Lt. Commander Pesca had been installed in the adjoining chamber reserved for the aide or valet, a promotion to another position in which he might prove his incompetence. He popped out of his own room as soon as he heard her come in.
“Captain, I’ve discovered the most amazing thing!” he declared, running over with enthusiasm. “I think that it might be some kind of big conspiracy. When they were bringing me here, I saw real people in this station. Humans. You know, like us.” “Since when did you pass the entrance requirements?” she asked peevishly, in no mood for foolishness. She was trying to make some determination about procuring food. “I became aware of that odd fact some hours ago. For that matter, I already know that there is no conspiracy, and that there are in fact more humans here than Starwolves.”
“Well, what are they doing here?” he protested. “This is Starwolf space!”
“This is the Republic.”
“But there is no Republic.”
“Starwolf space is the Republic. Don’t they teach you children anything in the Sector Academy these days?” She opened a cabinet and found a bar, but nothing she wanted. “Do they feed us around this place?”
“You can call for catering on the wall com,” Pesca suggested helpfully. “They put up a menu on the monitor. The number is fifteen thirty-seven.”
Trust Wally to know all the important things. She went over to the unit on the wall by the main door and put in the number he had given her, and she was rewarded with a menu. “How goes the linguistics?”
“Frustrating,” he answered dismally. “They never will speak their own language.”
“You might as well give that a rest for now,” Tarrel said. “Terran is the official language of the Republic, or at least the station. I’ve spent my morning speaking Diplomacy. It’s just like Terran, except that you sound like an educated ass and you get a headache from trying to figure out what you’ve said, much less what the other guy said. But that’s easy compared to the language used by scientists. Just one question, Mister Linguist. What do you suppose a chicken would be?”
“A small bird from old Terra, as I recall. Khoran hens replaced them in popularity long ago.”
Tarrel looked amused. “We really are in the Republic, aren’t we?”
“What do chickens have to do with all of this?” Pesca asked.
“They seem to be on the menu.”
When Kelvessan put their minds to it, they were enormously clever little problem-solvers. They had a computer simulation ready for demonstration only twelve hours later. Dalvaen, the director of the research team, explained that putting together the theories was a great deal easier than finding ways to implement those theories. At least this group was neither as large nor as formal as their first meeting had been. Fleet Commander Asandi collected Captain Tarrel and escorted her to the demonstration. Other members of the military staff and the Commanders of the carriers presently in port were also there, but that was about it other than the researchers.
“Do you trust these simulations completely?” Tarrel asked. “You really don’t have a lot of information on which to base your models.”
“It might seem that way,” Dalvaen agreed. “However, we can infer how that shield works very exactly from the information we do have, because there is only one practical model which fits those clues. I would say that our model is accurate to within ninety-five percent, probably better. What we lack is the time to learn how to re-create the technology which projects that shield, or find the additional information we need to learn how to defeat it.”
“Then, in military terms, we would say that the probability that your model is accurate is so high that it would not justify the time needed to obtain additional information and proofs.”
Dalvaen finally seemed to understand her approach to looking at the problem. “Let me put it this way. The information that we have was obtained the hard way by yourself and by the Kerridayen. We will now exploit that information into advantages that will allow us to obtain more information about our enemy, which in turn will give us new advantages. Taking this in a series of steps, we will eventually be stronger than it is.”
Tarrel nodded. “In other words, there are no quick answers: We have to do this the hard way from start to finish. Please, proceed.”
Dalvaen indicated the main monitor. “For the purposes of this simulation, we have encapsulated the projection of a Union battleship, expanded in size to a length of nearly twelve kilometers, within a shield exactly like the one we believe the Dreadnought possesses. That ship is moving through the simulated star system you see on this monitor, presently unseen either visually or by scan. Our point of view on this monitor is that of the main screens aboard a carrier fitted with enhanced scanners. At the moment, we are trying to locate our Dreadnought with ordinary scanners. As you can see, we have no contacts.”
He turned to a second monitor. “Let me show you something here. This is what we believe happens when light or scanner beams contact the Dreadnought’s shield. The beam is not immediately neutralized at the point of contact, but captured within a layer of the shield where it travels like waves on the surface of calm water. The shield captures the beam and holds it until it can be absorbed.”
“But the Dreadnought can use its own scanners effectively through this shield,” Daerran pointed out.
“How can it?” Tarrel asked.
“There seems to be only one way to make that work. The Dreadnought’s shield already pulses at a certain frequency. All shields do, since it is that wavefront pattern that deflects the bolts of cannon fire. At a high enough frequency and intensity, it will also break up active scanner beams. At an even more intense level, it has the same effect even on light. But the Dreadnought knows the frequency of its shield, and it knows the corresponding frequency for an achronic beam that will slip through the wave troughs. It is a shutter that opens and closes thousands of times every second. From the outside, it appears constantly closed. From the inside, constantly open. Does everyone follow me so far?”
“From a distance,” Tarrel remarked drily, and several of the others seemed to agree with her.
“If the secrets of the universe were easy, there would be no justification for experts,” Dalvaen explained. “Unfortunately, knowing all of this does not give us what we would like to have. Let me show you on the simulation what we have so far. This is an application of what Captain Tarrel did to get the only clear scanner reading of the Dreadnought we have so far. She hit it with so much energy that just enough of the proper frequency and intensity was bounced back by the Dreadnought’s shield. We have developed a special high-intensity achronic scanner pulse which we propose to call an impulse scanner. When the pulse strikes the surface of the shield, it is absorbed in the same manner. But at that same moment, achronic resonance causes a signal of proportionally smaller strength and frequency to be bounced back. ”
He set the simulation into motion. The carrier sent two pulses, and a target responded deep within the system.
“No scanner lock,” one of the Starwolf Commanders observed.
“No, we do not receive a clear signal of the target,” Dalvaen said. “All we get is a ghost reflection of the shield itself. It is perfectly accurate to location, size and distance, but it still gives us no detail about anything within the shield. It cannot, since the signal never penetrated the shield. It was easy enough to guess how to do this, since the Dreadnought did it to the Kerridayen after failing to find her on normal scan. You can find those pulses in the Kerridayen’s records, but there was no reason for the ship’s computers to consider it relevant information at the time. ” “Unfortunately, there are three deficiencies with this system. The first is that it gives you no information about the target itself. Because the pulse generates its response by interacting with the shield, it cannot reach through the shield to the ship within. Secondly, you will only want to use the impulse scanner very sparingly. The interaction of the pulse with the shield can be detected. The Dreadnought will sometimes know that it is being scanned, and the side of the shield reacting to scan indicates the general direction of the source of the scan. You can see it, but it will know to begin looking for you.' The third problem is that there might not be a better way to do this, since the Dreadnought used the same system itself.”