“I trusted your advice beyond life itself before I realized I loved you,” he said quietly. “The confusion is mine, Sylvia. I…” he sighed. “I wish I could promise it won’t happen again, but I am human.
“More, I am a military officer and part of my responsibility to my people is to occasionally question my judgment in private to make certain that I am making the right calls.”
“Believe me, Henry, I can bloody well question your judgment enough for both of us,” Sylvia snapped. “This one was dumb.”
“Yes. But the end result is that we have full buy-in to your plan from the officers accompanying us,” he pointed out with a ghost of a smile. “Had I thought everything through in advance, this might well have been my plan anyway.
“But had I thought things through, I would have brought you in on that plan.”
“That would have been wise,” Sylvia said. She glared at him for a moment more, then sighed and waved a finger at him. “Don’t do it again, Henry. Can you manage that?”
“I promise to tell you what I’m planning in meetings where I need you to play along,” he said. “Good enough?”
“It’ll have to be,” she conceded, shaking her head.
“I don’t know if it will help make up for that, but my steward is putting together a dinner for us in the Captain’s mess,” Henry noted. “And unlike the First Kitchen, he knows what wine he’s picking!”
Chapter Eighteen
“Ser…I think we’re being watched.”
Henry turned in his chair to look at Eowyn as she spoke quietly.
“What do you mean, Commander?” he asked. “I assume you don’t mean our Cluster friends.”
They were still in the Satra System, where a trio of Tano-built escorts stood sensor watch. Henry’s three destroyers were on their way to the skip line to the Avas System, the first of five skips through neutral and E-Two territory that would bring them to Eerdish.
“When you checked this place out for the Cluster, you saw ghost contacts, right?” Eowyn asked. “I read the report.”
“We found the source, though,” Henry pointed out. He’d swept the system with Raven and a group of Cluster escorts. “A Kozun corvette hidden in an ice rock.”
“Except that a bunch of your ghosts were over here, weren’t they?” Eowyn tapped a gas giant. “And I just got another ghost there.”
“Show me,” Henry ordered.
She brought it up on the main display, marking all of the information they have.
“The heat signature is minimal,” he noted. “It could just be a heat reflection off a high-metal-content rock.”
“It could, yeah,” his Ops officer confirmed. “It matches up to a few of the ghosts the locals reported as well, but the full sweep with escorts didn’t find anything.”
Henry nodded and exhaled slowly.
“Whatever it is, if it’s been here for months, it’s not a problem for today’s mission,” he pointed out. “Keep an eye on it and fire off a data packet to the local ships when we hit the skip line. If the Kozun are still playing games, we want to confirm that. Admiral Rex has some sensor shuttles and probes he can use to open up anything that’s hiding here.”
The descendant of AWACS aircraft, those shuttles were designed to provide targeting assistance to fighter strikes. The six of them could read a newspaper over your shoulder from the other side of a star system, though, so Henry figured they could find a hiding Kozun ship.
“Keep your eyes open, though,” he ordered. “That’s the kind of thing we want to be looking for.” He grinned. “Once we’re in E-Two space, past Avas and Ra-One-Sixty-Six.”
Avas, though, only raised more questions. Avas was an M-type red dwarf, never inhabited but named by someone whose records were in the UPSF’s navigation databases. Those databases weren’t so helpful as to name the sources of the names they included.
“Okay, so that’s three different locations throwing off wonky sensor signatures,” Eowyn concluded after they’d been in system for two hours. “Nothing that looks like a starship, so I’m guessing unofficial rogue colony.”
“But one of those would have ships of some kind,” Henry pointed out. “And we’d see those ships, because they’d be completely visible.”
“Not if they were hiding from the Kenmiri,” Eowyn said. “On the other hand…”
She shook her head.
“What?” he asked.
“We have some of the best sensors the UPSF has,” she reminded him. “Better resolution, range, frequency breadth, the works. The estimates I’ve seen say that we have better sensors aboard these ships than the Kenmiri ever had.
“And all I’m getting are ghosts and anomalies,” she noted. “The Tactical officers aren’t doing any better. They’ve all noticed the pattern, but it’s nothing we could flag as a threat. Nothing that’s definitely a ship, nothing that’s even definitely a space station.”
Henry nodded slowly, looking at the details of a couple of the anomalies.
“The system flags when we have more than a certain number of anomalous sub-detection signatures, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s what pinged us in Satra. And then again here, and I started going into the sub-detection threshold scans. I mean.” She waved her hands helplessly. “There’s still false positives in this mess,” she told him. “All three of my ghost groups could be entirely false positives, for that matter.
“Sunlight on ice and sunlight on iron do a lot of screwing around at these frequencies and energy levels. That’s why we have a detection threshold built into the software.”
“But you don’t think it is,” Henry said grimly. “This is neutral space, Commander. The La-Tar Cluster doesn’t claim Avas. The E-Two don’t claim Avas. It’s an uninhabited mess that is only a useful pass-through between La-Tar and Eerdish. If Ra-Ninety-Two and Satra were three light-years closer, no one would ever come here.”
“And because it’s a bunch of backwater stars that takes ten days to travel through with nothing of value or interest, there hasn’t really been much contact through here.”
“Ten days for us,” Henry pointed out. “We’re pushing four times most ships’ cruise acceleration, Commander. Over twenty days for anyone else, with some long and painful skips.”
“So, if I were hiding, say, a logistics depot for a stealth scouting program…” Eowyn trailed off. “There’s a lot of people those ghosts could belong to.”
“Or they could just be ghosts,” Henry said grimly. “The fact that we can’t definitively call them anything is enough for me to want to leave them be for now.
“But as with Satra, let’s flag them and record everything,” he ordered. “I agree with you, Commander. We’re being watched. In Satra, I’m pretty sure they’re Kozun. Here, I’m less certain. If nothing else, what I’m seeing here suggests some pretty effective stealth tech.”
“I don’t believe in stealth in space, ser,” Eowyn said dryly. “So, these people offend me.”
“If we’re looking at some kind of stealth ship, Commander, what are they doing?” he asked.
She sighed, looking back at the data.
“I’d say they cut their engines as soon as they detected us, except our ghost numbers never dropped in a way that would line up with that. So, either they weren’t accelerating to begin with, or they don’t think that we can pick them up at this range.”
“Your closest ghosts are two light-minutes away,” Henry pointed out. “That could be a reasonable assumption against most people if they have stealth tech.”
“Yeah.” Eowyn glared at the display. “If my largest ghost is a Kozun corvette with engines online and some kind of stealth system, she’s sinking or redirecting over ninety-eight percent of her heat output. Redirecting would assume that they knew where we were, so that’s probably out.”
“Heat-sinking would also imply they figured somebody was here,” Henry observed.
“Depends on how they do it,” she replied. “If they discharge
their heat sinks at each of their destinations and keep most of their flights short, it’s…theoretically possible that they could be sinking all of their heat for their entire flight. Every flight.”
“Could we do it?” Henry asked.
She laughed.
“Not a chance in hell,” she told him. “You command the stealthiest ships the UPA has ever built, but that’s only in comparison. At this range, running at point-five KPS-squared? We’d be underneath most people’s detection thresholds…but we’d be more visible than this.”
“What about optical examination?” Henry asked.
“I had Bach and her team take a stab at that,” Eowyn admitted.
Henry nodded—that made sense, and he had faith in Paladin’s Tactical team.
“And?”
“Nothing. So, either I’m crazy or they’ve got optical camo on the hull. That we can do, before you ask,” she told him, “but it’s pointless because the heat signature gives you away and, well, for us the grav-shield and drive both screw up any visual on us.”
“Keep watching,” Henry ordered again. “I don’t want to detour, but I want to know as much as we can. Someone is out there, Commander, and they’re hiding in a way we didn’t think they could.
“That is always going to make me nervous.”
“Me too, ser.”
Henry studied the screens grimly, double-checking the distance.
“And Commander?”
“Yes, ser?”
“If any of those ghosts start heading our way, let me know immediately,” he ordered. “I don’t care what I’m doing. Emergency-ping my network. Am I clear?”
“Yes, ser.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Ser, can I show you something?”
With the current level of not-quite-alert, Henry had left the door to his office open. He was still surprised to see Chan sticking their head in.
The Chinese officer was broad-shouldered and heavyset, with their head shaved and subtle makeup to soften their features. Right now, they looked…intrigued.
“Probably,” Henry said with a chuckle. “Unless Eowyn’s ghosts decide to charge us, it’s going to be a quiet trip.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Chan told him. “Do you have a few minutes to walk with me?”
Henry was curious now. That didn’t sound normal. With a wave and a thought, he shut down his network’s link to his office systems and rose.
“Certainly, Commander,” he said. “Lead the way.”
Chan waited for Henry to join them, and then set off to the exit from the bridge.
“You know that the first-wave Cataphracts still have subspace transceivers, right?” the communications officer asked.
“I recall that coming up, yes,” Henry conceded. “They’re nonfunctional, but taking them out would be a pain and they don’t take up that much space. As I understand, current construction is being done without them.”
“Exactly. But Paladin has one, and Lieutenant Commander Jackson and I have been experimenting,” Chan explained as they walked. “How much of the theory behind it all do you follow, ser?”
Henry snorted. Mehitabel Jackson was Paladin’s coms officer—and, along with Chan, one of about five people on the destroyer who actually understood the theory of their late FTL coms.
“I know what it did, Commander, and I know the Kenmiri shut it down,” he noted. “I think subspace was a three-dimensional space offset from our own?”
“Basically,” Chan said. “Subspace is a stable set of three spatial dimensions, except that as we normally track dimensions, they’re dimensions seven through nine.
“That level of stability was recognized early in the twenty-second century, but the level of noise in them rendered them useless for anything,” the coms officer continued. “Then, shortly after the Unification War, we found three sets of stable frequencies in subspace.
“A lot of math and hair-pulling went into the theory explaining how they existed, because we had no reason to believe they were artificial.” Chan sighed. “Now, of course, we know that what we were looking at was a stabilizing carrier signal transmitted from Kenmiri space.”
“But we didn’t know that then, so we just started using it?” Henry guessed.
“Basically. Now we’re researching the crap out of how that stabilization was done and we’ve realized that, well, it’s easier to stabilize a subspace frequency across an entire galaxy than to localize it.”
“Hence us accessing the Kenmiri frequencies.”
“Exactly.”
Chan opened the door to the subspace transceiver facility. There was no one inside, but the systems continued to hum along. They weren’t any use, but they ran along.
“How does this impact us?” Henry asked.
“Couple of ways,” Chan told him. “R-Div has every ship with an operating transceiver running it twenty-four-seven and reporting everything that pings back to them. The data is critical, according to some of the researchers I’ve interacted with, to learning how subspace looks without a stabilizing carrier frequency—which should help us create such a frequency.”
“I seem to recall something along those lines in the standing orders,” Henry said. That kind of order was outside of a Captain or squadron commander’s authority and didn’t really impact him. They didn’t get remembered unless they came up, even with a computer network in his head. R-Div—the UPSF’s Research Division—had a wide authority to order low-impact data collection like that.
“On top of that, Mehitabel and I have been poking at the receivers to see if we can find any sensible patterns in the mess,” Chan told him. “So, we’ve been experimenting with the hardware and running pattern-recognition AI through the noise that we’re recording for R-Div.”
Henry stared at the humming displays around him as Chan’s words sank in, then he turned to face his officer directly.
“You found a pattern in subspace?” he demanded. That could be…huge.
“Yes, ser,” Chan confirmed. They crossed to one of the consoles and tapped a few commands.
An image appeared in the air between Henry and Chan, projected to their internal networks. It was…nonsensical to Henry, a three-dimensional display of lines and colors.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“This is a representation of our current passive receipts of subspace activity in the Avas System,” Chan told him. “Notice anything?”
“Not really,” Henry admitted. “An incoherent mess.”
“Don’t worry; that’s all I see in this, too,” Chan said. “Right now, there’s nothing out there. This is subspace’s normal, natural state.” They shrugged. “Given the variant sizes and not-exact-correlation between our regular three dimensions and the three in subspace, that cube covers about fourteen light-years of space.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “So, what now?”
“What I’m about to show you is a thirty-six-second clip that our pattern AI picked out,” Chan told him. “Watch carefully.”
Henry registered the moment the time stamp changed, but the starting point was still just as chaotic as the original video. Then, after five seconds, he saw what the AI had picked out.
A sudden flat disk of solid signal, a pulse that crossed the entire meter-wide cube and stayed that way for ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
Then it was gone, and only chaos remained.
“While I coded that to augment the visibility of the pulse for you, if any of our coms people had been watching the data when that happened, we’d have picked it out,” Chan observed. “The AI wasn’t necessary. That was obvious.”
“What was it?” Henry asked.
“That, Commodore, was a time-and-distance-constrained subspace carrier signal,” the coms officer said quietly. “Someone stabilized the thirty-two-point-six-six-megahertz frequency of subspace for twenty-two seconds. More than long enough for a compressed data burst.”
“When?” Henry said quietly. He could
guess, but there was no time stamp on the recording.
“About five minutes after the farthest of Eowyn’s ghosts would have picked up the lightspeed signal of our arrival.”
“So, we are being watched,” Henry noted. He pulled up the map of the system in the air as well and looked at their position.
They’d been in Avas for eighteen hours now and were still ten hours from the skip line to Ra-166. That said, they’d only been increasing the distance from Eowyn’s ghosts, who had positioned themselves clear of the most likely transit routes through the system.
Going to investigate would add at least two days to their trip—ignoring whatever time actually investigating or dealing with the ghosts would take.
“Who do you think they are?” Henry asked.
“First instinct is Kenmiri, but we’re a long damn way from the Remnant here,” Chan said. “It might be the Drifters—there’s a lot they didn’t tell anyone. They might have more information on the subspace coms than they told us.”
“It’s definitely not the Kozun,” Henry said, as much to himself as Chan. “If they had subspace coms, they’d be playing very different games. But there are others out there…”
“We won’t know unless we can ID a source,” Chan said. “So far, all I can really tell you is that the source was somewhere in Avas. It could have been any of the groups of ghosts Commander Eowyn picked up—or those could even be just sensor anomalies and the transmission was from somewhere else.”
“It’s not worth turning back, then, especially if we don’t know who it is,” Henry decided. “Record everything, Commander.”
“Of course, ser. We already are.”
“Then do two more things for me,” the Commodore ordered. “First, Avas is now blacklisted in our drone computers. It’ll add time to their return flights to the La-Tar postal station, but we know Avas is home to an unknown.
“I’m not picking fights without more data, but we are also not sending our mail right through their gunsights.”
Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4) Page 11
