Searching for the Fleet
Page 37
Lankstadt joined her at the controls. Coop was maneuvering, zigging the skip for a moment or two, then zagging in the opposite direction. He went up, and down, back into the clouds for a few moments, then rising back up.
He couldn’t continue doing that for long.
“You ever ghosted?” Yash asked.
“Who hasn’t?” Lankstadt said as he crouched beside her. There were only two chairs near the control panel of this skip.
She glanced at Coop. “He hasn’t.”
“So that’s how you become captain,” Lankstadt said. “Why do I always get information like this too late?”
“Yash, please,” Coop said, apparently not appreciating the levity—which surprised Yash. He usually didn’t mind it at all, even in tight situations.
“I need you to ghost this skip,” Yash said to Lankstadt. “And when I give you some coordinates, you send that ghost in that direction.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lankstadt said, and immediately got to work.
“Can you do a dual ghost?”
“That’s all I ever learned,” Lankstadt said, which relieved her. Because if he didn’t know how to make a dual ghost, then she would have had to do some of the work herself.
She was busy enough trying to figure out how to convince the ships out there that one of their own was the Shadow, which was the ship Lynda Rooney usually commanded, one of the ships they had left at Lost Souls. Yash had those specs at her fingertips, and right now she needed everything to happen quickly.
“This is not going to last very long,” she said to Coop.
“I just need whoever is commanding those ships to look in the wrong direction while we leave the atmosphere and head to the first moon,” he said.
She suspected her work wouldn’t even last that long.
“We could time it,” she said. “Ghost first, then layer in the trickery.”
“Whatever you think will work,” Coop said. “I’m not going to have time to help.”
As if he thought that she wanted help. She was only informing him so that he could coordinate his own actions.
And then she understood what he had been saying all along: there would be no coordination. She was going to do what she needed to do, and he was going to fly the skip, and they were going to hope that this trickery would work.
“Tell me when you’re ready to go,” Coop said.
“Lankstadt?” Yash asked.
“Ready now, ma’am,” he said.
She half smiled at him. “You did this a lot as a kid, didn’t you?”
“More than I should have,” he said primly.
Yash would have laughed again—usually laughing relieved the tension—but Coop didn’t seem all that appreciative at the moment.
She picked her vessel—a DV-Class ship that looked like it had been built around the same time as the Ivoire, only the other ship was in terrible condition. It limped its way toward Nindowne, which was just perfect for Yash’s purposes.
The farther back that ship stayed from the pack of ships heading toward the planet, the better for her ruse. The other ships wouldn’t be watching that one—not until they believed they saw the skip heading toward it.
“Here are the coordinates,” she said to Lankstadt. “You’ll go first.”
“We fly out of the atmosphere together,” Coop said. “I’m going into the thickest pile of space junk I can find.”
She understood why. He was hoping for a little extra distraction.
“As soon as we’re out of the atmosphere,” Coop said, “I’ll shield.”
Shields didn’t work well coming out of atmosphere, so Coop was going to have to activate the shield the second the skip emerged.
“We don’t want them to see two ships,” he said. “So you’re going to activate your ghost—”
“Ghosts,” Yash said.
“—right after I activate the shield.”
“There’ll be a nanosecond or more of emptiness,” Yash said. “Someone observant might see it.”
“That’s why I’m using the space junk,” Coop said. “And I’m gambling on two other things. I’m gambling that their equipment isn’t as sophisticated as it should be. I’m also going to gamble that they’ve never seen this little maneuver, so they don’t know what to look for.”
“You think the Fleet doesn’t allow ghosting anymore?” Lankstadt asked. He sounded almost sad.
“We don’t think they’re the Fleet,” Yash said.
“Ready?” Coop asked. “Because here we go.”
Thirty-Eight
At the very last minute, Coop realized that Lankstadt wasn’t strapped in.
“Lankstadt,” Coop said, “turn on the gravity in your boots and hang on tight. I don’t trust the attitude controls on this baby.”
“Got it,” Lankstadt said just as Yash asked, “Is there something wrong with the skip?”
Was there something wrong? There were a lot of things wrong. She apparently couldn’t feel the shaking, but Coop could. It felt like a tremor that a nervous person had in his hands, something that he couldn’t quite control.
Only the skip had the tremor, not Coop.
“Just a precaution,” he said, not wanting to distract her. “Now, everyone. Hang on.”
He programmed the Ivoire’s coordinates into the skip.
He changed the skip’s position ninety degrees from where it had been just a moment before and accelerated as he headed out of the atmosphere.
He was taking another risk he hadn’t mentioned to Yash. By waiting to shield after he got out of the atmosphere, he risked hitting some of that space junk.
He figured he was a good enough pilot to head into the thick of the junk and avoid hitting any of it.
He also hoped there was nothing too small coming at them.
He didn’t have time to process that junk, to see where the safest pieces were.
He was going to fly this skip as fast as it could go, maybe faster than it should go given the condition it was in, and he hoped he could outrun the illusions that Yash and Lankstadt were creating.
It took maybe five seconds to launch this skip into orbit. The moment the skip broke through the atmosphere, Coop said, “Now, Lankstadt!”
Coop threaded past pieces of metal and other things he couldn’t identify. Collision alerts were activating all over the board, some beeping at him.
He ignored them as he activated the shield around the skip.
The shield flickered for a second and then held.
Nothing had hit the skip after all.
On his own equipment, he saw an image of the skip appear right next to his position. The fake skip moved at the same speed he was, mirroring their path for a good ten seconds before veering off.
The path it needed to take to go to the fake Shadow curved toward a cluster of planets much farther away. Coop had to negotiate around a small moon, and then an asteroid belt, and then into the wide-open expanse of space where the Ivoire waited.
Rooney had moved the Ivoire there so that the jump to foldspace would be easy. Something about the jump to foldspace niggled at Coop too, but he couldn’t think about that right now.
He needed to get the skip to the Ivoire first.
A rumble started toward the back of the skip.
“Hey, Captain,” said an unfamiliar voice from the back. Had to have been Chen. “Things are vibrating back here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just hang on.”
The weapon the Not-Fleet had hit them with had been damaging after all. It hadn’t affected the exterior of the skip. Instead, it had burrowed into the skip and started unbonding the nanobits inside. Maybe the repair on the outside would hold long enough for them to reach the Ivoire.
And if that weapon was unbonding nanobits while it burrowed into the skip, what was happening to Perkins and the other injured person? Did the weapon they got hit with operate in the same way?
Probably, since whatever had hit the skip had been used in that ice storm.
“We have two fighters on our six,” Yash said, “and they’re not ours.”
Great. This skip didn’t have its own weapons system. Normally, he would try to outrun them, but they were fighters. He wouldn’t be able to.
“You think they’re tracking us?” Coop asked.
“They’re close enough to,” Yash said.
“Are you done with the Shadow?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Then finish that and let me worry about the fighters,” he said. He wasn’t going to monitor what was happening with the fake skip and the fake Shadow and all the other ships. He was only going to monitor this skip and hope to hell he could get it away from this planet without losing any more lives.
The fighters continued to trail, but they didn’t shoot. That seemed odd to him. Either they didn’t have weaponry (not possible, right? That couldn’t be possible), or they weren’t entirely sure he was here. Maybe they had seen the ghosting start, or maybe they were tracing the echo on their systems, the kind of echo that the stealth tech occasionally created.
He made a sharp veer to his left, then piloted down, backward, and up behind the fighters.
A small cry echoed from the back, followed by a sliding sound and a sharp bang. He tried not to pay attention to that. Clearly, though, he had been right: the attitude controls were failing. Other parts of the skip were failing too.
He hoped the inertial dampeners were still intact because he would need them when he reached the Ivoire.
But that was a long way away.
Right now, he had to shed those fighters—and it looked like he had.
They continued on the same path.
They had no idea where he was. They had seen him leave, plotted their trajectory based on his path, and matched his speed.
Their tech was better than he wanted it to be.
However, they were the only ships following him. No one else was. Which meant that everyone else was fooled—at least for the moment.
He hoped no one had seen the Ivoire’s fighters or had thought much of them. He also hoped those ships were already back at the Ivoire—and had not been followed there.
That wasn’t his problem though. If they were followed, Lynda was going to have to deal with whatever ships crossed her path.
Coop had to get to the Ivoire, and he had to do so before this little skip fell apart.
He flew beneath the Not-Fleet fighters—directly beneath them, staying close enough that if they saw an echo, they would think it was being caused by their own equipment. They were going fast enough, maybe a little too fast for this skip, and since he needed to go fast, he kept pace.
“You done yet, Yash?” he asked.
“As done as I’m going to be,” she said. “Let’s hope this holds.”
He glanced at the holomaps, saw the Shadow—or what looked like the Shadow—at the end of a long string of vessels.
And then his breath caught. In that string of vessels were two foldspace search vessels. They were three models up from the Arama, which he had served on as a young man. He had made recommendations on how to improve foldspace search vessels, including ways to track where a ship went into foldspace and also have a better chance of figuring out what its trajectory in foldspace was.
The newer ships (newer from his timeline, anyway) could track a foldspace opening up to twenty-four hours after a ship left a region. The newer ships could read energy signatures that wouldn’t entirely dissipate—sometimes for days.
“Dammit,” Coop said.
“What?” Yash asked, not looking at him. She was still doing whatever she was doing to make some other ship look like the Shadow.
He couldn’t consult with her—not that he had time.
“Nothing,” he said, although it wasn’t nothing. Because getting to the Ivoire was now only part of the goal. The Ivoire had to get out of this system without some ship following it all the way to Lost Souls.
He didn’t know if the foldspace search vessels could do that now, but he also didn’t know how much tech had changed in the past 5,000 years. Also, if these Not-Fleet people were advancing their own tech, tech that destroyed Fleet tech, then they might have figured out on their own how to do something Coop’s Fleet had never learned how to do.
The Not-Fleet people might be able to track through foldspace.
He had to consider tracking through foldspace an option, just to protect Lost Souls and everyone in it.
He frowned.
Lost Souls…
The fighters peeled away, apparently no longer able to track anything. Or maybe they had been called to deal with the Shadow. They were heading in the direction of the fake skip.
Coop changed his trajectory slightly, not wanting them to come back and be able to trail him by energy signature or something else.
The skip was still rumbling, and the rumbling was getting worse.
But he didn’t have too much farther to go to get to the Ivoire.
“Yash, you too busy to contact the Ivoire?” he asked.
“I’m not busy at all,” she said. “I’m just monitoring our fake Shadow and hoping it sticks long enough for us to get out of sensor range.”
Coop glanced at the skip’s internal monitors. The very center of the walls was crumbling, or being eaten away by whatever that weapon was. The skip would end up looking just fine, but someone would be able to put their hand through it.
“You gotta strap in, Lankstadt,” Coop said, envisioning Lankstadt sliding into the walls and going right through. “Everyone, hoods up. Full environmental suits.”
Just in case.
No one asked why. They trusted him. He wasn’t sure he trusted his abilities to get them out of here, but they did.
“I got the Ivoire,” Yash said, “but I don’t recommend you chat long. I’d like to cycle through quickly.”
Coop didn’t have time to chat long, nor did he have time to tell Yash that.
“Lynda,” he said, “we’re coming in hot. You’re going to need to separate us from most of the ship, and you’ll need to set up a shield for the interior of the ship. We’re going to be going faster than I want, and you’re going to have to siphon off some of that energy.”
He took a breath, glad he had an experienced crew. They didn’t look at him sideways at all. They knew if this failed, everyone would be flattened against the interior of the Ivoire.
Plus there was one other problem.
“And, Lynda,” he said, “we’re going to need to be quarantined. We might be bringing in something that could unbond nanobits.”
“Got it,” Rooney said. She was such a professional. She didn’t ask why or what, knowing they didn’t have time.
“Finally,” he said. “I’m going to be cagey here, just in case. But you need to set coordinates to get us out of here. I don’t want you to go to base. I want you to set coordinates to that starbase where Dix went off the deep end.”
“Will do, Captain,” Rooney said.
“We’ll be there in about five,” Coop said, and signed out.
“What the hell?” Yash asked. “Starbase Kappa?”
Coop nodded. He’d explain to her later. “How’s our ruse?”
“It’s about to expire,” she said. “And then they’re going to search for us.”
Lankstadt had made it to one of the chairs and was strapped in. Coop looked over his shoulder, saw that everyone in the back was protected—conscious or not.
“How fast do you think I can make this thing go?” he asked Yash.
“And keep it intact?” she asked. “You’re already there.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, and hoped the skip hung together long enough to get them to the Ivoire.
Thirty-Nine
Yash pulled up her hood. Coop hadn’t yelled at her for leav
ing hers off. She wasn’t even sure he had noticed. He hadn’t pulled his up either. He was looking wild-eyed, something she had only seen a few times in all the years they had worked together.
He didn’t think they would make it to the Ivoire.
She called up one small holoscreen and looked at the skip’s specs. Something was eating it from the inside. That something was heading toward the engines, and if that something hit the engines, then the skip would stop functioning.
They’d continue forward, but slower, and eventually, the other ships would find them.
This far out, the Ivoire wouldn’t be able to rescue them. Even up close, the Ivoire might not be able to rescue them, depending on what was happening there.
However, the shields were holding, which was good, considering. Because the skip was now far enough away from that group of ships that the work she had done to spoof one of them couldn’t be sustained.
At least Lankstadt’s ghost version of the skip still functioned. That was a self-sustaining image that would only dissipate if something hit it.
She saw the moment the Shadow’s signature vanished from the other ship. She saw it in two ways: first on her own equipment, which told her that it couldn’t sustain the spoof, and then in the ships heading toward the fake version of the Shadow.
Those ships slowed, like people did when they thought they saw someone they knew, and then realized that the person they were looking at wasn’t their friend after all. The ships stopped then, as their commanders started searching for the actual destination of the fake skip.
It would only be a matter of time before someone on those fighters mentioned the trajectory they had been following, and the ships would retrace those steps.
“Okay,” Yash said, “they just figured out that they were chasing one of their own ships.”
“Got it.” Coop was actually leaning in, toward the console, as if he could physically push the skip forward. He kept moving his hands along the console, monitoring everything, but not changing anything.
Yash had to look away. She wanted to tinker, to force this little skip to move faster, and she didn’t dare, especially since something was eating at it.