The inactive population had grown as welclass="underline" more people in cold sleep, and many kept only as library records.
The orbital construction yards remained dormant, their last products the twin warships, now more than eight centuries old.
A long untroubled time.
But the DI would not have wakened her only to say that all was well.
“Get to it,” she said, wiping the last of the mucus off her smooth brown skin. “What’s gone wrong?”
The DI told her of the Chenzeme courser. In its reassuring voice it said:
*The warship’s heading is still being determined. It is not yet known if it will enter the Deception Well system. But there is an additional threat. Gravitational sensors have detected faint perturbations approaching this sector of the system periphery. These signals are consistent with known effects generated by propulsion reefs, suggesting the presence of an inbound swarm of artificial objects, estimated six in number.
Fear shot through her, bitter cold. “Give me details. What kind of objects are we talking about?”
*Unknown. The telescopes have been unable to resolve an object in any wavelength.
So the objects were stealthed. They had to be weapons. What else could they be? Running silent and dark.
“Has there been an order for a radar sweep?” she asked, knowing her revival would have required nearly half an hour following the initial alert. Time enough for the bridge crew to take action.
*Negative. That strategy is presently under discussion.
Despite her lack of any official position, Clemantine intended to be part of that discussion. Caution had always been the guiding principle of their little civilization at Deception Well. Caution, always—and they were a long-lived people. Change came slowly. She didn’t doubt that even now someone on the bridge was insisting that using radar was a mistake, that the courser would detect it, and interpret it as confirmation that some fragment of a technological civilization still existed in the Well, while passive observation would give away nothing.
But we are not hidden from any who bother to look!
Clemantine intended to argue for aggressive action. Every Chenzeme encounter recorded in their broken and fragmented histories—whether with courser or swan burster or plague—was a testament to the ruthless nature of the Chenzeme killing machines. It must be assumed the stealthed objects were associated with the courser—and anything associated with the courser had to be a weapon aimed against them.
It was up to the crew of Long Watch to locate and destroy the intruding swarm before it could deliver its payload in-system.
Clemantine looked around to find freshly compiled clothing budding off the walls. Puffs of air propelled the clothes toward her. She dressed quickly in a gray-green shirt with a patterned weave and dark-gray leggings—surprised and grateful at the return of such a simple, practical fashion. She ran her palms over her scalp, smoothing black hair that had been modified at the roots to never grow to more than a stubble. Then she kicked at the wall, propelling her muscular body toward the door.
“Open an audio channel to the bridge,” she told the DI. “I want to hear what’s going on.”
Chapter
2
Like Long Watch, Deception Well’s array of telescopes orbited on the periphery of the system, beyond the nebula’s obscuring dust. They formed a great circle, so far from the central star a single orbit required two and a half centuries to complete.
Riffan had pursued his position aboard Long Watch to gain access to those telescopes. He’d undertaken the requisite two years of Defense Force training to earn time on them and he’d used every minute he’d been allotted.
Half his telescope time had gone to searching the stellar frontier. The other half he’d used to look much farther back along the route of human migration, turning the lenses toward that distant region of space known as the Hallowed Vasties, where the human species had begun.
Great civilizations had once existed there, but all observational evidence suggested those civilizations were gone, lost in a catastrophic collapse centuries ago, though they were so far away no one knew what had happened or what might be left. No one had gone back to look because the resources of the frontier had been consumed in the long defensive struggle against the Chenzeme’s robotic ships.
Riffan, gazing at the projected line of unidentified objects on track to enter the nebula, could no longer doubt he was about to engage in an action in that war.
His gaze shifted to take in the span separating Long Watch from Deception Well. Nearly six light-hours lay between them. It would be hours more before the security council even knew there was a threat. Riffan could not receive timely orders or advice. Whatever action he took he would take under his own authority, and the fate of his people could very well depend on the choices he made over the next few hours.
He ought to be frantic under that burden, on the edge of meltdown, yet he felt strangely detached. In shock, he supposed. He was aware of being afraid—muscles taut, heart running in a giddy beat, his breathing a little ragged—but as he weighed the array of threats they faced his mind felt clear.
Despite the known hazard of the luminous courser and the potential threat of a hypothetical dark twin, the line of six undefined objects worried him most.
The Defense Force training they’d all undergone had covered every known means of Chenzeme attack, but had failed to describe an attack like this one. Pasha had searched the library, seeking any mention, any hint of such a phenomenon, but she’d found nothing so far.
“Working hypothesis,” Riffan said aloud, his voice trembling only a little. He gestured at the orange lines marking the widely separated paths of the anomalies. “These objects originated with the courser but are now independent of it, powered by their own zero-point propulsion reefs. They are likely small, stealthed, designed to penetrate the nebula while carrying some specialized weapon of unknown capabilities.”
“That ‘unknown’ aspect,” Pasha said heavily. “That part’s brutal. Is it unknown because it’s new? Never been used against anyone in our branch of history? Or is it unknown because no one survived the encounter?”
“Right,” Riffan said.
History was understood to branch. Given the distances between settled worlds there had never been much trade in information and after the war with the Chenzeme had gotten underway there had been none. So the history they possessed was only that branch lived by their ancestors. Distant worlds around the frontier would have their own legacies—if those worlds still survived.
Many worlds had not—a stark fact that compelled Riffan to say, “It doesn’t matter which it is. Either way, we do what is necessary—whatever is necessary—to prevent the devices from reaching the nebula.”
He looked across the chamber to Zira. “If you could get a DI working on navigational options. Develop a course that will bring us within effective range of the intruding devices, optimized so we can hit all of them over the smallest possible span of time. I don’t want to have to chase them down.”
She drew back, looking horrified at this request. “Riffan, if we move the ship while the courser is in position to observe us, that could give it incentive to come in-system.”
“Right,” Riffan said again. “I understand that and I agree it’s a risk.” He realized he was responding as an academic rather than a military officer, but given Zira’s obvious emotional fragility he thought that might be best. “We are a warship,” he reminded her. “We have fire power. We were designed to take on the Chenzeme.” He called on his acting skills again, making sure to sound confident—though neither Long Watch nor Silent Vigil had ever been tested in battle. “Anyway,” he added quietly, “if there’s a dark courser already in-system, we need to draw it out.”