“Kasparov, do you know how to tell whether a Reactionless Drive ship is about to change course? I mean, before you can see an aspect change.”
“No sir. I didn’t think anyone had ever followed one before.”
“Let’s just say it’s been done once or twice.”
Max got up and walked over to Kasparov’s station. “Reactionless drive propels the ship by polarizing and amplifying gravity. Pull up a gravimetric flux profile. No, larger scale. Still larger. There. That’s it. Now, see this slight notch in the outer isograv right in front of his bow? That notch is always aligned with the direction of thrust from their drive system. It’s sort of like being able to see the rudder of an ocean vessel you are trying to follow through the water—the rudder turns before the ship changes direction. When this notch shifts, the ship is going to turn in the direction the notch moved. Put a marker dot in the notch and have the computer tie the dot to the notch. Now go to a rear view so that the dot is in the center and project degree markings around it on the screen. Now get the computer to project a bright green circle around that red dot—just one pixel more in diameter than the dot. There. You got it. Now, any motion of that dot will be clearly visible and you can see exactly what the direction of the turn is going to be. When you see that dot shift, you sing out the direction in degrees as fast as you can. You have to be fast. Only about a second, maybe two, elapses between the shift in their drive field and the ship starting to turn.
“Now, Chief LeBlanc,” Max said, walking over to Maneuvering, “Put an aspect outline of the Vaaach ship on your display.” The Chief complied. “Good. When Kasparov tells you which way the ship is going to turn, you have to be ready to follow it. Go ahead and start your turn as soon as he sings out. Do not, repeat do NOT wait for an order from me—and then adjust your rate of turn based on your observation of the aspect change on the target. Don’t watch where the target goes. Watch for the ship’s change in orientation and let that tell you how hard he is turning. We have to stay in his wake or he’ll spot us and the game is over.”
“Aye, sir. Understood.”
Max went back to his own station, sat down, and pulled up a few status readouts. Everything looked good. He heard LeBlanc order the man on drives to reduce thrust just as the range reached 16,000 kilometers. Cumberland was on the Vaaach’s tail, right in his wake. Max hit the comm. button on his console to let him talk to the Sensor Back Room. “People, this is the Captain. Kasparov has his attention fully occupied right now, so that’s why I’m on this loop. We want to take this opportunity to learn as much about the ship ahead of us as we can. Do anything you can think of to learn more about the contact, except active scanning. Use every instrument, apply every kind of analysis. Tie up as much bandwidth as your hearts desire. Just get the data. Captain out.”
Half an hour went by, crawling like an arthritic snail on a slow day. “Maneuvering, inch us closer. Same closure rate. Bring us to fifteen thousand.” For just over six minutes the Cumberland slowly closed on the Vaaach ship.
“Captain.” It was Nelson at Stealth. “The heat sink is nearing capacity. Should we radiate aft?” One of the hardest things to conceal about a Warship, or any working machine in space, is its heat. Stealth requires that the ship’s heat signature match that of space itself; otherwise, it stands out on infrared detectors like a beacon against the near absolute zero background of interstellar space. One of the functions of the stealth systems is, therefore, to prevent heat from radiating from the ship into space. Doing so requires, not only that the ship’s hull be chilled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero (a process which, paradoxically, generates considerable heat), but also that the heat from the fusion reactor, the heat generated by electronics and machinery, the heat produced by the crew’s bodies and radiated from their skin into the ship’s air, and all the heat removed from the ship’s air by its cooling system all must be stored in a heat sink, essentially a large tank equipped with heat exchangers and filled with an exotic heat-storing granulated metal/liquid polymer slurry, to be radiated into space later. That heat sink was now reaching its capacity, that is, becoming so hot that it would boil or melt or do whatever heat sinks did when they get too hot. If its capacity were exceeded, the sink might fail, causing the ship to radiate large amounts of heat in all directions, making it immediately detectable. The solution, when the location of one’s adversary is known, is to radiate heat away from him so that the body of your ship blocks his view of your thermal radiators, which is why stealth-equipped ships have retractable thermal radiator fins all around the vessel pointing in every conceivable direction, so that they can radiate heat in the direction or directions they choose.
“Affirmative. Radiate aft. Be ready to retract if the Vaaach get behind us.” Nelson keyed in a command that extended four radiator fins from the rear of the ship which would soon be glowing red hot as they shed the ship’s heat into space.
“Radiating aft,” said Nelson. About a minute later, “Heat sink temperature starting to drop.”
“Let me know when the heat sink gets down to 50%. I may want to retract the fins then.”
Nelson acknowledged the order and went back to watching his systems.
“Turn warning, angle three one five degrees,” Kasparov snapped out.
LeBlanc quickly gave orders that got the ship yawing to port and pitching up at about half of its maximum turn rate. After about two seconds of squinting hard at his screen, Leblanc told the pitch and yaw man, “hard over, all the way to the stops, she’s turning sharp.” A few seconds later, “ease off fifteen degrees in yaw and ten degrees in pitch.” Forty three seconds later, “all controls amidships.” Apparently, the other ship was finished turning. Now, came slight adjustments to match the Destroyer’s course exactly to that of the Vaaach ship to stay in her wake on the new course. LeBlanc squinted some more. “Two degrees to starboard. Prepare to come amidships. Straighten her out . . . now. Pitch one degree down for about five seconds, there you go . . . amidships . . . now.” He practically put his nose onto the display, and then nodded. “Skipper, turn complete, we’re right in the groove and I can guarantee,” he pronounced it “gare on TEE,” “that we didn’t stick so much as a toe out of her wake.”
“Ça c’est bon, Chief.”
“C’est pas rien, mon Capitain.
“Captain,” Garcia spoke up.
“Yes, XO?”
“Analysis of the turn, sir. The Vaaach vessel yawed to port a hundred and twelve degrees and pitched up ninety-three. Duration of the maneuver was seventy three seconds. Pretty sharp turn for a vehicle travelling at forty-two percent of lightspeed. She must have twenty times our mass, maybe fifty, but she almost out-turned us.”
“I know. Pretty damn impressive. And,” he said to the CIC in general, “we should not assume she can’t turn any harder than that. We do not know the capabilities of this race, and the fastest way to get into trouble is to assume that an advanced alien civilization works under the same limitations we do.” Max then resumed speaking confidentially to Garcia. “If we could get them into the war with us against the Krag, now, that would turn the tide in a hurry.”
“Sure,” just as confidentially. “And if my uncle were made out of yellow corn, he’d be a taco.” A few seconds pause. “I think he knows we’re on his tail, though. Expect another turn soon.”
“That makes sense. Give the order.”
“People,” said the XO more loudly, “be sharp. She might try another turn soon. Her skipper probably feels us as an itch between his shoulder blades. If Vaaach have shoulder blades.”
“Sensors, are we getting anything good out of this?” Max asked.
“Affirmative, sir.” Kasparov was actually starting to sound enthusiastic instead of terrified. “They’ve been blasting everything in sight with every kind of active scan we know of and three or four no one has ever seen until now. We’re not in the beams ourselves, or we would have been detected, but we are picking up reflections from bodies in t
he system and from the interplanetary medium, so we’re getting recordings of frequencies, phase alignments, pulse length, waveform polarization, basically their whole sensor profile. Plus, they have sent two messages. Not a hope in hell of decrypting them, but we got a lot of dope on their transmitter characteristics, what frequencies they use, their data bandwidth, things like that. We also have nearly enough data points for our computer algorithms to spit out a good estimate of their ship’s mass, density, location of its center of gravity, and maybe even a few good guesses about its hull composition. We have nearly doubled what we know about them, sir.”
“Well, at least Intel is getting something beneficial in exchange for my additional gray hairs.” Max considered for a moment. “Maneuvering, resume closure maneuver, same rate. Bring our range to one three triple zero.”
“Aye, sir, resuming closure maneuver, same rate, closing to one three triple zero.” Thirteen thousand kilometers. Roughly the diameter of the Earth and, for most purposes, not that close, but for two warships from non-allied and potentially hostile races in a neutral star system, Max was practically crawling into the Vaaach’s back pocket.
More minutes crept by. That’s what being in the Navy in wartime was all about: weeks of unbearable tedium punctuated by hours of unbearable tension punctuated by seconds of unbearable terror. Max had no problem bearing any of it, except that the unbearable tension part tended to wear thin pretty quickly. A few minutes ago, he had ordered finger sandwiches delivered to CIC. Everyone had already been getting good use out of the recently re-installed coffee pot and chiller. Humans dealt better with tension if they could eat and drink a little. Or, at least, Max did and what went for him went for other personnel under his command.
“Course change warning,” announced Kasparov. “Turning one zero seven.”
LeBlanc went with his instinct, betting that this turn would be as sharp as the last. “Yaw hard to starboard, all the way to the stop. Pitch down ten degrees. Drives, back off ten percent.” He watched his display for a few seconds. “Pitch, push her to the stop. He’s out turning us. We’ve got to slow to stay in his wake. Drives, null the main sublight. Engage breaking drive and bring it to fifty percent.” The ship’s main sublight drive ceased to push the ship, but with virtually no friction in the vacuum of space, the ship would not slow appreciably unless a counteracting force were applied, so the breaking drive, forward-aimed thrusters mounted on four projections that ringed the hull, fired at half power.
The Chief watched both ships’ trajectory and velocity with an expert eye. He’d been handling this ship since the day it came out of the yard and he was damn good at it. And, he had the help of a brilliant fly by wire computer that was, at this moment, adjusting the relative thrust of the breaking drive thrusters so that the ship would continue to answer the turn being commanded by the maneuvering controls even as the ship slowed. “Kill the braking drive. Engage main sublight at twenty-eight percent.” After a few seconds, “Drives, make it thirty percent. Pitch and yaw, steering amidships on my mark . . . NOW. Yaw, two degrees to port . . . and amidships . . . now. Captain, we’re through the turn. That one was close. If she turns any tighter, we’re not going to be able to stay with her.”
“Understood, Chief. I don’t want to press our luck. Back us off to thirty thousand kills. Let’s see if we can sneak away from this guy and go on about our business.”
Max pretended not to notice the obvious wave of relief that washed through CIC. He had to admit, though, that as the range to target reading on his own display showed a steadily growing number, he was breathing easier as well.
An hour and fourteen minutes went by and the range to the Vaaach ship was now 28,890 kilometers. Before long, Max was going to try to sneak his ship out of the Vaaach’s wake and slip away unnoticed with his new haul of priceless intelligence. Max was polishing off a sandwich that the Galley had earnestly proclaimed was made from roast beef but which Max strongly suspected came from an animal of a distinctly different heritage when he heard Kasparov gasp.
“Captain,” the Sensor Officer’s voice was far too loud and far too high-pitched for Max’s comfort, “the Vaaach grav curves are doing something I don’t understand. The whole pattern is twisting into something like an ‘S’ shape.”
Max knew what that meant. That “S” stood for “shit.” Very deep shit.
Automatically, Max came to his feet. “Maneuvering, pitch up hard, give me a delta Y of one three zero degrees, Main sublight to Emergency.” He wanted to veer off from the present course and also slightly away from the Vaaach ship in order to get out of its path and open up the range at the same time.
“Target has turned in its own length and is accelerating back down its previous course. They are already at point two five,” said Kasparov.
Sweet Jesus. In its own length? How was that even possible? As if that weren’t bad enough, the other ship had dumped .42 c of forward velocity and had put on .25 in the other direction—that’s a total delta V of 67% of the speed of light in under a minute. God only knows how many Gs that entailed. If the Cumberland tried a velocity change even a tenth that violent, the ship would tear it apart. The biggest piece anyone would find could fit easily into a shot glass. Obviously, the Vaaach were more advanced than anyone suspected. The ships that had so impressed the humans with whom the Vaaach had previously made contact were probably two hundred year old sixth and seventh raters. Today, Max was up against a Ship of the Line.
“Now they’re altering course to intercept. Closure is so rapid I can’t measure it—I’m not sure they didn’t go superluminal for a fraction of a second.” There was a violent lurch. Station harnesses kept anyone from falling out of their seats or being thrown around the CIC but Max was certain that one of his eyeballs was rolling around on the deck somewhere. “We’re being held by a very powerful grappling field, sir.”
“You think? Power rating?”
“Over two million Hawkings, sir.”
“We’d never break that. Maneuvering, null all drives, take maneuvering thrusters and inertial attitude control off line. Let’s not burn out anything trying to fight a two million Hawk grapfield.” Less than a minute later, having been reeled in by the Vaaach, the Cumberland hung stationary in space, like a dragonfly on a bug collector’s pin, with the now brightly-lit and decidedly menacing Vaaach ship a scant sixteen hundred meters off the bow, stabbing it with nearly a dozen brilliant spotlights. In contrast to the familiar cylinder, ellipsoid, or elongated box forms that dominated Human, Krag, Pfelung, and most other species’ design, the Vaaach vessel was a long, narrow, flattened wedge with a sharp bow and angled corners at the stern that bent back toward the central drive unit, like a giant, barbed spear point aimed threateningly at the comparatively tiny Union Destroyer.
“Sir,” it was Tactical. It had to be more bad news. “They’ve locked some sort of antimatter cannon on us. I’m pretty sure that one shot would, well . . . .”
“I get the picture. We’ll just have to convince them to not shoot, now, won’t we?”
“Ready to transmit, visual, aural, or text,” prompted Chin, a bit too eagerly.
“Negative. Not the Vaaach. They’ve got us. It would be . . . impertinent to speak without being spoken to. Here’s the way this plays out.” He tried to make it sound like plot summary for a Trid Vid comedy program. “They’re going to let us hang here for about a minute and a half, so that there will be just enough time for it to sink in how helpless we are and how we are entirely at their mercy, but not enough time for us to detect any weakness they might have and start to formulate a plan to get away. Then they’ll hail us on visual. They don’t care if the standard protocol for inter-species communication is text. They’re carnivores who hunt by sight, so they like to lay eyes on who they are talking to. Or who they might be having for dinner. They like to use Channel 7. The Forest Victor, or Grove Guardian, or Tree Tamer or whatever his title is will engage us in witty blood and guts warrior banter after which they’ll eithe
r let us go with their blessing or blast us to dust with that antimatter cannon.”
Bhattacharyya at Intel snorted almost inaudibly. It was clear that the Captain had asked for that briefing on the Vaaach to educate Bhattacharyya, not Robichaux. “Captain?” he interjected quietly.
“Yes, Bhattacharyya?”
“So, you’ve encountered the Vaaach before?”
“Let’s just say for now that we’ve met and I’m still alive to give evasive answers about the experience,” Max answered, evasively.
Ninety four seconds elapsed on the chrono before Chin said, “Captain, we are being hailed. Visual. Channel Seven.”
“Let’s see it.”
Several screens in CIC cut to an image of a large brownish-gray furry face with a small black nose and white fluffy tufts where the ears would go on an Earth mammal. The Vaaach looked greatly like an overgrown Earth Koala bear, but for the obvious and penetrating intelligence in its yellow-green eyes, its forty-five centimeter wide mouth from which protruded twenty centimeter fangs—six of them—and the ten centimeter double-edged claws with which it was grooming the fur on its forearm. A forearm which Max knew to be twice the diameter of his own neck. Your average Vaaach was just over four and a half meters tall, weighed roughly three quarters of a ton, and could easily take down a fully grown grizzly bear armed with nothing but claws, teeth, and attitude. The grooming gesture gave Max hope. It usually represented mild condescension with a hint of rebuke, as to a wayward but promising cub.
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