by David Weber
"Aye, aye, Sir," Shoupe said crisply, eyes gleaming with approval.
"It's going to be too late to make very much difference to Terekhov, either way, Loretta," the rear admiral said quietly.
"Maybe so, Admiral," she replied. "But maybe not, too."
* * *
"I sure hope this is going to work, Sir," Aikawa Kagiyama said quietly.
He and Ansten FitzGerald sat on Copenhagen's flight deck as the freighter accelerated steadily inward from the system's hyper limit. The merchantship's bridge was actually smaller than Hexapuma's, but it seemed incredibly vast because it was uncluttered by the elaborate plots, data displays, weapons consoles, and multiple command stations of a warship. It had been rather nice, in many ways, to have the space during the thirty-three-day voyage from Montana. At the moment, however, it simply served to remind Aikawa that he was aboard an unarmed, unarmored, absolutely defenseless, slow merchant vessel about to enter a potentially hostile star system under false pretenses.
It was not a pleasant thought.
"Well," FitzGerald said thoughtfully, glancing across at the midshipman manning the freighter's sensors, such as they were and what there were of them, "it's got a better chance of working than a visit from the Nasty Kitty would have, Mr. Kagiyama."
Despite the tension, Aikawa actually chuckled, and FitzGerald was glad to see it. The young man's humor still lacked the spontaneity and edge of mischievous wickedness which normally typified it, but at least he was no longer troubled by obvious bouts of depression. The Captain had been right. Assigning him to Copenhagen and working his posterior off had done wonders. And FitzGerald was also grateful for the time it had given him to get to know the youngster better. With only five officers, including Aikawa, in the entire ship, he'd learned more about each of them in the last T-month than in the previous six.
Not that learning more about some of them had been as pleasant as learning about others.
The freighter's acting captain glanced at the small com screen which showed the view from the optical pickup mounted on Lieutenant MacIntyre's skinsuit helmet. The engineering officer's personnel management skills impressed FitzGerald even less here in Copenhagen than in Hexapuma. The smaller ship's company only magnified her ability to irritate and annoy the experienced ratings and noncoms under her command, and FitzGerald was beginning to question whether or not his and the Captain's original theory about the reason for that was accurate. Lack of self-confidence was one thing, but some people—and FitzGerald was starting to think MacIntyre might be one of them—simply had too much little-tin-god in them to ever make good officers. She was actually a superior technician, and it had shown as she and her skinsuited work party prepped the recon drone in Copenhagen's cavernous cargo hold, however—
"Just hold it a minute, Danziger!" he heard the lieutenant snap suddenly. "I'll tell you when I'm ready to kick it loose, damn it! Don't you people ever pay attention to what you're doing?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. Sorry about that, Lieutenant," the senior sensor rating replied, and FitzGerald winced. Calling an officer by his rank was certainly proper procedure, but it could also become a backhanded swipe at one as junior as MacIntyre was. Especially when it was used in every single sentence . . . and delivered in the elaborately correct tone Danziger had just employed.
I'm going to have to have a little talk with her once we get back to Hexapuma. I hope it'll do some good. Although I'm not all that confident it will.
"All right," MacIntyre said more calmly a few minutes later. "All systems check. Let's get it out of here."
The working party lifted the massive drone—well over a hundred tons—easily in the depressurized cargo hold's micro-gravity. They walked it aft to the gaping hatch, big enough to engulf some destroyers bodily, and used presser-tractor jacks to kick it clear of the ship. MacIntyre kept her eyes on it, which had the effect of holding it in the center of FitzGerald's display, and the commander felt a flicker of relief as the drone's emergency reaction thrusters flared. Its onboard programming obviously had it, and it was adjusting its position to be certain it passed cleanly through the open kilt of Copenhagen's impeller wedge before lighting off its own very low-powered wedge.
"Drone successfully deployed, Sir," MacIntyre announced over the com channel dedicated to her link to FitzGerald.
"Very good, Ms. MacIntyre. Get the hold secured, if you please."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Well, Aikawa," FitzGgerald remarked as he returned his attention to the midshipman, "so far, so good. Now all we need to do is recover it again before we leave the system."
* * *
"We've been challenged by Monica Astrogation Central, Sir," Lieutenant Kobe announced.
"And about time, too," FitzGerald replied with just a bit more studied calm than he actually felt. "Even a light-speed system should've been asking us who we are before this," he added, and Kobe grinned.
"Shall I respond, Sir?"
"Now, now, Jeff!" FitzGerald shook his head. "This is a merchie, not a Queen's ship, and merchies don't do things the way men-of-war do. Let's not make anyone suspicious by being too on the bounce about all this. Astrogation Central will still be there whenever we get around to answering them."
"Uh, aye, aye, Sir," Kobe replied after only the briefest of pauses, and FitzGerald chuckled.
"At least a third of the freighters in space leave their com watch on auto-record, Jeff," he explained, "and Sollies are even worse about that than most. Generally, there's an alarm set to alert the fellow who's supposed to be keeping an eye on communications that a particular incoming message is important. More often than not, though, the computers aboard a ship like this are too stupid to make that kind of evaluation reliably, so the system simply records anything that comes in and otherwise ignores it until a message has been repeated at least once. At that point, it figures someone really wants to talk to somebody and sounds an alarm to get the com officer's attention. That's why we often have to hail merchantships two or three times."
Kobe nodded, obviously filing away another one of those practical bits of knowledge that places like the Island so often forgot to pass along. FitzGerald nodded back and turned his command chair to glance at the midshipman.
"Anything interesting showing up, Aikawa?"
"Sir, if someone were obliging enough to set off a ten- or twenty-megaton nuke at a range of ninety or a hundred klicks, this ship's passive sensors might actually be able to pick it up."
FitzGerald snorted, and Aikawa smiled.
"Actually, Sir," he said more seriously, "I am picking up a few impeller signatures now. Not very many, though, and I can't tell you much more than that someone's moving under power out there. If I had to guess, I'd say four or five of them are LACs, but there's at least a couple acting like bigger warships. Maybe destroyers or light cruisers."
"What do you mean, 'acting like bigger warships'?" FitzGerald asked, curious about the midshipman's logic chain.
"It looks to me as if they're carrying out maneuvers," Aikawa replied. "Two of the ones I think are LACs are moving along under only about two hundred gees with a current velocity of less than twelve thousand KPS. From their vectors, it looks like they're pretending they just crossed the alpha wall and they're heading for Monica. And with that acceleration, they almost have to be playing the roles of merchantmen. Meanwhile, these other impeller signatures over here—" he indicated a pair of unidentified icons on the freighter's deplorably detail-free "tactical plot" "—are chasing after them from astern. Looks to me like they're pretending to be commerce raiders, and effective commerce raiders would just about have to be hyper-capable. Which probably makes these two destroyers or cruisers."
"I see." FitzGerald nodded in approval. "Are any of them in a position to pick up our drone?" he asked after a moment.
"I doubt anything in the system has the sensors to spot our bird at anything over five kiloklicks, Sir. And these fellows are so far off the drone's programmed track they couldn't pick it up
even with Manticoran sensors that knew exactly where to look."
"I'm glad to hear it," FitzGerald said. "But don't get too confident about the quality of the other side's sensors. If somebody really has been upgrading their naval capabilities, they could have a lot more sensor reach and sensitivity than ONI's estimated."
"Yes, Sir," Aikawa said, just a bit stiffly. FitzGerald only smiled. The youngster's stiffness was directed at his own overconfidence, not at the commander for having pointed it out to him.
FitzGerald tipped back his command chair and glanced at the time display. Copenhagen had been in-system for almost thirty-five minutes. Her velocity was up to 14,641 KPS, and she'd reduced the range to the planet Monica by well over twenty-six million kilometers—down to 9.8 LM. And it had been about six minutes since Kobe received Astrogation Central's challenge. So in another three or four minutes, the people who'd sent it would realize Copenhagen hadn't replied. Call it five minutes to allow for the usual Verge sloppiness. Copenhagen would have traveled about another 4.5 million kilometers during the interval, which would reduce the light-speed transmission time by only fifteen seconds, so it would be roughly another sixteen minutes before the second challenge arrived. The time dilation of Copenhagen's velocity—her tau was barely .9974—was so low as to have no effect at all on message turnaround.
Which meant he would enjoy the entire sixteen minutes worrying about whether or not the Captain's stratagem was going to work after all. Taken all in all, that might not be so bad a thing. After all, it meant he'd get to use up sixteen minutes of the six hundred or so he intended to spend in the system worrying about something besides that damned reconnaissance drone.
* * *
The reconnaissance array in question proceeded along its preordained path in sublime electronic indifference to any anxiety which might afflict the protoplasmic creatures who'd sent it on its way.
It was a very stealthy array, the hardest to spot, lowest-signature drone the Royal Manticoran Navy was capable of building, which was very hard to spot, indeed. It was equipped with extraordinarily capable active sensors, but those were locked down—as, indeed, they almost always were when the drone or its brethren were deployed. There was very little point in being undetectable if one intended to flounder around shouting at the top of one's lungs. The drone's creators had no intention of allowing their offspring to do anything so gauche, and so they had also equipped it with exquisitely sensitive passive sensors, which produced no telltale emissions to give away the drone's position.
Or, in this case, the simple fact of the drone's existence.
It sped onward, under the paltry acceleration (for one such as itself) of a mere 2,000 KPS2. Because of the profile on which it had been launched, and the need to avoid the fusion-fired furnace of the system's G3 primary, which lay almost directly between it and its intermediate destination, it would find itself forced to travel two light-hours in order to cover a straight-line distance of only a little over forty light-minutes. After that, it would be required to travel an additional thirty-one light minutes in order to rendezvous once more with the plebeian ship which had launched it upon its journey. Thus its pokey rate of acceleration. It had ten hours to kill before it could possibly be collected once again, and its languid acceleration would give it almost twenty-four minutes to look around at its intermediate destination before it had to get back underway if it was going to keep its rendezvous schedule.
The drone didn't care. At such a low rate of acceleration, it had a powered endurance of nearly three T-days, and if it couldn't begin to match the massive acceleration rates of ship-to-ship missiles, unlike those missiles, its far lower-powered impeller wedge could be turned on and off at will, extending its endurance almost indefinitely. Besides, the far weaker strength of its wedge, combined with the stealth technology so lovingly built into it, was what made it so difficult to detect in the first place. Let the glamour-hungry attack missiles go slashing across space at eighty or ninety thousand KPS2, shouting out their presence for all the galaxy to see! They were, at best, kamikazes anyway, doomed to Achilles-like lives of brief, shining martial glory. The recon drone was an Odysseus—clever, wily, and circumspect.
And, in this instance, determined to get home at last to a Penelope named Copenhagen.
* * *
"Sir, Astrogation Central's repeating its challenge. And, ah, they sound just a touch testy about it," Lieutenant Kobe added.
"Well, we certainly can't have that, can we?" FitzGerald replied. "All right, Jeff. Turn on our transponder. Then give it another four minutes—long enough for the com officer to get to his -station, turn off the alarm, and get a response from whoever has the watch—and send the message."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
The communications officer pressed the button that activated Copenhagen's transponder, squawking its perfectly legal ID code. Four minutes later, he pressed his transmit key, and the prerecorded message went zipping out at the speed of light.
Aikawa Kagiyama muttered something under his breath, and FitzGerald glanced at him.
"What is it, Aikawa?" the commander asked, and the midshipman looked up with an embarrassed expression
"Nothing, really, Sir. I was just talking to myself." FitzGerald raised an eyebrow, and Aikawa sighed. "I guess I'm just a little worried about how well all of this is going to work out."
"I hope you won't mind me pointing out that this is a hell of a time to be just getting started worrying about that, Aikawa!" Kobe said with a chuckle, and the midshipman smiled wryly.
"I'm not just getting started, Sir," he told the lieutenant. "It's just that the worrying I was already doing has suddenly taken on a certain added emphasis."
Everyone on the bridge chuckled, and FitzGerald smiled back at him. It was good to have something break the tension, he reflected. And, in all honesty, he shared some of Aikawa's trepidation. Not about the message itself, but about who might be receiving it.
Thanks to the manner in which Hexapuma had taken possession of Copenhagen, all the freighter's computers had been intact and undamaged. True, the secure portions of their databases had been protected by multiple levels of security fences and protocols, but most commercial cybernetics—even Solarian cybernetics—simply weren't up to the standards demanded by governments and military forces. There were exceptions, of course. Without De Chabrol's assistance, for example, it would have been effectively impossible for Hexapuma's technicians to break into Marianne's secure systems. A proper team of ONI specialists could have managed it, in time, but it wasn't something to be lightly undertaken under field conditions.
But a run-of-the-mill, honest freighter like Copenhagen neither needed nor could afford the same degree of security, and Amal Nagchaudhuri and Guthrie Bagwell had hacked into the ship's computer net with absurd ease. Which meant Lieutenant Kobe had access to Kalokainos Shipping's basic house encryption and authentication codes. With those in hand, he and Nagchaudhuri had crafted a totally legitimate message in the company's encryption format. The message content was just as totally bogus, of course, but there wouldn't be any way for anyone to realize that until it ultimately reached its final destination—which happened to be the office of one Heinrich Kalokainos on Old Earth herself.
When old Heinrich finally opened and read that message, he was likely to be just a little bit irritated, FitzGerald reflected. But the fact that its addressee was Kalokainos Shipping's CEO and largest single stockholder ought to discourage any officious underling from fiddling around with it in the meantime. And that message was Copenhagen's ostensible reason for being here.
The fact that Kalokainos didn't maintain an office of its own on Monica might have been a problem, but there was a gentleman's agreement among the shipping agents of the dozen or so most powerful Solarian shipping lines to act as one another's representatives when circumstances required. Although Copenhagen's message didn't carry any sort of emergency priority (aside from its intended recipient), FitzGerald didn't doubt the Captain was righ
t—the Jessyk Combine agent on Monica would normally accept it and forward it Solward. The only question in the commander's mind was whether or not the Jessyk agent would be feeling equally helpful in light of whatever deviltry Jessyk was up to here.
Well, that, and the question of whether or not he'll ask any questions about it—or us—that we can't answer.
The problem was that while, as nearly as they could determine from Copenhagen's logs, she'd never visited Monica, those logs were unfortunately far from complete. And even if they hadn't been, Copenhagen had worked the rest of the Talbott Cluster for over five T-years. The ship herself might never have visited Monica, but that was no guarantee the members of her crew hadn't, or that the Jessyk agent in the system didn't know her legal skipper. Or, at least, what the legal skipper's name was.
Only one way to know, he told himself, and settled back to find out while Copenhagen continued toward Monica orbit.
* * *
"So, of course I'll see to it your message is forwarded, Captain Teach," the man on FitzGerald's com said. "You realize, I hope, though, that it may be some time before I'm able to get it aboard a ship headed for Sol."
"Of course, Mr. Clinton," FitzGerald said. "I never expected anything else. Frankly, it's an unmitigated pain in the ass, but the damned Rembrandters insisted that I relay it to our home offices. And you can guess how often Copenhagen sees Sol!"
