by Shane Black
“A Gitairn sensor beacon in Sector Eight last reported a transponder reception from the starship Dunkerque over sixty hours ago. The Dunkerque is a Strike Cruiser with a crew of 200 officers and men. Vice Admiral Hughes is in command. He is in the sector to show the flag and establish a forward post from which to observe activity along the Reach. Since the Sector Eight contact, there has been no sign of the Admiral’s ship or any other contacts in that region of space.”
Hunter paused. The crew listened attentively and silently.
“I have orders to navigate to the last known position of the Dunkerque and conduct search and rescue operations. There may be hostile forces in the area. We are authorized to defend ourselves and any friendly vessels. We will enter Gitairn space in approximately 28 hours. Between now and then our new department chiefs will schedule four sets of combat readiness drills, one for each watch.”
The Captain closed his tablet.
“I realize we’re still a shakedown ship with a shakedown crew. But I expect all of us to perform to the best of our ability. This is a battleship. Let’s make sure nobody forgets it.”
The sergeant barked again and the crew returned to attention. Hunter gathered the items off the lectern and stalked off the platform.
“Have the senior staff assembled in my in-board cabin in ten minutes.”
“Aye, sir,” the sergeant replied before saluting.
The Captain stalked down the corridor.
Ten
The officers of the Argent sat together in a contemplative silence.
“You requested transfers for all of us to protect us,” Zony finally replied after listening to Captain Hunter’s short briefing.
“That’s one way to look at it,” Hunter replied. The five pilots were seated around the Captain’s luxurious conference table. Behind Hunter’s chair was a spectacularly colorful real-time map of the Gitairn Reach lit up in glowing vector graphics projected on a transparent 12-foot high slab of dense reactive crystal. At the lower edge, a small replica of the Argent’s flag crept along towards the sprawling asteroid field that separated the Core Systems from the rest of space. Next to the avatar was a readout of the ship’s position and designation.
“I haven’t had time to do a complete control check yet, but if your stories about your sister are accurate, you might want to take her up on that robot offer,” Yili said evenly. “The last thing we need is a concussion charge popping off in our life support circuitry during a critical situation.”
“We should rig the ship to catch any saboteurs in the act,” Moo offered.
“That could take days,” Annora replied. “I think we should be careful not to start second-guessing ourselves and we definitely shouldn’t be running here and there preparing for potential enemies when there are plenty of real ones.”
Zony and Yili nodded.
“Agreed, XO. I want all of you armed until further orders. Each of you will quietly select one person from your department you can trust. Tell them I’ve ordered an unusual drill and they need to be prepared to take over for you at a moment’s notice. Moo, I want you to recruit fifteen marines you know well. Order them to shadow each of us two by two in shifts. Don’t make it too obvious.”
Moo nodded.
“No officers. Quietly keep ship’s security on emergency condition one even if we stand down from quarters, understood?”
“Aye, sir.”
The ComSat console beeped.
“Hunter.”
“Captain, we have a new contact designated Mockingbird One One Four bearing three-one-nine mark seven, range 22 million miles.”
“Identification?”
“Negative, sir. Navicomp thinks its a sensor echo. Battle computer thinks its a ship. Signals isn’t reading a transponder in any known frequency range. It appears to be moving, but we can’t establish a track. Energy emissions are present, but spectrometry is inconclusive.”
“Are we active?”
“Negative. We haven’t lit it up yet. All scanners and sensors are on passive readings only per your orders.”
“Alright, put a pin in it and start a tape. I’ll be up in a--”
“Captain, unidentified contact has just changed course. Threat board just went active. Battle computer reports Mockingbird One One Four now hostile. Shift designation to Kilo X-Ray One. Now vectoring One Five Six on intercept course and closing--”
The channel clicked.
“Sir, this is Skywatch on emergency intraship. Combat STC reports hostile contact Kilo X-Ray One now inside our defense perimeter--”
Hunter was already on his feet. “Signal the Officer of the Watch to sound general quarters. All hands to battle stations.”
A moment later the clear channel alarm sounded over all communications channels. A pleasant female voice echoed through the intraship address system.
“Attention all hands. Attention all hands. Officer of the Watch has signaled general quarters--”
The klaxon began echoing. All the lights shifted to a hellish red glow and the five members of the Bandit Jacks stood around the conference table wearing expressions common to all soldiers about to join battle.
“All hands man your battle stations. Repeat: All hands man your battle stations. Time out two minutes. Deck officers report alert status to the first officer--”
“See you on the beach, sir,” Moo said calmly.
The Argent’s officers rushed out the door with Hunter in the lead.
Eleven
“Captain on the bridge.”
Hunter took the center chair and lashed up his emergency harness.
“Zony, tell me everything I don’t already know.”
The Signals Officer was already hard at work, her fingers dancing over the impossibly elaborate bank of controls at the communications station. She wore old-fashioned over-the-ear headphones equipped with a small boom mic near one cheek.
“Annora, get Flight One on the box. I want two Jacks and a T-Hawk in space in sixty seconds. Have Flight Two ready a Nemesis and park them on station one megaclick off our starboard wing. Everyone stays scanner passive until further instructed.”
“Affirmative,” Commander Doverly swiveled in her chair and began coding the flight orders.
“Helm, all stop. Thrusters at station keeping.”
“Aye, sir. Helm answering all stop.”
“CIC, report status of Kilo X-Ray One.”
“Contact slowing in space. Range now fifteen million miles. Vessel type still unidentified. Energy emissions suggest a warship in the 80,000-ton range. No active signals.”
“He can see us and he knows we can see him,” Hunter mused. “Skywatch, what have you got?”
“We confirm CIC’s report. They’re still closing, but they’re also slowing down.”
“Sir, Flight Two reports Nemesis Eight standing by to launch,” Doverly reported. “Space Force Patrol Cavalier Eleven is standing by on rails two and three.”
Hunter turned back to the tactical display. “Signal STC rails are green. Launch all spacecraft.” Doverly switched the launch board over and signaled clear space.
The twin-engine Yellowjacket fighter’s cockpit was filled with cool oxygen-rich air. The whines of the overbuilt fusion engines on either side of its main section rose in unison as the pilot’s tac suit inflated and normalized the ionization of its internal fluid circulation.
“Yellowjacket Ten, this is Skywatch. Spacelane Control has cleared the rails. Stand by for full power launch in five.. four.. three.”
The cylindrical magnetically charged rail tunnel around the angry-looking little attack craft began to thrum with millions of volts of barely restrained energy. The pilot saluted the armored and receded bunker right next to the flightway, and the rail operator returned the salute just before the count reached zero.
The pilot’s anti-inertial circulation went to full pressure as his body was slammed into the flight couch. Yellowjacket Ten was pulled down the ninety-meter rail tunnel by impossibly strong
magnetic forces until it was literally fired out the port side of Flight One at a speed of more than 350 MPH. Its powerful engines kicked in and rocketed the heavily armed little ship up to nearly 2000 MPH in a matter of seconds. Moments later Yellowjacket Eleven and T-Hawk Black performed a textbook rendezvous at the innermost Space Force Patrol range of 400 miles and began to circle the Argent.
Beneath the mighty battleship, the same ritual played out again, this time for the much larger Nemesis Electronic Warfare Corvette. Her crew of five harnessed themselves to their shock frames before the rail launcher blasted the sleek vessel into a heading towards the starboard edge of the Argent’s command area. It banked its way through a tight maneuver before literally disappearing into the inky vacuum and vanishing from the Argent’s instruments. Only her pinpoint directional LOS datalinks remained active, transmitted across a shifting hyper-accelerated LASER impossible to detect from anywhere in space except a point directly between Nemesis Eight and her mothership. The datalink gave her both communications and telemetry without alerting any hostile ships to her position.
“Combat Space Patrol on station and standing by, Captain,” Annora reported.
“Very good. Zony, have Ice Station start turning this region of space into Channel Three. Ops--”
Zony turned to face the Captain’s chair, but didn’t say anything. She was listening intently, one hand on her headphones and staring at the floor.
“Zony?”
She held up her hand, as if trying to quiet sounds that might make it hard to hear.
“Wh--” Hunter stopped himself. He knew that look Zony had. She was doing that thing where she could figure out what note on a piano would match the sound of a door creak down the hall...
... in the building next door.
“Captain, I have a microwatt-strength signal coming from Barker’s Asteroid. It sounds like a human voice. They’re hailing us,” Zony said without looking up.
Hunter stared at the tactical plot. Barker’s Asteroid was far beyond the unidentified contact on the opposite side of the Argent’s projected Z-axis.
“Hailing us? At this range?”
Commander Doverly performed some quick calculations before getting to her feet. “That’s impossible. We would have detected active scanners, Even then they’d have trouble identifying us.”
“Let’s hear it, Lieutenant,” Hunter said quietly.
The channel popped and sizzled with static and background noise. Buried deep in the electronic haze there was a thin, tinny-sounding voice clearly audible. Hunter couldn’t tell who the voice belonged to, but it sounded for all the world like a 1940s radio broadcast.
“Argent! You’re walking into a trap. It’s a set up. Run! Before it’s too late!”
Twelve
“Sir.”
The marine snapped to attention and saluted. The officer returned the gesture.
“What’s on your mind, corporal?” Major Lucas Moody was standing at the lectern in the squadron briefing room working his way through equipment readiness reports. The unsheathed sword of the marine mechanized infantry’s crest filled the wall behind him.
“Sir, well-- see, the guys and me, we’ve been talking, and..”
“Just say it, corporal. Second Marines are a team, commanding officer to gas can.”
The major’s encouragement didn’t seem to do much for the young marine’s uncomfortable expression.
“Well, sir, I found out the skipper’s just a little older than me, and I was wondering if that’s, you know, a normal thing in the fleet?” He scratched the side of his nearly shaved head with a confused look.
“You have plans to join the officer corps, marine?”
“No! I mean no, sir. I’m pretty happy just being one of the guys.” He chuckled nervously. “My mom would disown me if I messed up my marks in basic, sir. But I was just wondering, because--”
“I went to flight school with Jason Hunter. I was one of the men he rescued when he won the Skyshield Legion. He charged an enemy frigate squadron in a single seat Yellowjacket fighter. They went this way, he went that way. He made it. They didn’t.”
“I-- I didn’t know that, sir.”
“Most people don’t. The skipper isn’t the type to brag. There’s no man alive I’d rather have on the bridge of any ship I’m taking to war than Jason Hunter. If you went missing, marine, he’d bring every man and woman in this command with him looking for you.”
For whatever it was worth, the look on Major Moody’s face seemed to provide the young man some comfort. The corporal stood at attention again and saluted. Moody returned the salute again and the marine dismissed himself.
Thirteen
As heroic as Major Moody made the young captain sound, at that particular moment he didn’t look like he was ready to slay any dragons. Captain Hunter was pacing the bridge of his ship while his Executive Officer and Signals Officer watched with concerned expressions.
“I’m tempted to call it a ruse,” he said, looking up at the massive tactical display of Gitairn Sector 8. On the port side of the Argent’s avatar was Alert Three, consisting of two fighters and a Tarantula-Hawk class gunship. On the opposite side was an indicator for the last known position of Nemesis Eight, an electronic warfare corvette stationed nearby to assist the much larger battleship in the event hostilities broke out.
And by the looks of things, Hunter thought, they just might. Although his flight decks were still at general quarters, Hunter had ordered the rest of the ship to emergency condition three. Unidentified contact Kilo X-ray One had neither advanced nor retreated in the last three hours, and Hunter remembered well the lesson he learned in officer’s training about crews that remained at high alert for too long.
“At this range, there’s no way to tell. I can’t give you any details on the hardware they’re using, or why we’re getting such weird signal attenuation,” Zony replied. “They’ve set it to automatic broadcast, so either they know we’re here or they know we’re coming.”
“Still doesn’t make sense,” Annora Doverly countered. “They called us by name. No designator. There wasn’t even an attempt to conceal our identity or theirs. They just fire off this minimum bandwidth signal, hoping we’re here to receive it and then tell us to run? What about them? Barker’s Asteroid isn’t exactly well known for its five-star accommodations.”
“I’ll give you that much, Commander,” Hunter replied with his back still turned. “If I was crashed on that spinning junkyard, I’d be more concerned about survival than setting up warnings for ships I don’t even know are--”
It hit Zony and Jason at exactly the same moment. He turned around and her face gradually lit up into a delighted expression of sudden discovery. “What if the Admiral knows we’re coming?”
Hunter pointed at Lieutenant Tixia in a wordless gesture of agreement and turned to his Executive Officer, whose frown indicated she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about their electromagnetic sleuthing skills.
“A flag officer would not set up an emergency beacon and start broadcasting ship names in the clear,” Doverly said. “Look at this.” She rose from her seat and walked over to stand by the Captain at the forward bridge tactical display.
“Here is Alert Three. They got the same signal we did only a few hundredths of a second sooner. Nemesis Eight is over here. They got the same message a few ticks later. That means if Barker’s Asteroid is broadcasting the signal, it’s omnidirectional. With all due respect to the Admiral and the Captain, sir, it takes a special kind of imbecile to start listing ship names in a clear frequency omnidirectional broadcast with hostiles in the area.”
“Yeah, the next thing you know, they’ll be asking us to confirm our position,” Lucas Moody added. He was leaning against the edge of the main bridge entrance portal behind the tactical console and munching on a piece of celery.
“Exactly,” Annora said. “Whoever that is, they aren’t Skywatch.”
“Alright, let’s come at this from the other directio
n. Kilo X-Ray One is between us and the signal. They must be getting it too. But they’ve been sitting out there for three hours. They’re not moving. No emissions. No energy readings. Nothing. What’s their purpose here? Drawing a line and daring us to cross it? Why wouldn’t they respond to the signal?”
“Maybe the signal is bait?” Zony speculated.
“Could be, but that ship is no match for Argent,” Lucas said. “Why draw a line in the sand if the guy’s just going to push you down and step on you?”
“Maybe that’s why they’re trying to stay out of reach,” Hunter mused, looking back up at the tactical display. “I wish I could get a line on their weaponry and loadout. If that’s a missile cruiser, a couple squadrons of jacks could carve it up like a pheasant. But if they’re loaded up with energy weapons...”
“How sharp his teeth are only matters if he bites us,” Commander Doverly said.
“Want me to take a flight of Paladins out there and kick the door in, Skipper?” Moody asked.
“I’ve got a tougher job for you and the boys, Major,” Hunter replied. “When the time comes I want you to set a squadron down on Barker’s Asteroid and find out who’s playing with the radio. Bridge to Sensor Section.”
The overhead intraship commlink switched over and a pleasant female voice answered. “Sensor Section, Ensign Cavanaugh.”
“Do we have anything on the Dunkerque we can get through passives? Radiation trail, reactor signature, last known course, anything?”
“Negative, Captain. Unless we go active, we can’t turn the clock back that far. Nemesis Eight could probably do it, but covering the sector yard by yard is going to take a while.”
“How much of a ‘while?’”
“At least a couple of days, Captain. Gitairn is a big box of rocks, and every asteroid out there is a special signal-reflecting, interference-producing snowflake.”
Hunter ran his fingers through his light-colored hair. “Well, I’ll say this much. Whoever decided to drive me up a wall today sure planned ahead. Bridge out.”
The bridge crew quietly continued monitoring their instruments and waiting for orders. Hunter paced.