The picket ships were already racing in to join the fray, their speed well up past a thousand clicks a second with maneuvering scoops fully closed.
"Turning in on jump point. Get ready for uncalibrated jump in fifteen seconds!" Paladin shouted.
Another laser burst hit Bannockburn dead astern, overloading the shields, cutting into the Y-axis maneuvering thrusters, and Paladin cursed as he purged the thrusters fuel lines before they detonated.
He spared a quick thought for the message he sent out, hoping that Tarawa was at least still alive to get it, otherwise this whole damn thing was for naught. "How the hell did I ever get into this business?" he shouted even as the jump transit hit.
"We've got it"
Jason looked up at Vance who had not even bothered to knock before bursting into his cabin. The normally unflappable director of intelligence seemed almost giddy with excitement.
"Got what?"
"The signal damn it, the signal. Come on, I'll show you."
Jason followed Vance back down the corridor into the fighter bay. He had a flash memory of the same corridor, running towards the bridge when it was hit by the Kilrathi suicide pilot, killing O'Brian, the first captain of the Tarawa, the corridor decompressing when the hull was shattered
They reached the end of the corridor, the two security guards still requiring that even Vance show ID and undergo a corona laser scan. It struck him as a bit absurd, here they were hiding on a planet's surface, no one could possibly sneak aboard to impersonate Vance, and the man had come down the corridor only a minute before. But he knew that security above all else required no relaxation.
He showed his ID as well and leaned into the corona scanner.
The guards opened the doorway into the bay and saluted, the door slamming shut behind them.
The D-5 team was gathered in a knot around what was Vance's cubicle, and to Jason's surprise he saw bottles of champagne being passed around. He was about to raise an objection to such an open violation of fleet regulations but then realized that fleet regs no longer applied, since officially they were not part of the fleet, and in fact officially did not even exist. Intel people had always struck him as a little strange and he realized that perhaps they needed to blow off steam like this otherwise they would have cracked under the pressure long ago. They were no different than pilots in that respect.
The crowd parted for Vance, patting him on the back.
"Good job, people, now let's finish our party and get back to work, there's a hell of a lot to be done before this mission is finished"
The crowd seemed to immediately sober up and drifted away back to their stations.
"Here's what all the excitement is about. I thought you should know in case anything happened."
"Anything happened?"
"We could take a hit to this bay and our entire team gets wiped out. I want someone off this deck to know what we've just found out I want you to remember the message but you are to immediately, and forever, forget how we found out"
Jason nodded in agreement
Vance pointed to a two dimensional screen. On the right side was what Jason assumed was phonetically translated Kilrathi, on the left long series of white blocks, and occasional words in English which were partial translations of the message.
"When Geoff left he went back amongst other reasons, to have ConFleet send out a false message which stated that our primary matter-antimatter assembly plant on the moon had been destroyed due to an accidental detonation. As a result no new weapons would be delivered for several months. The message of course was a complete fabrication.
An hour ago we picked up this message from Kilrah to their Hari base and cracked part of it."
Jason leaned over to look at the screen.
Most of the message was untranslated but one line highlighted in red leaped out at him . . . "Remove target 2778A on moon of nak'tara from primary strike list Accident has destroyed target, . . ." there were several lines untranslated . . . "shortage in antimatter weapons produced from 2778A expected, will update."
Jason looked back up at Vance.
"They took the bait. We broadcast the false message on a code we knew they had already cracked. Their listening post, most likely right in their embassy office picked it up and passed it back to Kilrah. Nak'tara means Earth. It means that whatever it is they're preparing out there in Hari is being aimed for an attack straight at Earth. Damn it, the bastards are getting ready to strike."
Jason leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. He could understand the elation of Vance's crew. Their job was to get information and they had just pulled out a gold nugget of information unlike anything found in years. They had reason to celebrate. But it meant as well that the armistice was nothing more than a sham. Though he had assumed it to be so from the beginning, there had always been a small part of him that had hoped against hope that maybe the peace was real after all. This was a dark proof that shattered the dream.
Damn all of them, the Kilrathi, the political leaders back home that had led them into this fix, damn all of them.
"Think we should lift off and get the hell out of here?" Jason asked. "We could punch our way through the picket screen.
Vance shook his head.
"And bring back what? One partially decoded message as proof. The peace party crowd would say it was cooked up to restart the war. A lone burst signal does not an ironclad case make."
"They could be moving at any time now. We should be alerting ConFleet, they'll believe us."
"Son, ConFleet will believe us, but they're the only ones. You've got to remember this as well. We don't exist as far as the government is concerned. There aren't more than half a dozen people off this ship who even know we're out here. How do you think it'd be presented if we go rushing back home and stand up to announce that we parked this ship clear on the other side of the Empire in clear violation of the armistice? The real truth of what we found would be lost in the screaming and protests not only from the Kilrathi but from some of our own people as well. It'd also blow the cover on this D-5 system. That's one of the problems with intelligence. If we make public what we've found, the Kilrathi will figure out just how capable our surveillance is and change their procedures and it might be years before we can break it back down again."
Jason nodded. They'd need something hard, clearly recorded visuals, and even then some people would claim it was a fake out. Hell, the Kilrathi would most likely have to start kicking down the front door before anyone would act.
"So we just sit here and wait."
"Too bad this planet screens us from your friend Paladin. Maybe he might have something by now," Vance replied. "Hell, we're stuck here, unable to move and one ship out to scout. I doubt if he's even got within a hundred light years of their base."
Standing up to stretch, Prince Thrakhath growled softly as he continued to look at the screen which showed the latest intelligence report.
The intelligence report from Jukaga matched that of what his own military chain of command had stated. Jukaga most likely knew that Thrakhath had his own lines of communications, and since the incident took place within a military command district he would find out about it almost immediately.
Someone, almost undoubtedly from the Confederation, had penetrated right into the very system where the new fleet was being constructed. The translight radar sweep could only have been done by a very well outfitted spy ship, as no smuggler could afford to carry such equipment. Beyond that, the ship had been using Stealth masking. The fact that the humans had either learned the secret of Stealthing or captured such equipment was stunning. They were on to something. The question now was whether the information had gotten back to the Confederation and their fleet command. No burst signal could possibly cross such a distance. The spy ship had sent out three burst signals so far, all of them aimed towards the Paghk System, where a suspected ship was still being hunted. But no burst signal had come from that system to relay the message on.