by Peter Grant
“Not me. I’m going to use my money to buy a part share in an asteroid prospector’s boat. You know what those guys earn, if they strike it lucky?”
“Sure, but what if they don’t?”
The other shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a crackling voice, coming over the intercom. “I’m ready with the sled.”
The team leader glanced at the time display. “All right. Switchover time is twenty-one-thirty precisely. Synchronize the sled’s internal clock with the ship’s, and your own timepieces as well. On my mark, it will be twenty-one-hundred precisely. Stand by… stand by… three, two, one, mark!”
“Synchronized. I’m on my way. Don’t leave without me!”
“No such luck. You may not be good company, but you’re better than no company at all.”
“Gee, thanks! I’ll remember those kind words when I cook breakfast for you!”
Chuckling, the two OpCen crew started another check of the old ship’s systems. As they did so, one of the Engineering techs slid out into the vacuum of space aboard a maintenance sled. He used its tiny thrusters to position it one hundred meters beneath the center of the keel, making sure it was stationary relative to the ship above it. That would ensure it remained in the same parking orbit for the foreseeable future.
As the deadline approached, the techs abandoned even the pretense of work. One tuned the ship’s radios to the frequencies used by OrbCon and SysCon. If those stations detected anything, the first warning of it would be a broadcast ordering local patrols to investigate the Reserve Fleet ships. If that happened, they’d have to get out while the getting was good, and trust to luck that they could evade pursuit.
The team leader poised his finger over the cut-off button for the transponder, just in case the automated handover went wrong, while his teammate counted down, “Five… four… three… two… one… cutoff!” As he spoke the last word, the green light on the transponder transmitter panel blinked out. Both men glanced at the emissions display. The transponder indicator there showed green, proving that the correct signal was still being transmitted on the assigned frequency. However, it was now coming from the maintenance sled, one hundred meters below the ship.
They waited long enough for the light speed delay to pass, to reveal anything stirring at the main planet, but nothing was visible in the Plot display. “No signals from SysCon or Orbcon?” the leader breathed quietly, tensely.
“Not a thing. I reckon they didn’t notice the switchover.”
“They shouldn’t have – it was a pretty seamless transition – but you never know… Are all the other transponders also in the green?”
“Yeah.” All the Reserve Fleet ships were still showing their transponders in the normal way. A casual observer would never suspect that the patrol craft and the depot ship were no longer emitting any signal at all.
“All right. We move at twenty-three, at five-minute intervals. If you need to use the heads, do it now. You won’t have time later.”
Behind them, in the docking bay at the stern of the ship, the engineering tech eased himself through the airlock. He racked the propulsion unit he’d used to get back to the ship, took off and stowed his spacesuit, then returned to his station in the drive compartment, whistling cheerfully.
As twenty-three approached, the tension on board ratcheted up once more. One of the engineer techs swung the four reaction thrusters out of their housings and tested their range of motion once more, just in case. The other brought the gravitic drive to standby mode, and made sure the reactor was ready to provide power to it. The two in the OpCen prepared the ship’s systems for departure. They kept all active emitters in standby mode, so that their transmissions would not alert local forces that something was wrong. They would rely on passive sensors alone.
“The freighter’s right where she’s supposed to be,” the leader observed. “With luck, we’ll rendezvous with her by midnight.”
“Just as long as she doesn’t hyper-jump out of here without us. I wouldn’t like to have to answer unfriendly questions.”
“You and me both!”
On the stroke of twenty-three, NWS Skelwick activated her gravitic drive at its minimum power setting. She was far outside effective radar range from New Westray, and her emissions signature at low power would not be detected by Syscon’s sensors. A more modern installation would have picked it up, but the local authorities had seen no reason to waste money on that sort of upgrade. After all, nothing had ever happened to justify the expense. At five-minute intervals, the other seven patrol craft followed her out of their parking orbits, with the depot ship bringing up the rear. Silently, stealthily, they slipped away toward the oncoming freighter.
Fifteen transponder icons still identified the ships of the Reserve Fleet, if anyone had bothered to count them at that moment. However, only six of them now represented ships. Nine were maintenance sleds, carefully prepared by Jock Murray. The capacitors powering their transponders would last for at least a week, not long enough for them to drift far enough out of position that observers might realize something was wrong. The Reserve Fleet icon blazed undisturbed in SysCon’s plot display.
On Flyco’s bridge, Henry Martin paced to and fro. He’d never been part of a space-based operation before; his previous criminal experience, extensive though it was, had been on planets. It galled him to be cut off from all his usual sources of information. He was utterly dependent on what the crew chose to tell him. He was paying them enough to ensure their cooperation, but even so, he hated the feeling of not being in personal control of the situation.
He whirled on his heel as the communications operator announced suddenly, “Tight-beam detected! Synchronizing.” He knew that outside the hull of the giant freighter, a turret would be turning to align a laser beam with the one from the approaching ship. A few seconds passed, then he heard a familiar voice crackle over the speakers.
“One to Mother. We’re ten minutes out. The others are following us. Are you ready? Over.”
At the command desk, the skipper picked up his microphone. “Mother to One, we’re opening our hold doors now. Assume formation as arranged, and we’ll reel you in. Over.”
“One to Mother, gotcha. Out.”
Henry muttered to the skipper, “Are you sure they can’t read that on the planet?”
“Not a chance. It’s a tight-beam laser. You’ve got to be right in the path of transmission between stations if you’re to pick it up. The planet’s way off behind us, and the only patrol they have in the system is on the far side of the star.” He sniffed disapprovingly. “It’s about the most careless, half-baked patrol system I’ve ever seen. You could run a fleet through this system and they probably wouldn’t notice!”
“Don’t complain. It’s helping us now.”
“You got that right!”
One by one, the other ships reported in. Henry knew that they’d be turning slowly, delicately, to come onto the same course as the big freighter; then they’d be closing in on their assigned holds, where the cradles he’d ordered were carefully spaced out and waiting for them.
It took a full eight hours to get the patrol craft aboard. As each drew level with its hold, at a distance of over a kilometer from the freighter, it matched velocities, then used its reaction thrusters to drift very carefully toward the larger ship. The nine-thousand-ton patrol craft looked like minnows compared to the three-million-ton whale-like freighter.
When each patrol vessel got to within a couple of hundred meters of the freighter, tractor and pressor beams licked out from the open holds, measuring, grasping, taking control of the docking maneuver. Moving so slowly it seemed snail-like, each of the patrol craft was drawn into the yawning, cavernous hold awaiting it, and positioned precisely over the cradles. More tractor and pressor beams pulled the ships down into them, locking them in place against the stress of maneuvering. All the while, the bigger vessel ambled toward the system boundary.
By the time the last patrol craft was locked down, Henry was soaked in perspiration, as if he’d run a marathon. He felt mentally and physically exhausted from the strain. The captain, on the other hand, looked fresh as a daisy.
“I told you it would be fine,” he pointed out genially. “This isn’t the first time we’ve loaded smaller vessels while under way. It’s tricky, but you get used to it.”
“That’s all very well for you to say, but this is all new to me,” Henry retorted. “I’ve got to hand it to you, though, Frank. You made it look easy.”
The speaker crackled again. “Nine to Mother. Looks like it all went well. I’ll take off now, and see you at Constanta. Over.”
The skipper picked up his microphone. “Mother to Nine. Yes, you can head out. Be careful not to let them spot you. Over.”
“Nine to Mother. Teach your grandmother!” The bridge crew chuckled to hear the retort. “We’ll be careful, boss. You do the same. You haven’t paid us yet! Nine out.”
As he replaced the microphone, Frank said, “Speaking of payment…”
“Of course.” Henry reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “Here’s the second payment; five million francs, as agreed.”
The skipper took out the interplanetary bearer bank draft and inspected it closely, then nodded. “Looks good to me. All right, we’ll close the hold doors and get ready to hyper-jump out of here. Don’t forget, this is a slow ship compared to smaller freighters, so it’ll take us about fifteen days to reach Constanta. The depot ship will take much longer, of course. She’ll be in local space for ten to fifteen days, getting far enough away from the planet for her hyper-jump signature to be lost in the background radiation of space. We don’t want New Westray to notice her departure, and wonder why only one ship left orbit, but two hyper-jumped out of the system. We’ll be long gone by the time she arrives at Constanta.”
“That’s OK. She’s got to rendezvous with another ship on the way there, anyway. The shipyard will start work on the first two patrol craft while we’re waiting for her. They’re going to have to work like demons to get them ready as fast as possible. I’ll give you the third payment once the ships are offloaded at Constanta, then you can go your way.”
“Thank you. This job’s been just like you promised. A slow trip here, a slow trip to Constanta, but nothing much to worry about in the way of cops or security. Fifteen million francs for two months’ easy work. I wish we had more jobs like that!”
“Just don’t talk about it. By the way, I’ll be grateful if you can keep enough spacers handy to form two passage crews for freighters. We may need them real soon, and without much notice.”
Frank grinned broadly. “For clients who pay as well as you, it’ll be a pleasure! You know how to reach me.”
Two weeks later, a meeting of the entire Cabinet of New Westray convened to hear a report from the Minister of Defense. He didn’t mince his words, castigating the System Patrol Service from its leadership down to the lowliest spacer in its ranks – but carefully failed to mention that he and his predecessors had turned a blind eye to its relative inactivity for the past two decades or more. It had been an expedient way to save money from the funds authorized in the Defense budget… money that had been diverted into ministerial pockets.
“So, what do you plan to do?” the Prime Minister demanded.
“I’d like to fire every senior officer in the Patrol Service, but you know we can’t get away with that. They’re all First Families, just as we are, even if they’re the dregs among us – people we shunt off into the Patrol to keep them out of business or politics, where the real money is. If we punish them, we’ll damage our own image among the populace.”
“It’s going to get damaged anyway,” the Foreign Minister pointed out sourly. “When this gets out, we’ll be the laughing-stock of the galaxy! We’ll be forever painted as the planet that let someone sneak off with more than half its Reserve Fleet. What’s more, we didn’t even notice it for over a week, until the fake transponders the thieves left behind ran out of power! It doesn’t bear thinking about!”
“But… but… what can we do, then?” the Minister of Finance asked querulously. “Can we cover up the loss?”
“We can say that the missing ships were destroyed as targets,” the Minister of Defense offered. “That’s a common enough use for them, after all. The System Patrol Service can announce that officially. It’s not like anyone here’s going to argue with them.”
“But that means we can’t circulate the ships’ descriptions to other planets, and ask them to be on the lookout for them, and report them to us if they turn up,” the Foreign Minister objected.
“No, we can’t – but as you said yourself, we’ll be a laughing-stock if this gets out.”
“What if the thieves, whoever they are, tell the story?”
“Why should they?” the Prime Minister asked. “They’re probably planning to sell the ships on the open market for whatever they’ll fetch. I doubt whether any planetary government worthy of the name will buy them. After all, they’re so worn-out, it’ll cost too much to refurbish them. They’ll probably end up at some newly-settled planet in a galactic backwater, one that’s looking to spend as little as possible on its System Patrol Service. The thieves won’t want to identify them as stolen property, otherwise they’ll have a lot more trouble selling them.”
“You have a point,” the Foreign Minister admitted. “I just wish I could understand why they stole ships as badly worn-out as ours were. Surely, they could have done better somewhere else?”
“I’ve wondered the same thing,” the Defense Minister acknowledged. “I can only presume they wanted warships – any warships – as quickly as possible, and we were the nearest available target. We’ll probably never know for sure.”
“What about that freighter?” the Minister of Education asked. “Can we trace her?”
“I doubt it. We’ve learned that the only ship named Flyco listed in the United Planets Merchant Vessel Registry is a small tramp freighter in the Norcross system. The ship that called here was several times larger, with a completely different gravitic drive signature. By now she’ll have changed her name again, altered her drive signature – she can do that with a military-grade frequency modulator – and disappeared back into the commercial shipping world. There’s no point trying to trace her, even if we could afford to sponsor a search throughout the galaxy.”
“We can’t,” the Prime Minister said tersely. “Let’s cut our losses. It’s not like we’ve lost much, anyway. Those ships were the next best thing to scrap metal. Let’s simply say we disposed of them as targets, and leave it at that. We’ll have the Patrol Service publish the announcement where it’s least likely to be noticed, and tell our tame editors in the news media to downplay the story. All those in favor?”
Everyone around the table raised his or her hand.
“Very well. Let’s put this behind us, and get on with more important things.”
CONSTANTA
Cochrane went aboard the depot ship as soon as she pulled into her parking orbit near the shipyard. Sue McBride was waiting in the docking bay to greet him. He shook her hand warmly.
“I’m glad you were able to rendezvous with her as planned. You’ve had two weeks to look over the missile pods. What’s the verdict?”
“Let’s go to my cabin, sir. We can talk in private there.”
“That sounds ominous,” he said, lowering his voice.
“You don’t know the half of it!”
When they’d closed the door, she turned to him. “It’s bad, sir. I can hardly believe any service would let its missiles deteriorate like this, even if they were old units in reserve.”
“All right, give me the details.”
She began counting off on her fingers as she spoke. “Each patrol craft can carry one missile pod, holding fifteen main battery and fifteen defensive missiles. There are twenty-five pods aboard this ship, for a total of three hundr
ed seventy-five each of offensive and defensive missiles. My techs and I have been running tests on them ever since we came aboard. At least half of them are unserviceable. I’m not sure how many of them can be salvaged. Even those that passed our circuit tests may not stand up to more detailed inspection when we tear them down. Drive units, micro-reactors, sensor and homing systems… they’re all in poor shape.
“It’s not just the missiles you have to worry about. Most of the nuclear warheads are bomb-pumped lasers. I reckon four out of five of them are useless. The laser rod assemblies weren’t properly stored. They just left the warheads on the missiles, rather than take them out, disassemble them, and store them under controlled conditions. If you can find as many as fifty working laser warheads on this ship, I’ll be surprised – and even those I wouldn’t trust under combat conditions.”
Cochrane sighed. “And the other warheads?”
“You’ve got eighty-four electromagnetic pulse warheads. They’re designed to take out a target’s electrical and electronic systems, shutting her down so she can’t even move under her own power. Most of them seem in reasonably good shape, or they will be once we’ve stripped them down and checked their chipsets. They’ll need new capacitors – most of the old ones won’t hold a charge any longer – but fortunately, there’s a standard commercial unit that will fit into the cavity designed for them. I think we can return most of them to service. You’ve also got a couple of dozen high explosive warheads, although I don’t know why you’d use them in space. Perhaps they were meant to bombard an asteroid, or damage a ship without destroying it.
“As for the defensive missiles, they’re standard thermonuclear blast units, intended to burn out the sensors of incoming missiles. Their warheads aren’t in great shape, either, but they’re a much simpler design than a bomb-pumped laser. I’d say we can restore up to a quarter of them, with luck. Amazingly enough, this ship’s robotic missile and warhead maintenance systems are in good shape – probably because they were never used much! I think New Westray simply didn’t bother with routine maintenance. At any rate, we’ll be able to work on all the missiles and warheads, which is a blessing. We wouldn’t have been able to without that gear.”
