“Fifteen. Telemetry from her suit indicated that she went under fairly early on, so I took advantage of the situation.” Captain Tarrel had passed out in her seat, which had been inclined about halfway in anticipation of this event. For the same reason, the supply of drugs that had been selected was close at hand. Now that they had found the Dreadnought, she could be given the drugs used by the Union that gave humans a higher tolerance to stress, allowing them to recover almost immediately if they did pass out. For the moment, simple smelling salts brought her back instantly.
“Vile stuff. Take it away,” Tarrel commented, making a face. “How goes the war?”
“Valthyrra found the Dreadnought,” he told her, giving her the additional drugs. “It apparently did not sense her scanner pulse, and she was able to put the planet between us before it could discover us. We are waiting now to begin our next move, once we know what to do. Any ideas?”
“Based upon past experience, run like hell comes immediately to mind. The trouble is that hiding from the Dreadnought does us absolutely no good, beyond offering the chance to choose our own time and method of acting. Is there any way to sneak in closer before it knows that we’re here?”
“There is none that I can envision,” Valthyrra said, bringing her camera pod well back into the upper bridge. Kayendel had joined them as well.
“Two thoughts come to mind,” Tarrel mused. “We do something that hints of our presence without giving it away absolutely, and then we see if we can lure the Dreadnought into coming here. Or we can use the Maeridan as bait. If the Dreadnought chases her, we might be able to slip in behind. Is she blind to the rear, I wonder?”
“I am not,” Valthyrra said. “I would not expect that plan to work. I would have to use my impulse scanner to track its position, and it will become aware of that too soon.”
“Then we should bring it here,” Kayendel declared. “Valthyrra, correct me if I am wrong. Like most gas giants, this one probably has a very large and powerful magnetic field, which serves to hold in an invisible cloud of ionized particles that will interact with a ship’s shields and cause stealth to become ineffective.”
“Yes, I have already dropped my own outer shields altogether,” Valthyrra agreed. “I was looking like a distant thunderstorm with all that discharge over the shell. Anticipating the point of your question, the answer to that part is also yes. If the Dreadnought comes through here, we will be able to see it from static discharge even if the ship itself remains invisible. That probably offers the best chance we will ever have to get an extremely short-range scan.”
“Before it turns around and kicks our ass,” Tarrel added. “The only real alternative is to wait for it to make a regular scanner sweep and then move in on it quickly. But that doesn’t work, does it?”
“If we detect the sweep, then the sweep detects us,” Valthyrra agreed.
“The other plan is best,” Gelrayen agreed. “What do we need to do?”
Valthyrra was already considering that. “Supplying the bait should be simple enough. I will simply have one of my drones hide itself on a small moon and begin making random achronic noise. The Dreadnought will have to come here to see what it is, something that it can only destroy at very close range. The only real problem is hiding myself. Where does a fifteen-million-ton fighting ship hide itself?”
“Anywhere it wants?” Captain Tarrel asked innocently.
“Cute.”
A solution to the second problem presented itself very quickly. Once Valthyrra had a look about with a very short-range scan, she was able to find any number of small shepherding moons in the gas giant’s band of rings. One of these moons, an irregular rock about twenty kilometers across, had a very convenient hole like a very deep impact crater that was just the right shape to hold a Starwolf carrier. Her construction bay at Alkayja station had been smaller. The Methryn was able to back into this, ready to move forward just enough to expose her main battery and her sensitive forward scanner array. The moonlet did posses a trace of gravity, just enough to pull the carrier slowly to her left. Since the rate of fall was only about a tenth of a meter every minute, her field drive was able to counteract that pull.
A drone was prepared and sent on its way to a much larger moon just outside the disk of the ring, at present less than ten thousand kilometers away. By the standards of the Methryn’s scanner, that was very short range indeed. Better yet, the most direct approach path between that moon and the Direadnought’s present position lay only three thousand kilometers out from the Methryn’s cubby hole. Valthyrra hoped that static discharge against that very high-power shield would give away its position as it passed through.
“Something about this situation bothers me,” Captain Tarrel commented. “This entire plan seems very unorthodox.”
“The stupid idea is a favorite Starwolf tactic,” Gelrayen told her. “When nothing else works, try something stupid. You always surprise your enemies, and you often surprise yourself.” “I’m beginning to understand why you people were never able to win the damned war.”
“My drone has begun its first series of broadcasts,” Valthyrra reported. “It is repeating a brief sequence on a low-power signal, very much like a transponder or a distress beacon. In fact, I have it using Starwolf codes. If the Dreadnought knows our language, as certain of my siblings have suggested, then it should find that bait irresistible.”
“I thought that you were going to be more subtle,” Gelrayen said, looking up at her camera pod. “Just random achronic signals.” *
“The Dreadnought is in the business of breaking things, and random signals would already sound broken. It has destroyed a small mining station in these moons already, and it might think that a transponder came from that wreckage. This is designed to look like a surveillance drone trying to transmit data out of system using the gas giant as a shield.”
Captain Tarrel leaned back in her seat. “Now I get the feeling that you’re trying to get this complicated.”
The camera pod rotated quickly. “I am trying to be subtle. In my experience, subtle and complicated look very much alike.” “The logic aboard this ship is amazing,” Tarrel said, and sighed. “If it thinks it knows what it is, won’t it just leave the thing alone and see what happens? If it looks like it belongs to Starwolves, a Starwolf might come along and claim it.”
“Oh, I never thought of that.” The camera pod dropped slowly, then lifted brightly. “Well, I still believe that it will work. The Dreadnought will have to be curious. What else does it have to do with its time?”
“Oh, that’s logic again! It’s a machine. It has an untapped bounty of machine patience.”
“I’m a machine, and I can be very impatient.”
Tarrel had to think about that for a moment. “You know, I suspect that you’ve just invented a trap for catching yourself. What are you going to do if this doesn’t work?”
“Something else.”
It took a while, but Captain Tarrel finally realized that she was being teased by a machine. Unfortunately, that thought did not occur to her for another three days. It amused Valthyrra to play harmless games of subtlety with Tarrel, who obviously doubted her ability to be clever.
“Passive scanner contact,” Valthyrra warned, again very serious. “I have identified static discharge against a high-power shield approaching from six thousand kilometers. No visual contact with any ship.”
“Is it the Dreadnought?” Gelrayen asked.
“Well, that is the only invisible ship I know. It is definitely moving toward the drone.”