Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3), page 24
Hannah grinned. “You could see me, most of the time. One or two of you, anyway. I would move in front of a large rock, so I was between it and you. All you saw was the rock; your computers are programmed to not scan known targets except every couple of minutes. I just looked like new geography that had rotated into view. The missiles are too small for you to detect. Your lidar picks them up, for sure, but since they weren’t under thrust at the time, it decides they are just small debris and ignores them. After about ten minutes or so, when I was occulted, I’d blip the engines and sail off on a vector still further away. Because I was so close to a rock, and the drive was on such a short period of time, your computers couldn’t see me.”
“We need to do something about this,” Donna mused. “There must be all kinds of holes in the programming like that.”
Hannah shrugged. “The problem is, the fighter computers aren’t too smart. Put them in an asteroid field and most of the CPU cycles are dedicated to watching out for oncoming traffic, combat ops or no combat ops.”
“We still have to do something!” What, of course, was definitely vexing.
* * *
A few days later they made their last stop before Adobe. A half dozen corvettes met them at an uninhabited system a few light years from Adobe’s star. Fighters were launched, but the greeters all had the right codes.
Hannah was called to the bridge some days later, just before they were to arrive at Adobe, itself. Admiral Kinney waved her to her conference room. “Of all the people with the Fleet, Lieutenant Sawyer, your perceptions are the most accurate I’ve found. What do you think is about to happen?”
Hannah glanced at the screens, still black. “As of a two weeks ago, we still held Adobe. Probably we still do. I was sort of hoping to meet Captain Drake, if I could.”
“You will, Lieutenant, I promise you. Anything else?”
Hannah looked at the admiral and shook her head.
“I know you, of all people, were upset at Caravalos, at the delay there. Why do you suppose that happened?”
Hannah considered that carefully. “I don’t know, Admiral.”
“Because a problem had developed that I had to address. You have no idea what the problem was? Is?”
“No, Admiral.”
Admiral Kinney grinned and turned to Ernie Sanchez, hovering not far away. “As soon as we are down in the Adobe system, Captain, I want every fighter up. The CAP doesn’t change, but I want every fighter flying search patterns. Tell the pilots they have two hours to report what they find.”
Ernie looked at his admiral. “Report what, Admiral Kinney?”
“Anything, Captain. Anything at all.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral!”
Admiral Kinney turned to Hannah. “I want you to fly with your squadron, as you should. When you understand, tell your squadron commander. For this, she has operational control of all of Rome’s fighter squadrons.”
Hannah spent her time as she waited her turn to launch contemplating the Adobe system. She wasn’t sure exactly when she realized what was going to happen, but it was before she launched.
“Lieutenant Merriweather, Ops.”
“Ops, go!”
“Do not launch with weapons free. Identify any unknown vessels before engaging.”
“What are you saying, Hannah?” Donna asked.
“Launch with weapons locked, slaved to your command. Don’t be hasty.”
“As if! What’s going on, Hannah?”
“I don’t know for sure, Donna. But do this!”
The orders were passed, with a minimum of fuss and no grumbling at all.
The ready squadrons swamped the Adobe system, identifying a half dozen ships that were running in stealth mode. At the end of the two hours, though, they reported that the sky appeared to be clear of hostiles.
Someone muttered something a few minutes later, “Whazzat?”
“Whazzat” was a lot of ships coming off fan. Hannah was concerned for a few seconds, then she realized that she was seeing what she had expected, although she hadn’t expected quite as many ships as she was seeing. Still...
“Donna, order a stand down,” she told her boss.
“A stand down! Christ! Look at this! More targets than I ever dreamed!”
“And if you check, they all have friendly IFF. Lieutenant Merriweather, the cavalry has arrived. Us, too.”
More and more ships were transiting into Adobe. Hundreds of them.
Ernie Sanchez’s voice came over the circuit. “Rome fighters, Rome fighters! Alert Rome at once if any hostile threat is detected! You’re going to be aloft for a while! If someone takes a whiz without authorization, I want to know!”
Hannah was bemused. Hundreds of freighters had arrived, and were disgorging shuttles and cargo carriers. A lot of them.
Four hours after the fighters had launched from Rome, the first freighter returned to High Fan. The last was gone at the six-hour tick.
“Now that was an eyeful!” Admiral Kinney said on the all-fighter circuit. “Now, forget it! Squadrons, begin your scheduled recoveries to Rome!”
Second Squadron was the last to return and then except the combat patrols in the Adobe system, Rome left, headed out into the cold dark.
There was a meeting of all the fighter pilots aboard, conducted by Admiral Kinney.
“Obviously, we’ve significantly reinforced the Adobe system. How much and with what are now one of the highest secrets of the Federation.
“Some of you were upset about how much time we took at Caravallos. That was necessary to coordinate with vessels in our company. Now we are going to be staying near Adobe for at least two months, while construction of additional defenses in the system is underway.
“Our reason for this is that, for now, attacks against the Federation have ceased. New Cairo was the last system attacked, and, as grievous as our losses have been, evidently our enemies have felt their losses as well.
“We have no idea how the battle goes against them. We don’t have enough data on their ship losses, that we can be sure about. We have data on our lost colonies, and how much their loss has hurt humanity, as well as their aggregate inputs to the economy and in human terms.
“We think they’ve lost about three hundred ships -- in exchange for more than half of the Federation. It is unrealistic in the extreme to think they’ve been badly crippled, when they’ve taken relatively minor losses.
“Our purpose is to put them on notice that that phase of the war is over and done with, and from now on, we’ll be bringing the war to their doorsteps. That said, we don’t want to do a pratfall where we are destroyed without result. Thus, we will take great care.
“First, we are certain that they have observers in human-occupied systems. We don’t know where these observers are or how they communicate their intelligence. But it’s been clear from many battles that they have some degree of real-time intelligence when they attack a system. We think they get that intelligence once they drop from fan, but it’s really just a guess.
“We’ve analyzed where enemy ships have appeared in our systems and there is no joy there. The locations seem to be determined by their attack plans; it would be nice if they came off fan near their outposts, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
“We flooded the Adobe system with fighters and left Rome dangling as bait, hoping to draw a response. Obviously, we did not. Then we dropped in the reinforcements, also hoping to draw a detectable response. We failed in that, as well. We will continue to scan, but I’m not optimistic we’ll find them.
“After Adobe is as secure as we can make it, Rome will depart on its basic survey mission. Our enemies, ladies and gentlemen, are clever and ruthless. Moreover, they’re winning going away. We have to dramatically change the calculus, or they are going to start slamming hammer blows into the Federation, directed at larger systems. Four, five or six hundred ship attacks instead of a half dozen or less.
“Once we’ve located some of their systems, they are going to have to redeploy, the feeling is, considerable numbers of ships to local defense. It is imperative that we succeed.
“I know it is human nature to speculate about what’s going on. We still don’t have any idea as to the nature of our enemy. We consider the odds that one of you is one of them to be vanishingly small, but you have to know we can’t leave it at that. You have to know that if you say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, it’s possible to compromise the security of the entire Federation. That can’t be allowed to happen.
“I have, with the utmost reluctance, allowed the placement of officers in your midst to report such conversations to competent authority. Hopefully the first time someone is shot, you will realize our deadly seriousness. It would be ideal, of course, if you keep your mouths shut and your speculations to yourselves, except in the appropriate forums.
“You are dismissed.”
Hannah rose with everyone else, only to have Donna tug on her sleeve. “Admiral Kinney and Captain Sanchez want to talk to us.”
She nodded and they made their way to the admiral’s conference room. Hannah noted with amusement, that the star field was running.
Admiral Kinney was there, so were Ernie Sanchez, Light Huygeens, Commander Ferris and a woman that Hannah recognized from her pictures, Colinda Drake.
“I want you all to meet Colinda Drake,” Admiral Kinney said, then introduced the various officers to her.
When Colinda Drake shook Hannah’s hand, the older woman grinned. “I read the report you did on reexamining the survey records. Master’s Game promptly did the same thing. Imagine our surprise to find that the planet we were in the process of preparing for colonization had been hammered in the past.
“And do you know the scary part?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, Captain.”
“It must have been upwards of a million years ago. The planet was hit about as bad as it was this last time.”
Hannah frowned. “A million years? Either the aliens are in the worst cultural stasis imaginable, or it was someone else. And they can’t be in a cultural stasis, because even then, they’d most likely have been building ships.”
“You’d think,” Captain Drake said. She looked around the room. “All of this is most secret, and, while what Admiral Kinney said is true, we have to trust our senior tacticians or we’re doomed. So, this is one of those forums where you can feel free to speak.
“Master’s Game’s AI is the most advanced in the Federation,” Colinda Drake stated baldly. “I pulled out all the stops and have violated a dozen rules for AIs. It’s given us a list of possibilities.
“One of those possibilities is that they did this before, met someone like I hope we are, who kicked the stuffing out of them and they’re just now making a comeback, still as psychotic as ever. Another possibility is that they did go into stasis for a million years, using some technology we don’t understand. Why, for what purpose? Who knows?
“However by far the largest possibility is that the social defect that our enemies have is relatively common, and what we face is another species that has come along with the same attitude.”
Hannah looked at Admiral Kinney. “Admiral, I had an idea while you were talking earlier, about how they could be doing the coordination between an outpost and their fleet.
“You said it yourself, Admiral. They drop in their attack formation and go from there. That means their plan is formed well in advance. The outpost knows where and when to squirt a burst transmission. The transmission arrives at the same time as the ships, they get the data and off they go. For routine stuff, odds are the ship is a light week or so out, too far to pick up on our detectors. With a squirt radio transmission, you’d have to be in the beam path at the time of transmission. Odds of a successful intercept happening in the outer system are beyond remote.”
The admiral contemplated Hannah for a moment, then sighed. “If that’s the case, sometime during the war we might detect an outpost. One. Maybe. And it would be an accident.”
Admiral Kinney turned to Captain Drake. “Your AI said something about that, as well, did you not?”
“It pointed out that our enemies use multiples of 3.2 gravities to accelerate. That is in the range of a gas giant surface gravity. Of all the places we go, into the gravity well of gas giants isn’t one of the places we go very often.”
“We surely fly the outskirts,” Leyten Huygeens said. “Every system we’re in, we mine the innermost gas giant for hydrogen and methane.”
“While we have a permanent presence at Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system,” Admiral Kinney mused, “we have only a few research satellites at Uranus and Neptune. In most systems, except for the innermost gas giant, we pretty much don’t bother.”
“We’ve never found life on a gas giant,” Colinda Drake said. “But certainly the proper conditions exist at some levels of most gas giant atmospheres. Perhaps we should have looked harder.”
Admiral Kinney turned to Ernie Sanchez. “I want a couple of people tasked at once to do a study on possible life in gas giant atmospheres. Get the preliminary results to me by dinner tomorrow. Captain Drake can return to Earth with it.”
“You know I’d rather be out here,” Colinda Drake said evenly.
Admiral Kinney smiled. “Everyone would. But not you, Captain. I read your reports and those of your AI. You need to return directly home and report.”
Chapter 12
Hannah watched her instruments intently, and then it was time. Right on the tick her fighter came off High Fan. The entire Second Squadron was here today, not just two elements. This was the system that Master’s Game had planned on colonizing.
Hannah had done the mission planning and thus it was the elements she led that popped back into normal space two light seconds from the planet that had been attacked in passing by their enemies.
Another group under Donna were at the inner-most gas giant, and the new Exec had gone to investigate the asteroid habitat Master’s Game had been working on.
She verified her location, verified that the other five fighters supposed to be close by were in fact where they were supposed to be. She spoke into her microphone, “The latch frame beacon is gone, but the passive scan satellites are still working. Downloading the feed now.”
Hannah scanned the passive logs, starting with the most recent entries. There was the flurry of twenty-one ship footprints in the last few minutes, throughout the system, then nothing before that for weeks and weeks, until six weeks after Master’s Game left the system. Then there was a single ship that dropped from fans, then went right back, six minutes later. It appeared twice more, before departing and not returning.
“Tentatively,” Hannah announced, “the sky appears to be clear. Remember that appearances can be deceiving and are subject to change without notice. Stay alert.”
The clock ticked inexorably forward and there was nothing to do but wait it out. Hannah spent a few seconds looking at the planet.
This was as close as she’d gotten to a planet that had been destroyed and this one had gotten off comparatively lightly. Half a year later the surface was still obscured, and the atmosphere was significantly depleted in oxygen.
There was no chatter on the radio. One of the intelligence items of interest was that the aliens actually used radio waves for communication. Humans still called what they used to talk in space “radios” for the simple reason that they’d always called them that, and even if they used coherent light instead of the radio-frequency spectrum, the name remained the same. There was some speculation that their enemies didn’t have lasers, but that seemed improbable to Hannah. While you could build a starship without lasers, the job would be ten thousand times more difficult.
She spoke again, “Coming up on the sixty minute tick. I’m going to the section briefing. The rest of you hang loose for a few minutes.”
She told the computer to make the jump already plotted. In theory, this was also an attractive target for their enemies, a clustering of fighters from the different groups around the system. The idea was to troll for a response. Unless there was a response there would be no way to tell for sure if the system was picketed. Of course, the picket’s report might not be due to be picked up for weeks or months yet.
The four fighters were Hannah’s, Donna’s, Zodiac’s and Jeff Flake’s, the new executive officer. An unfair term, Hannah realized as Jeff had actually held the job now longer than Hanlon had, but he was still “the new guy.”
“There was a working passive scanner at the innermost gas giant,” Donna said. “I read the record. I think the sky is clear and I didn’t see anything like the last ship to visit leaving any pickets behind.”
“They could have dropped something passive,” Hannah reminded her boss.
“Yeah. Jeff?”
“The installation that Captain Drake was working on has been left untouched. The remote latch frame site has been nuked, though.”
“I’ve got something interesting,” Zodiac told them. “As you know, I got with the navigator and Captain Drake before we left Adobe to see if we could plot the course that the third unknown vessel took. Then I put us close to that estimated location on the way in. Sure enough, we found something going like a bat out of hell, their ram scoop. The thing was operating, too. I wish I could have put a beacon on it or something -- but there’s just no way at all to catch it.”
“Why did you want to put a beacon on it, Zodiac?” Donna asked.
“You gotta figure the original ship has the same vector as the scoop. Eight gets you ten they dropped out here someplace and have been slowing down, waiting for the scoop to catch up. I’ve got the numbers; maybe the computers on Rome can plot the intercept.”
Hannah sighed. “If they thought we were their enemy, they’d jump. We might kill them, kill their entire species, just by trying to say, ‘Hello!’ There’s no safe way, not really, to make contact with them at this point.”
“Yeah, if you’re the last marbles in the bag, you do what you have to do,” Donna opined. “On the other hand, we don’t get paid the big bucks to make decisions like that. Dump the data to our computers, Zodiac, and we’ll let Admiral Kinney make the final decision.”
