“Focus, you idiot,” he ordered himself.
Academic arguments didn’t matter. Other worlds didn’t matter. Not now. All that mattered now was the defense of Deception Well.
He closed his eyes a moment. Drew a deep, calming breath. Then another. Sliding into the role he’d trained for: Defense Force commander. If this Chenzeme courser approached the system, it was Riffan’s duty to direct Long Watch against it.
He sent his first order out over the ship’s network, his voice mostly steady: “All senior crew report to the bridge now. Everyone else, summon your external equipment and see that it’s safely stowed. Secure your internal gear, and configure your quarters for acceleration.”
Then he punched out through the gel membrane that served as the door of his study, shooting into a round-walled passage. Two worried-looking students and a maintenance drone scrambled to get out of his way as he launched himself toward the bridge.
Deception Well was the farthest outpost of the human frontier in the direction known as swan, named for the still-distant supergiant star, Alpha Cygni, brightest light in the constellation of the swan as seen from old Earth.
The first Chenzeme ships ever sighted had come out of the swan, probably originating from somewhere far beyond Alpha Cygni. This newest courser had come from that direction too.
The luminosity of a Chenzeme warship’s hull was a known factor that allowed the astronomical DI to work out the courser’s distance from Long Watch, while the Doppler shift provided a rough estimate of its relative velocity. The implication was ominous.
Riffan reached the bridge just behind the ship’s senior astronomer, Enzo Hui. “You’ve seen the numbers?” Enzo asked in a low voice.
“They don’t look good,” Riffan murmured.
He kicked off the wall, shot through a detailed holographic projection of the Near Vicinity that filled the central volume of the chamber, and then arrested his glide at a workstation on the opposite side of the room.
In its current configuration, the bridge held four workstations evenly spaced in a ring around the plane of the designated floor. Enzo took the station on his right. Exobiologist Pasha Andern already occupied the station to his left.
Without looking up, Pasha said, “I’m going over the historical record. Transient-Hazard 6 is closer to the periphery of the nebula than any previously recorded Chenzeme ship.”
“Understood,” Riffan said as he shoved his bare feet into stirrups that would hold him in place at his workstation. “Its velocity relative to the system also appears significantly slower than past sightings.”
The door drew open again. Past the holographic projection, Riffan saw the ship’s engineer, Zira Lin, glance around the chamber, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted.
Riffan sensed her fear and shared it. His heart raced. His hands trembled, though he strove not to show it. He had a role to play. The amateur acting he’d done helped him to keep his voice steady as he addressed his companions.
“This is serious, friends,” he told them, watching Zira take her place at the station opposite him. “In our sixteen-hundred-year history at Deception Well, no Chenzeme ship has ever tried to enter the nebula. I hope TH-6 will pass on too, but right now it is not behaving like any courser we’ve observed before.”
“Its behavior is frankly ominous,” Pasha interjected, a hard edge to her voice. The exobiologist had spoken without looking up, her right hand moving in steady rhythm as she scrolled a display on the slanted surface of her workstation. “Why would its velocity be so low, unless it intends to come in? We know that can happen. It’s happened at least once before.”
Riffan grunted agreement. The evidence of that long-ago incursion haunted Deception Well’s night sky. Caught in the planet’s gravity well was the dead dark hulk of a swan burster—a gigantic, ring-shaped Chenzeme warship far larger than a courser—easily visible despite its high orbit.
Like all swan bursters, this one had once carried a gamma-ray gun capable of boiling oceans and burning off planetary atmospheres. It was harmless now, but in some long-gone, pre-human era it had penetrated the nebula and reached Deception Well intact.
Riffan said, “If TH-6 tries to come in, we’ll work with Silent Vigil and do what’s necessary to stop it.”
“We’ve got time to work out what it’s doing,” Enzo said. “Maybe days. The courser is slow, but it’s not slow enough to survive the nebula. It’ll have to dump velocity if its target is Deception Well.”
That was true. If the courser entered the nebula at its current speed, its mass would be quickly eroded by continuous micro-collisions with the nebula’s tiny grains of debris, and eventually it would be destroyed. That was the good news. The bad news, Riffan thought with a sinking feeling, was that this awful encounter could stretch on for days.
“It might not slow down,” Zira said in a trembling voice. “Not if this is a kamikaze mission. Depending on its angle of entry, it might be able to survive long enough to deploy its gamma-ray gun against the space elevator, or worse, aim its mass at the planet. With enough momentum, a collision could shatter the crust and destroy the atmosphere. One courser is a small sacrifice if it means wiping out the last surviving settlement anywhere on the frontier.”
Love and Nature! Leave it to an engineer to find the worst-case scenario.
“We are not the last surviving settlement,” Riffan said. “There are others out there, somewhere, and someday we are going to find them. And there is no historical record of Chenzeme ships ever employing a suicide attack.”
“Because they’ve never had to?” Pasha wondered. “Our situation here is unique. Chenzeme tactics might prove unique too.”
“I agree,” Enzo said, eyes half-closed as he communed with the ship’s information system.
Riffan nodded. “We’ll keep that possibility in mind, but right now, Enzo, we need you to calculate the courser’s trajectory. That will tell us if we’ve got a fight coming.”
“I’m working on it,” the astronomer assured him. “But it’s going to take time.”
“Understood.”
To work out the courser’s trajectory, Enzo had to map its relative motion against background stars—and at its present distance many minutes would have to elapse to detect any motion at all.
Riffan looked across the holographic projection to the engineer. “Zira, I want you to reconfirm all systems. Ensure everything’s in peak condition. But keep us silent. Don’t give our position away.”
She sniffed a little, and nodded. “All systems are in peak condition, but I’ll run the checks again.”
“Thank you.” He turned to his left. “Pasha—”
“I’ve already run system checks on the gamma-ray gun,” she said crisply. “All nominal.”
In ordinary circumstances, Pasha spent her hours studying the tiny artificial lifeforms that inhabited the nebula, but for the extent of this emergency, she would serve as weapons officer. Cool and unruffled, she appeared particularly well-suited to the task—though she’d never had an opportunity to fire the weapon. Over the centuries, the laser had been test-fired only three times. The security council feared the weapon would be a beacon to draw the Chenzeme—but they would use it if they had to.
Riffan sighed, now that the first panicked flurry of activity was past. His gaze drifted over the holographic projection, really seeing it for the first time since he’d entered the bridge. It was a high-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Near Vicinity. At the center, a tiny bright sphere represented Kheth, Deception Well’s star. The vast scale of the projection gave an illusory impression that the solitary planet was nestled very close to its sun. The blue-green orb was shown as a dot, far smaller than Kheth, but still exaggerated in size to make it visible on this scale. A silver wisp represented the column of the space elevator that linked the planet’s surface to the orbital construction yards. The city of Silk, mounted on the elevator column, was indicated by a glint of golden light.