by Jay Allan
“Yes, Captain.”
He suspected Travis might think he was overreacting. Or maybe not. She was as suspicious as he was most of the time, maybe even more so. Her tone let nothing on about what she was thinking.
Dauntless lurched once as the new thrust kicked in and the dampeners adjusted. Barron watched on his screen as the ship’s vector began to change. It was a slow process, altering an existing vector, especially with low thrust levels. Barron hadn’t wanted to risk heavy engine output from the beginning, and now the specter of the enemy vessel looking for Dauntless really ate at him. He’d have to order higher thrust levels eventually, or his course changes would send his ship flying right past the pulsar. When that happened, it could only increase the chance of this enemy finding Dauntless, if he hadn’t already.
The Union ship had launched more probes, which was disconcerting, but the ship itself had only repositioned slightly. None of the other vessels in the Union line had moved at all, but the location shift of the one vessel, combined with the probe launches, had Barron on edge.
“Course change executed, Captain.” Listening to Travis’s tone, he decided she definitely did not think he was overreacting.
“I want that ship’s course changes tracked, Commander, and I want the AI to analyze and compare to our own. If they’re responding in any way to our maneuver, I want to know immediately.” He’d been trying to make that connection himself for over an hour, but as raw as his nerves were, he hadn’t been able to connect the dots into a clear cause and effect.
“Yes, Captain.” A moment later: “Feeding the track into the AI.”
“Go back and add past data as well. I want every possible analysis, not only of whether they’re following or looking for us now, but also when they started. If there’s some way for the enemy to detect us, we have to know about it. Now.” Barron knew the generator was working, not only because he’d checked with Fritz at least half a dozen times, but also because none of the rest of the Union fleet seemed to be responding at all to Dauntless’s presence. If the Union forces, and their commander, knew there was a Confederation battleship blasting toward their superweapon, every ship on that line would be after Dauntless.
“All information entered, Captain. The AI is chewing on it.”
Barron nodded, and then he turned back to look at the display, at the symbol that represented the enemy ship, one out of over a hundred in the system, and the only one that seemed to suspect anything. Not many Union captains were as skilled as his gut told him this one was.
Who are you?
* * *
Tulus sat and listened to the high-pitched whine of Argentum’s laser cannons firing a full broadside. His ships had arrived in time to help Commodore Eaton’s force finish off the enemy pickets, and the survivors had fled back to the Union line and the protective cover of the pulsar.
Tulus and his Alliance ships, along with Eaton’s survivors, were several light minutes in-system now, well ahead of the main fleet, which was still transiting. Without any reliable data, Tulus could only guess at the pulsar’s effective range, but he suspected his ships were close.
“Commander, I have Commodore Eaton on your line.”
“Commodore.”
“Welcome to the Bottleneck, Commander Tulus…and thanks for the assist.” Eaton sounded tired. The enemy forces defending the transit point had been stronger than expected. Tulus didn’t doubt Eaton’s people could have prevailed alone, but they almost certainly would have taken heavier losses had his forces not been there.
“My honor and pleasure to aid an ally, Commodore. What should we do now?” The words expressed his feelings well enough, but for all his sincerity, it still felt strange to be speaking of allies and combined operations. For the more than sixty years it had existed, the Alliance had fought alone, never reaching out, never seeking aid from any of its neighbors. Its first ally had been Tyler Barron and his Confederation forces, and, despite his initial reservations, Tulus was enough of a realist to acknowledge that without the outside assistance, Imperator Vennius and the Grays would have lost the civil war. Vennius would be dead now, as would Tulus himself and thousands of other warriors. The Alliance would have become something quite different than the noble warrior nation he’d served his whole life, to the everlasting shame of the Palatian people.
“We hold here and wait for the fleet to form up and reach us.” Translation…we’re looking for any excuse to give Dauntless more time before we move against the pulsar and the Union fleet. It felt strange to delay battle—his Alliance training and experience usually pushed him to prefer bold moves—but he understood the strategy here. The chances of reaching the pulsar, of destroying it before it gutted both the Confederation fleet and his own expeditionary force, were nil. They were here more or less as a diversion, to fix the enemy’s eyes, to do everything possible to help Dauntless slip through undetected. And to do that, they had to buy time. Time for Tyler Barron and his people to do the impossible.
“Understood, Commodore. Our velocity is zero. We are in place, and awaiting further orders.”
Tulus looked out at the main display, staring at the blackness between the Union line of battleships and the pulsar positioned behind them.
Are you there, my friend? Are you somewhere in that open space, approaching the moment of your attack?
* * *
“Fleet command, this is Temeraire, requesting permission to leave assigned position. Our scanners have picked up an…anomaly…and I’d like to investigate more closely. I have sent my data for your review.” Turenne had moved his ship as far as he dared without express permission from the admiral. The data the probes had sent back was alarming, to him at least, but it was also inconclusive. There might be something out there, but the density of the dust clouds, though far heavier in this system than most, were still sparse. The effect Turenne had noticed was tiny. There were a hundred things that might have caused it.
But how many would have affected just that one spot? No, more than one spot…a trajectory.
“Please hold for Admiral Bourbonne, Captain Turenne.”
He sat, waiting, his hand moving slowly to his headset. He sighed softly, catching it before anyone else noticed. Showing disrespect for superior officers was dangerous—even when they were self-important fops like Bourbonne. It was always wise to remain silent, non-committal. As much as he’d worked to turn his crew into something special, he knew damned well Sector Nine could easily have spies among his people.
Probably had spies there.
“Yes, Turenne, what do you need?” The admiral’s voice was loud, his massive ego obvious in every word.
“I am requesting permission to temporarily break formation to investigate an intermittent scanner…contact.” He wasn’t sure noticing minor density fluctuations in dust clouds qualified as a scanner contact, but he didn’t have any better way to put it.
“Break formation? Are you aware, Captain, that the fleet is in line of battle, and that Confederation battleships are even now still transiting into the system?”
“Yes, sir, I understand the fleet is in combat formation, and I know I don’t have much to go on…but I want to break out of the line and do a quick scanning run. Maybe I’m paranoid, maybe my instincts are running wild, but I feel there is something out there. If I’m wrong, no harm. The pulsar will obliterate the enemy advance, and Temeraire will be back in plenty of time to engage any survivors that make it into range. But if my hunch turns out to be something, some kind of Confed weapon or trick…isn’t it better to be safe on this, Admiral?”
There was a long silence, part of it from the distance to and from the flagship, but as it stretched on, Turenne realized that wasn’t the only delay at work. His stomach knotted. He’d gone to great lengths to state that he wasn’t trying to escape the battle, that he just wanted to do a sweep and make sure there was nothing going on in the rear of the fleet. But senior officers were tricky beasts, and if Bourbonne took it the wrong way, Turenne coul
d be in for a world of trouble.
Finally, the comm crackled to life. “Very well, Captain, but you are to move no farther than one light minute from your current position without further authorization…and don’t even think about asking for that unless you have more to show me than a pile of meaningless scans and a feeling in your gut that’s as likely last night’s dinner as some Confed scheme.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you. Turenne out.” He cut the line. One thing his experiences had taught him was to take yes for an answer and stop talking. Especially when dealing with flag officers.
He turned toward Maramont. “Lay in that course, Commander.” He’d plotted everything already. There was something about the patterns in those dust clouds…they looked as though something physical had passed through. It was a slight effect—one no one else noticed, and the AI even discounted as unexplained but incidental, but that was far from conclusive.
He’d likely have ignored it himself, except for one thing: the approaching Confed fleet. From all he’d heard, and certainly what he’d seen in the war to date, Van Striker was a gifted commander, a highly skilled tactician…yet he was sending his fleet directly into the pulsar’s kill zone. The Confeds didn’t have the kind of operational details on the ancient weapon the Union did, but even a basic analysis suggested the kind of frontal assault apparently underway was almost doomed to failure. Why would Striker send his ships to nearly certain death? It made no sense. And that inflamed Turenne’s suspicions. Something else had to be going on, and that made the minute disturbance in the particulate matter worthy of a second look, at least.
“Course change executed, sir.”
“All scanners on full. We don’t know what we’re looking for, not exactly, so I want reports on anything out of the ordinary.” He stared across the bridge toward Maramont. “Everything, Commander. I don’t care how insignificant or unimportant it seems.”
“Yes, Captain. Active scanners now on full power.”
Turenne sat calmly, quietly, his eyes moving between the main display and his own workstation, watching the scanning data slowly start to come in.
We’ll see if there’s something out there…or if I’m just paranoid and crazy.
* * *
“That ship is definitely looking for something, and they’re too damned close to us for comfort. It could be a coincidence, but I think that’s a fool’s bet. Are you sure the stealth device has been operating at one hundred percent? A glitch maybe? Even a fraction of a second could be picked up if someone was scanning in the right spot at the right time. They might have detected something, some energy leakage perhaps. Maybe not sufficient to give them a positive ID, but enough to send them searching.”
Fritz was shaking her head even as Barron was still talking. “No, sir, not a chance. At least on the energy leak. I’ve got half a dozen monitoring devices attached to that generator. If it flickered, even for a nanosecond, I’d know.”
Barron exhaled hard. “If you say so, Fritzie, I believe you…but I need a good answer on what that ship is up to. And I mean a good answer, because barring another reasonable theory, I have to assume they’re looking for us. Every other Union ship is sitting in that battle line, at a full stop, waiting for the fleet. Why is this one hunting around behind the main formation? There’s no doubt the Union battleship is looking for something. Their active scanners are blasting away at full power and they keep launching probes.”
Fritz was silent for a moment, but then she said, “Captain, we didn’t have time to properly test the generator, you know that. Perhaps it has a malfunction of some kind, one we can’t even detect, something we don’t know to look for. Or a weakness of some kind. We have no idea what that ship saw, or more likely, thinks it saw. That search pattern is pretty generic, sir, and with only one ship looking, it’s pretty definite they don’t know we’re out here. I agree, they must have picked up something, but it doesn’t look like they know what, and definitely not where.
“Suggestions?” Barron looked around the table at his officers. “A course directly toward the pulsar, which, despite the vector changes we’ve made, is more or less what we are on, is as obvious as it gets. If they do decide there’s something out here, you can be damned sure that, absent any other contact data, they will focus on that line. Then we’ll be looking at intensive scans, overlapping fields, and waves of probes so thick we could hop from one to the other all the way to the pulsar.”
Barron paused, letting his words sink in before he continued. “Or, do we make a significant course change, add time to our mission? If we go wide, something well outside the direct line, we’ll need multiple course changes. That means burning the engines a lot more, and it damned sure means tacking time onto our projected H-hour. The fleet is expecting us to hit that thing at a certain time, and we’re already behind schedule. We can only hold back so long before they’ll be forced to advance into range. Increasing the time before our attack only makes that worse.” He looked over toward Fritz and added, “And, notwithstanding Commander Fritz’s opinion on the generator, upping our thrust can only make us easier for them to detect.”
“I agree, Captain,” Travis said. “There’s no other explanation for that ship’s behavior. Their initial maneuvers might have been written off to something else, but I don’t think we can doubt they at least suspect something is happening here. At the very least, the captain and crew of that one ship are suspicious. If they discover anything else, even enough to increase their concern level, they’re going to put the pulsar on full alert. Worse, they may send a whole task force of battleships back to protect it. If they do that…”
“We’re dead.” Barron shook his head. “That pretty much kills taking a wider route. That would just give them more time to pull back part of the fleet. We’re just going to have to go straight in…we can hit the pulsar before they get any other ships back here, at least if we take a straight route. We’ll just have to hope Fritzie’s right that the generator can cover increased thrust.”
“We still don’t know what got their attention, sir. Maybe…” Travis hesitated. She jumped up and walked across the room, to the small workstation against the wall. Her fingers moved across the touchscreen, bringing up a map of Dauntless’s course for the past six hours.
Barron stared at the screen, a confused look on his face. “What do you see there, Atara?”
“Here,” she said, extending her arm and pointing toward a section of hazy white light. “And here.” She pointed to another one. She looked back toward the table. “This system’s full of dust clouds, ten or twenty times the concentration of the average system. And the particulate matter in the clouds is much heavier than normal. My best guess is two bodies collided in this system long ago, perhaps even two planets.”
“Dust? I’m not following you.” Barron was looking intently at the display, shaking his head.
“Don’t you see, sir? The generator cloaks emissions and screens the physical material of the ship. Traveling through a vacuum leaves no other traces.”
“The dust clouds!” Barron finally understood.
“Yes, sir. Dauntless is still in physical space, even though the generator is hiding its presence. It still affects other physical bodies. If we slammed into a moon, for example, the stealth generator wouldn’t stop us from being obliterated.”
“And it doesn’t stop us from disturbing dust clouds as we pass through them.”
Barron had looked convinced, but now doubt crept back into his expression. But we’re talking about minute changes, Atara. Even a dense dust cloud is pretty empty over a distance the size of Dauntless. I can’t believe any kind of normal scan would pick that up.”
“I agree, sir. I wouldn’t think most scans would pick it up. Certainly, our AI algorithms wouldn’t flag something like this as a likely contact…but what else could it be? Unless Commander Fritz is wrong about the generator…and I’m inclined to accept her certainty that the unit hasn’t failed at all since we’ve been in system.”
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br /> Barron nodded grudgingly. “Since that’s our only theory, it’s what we’ll go on.” He looked back at the display, at the location of the Union battleship. Its course wasn’t directly toward Dauntless, but it was a lot closer than Barron liked.
He got up and walked toward the large screen, on the opposite side from Travis. “We’re going to change course. I hate adding time to the approach, but I want some extra room between us and that line of battleships. If they do detect us, we’re going to have enough trouble with the damned pulsar…we don’t need a dozen battleships and all their fighters after us too. If we come around this way…” He moved his arm in an arc around the pulsar. “…we can come around from behind, putting maximum distance between us and that battle line. That’s fewer ships that can search for us, and fewer that can engage before we launch our own attack.”
Travis was nodding. “I agree, Captain…but I think we should increase thrust levels, up the acceleration and deceleration periods by an extra 3g. That will save us about half the time we’re losing. We won’t hit the pulsar on schedule, but with any luck, we’ll get there before the admiral has to move the fleet forward.”
Barron stared at the display, considering Travis’s suggestion. He was still nervous about blasting the engines too hard. He didn’t like trusting the lives of his people, not to mention the potential outcome of the war, to some ancient device they barely understood. But Travis was right. They had to make up time somewhere. If Striker had to order the final advance with the pulsar still operational, battleships would start dying. “Very well, Commander. See to it, at once.”