“I don’t like it,” Torres said, “if something seems too easy…” he began, knowing that his old commanding officer would be finishing the mantra inside his own thoughts.
“Yeah, maybe,” Dassiova replied, “just stay sharp and report when and if you see anything. The plan remains until such time as you report something that throws a wrench in the gears; conduct a deep recon and keep me posted. We’ll send more firepower deeper into the system after the station is unpacked. Anything else?”
“Any more unauthorized comms?” Torres asked, more out of curiosity than any operation need. He could tell that there hadn’t been from the look on the admiral’s face even before he shook his head.
“If there is, I’ll notify you and take the bridge crew manifest for investigation. Believe me, anyone coming under suspicion will find their ass strapped to a chair and enjoying a little private one on one time with my Chief. I’m sure you remember how he’s a people guy.”
Torres smiled, signing off from the conversation and allowing his thoughts to drift back to when he’d first met the newly-appointed ground commander of the Indomitable. Command Chief Onyilogwu, the unnaturally malevolent Nigerian who had been the senior NCO in Torres’ first unit under Dassiova’s command, had been brought out to Mars on personal invitation from the admiral and despite the ruffled feathers of a few career officers, had been put in overall command of the troops. The fact that he had even risen to the very top of the NCO ladder and still refused a commission directly to Lieutenant on more than a few occasions spoke volumes of his character and abilities, not to mention his luck, but for him to have gone on to command CP teams and still retain enough years left in service to be on the front line elevated him to something nearing legendary. Torres could only begin to imagine how uncomfortable that particular conversation would be. His thoughts were interrupted by the ship-wide comm channel breaking into sound.
“Captain to the bridge.”
Torres rose and strode from the room, pausing for the door to slide open with a pneumatic hiss, before walking onto the bridge and calling for a report.
“A pair of Va’alen ships on long-range sensors,” his tactical officer said excitedly, “but the energy readings are different; there’s something strange about them.”
“Strange how? Are they damaged? Are they venting atmosphere?” Torres asked as he tapped at the console beside his chair to look at the sensor data himself.
“Not sure, Sir, they appear to be connected to a third power source but this one is… different somehow,” the ensign tried and failed to explain.
“Can we get them on screen?” Sarvanto asked from the chair beside the captain.
“Negative, too far away.”
“Are they shrouded?” Torres asked, “And are they sending out active sensor pulses?”
“Negative,” the tactical officer responded.
“To which question, Ensign?” Torres asked, carefully enunciating the words so that the young man knew he was leaning towards having his ass removed from the station for a second time. It had the desired effect, and the ensign took a steadying breath.
“No fluctuation in the power signatures, which makes me think that they aren’t shrouded. I’m reading no incoming sensor spikes but at this distance I can’t say for sure that they aren’t using active sensors in localized space,” he said, mastering his youthful enthusiasm.
“Very good, Ensign. Lieutenant Rogers, come about and loop in towards their signatures from their stern. Three-quarter speed.” An acknowledgement of the orders from the pilot was drowned out by the tactical officer’s high-pitched voice calling out again.
“Sir, I have to caution that there may be shrouded signatures out there that we can’t detect at this distance. I’d recommend senso…”
“Thank you, Ensign,” Torres interrupted, “I’m well aware that I can’t see what I can’t see.”
Red-faced and clearly embarrassed, the ensign acknowledged the reproof and kept his eyes on the scanner. Off to his left and seated lower down was the helm where Lieutenant Nathan Rogers, young and justifiably cocky with a natural gift for flying, piloted their sleek and unique reconnaissance ship.
Rogers knew his job well, knew it almost on an instinctive level, which combined with his joker attitude made people believe that he didn’t have to try hard. He tried hard every day to make his natural skills look easy, but it was the way he carried it off that gave people the wrong impression as to just how difficult it was to be a fly-boy with that amount of ability.
Rogers called out the bearing and percentage of engine power in use, sticking to the safety guidelines of maintaining less than sixty-six percent propulsion to lower the risk factor of being detected behind their Shroud, all for the rookie mistake of moving too fast.
He recalled a conversation with their resident marksman on commander Brandt’s detail; the guy went by the name of Zero like some kind of mystical SpecOps ninja, but after a single conversation with him, he left as a converted believer. He explained the concepts of concealment and camouflage as they applied to him as a trained sniper, and Rogers applied as many of those principles as he could to the Ichi and also the Tanto when he got to go joyriding in the miniature version of their one-of-a-kind warship.
“Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, signal and spacing,” Zero had said to him in his southern accent, drawing out the words as though crooning a lullaby. He sipped his drink, no doubt smuggled aboard from an illicit stash on the Mars facility, and drew his lips back from his teeth as he let the fiery liquid burn the inside of his mouth before swallowing it. He didn’t throw it back in a shot like others did, but savored each mouthful like he was preparing to remember how it tasted before they went dry for as long as the mission took.
“Don’t reflect any light, disguise your shape at all times because nature don’t make straight lines, put yourself in a position where you’ll be in shadow wherever possible,” he explained slowly, taking another pull on the appropriately-named Bulleit whiskey. “Never silhouette yourself on high ground with light behind you, watch what signals you put out because an errant transmission is as easy to DF as waving a flashlight…”
“DF?” Rogers interrupted before logic caught up and he answered his own question. “Oh, direction finding. Sorry, go on.”
“…and keep your spacing between you and your squad buddies. That last one’s real important, because if there’s another like me out there lookin’ down his barrel atcha, you can bet your ass he’s waiting for you to do something dumb like stand in front of your CO and salute. Pop: two for one sale.”
Rogers listened intently, converting the marksman’s rules into his own rules for moving their ship through space. The reflection and shape elements were covered by the Shroud device. He would use the cover of planets wherever possible to put physical barriers between them and any potential enemy, and be sure to stay apart from the other fleet ships and be wary of where he positioned them in relation to the sun.
Suns, he thought, plural. It was hard to adjust from the habit of a lifetime where he had only ever known one sun in the sky. Now he had two to contend with, and he plotted his approach accordingly to come up behind the abnormal readings, without silhouetting their hidden form against the powerful light sources of the two burning orbs.
It took him under two hours to plot them within a few hundred thousand kilometers of the enemy ships.
“I have them now, Sir,” the tactical officer reported, “confirm two enemy ships, not shrouded, and they appear… they appear to be towing something.”
“On screen,” Torres said as he sat forward. The large display blinked into life and showed them the most curious thing they had seen the Va’alen doing so far.
~
“Oh,” Brandt said in slight surprise at how fast her Lieutenant and second in command walked into the team’s private crash deck near the armory.
“Yeah,” Eze said as she went straight to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup, “I was on the br
idge checking in when you called me.” Brandt smirked to herself but turned away to bring it under control as she heard the sound of the sugar tablet container being popped open. She kept her eyes on her reflection in the mirror of her locker as she twisted the strands of her hair into braids running the length of her skull. She had been forced to find a way to keep her hair from getting trapped in the new armor ever since she’d decided to abandon the short style she had been living with for years and grow it long. There was something about being so far removed from Earth and the constant bureaucracy that came with the tight constraints of regular service that made her feel a little more free than she had done for years.
Free, but under near-constant pressure.
As far as the other commanders in her position went, she had by far the easiest job in administrative terms. The Venture and the Indomitable both had entire units to command and organize. The Cortez, the Anvil and the two frigates had two or three squads on board to rotate on guard duty and provide rapid response teams, whereas she, on board the small reconnaissance ship, had a small mixture of regular seaman – ground pounders all – attached to her detail which was backboned by her hand-picked CP special operators.
She finished twisting the last braid into place and pinned it back. “Everything alright on your gun rotation?” she asked.
“If by ‘alright’ you mean boring as hell with nothing to do, then yeah; it was perfect,” Eze replied as she turned and gave the internationally recognized sign for everything being fine; circling her thumb and forefinger instead of giving a thumbs up gesture. Like Brandt, she too had grown bored with training exercises in the empty shield domes on Mars.
“I hear that, Lieutenant,” Brandt replied as she swung her locker door shut and turned to face the younger woman. Both of them had their flight suits unzipped, had pistols holstered on their right thighs and their sleeves rolled up to above the elbow, which would look like some kind of uniform in itself, only the environmental controls in the adopted soldier’s ready room had been unable to maintain a steady temperature for some unknown reason. Both the ship’s chief engineer, a constantly smiling but harassed guy named Harris, and Jamie Paterson, had even run over the diagnostics of the control software and found nothing amiss. It had to be a hardware issue, he had told them, and short of ripping all of the wiring out of the bulkheads to find the fault, they had little choice but to accept that the room they had to hang around in was ten degrees higher than was comfortable.
“You needed me?” Eze asked, getting to the reason for the summons.
“Yeah, the Captain asked me to put together a ground team ready for a couple hours’ time,” Brandt said, earning a furrowed brow on the otherwise flawlessly smooth skin of Eze’s face. Brandt saw it, and let it go without her own face registering a response. If Eze thought that she and Torres were a secret, then she was kidding herself. Of the four people on board who had been trained in covert operations, two of them were involved with each other and the other two saw their subtle interactions. They saw it a mile away as clearly as if they were looking through the sights of Zero’s heavily customized DMR; his cherished dedicated marksman rifle that would probably breach a few UN convention restrictions back on Earth.
Eze recovered quickly, forcing away the reaction to blurt out that she hadn’t been told, and asked the question she should be asking.
“What do you need?”
“I’ll take the mission, if it happens that is, and I’ll need you to take over on board as ranking officer of the ground troops,” Brandt told her. Eze was unhappy not to get her hands dirty, not to be included at the sharp end, but her formal acknowledgement as the troop commander would go a long way to support her claim to be promoted to Lieutenant Commander when they got back; the difference between undertaking the role and being awarded the title still counted in the bureaucratic systems of the UN. She kept her face straight and asked the next logical question.
“Who are you taking?”
“I’ll take Zero as my Two,” Brandt said, not surprising her at all by using the capable and dependable sniper as her second in command on the ground, “I want Specter, obviously, as long as the Hyper assholes will let him out to play.”
Eze made a huffing noise, agreeing with Brandt’s annoyance at how tightly they had the cyborg locked up. Only Paterson had seen him much, and that was because they needed his expertise with shield harmonics, among other things. Paterson, the former grunt of a ground-pounder who had been the friend of Brandt, and Specter when he was Jake Santana, way back when, had only served his tour to earn the credits to get his degree. When events conspired to give him that opportunity, along with all the well-funded research he could get his teeth into, his true colors shone through and showcased his brilliant problem-solving mind.
“They’ll send at least one of their PMCs to make sure we aren’t messing with his head again,” Eze offered.
“Hmm,” Brandt grunted in agreement, suspecting something more sinister in the fact that Specter was escorted everywhere he went. “That leaves me five or six spare seats.” Eze shot her a look, the questioning expression fading into mild excitement.
“You’re taking one of the new mech rigs?” she asked, figuring out the available space on the Tanto with a squad of ten on board.
“Two,” Brandt said with a smile, “I’m pretty sure I can squeeze them in.”
Chapter Four – Proxima b Orbit
“Deployment at four percent, Admiral,” the comm officer on the bridge of the Indomitable answered Dassiova’s nagging. He had asked for an estimated time of completion an hour before, which now equated to an entire one percent progress. He ground his teeth and gave no response, because he was apprehensive about having the fleet so exposed while the big sections of their flat-packed floating base were expanded in painfully slow-motion. He decided that action was better than nervous tension.
“Signal the destroyers to push out another fifty thousand clicks and get me Hayes on comm,” he ordered. His words were acknowledged as both comm officers spoke in their calm and commanding radio voices. Moments later, Hayes’ face appeared on the display screen with the bridge of the Hammer providing a very war-like backdrop.
“Admiral,” he said in gruff greeting, as he was often a man of even fewer words than the taciturn fleet commander.
“Captain,” Dassiova acknowledged, “my compliments – if you would push out a half light-year and conduct an active sensor sweep to relay, I’d be obliged.”
“Understood, Sir,” Hayes said, clicking off the active link between the two ships. Dassiova looked down at his personal console and watched as the icon for the Hammer blinked out of existence. He used two fingers on the screen to widen the field and as the icons for the majority of the fleet shrank down to become one instead of the cluster of individual readings, he saw the Hammer reappear far ahead of their location. He zoomed out further, watching in an awe that never got old as the single icon for the fleet sat almost directly behind that of the newly-jumped Hammer, and he marveled at just how far the Ichi was from them. He imagined that one-off recon ship with its crew of misfits drifting silently in the deep waters of open space, just waiting and watching for prey to swim by unaware.
“Sensor readings incoming,” the tactical officer reported as he began to receive the relayed data from the distant frigate. He paused, his eyes double checking the information and his brain computing it before he spoke. “Nothing, Sir. Clear skies as far as we can see.”
“Signal the Hammer to remain on point and maintain active sensor sweeps,” the admiral replied, glancing down at his personal console in response to the sudden and urgent flashing of an icon. He hit it, seeing the boxed message show up in large text.
UNAUTHORIZED SUBSPACE COMMUNICATION.
“Massey, on me,” he ordered his flight officer as he practically leapt from his chair. She didn’t respond. He looked around for his executive officer and saw her walking out of the briefing room wearing a look of concerned confusion at see
ing the admiral on his feet in earnest. He was struck by an immediate sensation of curiosity mixed with fear and shot a warning glance at Asha, who hurriedly looked away and brought his emotions under control to prevent him being forced to take another walk and return when he could stop projecting everything he felt.
Dassiova switched his glare to Massey, somehow conveying that their covert computer fishing program had caught a bite and that he needed to see what was on the other end. She understood, nodding towards his office and the two of them fast-walked to the door where she threw herself into his seat and began hitting the glass surface to input the commands faster than he could type.
“Authority,” she muttered to him, pausing as he scanned his left forearm over the reader on the side of the screen. “I’m in,” she told him as she peered closer, “data burst transmission, less than a second long, from us to Earth by the look of it…” her eyes scanned fast over the data on the display as she interpreted it. “Came from further ahead of our position…”
“How much further ahead?” he asked her impatiently, wanting to know if his suspicions should fall on the Ichi or the Hammer.
“Checking,” she answered, “calculating the time the transmission took… it’s the Ichi,” she said confidently, “it has to be. The signal took too long to re-route to be the Hammer.”
“And it had to originate there?” He asked.
“No way to tell,” she said with evident annoyance, “the tracer algorithm can’t see it.”
“Goddammit,” Dassiova growled, “alright, give me a minute and I’ll call Torres.”
“Is that wise, Admiral?” she asked carefully, earning a hard glare from him.
“Speak your mind,” he told her after a pause, wanting it straight and not suggested cryptically.
“I mean, what if it has something to do with him or his friends? They’re a small, tight crew after all…”
Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3 Page 4
