“So the plan is to put on some snow camouflage and jump over there with our swords? Duke it out with these guys and try and close the rift?”

40

“Not you,” Arthur said. “We’re gonna teach you to drive a hyper-skimmer so you can help pick up raiders after the attack. Everyone’s getting shuffled around after our casualties from the last raid.”

Mortimor narrowed his eyes and fixed them on Cole. “You think you’ve got a better idea, don’t you? Listen, there’s a lot you don’t under-stand about this place. Navy tactics are useless, here. For one thing, we can’t see this rift unless we’re right on top of it. SADAR is pretty much blind with all the rain and snow. The best we can do is measure the overall size of their fleet and tell it’s shrinking. So, if you think you’ve got a better plan—”

“A better plan? Hell yeah I’ve got a better plan. Screw jumping back to that village of theirs, let’s jump on some of the Bern ships before they leave. We can close the rift from the other side, even without our own ships!”

Mortimor and Arthur looked at each other. Arthur started laughing first, Mortimor doing a better job of stifling it. “Just jump blind into a ship?” Arthur asked. “Son, what makes you think you’d hit open space? Look, this isn’t like jumping through hyperspace, we’re in it!”

“What he means,” Mortimor said, placing a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, “is that there’s no place left to bounce to.”

Arthur laughed. “Yeah, that clears it up—”

“Wait.” Cole held up his hands. “One at a time,” he said.

“Okay,” Arthur said, beating Mortimor to it. “Let’s say you jump into one of their ships and you meet a bulkhead. Well, you’re gonna have a bulkhead bisecting your body when you’re done. We don’t even take a chance on our raids, even though we have a visual. We jump in a meter or two off the deck and roll. And you can feel a burn from every snowflake you absorb.”

“You have a visual?”

Mortimor waved Arthur off. “We have sources,” Mortimor said.

“What about jumping bombs in?”

“You got any bombs? They’re rarer than fusion fuel since the war. Hell, we’ve tried jumping random things in where we thought the cockpits would be, but it’s like throwing darts in the dark. The only thing we could see we were doing was running low on fuel and getting no results. The stuff is precious, and the denser the object, the more you use. Jumping metal really eats the stuff up.”

“What about jumping cameras in and sending shots back and using that?”