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attack.”

    “Contingency Omega.” Bauer paused. “Wasn’t that shelved, because of, ah, legal concerns?”

    “Yes.” Kurtz nodded. “But only as a plan of att-att-attack. We are not allowed to fly closed timelike paths—use faster-than-light travel to arrive before war breaks out. Leads to all— all—sorts of bother. Neighbors say God doesn’t like it. Blithering nonsense if you ask me. But we’ve already been attacked. They came to us. So we can arrive in our own past, but after the attack began: I must confess, I think it is a bit of a pathetic excuse, but there we are. Contingency Omega it is.”

    “Oh.” Bauer reached toward the red folder. “May I?”

    “Cer-certainly.”

    The Commodore began to read.

    Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century.
    However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

    A couple of these techniques relied on quantum trickery, strange hacks involving Bose-Einstein condensates to flip bits in quantum dots separated by light-years; as with the causal channel, the entangled dots had to be pulled apart at slower-than-light speeds, making them fine for communication but useless for transporting bodies. Some of them—like the Eschaton’s wormholes—were inexplicable, relying on principles no human physicist had yet discovered. But two of them were viable propulsion systems for spaceships; the Linde-Alcubierre expansion reciprocal, and the jump drive. The former set up a wave of expansion and contraction in the space behind and in front of the ship: it was peerlessly elegant, and more than somewhat dangerous—a spacecraft trying to navigate through the dense manifold of space-time ran the risk of being blown apart by a stray dust grain.

    The jump drive was, to say the least, more reliable, barring a few quirks. A spaceship equipped with it would accelerate out from the nearest star’s gravity well. Identifying a point of equipotential flat space-time near the target star, the ship would light up the drive field generator, and the entire spaceship could then tunnel between the two points without ever actually being between them. (Assuming, of course, that the target star was more or less in the same place and the same state that it appeared to be when the starship lit off its drive field—if it wasn’t, nobody would ever see that ship again.)

    But the jump drive had huge problems for the military. For one thing, it only worked in flat space-time, a very long way out from stars or planets, which meant you had to arrive some way out, which in turn meant that anyone you were attacking could see you coming. For another thing, it didn’t have a very long range. The farther you tried to jump, the higher the probability that conditions at your destination point weren’t what you were expecting, creating more work for the loss adjusters. Most seriously, it created a tunnel between equipotential points in space-time. Miscalculate a jump and you could find yourself in the absolute past, relative to both your starting point and the destination. You might not know it until you went home, but you’d just violated causality. And the Eschaton had a serious problem with people who did that.

    This was why Contingency Omega was one of the more sensitive documents in the New Republican Navy’s war plan library. Contingency Omega discussed possible ways and means of using causality violation—time travel within the preferred reference frame—for strategic advantage.
    Rochard’s World was a good forty light-years from New Austria; normally that meant five to eight jumps, a fairly serious journey lasting three or four weeks. Now, in time of war, the direct approach zones from New Austria could be presumed to be under guard. Any