Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time, as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer’s generator could return to stand-by readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Five minutes since they’d crossed the alpha wall, he noticed.

* * *

“Looks like this is it, Sir,” Ensign Brynach Lacharn said quietly (and redundantly, in Lieutenant Hamilton Trudeau’s opinion).

The Junction traffic control net had just gone berserk as the bulk carriers and passenger vessels queued up for transit got their first intimation that something untoward was occurring a few light-hours away in the direction of Manticore-A. Given what had happened to the star system a few months ago—and the possibility that the people who’d done that might choose to hit the Junction after all, if they went for a repeat visit—Trudeau could hardly fault the merchies’ evident consternation. Not that he was particularly pleased by how quickly that consternation had manifested itself. It only confirmed what he and the rest of the ship’s company of SLNS DB 17025 had already decided had to be the case: the Manties really did have FTL communications.

“Anything from Junction Astro Control?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Lacharn replied, then shrugged. “Well, aside from the initial announcement that ‘unidentified starships’ are approaching the Manticore-A limit, at any rate. That’s what set off this entire cluster fuck!” He waved in the direction of the obviously overworked petty officer monitoring the communications net. “Now that everyone’s yammering away, I don’t have any idea how soon ACS is going to manage to restore some kind of order.”

“Great.”