by Shane Black
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 kilometers.”
“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 kilometers. 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 Skywatch STC rails are green. Launch all spacecraft.” Doverly switched the launch board over to STC control 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 2000MPH 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 kilometers 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!”
One
“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 b
een talking, and..”
“Just say it, corporal. Second Paladins are a team, commanding officer to gas can.”
The major’s encouragement didn’t seem to do much for the young soldier’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--”
“Corporal, 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, soldier, 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 enlisted man some comfort. The corporal stood at attention again and saluted. Moody returned the salute again and the soldier dismissed himself.
Two
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 direction. 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.
“Alright, we didn’t fly all the way out here to watch the paint dry. I want the Dunkerque found and right now the prime suspect in her disappearance is Kilo X-ray One bearing three-one-nine.” Hunter fell into his command chair and punched the intraship. “Alert Three, this is Charlie Oscar. I want a loud ID pass on target Kilo X-Ray One. Acknowledge.”
“Yes sir,” came the confident reply.
Hunter switched the transmitter. “Nemesis Eight, blanket the sector. I want everything dark.”
A moment later the tactical display went haywire. Ships began appearing and disappearing all over visible space. Zony indicated loss of contact with the Barker Asteroid radio signal. As the tiny EW Corvette began filling the spectrum with noise, the Argent bridge crew watched carefully as the trio of attack vessels designated Alert Three veered towards the unidentified contact.
Three
Yili was engrossed in her work. The Argent engineering section had to be seen to be believed. Reactor Seven towered over the assembly chamber where the
Chief Engineer had set up shop. Lieutenant Yili was seated at a workstation observing changes in the chemical residue from alternative fuel mixtures and absently poking at a salad.
After her quiet and unheralded arrival as the new officer in charge of the entire engineering staff aboard the Argent, the other crew members weren’t too sure what to make of her. It took some time to get her to mention her last name was Curtiss. Some of the junior officers suggested a nickname of “Annie” while others preferred “girl with a gun” as she seemed to be permanently armed with a heavy blaster/disruptor pistol in a low holster on one side. Engineers were almost never armed. For one thing, they had enough tools and equipment to carry around. For another, most of the engineering crew had long since let their rifle and pistol skills wither. As crew aboard a Skywatch starship, they were required to pass basic training, but once they got their ship and assignment, most found themselves far too involved in their work to worry about regular visits to a rifle range for training. Besides, there were always sentry marines posted.
During the first few shift changes and especially during the battle drill, Lieutenant Curtiss had started a habit of wandering around the section and arriving on the scene of less-than-successful efforts by other engineering crew members precisely when the raised eyebrow of a senior officer would do the most good. She would rarely speak. She would only observe, add a quiet “mmmm” and then leave. At first, the engineering crews thought she was being critical, but she never followed up. After a few rounds of this they weren’t quite sure what she was doing.
The results, however, could not be argued with. Engineering crews would start obsessively checking their own work to avoid the nod and the “mmmm” from the Chief Engineer and in the process, in the space of scarcely a day, both efficiency and productivity had started to climb. Without a word, the OCE officer had turned the sprawling department into the beginnings of a self-checking, self-supportive team. All this was just fine with the Lieutenant, of course. What she really wanted was peace and quiet so she could learn the ins and outs of the Argent’s reactor array and power systems as quickly as possible. One thing her new ship was not was a Yellowjacket fighter.
