Drakon stared at her as what Gozen had just told him filtered through his brain. “That was a pretty good plan.” Far too good a plan. “I’ll let you go now. Thank you, Executive Gozen. You’ve got my comm ID. Contact me directly if there are any problems.”
The moment her image vanished, Drakon made another call. “Kapitan Mercia, I have some very important information that you will want to relay to Kommodor Marphissa.”
Mercia blinked at him, trying to focus. There must have been some long days for the mobile forces as well. “What happened?”
“There are a bunch of Syndicate troop transports hiding behind the star, the same transports that brought the Syndicate ground forces division here. If they lifted an entire division at once, I’m guessing there will be between ten and twelve of them. They are supposed to be maintaining position within ten to fifteen light-minutes of this planet.”
Mercia froze for a second, then looked impressed. “Nice. Do you want working transports or wreckage?”
“As many working troop transports as possible.”
“I’m sure that the Kommodor will be happy to accommodate your request, General. She’s been coming on behind me with the cruisers that got beat up fighting the Syndicate, and our Hunter-Killers, and is almost here. Do you have any idea why the troop transports haven’t run for it already?”
“They had firm orders to stay near this planet, orders from that CEO whose shuttle you destroyed a short time ago. Now they’re probably hoping we go away without spotting them.”
“That could have happened if we’d stayed fairly close together,” Mercia said. “They could have just kept changing their positions to stay behind the star relative to us as this planet we’re at orbited. I’ll notify the Kommodor, General.”
That task done, Drakon finally sat down again, the chair creaking under the weight of his battle armor, and realized that he could finally take off his battle gear if he wanted. But first he keyed his general command circuit. “To all personnel. The fight is over but for the mopping up. Ulindi is ours. We’ve won. Well done. All of you. Very well done.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Execute Maneuver Tango Victor,” Marphissa ordered her warships, then settled back to watch as all of her cruisers and Hunter-Killers accelerated away from the habitable world and toward the star Ulindi. Only the battleship Midway remained in orbit about the planet, an intimidating source of firepower should General Drakon need to either overawe or destroy any Syndicate holdouts.
Marphissa glanced to one side of her display, where a virtual window showed a dramatically different picture. In that view, all of her warships remained clustered near Midway, maintaining sedate orbits about the planet. “Confirm that the links and false feeds are stable,” she told Kapitan Diaz.
Diaz waited while one of his specialists ran checks. “All stable, Kommodor. The link data and access codes the ground forces found in abandoned equipment at the Syndicate ground forces headquarters all look solid.”
“Keep a close eye on it. It would be just like the snakes to plant something like that to fool us.”
“Yes, Kommodor. But everything is going great,” Diaz said. “Those snoop sats near the star that the Syndicate troop transports are using to keep an eye on us are showing the transports what we want them to see, thanks to that link data and those codes that let us access the sats and covertly mess with them.”
“Everything was going great a few days ago,” Marphissa reminded him, “right before a Syndicate battleship jumped out at us.” Still, she had to admit that the operation was proceeding flawlessly. Reverse-reading the snoop sats gave her warships views of the transports that were depending on the sats to watch Marphissa’s ships and stay hidden. Even though the troop transports remained behind the star relative to her warships, thanks to the snoop sats, Marphissa could see them maintaining orbits about three light-minutes on the other side of the star. The ten troop transports looked like a pod of immense whales swimming placidly through space. “We turned their snoop sats into traitor sats,” she remarked.
“Kommodor?” Senior Watch Specialist Czilla asked. “Is this similar to what the enigmas did to us for so many years?”
“No one has briefed you on that?” Marphissa asked, giving Diaz a look.
Diaz shook his head. “It’s not authorized. Classification Level Two, Special Circumstances.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Marphissa said. “Who are we keeping it secret from? The Alliance told us about it, the Syndicate got the same information from CEO Boyens, and the enigmas certainly already know all about what they were doing. Someone must have classified it that way when we first learned of it and never reviewed the classification level even when things changed.”
It would be half an hour before her ships got close enough to the sun to see around it and get visuals on the transports. Plenty of time to explain things to the specialists so they would understand their jobs better. She turned in her seat to look at Czilla and the other watch specialists. “What we are doing here is close to what the enigmas did to us, but not the same. We are feeding the Syndicate transports a false picture of what we are doing by using worms we inserted into the snoop sat control systems. The enigmas had placed worms into our sensor systems as well, but those worms completely blocked any detecting or sighting of enigma ships. That’s why we couldn’t see them at all. And the enigmas use some sort of worm that we can’t copy. The Alliance can’t copy them, either. They learned how to spot the enigma worms and cancel them out, but they can’t make anything like them.”
“That’s what the Alliance told us, anyway,” Diaz said, drawing mocking smiles from the specialists.
“That’s what Black Jack told President Iceni,” Marphissa corrected. “And Captain Bradamont told me the same.”
The specialists all nodded at that news. “The Captain,” Czilla said, “would not mislead us.”
“No, she would not,” Marphissa agreed, marveling that she could say something like that about an Alliance officer and really mean it. It was almost as amazing as the fact that to the crew of Manticore, Bradamont was the Captain.
“The sanitation routines we have to run daily in all the systems,” the weapons specialist said, “are those to find the enigma tricks? We’ve never understood how they work since they are nothing like any security or antiviral programs we are familiar with.”
“Yes,” Marphissa said. “That’s what they are doing. Do you want to become famous? Figure out how the enigmas do it. They code their worms using quantum-level programming.”
Jaws dropped among the specialists.
“All right,” Marphissa said, “keep a close eye on the links and false feeds. Every minute that we accelerate and draw closer to the star without the transports’ knowing we’re coming makes it less likely that the transports can have any hope of fleeing from us. But I want to nail them without any long chases,” she added as she turned back to face her display.
“It’s not the chases that are worrying you, is it?” Diaz asked in a low voice.
“Not nearly as much as how many snakes are on each of those transports to keep their crews in line,” Marphissa said, “and whether the snakes have outfitted transports as well as warships with those devices that can cause power-core overloads on command. If those devices are on the transports, all it would take is one fanatic snake on each ship willing to give everything for the Syndicate and all we would end up with is ten balls of debris orbiting near this star.”