was hard vacuum. Oh, one other thing, one of the lifeboats was missing.”
    Yamada checked her boards closely. She shook her head. “The hold doesn’t show that. But then again, it shows it’s warm and pressurized, too. Someone has hacked everything down there.”
    “Who could do it? Besides O’Donnell?”
    “Maybe me, Zye, or some of Rumbold’s people. But I doubt it.”
    “It was the engineering team,” I said with growing certainty. “That’s why they wanted off the ship. Looks like they finally got their way.”
    “Sir,” Rumbold said. He was sweating and stressing over the controls. “I’ve done what I can, but if we’re going to miss this departure point, we have to veer off right now. What’s your decision?”
    I looked up at the forward screen. A faint luminescence lit up a large circular area in the center of it. Could that be the entry?
    Taking a full second, I considered my options. Abort and retry, or sail into the unknown? The engineers had almost certainly sabotaged more than the aft hold. To fly now could be suicide.
    But then again, for some reason an enemy very much wanted me not to take this particular path at this particular time.
    Call it Sparhawk stubbornness, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn away now.
    “Steady as she goes, Rumbold,” I said, climbing back into my harness. “Alert the crew. We’re hitting the barrier in less than one minute.”
    Rumbold veered gently back on course, targeting the very center of the anomaly ahead.
    When we hit it at last, I felt it. Everyone aboard sensed our passage from one form of existence to another. It made my skin crawl, and it seemed to tug at every hair on my head individually for a moment. It was like walking into a resistance, a field, an invisible barrier that pressed against the flesh and the mind, but which had no effect on the hardware around us.
    And then we broke through it, entering into another state of the universe.

-6-
     
    When mankind found the first ER bridge between the stars, we’d sent in robotic probes. The probes had never returned.
    Finally, a human-run expedition dared annihilation and breached the entry point. What they’d found were a half-dozen wandering machines, unable to navigate as they had no point of reference.
    Hyperspace was unlike normal space in that it was really a state of being—arguably a state of nonexistence. The robotic systems had been built on the premise that they would enter the bridge and exit the far side after a short interval simply by following their original course.
    This turned out not to be the case. The twisted nature of hyperspace required course alterations to find the exit. Unfortunately, navigational systems found themselves without reference points as there were no stars or other objects to detect. Basic Newtonian physics still applied, allowing vessels to travel along the bridge under power, but which way was the correct direction? How fast was your ship going? Where, exactly, was the exit to be found?
    Without points of reference, these things were unclear. The robotic ships hadn’t been programmed with AI that was intellectual enough to solve the problem.
    Fortunately, the brave science team who’d dared to face what seemed like certain death were capable of independent, creative thought. They started off by creating what they referred to later as a “bread crumb” path. A large number of small transponders were dropped in sequence. By placing them at regular intervals, a ship’s crew could determine both their relative speed of motion and their direction of flight.
    It was soon discovered that hyperspace was inconsistent by nature. Going in a supposedly straight line left a curving set of transponders in the ship’s wake. After much careful work and nonlinear mathematics the engineers aboard were able to come up with an equation that described the curve created by the sequence of dropped points. Using