The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  “What do they have you on, Alec?” she asked Scarlatti with a smile that sometimes made him wonder what a female praying mantis looked like to a male. Beautiful. Worth whatever it took ...

  “Ah!” he said, snapping back to the reality of the two of them on duty ten levels deep inside the Willy C.

  Of course, their consoles were doing the real work.

  Still.

  “One of the courier ships tracked through a laser. Somebody’s drive laser,” Scarlatti explained, glancing back at his console to be sure that it didn’t require a human decision. Nope. “I’m to calculate the probable track of the laser and come up with a source ... assuming it was ship-mounted. Max priority.”

  Stich frowned and said, “But you can’t calculate direction from one point, can you?”

  “Well, no, but it’s not a point.” Scarlatti gestured to his console and muttered a command. Stich moved closer to see over the divider; their arms were almost touching. “The courier was in the beam for almost thirty seconds, so there’s a good long line to work with.”

  The ignorance implied by Stich’s question bothered him for a moment; it was as though she’d asked him how to turn on her console. But though the units were identical, the operators and their jobs were not. Jenna didn’t do the particular sort of number crunching that was second nature to Scarlatti.

  The console obediently gave him visuals, a green line hanging in the air. “The intersection line,” he explained. The green shrank to a mere dash, then extended in orange from one end, in a narrow flattened cone that stretched to the limit of the hologram display, “And a location cone, depending on the sender’s course and speed. I’m checking the extension against known objects before I run a plot from what I have already.”

  Scarlatti knew that what he had so far wasn’t enough to locate the sender, unless a couple of battle squadrons were recalled to the Home System to sift through all the possibilities; but Stich probably didn’t realize that. The bit of harmless boasting made the young lieutenant feel good.

  Beaming with his promise of success, Scarlatti said, “What do they have you on, ah, Jenna? Not”—a cloud passed over the sun of Scarlatti’s hopes—“a cross-check on my, ah—”

  “Oh, no, nothing like, that!” Lieutenant Stich warbled in amusement. “One of the omni newsreaders announced—”

  Stich cued her console with a gesture Scarlatti failed to catch. The unit said in, Noel Li’s dulcet, cultured tones, “ ... the Khalians have blown up . . .”

  “—Halley’s comet blew up before anybody here knew about it,” Stich continued over the newsreader’s voice. “I’m looking for the source of their data—”

  “ ... Fleet sources have refused comment on . . .”

  “What?” Scarlatti interjected, pointing as though the recorded words weren’t utterly disembodied. “You mean they did report it to us before the broadcast and somebody—”

  Stich’s smile wasn’t so much mechanical as electronic in its precision. She gestured again. Li’s voice switched in midsyllable to a man saying, “ ... Landhope, producer of the Morning News. We have a report—”

  “Assistant producer,” murmured Stich coldly. “He’s calling Commander Brujilla in the Public Information office thirteen minutes before air time.”

  “—just been blown up by a Khalian armada incoming to attack Earth. Can you comment on that for the record, Commander?”

  “What?” demanded a female voice from the heart of Stich’s console. “Landhope, what are you on?”

  “Commander Brujilla, I’m not going to be put off by pretended ignorance,” the producer snapped. “If the Fleet refuses comment on the biggest security lapse since Pearl Harbor, we’ll run what we’ve got!”

  “Well, run it and be damned, then, Landhope! And if you think your calls here’ll ever be answered again, y—”

  “Ooh . . .” said Scarlatti.

  “Yeah,” said Stich. “Brujilla’s got about as much chance of promotion as Ito van Pool.” Van Pool had docked Admiral Ozul’s gig three meters deep into his flagship’s hull, sixty years ago. Such things are remembered. “And I’d have said the same thing if anybody’d called me with such an idiot story . . .”

  “Sure, anybody would,” Scarlatti agreed. The cold feeling in the pit of his stomach had crushed all the pride, all the sexual display, out of his voice. He’d just seen somebody’s career get hit by an astrobleme.

  Stich gestured again. “This is the call to Broadcast Towers,” she said.

  “How do you . . ?” Scarlatti asked. “I mean, are you just pulling these calls out of a file, or . . .”

  “Of course,” Stich agreed. Her quizzical expression reminded Scarlatti of how he’d felt when she asked a ridiculous question about course computation. “They don’t name these ships after spymasters and hang them over sector capitals for nothing, Alec. I told my console to sort message traffic to and from Broadcast Towers over the past three days, using the key phrase ‘Halley’s comet.’”

  “ ... Towers,” said a voice from the console. “Can I help you, please?”

  “Record this,” responded another voice, probably unnecessarily. “I won’t say it again. A—”

  “We don’t have a match on the voice, at least yet,” Stich explained in an undertone, “but the call originated from Dallas.”

  “—Khalian armada is inbound toward Earth. They have already destroyed Halley’s comet. Professor Sitatunga at Fermi-Geneva will confirm this.”

  “Thirty-seven minutes before air time,” Stich added with professional appreciation. “They were cutting it close.”

  When Jenna Stich flicked her control hand again, the, console generated a hologram of a man with implanted hair—a cheap job that looked as though the surgeon normally specialized in putting greens—oriental features and a rich black complexion.

  “Yes, yes?” a voice was saying; the image’s lips moved slightly out of synch with the words. “I am Sitatunga, yes.”

  Noticing Scarlatti’s frown, Stich said, “They didn’t have enough warning to arrange pictures for the initial flash, but they got cameras on him later. I’m just manipulating those sends to fit the initial call.”

  “ ... told me you’d be calling about my research . . .”

  “Told by the same guy as made the call to the station?”

  Stich nodded absently.

  “Yes, Professor, but what about the comet exploding?” The caller from Broadcast Towers was probably Landhope; Scarlatti couldn’t tell.

  Stich murmured, “Yes, he called Sitatunga from Dallas the day before, pretending to be Noel Li’s producer himself.”

  The holographic face registered amazement and horror. “Why are you saying this to me? This is no joke! The comet is not exploded, it—”

  “Told him they wanted a feature on Halley’s comet, so he’d have the latest telemetry ready when the station called—”

  “See, right here!” insisted Sitatunga, obviously pointing to a display terminal that would probably have been illegible even if he were on-camera during the conversation. “It says ... oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

  “‘Professor?”

  “All my equipment! Gone! Gone! Exploded as you say! All my life!”

  Stich gestured away the scientist’s voice and the sight of his pop-eyed horror.

  “He was the greatest authority on the comet in ... I suppose the universe,” she explained. Her mouth moved in what could have been a cold smile. “I suppose he still is, but there isn’t as much now to know.”

  “Except who did it. And even that—” A pulse of red light and the peep in Scarlatti’s mastoid implant warned him that his console needed a human decision.

  “Go ahead,” he ordered as he turned to face his equipment.

  CONFIRMATION POINTS appeared in the air in bright amber letters. The heading lifted a hand’s
breadth. Beneath it, in red, indicating a high degree of probability—appeared MARS, followed by thirty-digit time-location parameters.

  “Right,” Scarlatti said. “Check it out.”

  Stich waited a decent five seconds to be sure she wouldn’t interrupt further business, then asked, “Check what out?”

  “Ah,” said Scarlatti. “The calculated course suggests the drive beam may have intersected Mars before it hit the Sabot.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been reported?”

  “Sure,” Scarlatti agreed, “but so what? A laser beam intersecting a Fleet unit is an incident that sets off alarms. But intersect a planet and that’s just data ... until somebody asks about it.”

  Lieutenant Stich responded with a smile that warmed Scarlatti all the way down to his toes. “My dad thinks my being in Fleet intelligence is exciting. I tell him I’m just a librarian: my job’s information retrieval.”

  Scarlatti nodded toward his unit. “Yeah. Like I could call somebody on Mars myself ... after the console told me who. But it’s a lot simpler to let the console talk to the data storage site directly.”

  “Computers don’t go out to lunch,” Stich agreed.

  Scarlatti’s implant chimed pleasantly, alerting him that new data hung in the air, to replace the calculated parameters. “Three hours?” he said in amazement as he translated the digits into human reality. “The beam was painting Mars for three hours? That’s absurd! Unless they were . . .”

  Stich said, “And what were the chances that the beam would intersect a Fleet courier by chance?”

  Scarlatti pointed to key his console. He had his mouth open to request the calculation when he realized that the other lieutenant hadn’t meant the question literally. “Oh,” he said, covering his embarrassment with a fixed grin. “Tiny. Had to be an accident, Jenna.”

  “Maybe not. What about Mars?”

  “Yeah. The Weasels meant to be noticed. Jenna, they kept a violently accelerating bomb between Mars and their ship for three hours. So people on Mars would look up. And see Halley’s comet explode. And that tells me a lot about their course.” His hands were moving.

  At Scarlatti’s mutter-gestured command, his console threw up a course calculated with the addition of the new hard data. The intruder’s green line danced in the smoothly-perfect curve of masses in vacuum dancing through the sun’s gravity well. The cone of extrapolated paths (orange) had narrowed considerably.

  “—but we only know this because Sabot was in the beam. And that’s four points on a line, Jenna. Couldn’t have been planned.”

  A chime from Jenna’s console drew the attention of both technicians. Scarlatti couldn’t hear the question Stich’s mastoid implant was asking her, but when she said, “Run,” the console spewed out loud the recorded conversation it had retrieved from Willy C.’s files.

  It made no sense at all. “What language is . . .” he murmured, too lost in his own ignorance to notice the frown wrinkling his companion’s forehead.

  Stich crooked a finger at her console. It obediently threw a holographic caption in the air above itself:

  NO KNOWN LANGUAGE.

  POSSIBLE COGNATES:

  WESTERN EUROPEAN/PRE-EMPIRE.

  No known cognates within the thousand years since the collapse of the first starborne human civilization.

  The speech, unintelligible even to the SCCS Willy C., stopped. Without prompting, Stich’s console threw up an additional caption:

  TIME TO NEXT PORTION OF TRANSMISSION:

  FIVE HOURS, THIRTY-TWO MINUTES.

  “Well, compress it, then!” Jenna snapped as though the console and not its programming had forced her to give that ‘obvious’ instruction.

  “Five and a half hours,” muttered Scarlatti, doing the computation for which he didn’t need his console’s help. “If the delay’s due to transmission lag”—and he couldn’t imagine it being from anything else—“it’s originating from well beyond Neptune. From the inner comets. Of course.”

  Stich’s console began speaking in a different recorded voice, though the language was at least putatively the same. “The console picked the call out on the basis of the voice print—one speaker’s a good match with the man who called Sitatunga and Broadcast Towers.”

  “In Dallas?”

  Jenna nodded. “Forty-three days ago. The other half of the circuit is supposed to be Gravitogorsk, Mars.”

  “Then why the lag?” her companion asked in puzzlement. “Mars should require only a few minutes’ delay.”

  “Supposed to be,” Stich repeated with a slight astringency for what she considered to be someone missing an obvious point. “With thirty seconds and a plot of comsat orbits, I can crash a Gravitogorsk circuit too, or any open circuit.”

  “But could you do it from five and a half light-hours out?” Scarlatti prompted.

  Jenna paused, pursed her lips in consideration. She looked beautiful. “With the Canaris’s navigational software to steady the transmission beam,” she said at last, “yes. Give me a starship’s navigational equipment, and I could tickle an orbital satellite any way you like. I could make anyone think a call was coming from Earth instead of ... The Oort Cloud is what we’re talking about, isn’t it? But you normally wouldn’t bother . . .”

  “Unless you had an agent on Earth,” Scarlatti said, taking the verbal handoff from his companion. “And you wanted to give him the details of your plans so that he could prepare the propaganda campaign.”

  Stich stared at the holographic solar system glowing above Scarlatti’s console. “Alec,” she said cautiously, “if you—”

  “—factor in the distance and course calculated from the decreasing lag time between call segments. That’s their velocity component toward the Sabot. Hee hee hee! We’ll have their velocity vector. That’s more than they wanted to tell us.” Scarlatti’s fingers danced. The unit began to chuckle as it processed data.

  The orange cone was now on the outer end of the green line—the course the intruder might have taken after his laser beam intersected the Sabot.

  “—then what’s on the inner side of the plotted course?” Jenna finished.

  The red pulse and mastoid chime from Scarlatti’s console drew the eyes of both operators.

  It was only a possibility, of course; a computer’s estimate based on the assumption that the Weasel ship had a specific intended goal, and that the vessel’s computer would choose the most elegant solution when it laid its course.

  There was an event point from which a microwave beam from the Khalian ship would almost align with Mars on its way to Earth itself. A later event point from which the beam of a drive laser would intersect the Sabot and Mars sequentially. There was an event-point beyond—

  “Of course, they could’ve popped into sponge space and headed home,” Scarlatti muttered. “They’d be crazy to do anything else.”

  “They haven’t done it yet,” said, Stich. “An unscheduled sponge space entry within the solar system would’ve alerted the whole defensive array. If they stayed in normal space-time, they could assume no one would notice until . . .”

  Scarlatti pointed, keying the console; then he paused while he decided whether to inform Commander Mown under the usual procedure, or to alert the Battle Center directly.

  They’d have to be crazy.

  Weasels are crazy!

  “Battle Center,” he said. Moments ago he had watched one Commander Brujilla blow her career in six hot seconds. Likely enough he had just done the same. But beside him, Jenna Stich’s bald, finely formed skull was nodding approval of his decision.

  Even if there were a ship prepared to take off at once, star-drive required incredibly complex equations that took time to complete.

  And if the computed guess glowing above Scarlatti’s console was correct, the handful of scientists at Tombaugh Station on Pluto didn’t have
very much time at all.

  * * *

  “Look, this is really some kinda training exercise, isn’t it?” said Pilot Trainee Rostislav. The fear was creeping up his spine. “Come on, Chalfond, a courier ship’s too small a box for us to be gaming each other.”

  “It’s no exercise, Rostislav,” said Warrant Officer Chalfond, captain of the Sabot. “Shut up, and worry about course coordinates.”

  Chalfond had been in charge of a destroyer’s gun turret before a Khalian torpedo shredded her legs. Transfer to the command of a courier vessel on intrasystem runs could have been considered a promotion. At least it wasn’t forcible retirement.

  She hadn’t considered it a promotion until now, when it seemed there might be a chance of action after all.

  “Captain, the coordinates are set,” Rostislav said in a frustrated tone. “They’ve been set for half an hour. It’s the calculations to get there through sponge space that’re the problem, and I can’t speed them up by poking at keys myself.” He grimaced at the blank, pulsing depths within his omni.

  The Sabot’s command console was a meter-thick pillar in the center of the vessel’s cabin. The console had three niches offset 120 degrees from one another, with seats facing inward. When the crew was at flight stations, they were almost touching—but they couldn’t see each other’s faces.

  “Moggs, are your guns ready?” Chalfond demanded.

  “Is a bear Catholic?” Rostislav muttered with another grimace. Couldn’t she just keep quiet and let the software—

  “Huh?” said Crewman Third Class Moggs. Moggs spent all his free time running training programs at the gunnery screen, zapping pirates, meteor storms, Khalians, and whatever else the computer chose to throw at him. “I don’t get it, Rostislav.”

  Rostislav wasn’t sure Moggs was bright enough to understand the difference between a training program and what was maybe about to happen.