After an hour of gentle acceleration, boosting away from Earth, and ten minutes of what I guessed was preparation for the jump, our transport ship jumped. I couldn’t see anything, strapped into my bunk. When the ship jumped, it felt like static electricity crawling on my skin for a split second, then it was back to floating in zero gee. I kept track of time on my watch, it took eight hours, twenty one minutes between the first and second jumps. Later, I learned that Kristang ships are powered by fusion reactors, and their jump engines take about eight hours to build up enough power for a jump. That time lag between jumps can be a major tactical liability for an attacking force; the attacking ships, which have just jumped into combat, mostly can’t jump away immediately if they get into trouble, whereas a defending ship, with fully charged engines, can pop to a different location, if it has a swarm of missiles incoming. In actual battle, the time lag between jumps is not so much of an issue. Warships always maintain reserve energy for a short emergency jump. Ships can’t safely jump in or out of hyperspace near a large gravity field such as a planet, the jump field can get distorted and tear the ship apart. So an attacking force needs to come out of hyperspace away from a planet, and travel through normal space to get into orbit. Once the attacking ships get close enough to a planet to use weapons, they are so far within the gravity field that even ships with fully charged engines can’t safely jump. Defending ships, which never know where an attacker is going to pop out of hyperspace, tend to hang close to planets, and then move out to intercept. If that sounds too much like a game with lots of rules to memorize, it is. Lucky for us humans, we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have any starships, and the Kristang aren’t giving us any. We’re infantry, we fight on the ground. The Kristang get us there, and we'll take care of the fighting. That's what we all thought then, anyway.

Between jumps, the ship boosted for about two hours, then we had free time, when we could be out of our bunks. Everyone experimented with moving around in zero gee, I could see after only a few minutes that we should have been issued helmets. Sergeant Raynor came in to yell at us for stupidity, but mostly let us get bumps and bruises. Experience is the best teacher.