“Authorized,” the admiral said, wincing. He knew the weaknesses of the FMF from long experience. “Anything else?”
“I think we’re done, sir,” the CO said, looking around the group.
“Get back into space, find the Dreen, find out what they’re up to, try to get any tech you can acquire and report back,” the admiral said. “And do all that carefully. You’re still the only ship we have.”
“Yes, sir,” Spectre said. “Can do.”
“Weaver,” the CO said as everyone was filing out of the wardroom.
“Sir?”
“Stay.”
When everyone was gone, the CO looked at the astrogator thoughtfully.
“What do you think the chances are you can find some trace of the Dreen ship in space?”
Weaver thought about the question for a few seconds, then blanched.
“Effectively zero, sir,” Bill replied. “Do you want to know why?”
“Yes,” the CO said. “Because I don’t think you’ve thought it through. We make waves as we pass through space. You’ve talked about it. Disturbed solar wind, ionization from destroyed particles, even bits of our forward armor that get flaked off. Surely the Dreen have got to leave some traces.”
“I’m sure they do, sir,” Bill said. “And if the track was fresher, I might be able to sort out which ions are from a passing Dreen ship and which are just from solar wind. If I could do a survey of the local area for about a month and figure out what the solar winds look like. But a Dreen… wake, if you will, is going to look like a ship’s wake. Sure, you can detect one of those for the first few hours. But after that, waves, current, wind, they all tend to erase it. There’s a bit more thermal image for a tad longer time, but even that eventually goes away. The Dreen were here thirty days ago, sir. Any trace is long gone. Even the holes we found were filling in from dust. And those are much more permanent than anything you’d find in the solar wind.”
“So how do we find them?”
“If it’s only one or two ships and they’re in EMCON, it’s going to be tough, sir,” Bill said, referring to shutting down transmissions so as to remain less noticeable. “I don’t know what sort of traces they leave behind until we find one. And finding a ship in space, well, space is a very big place and ships are very small. I think we’re just going to have to hope that they’re broadcasting or otherwise being noticeable.”
“You know,” Favarduro said as the Caurorgorngoth’s lasers eliminated three of the Blin fighters, “in between five and twenty kleng this is going to be noticeable to anyone inhabiting the nearer stars.”
“In between five and twenty kleng, anyone inhabiting the nearer stars is going to be Dreen food,” Ship Master Kond replied. “Shields are at less than forty percent. Concentrate on the central fighter pack. Stop some of these Manaeg-spawned plasma bolts.”
As plasma fire slammed into the ship, being disbursed by the ion shields, he whistled for a control to shift some power to long-range scanning but the Blin dreadnought was still impossible to detect. At least fifteen kleg until the ball generator was online. And more than four hundred until they reached the unreality node. The fleet had escaped, through, leaving them to limp outward on their own, with not so much as a shield ship by their side.
As the mighty Chaos Ship rocked under the hammer of the missiles, he hoped that there were no races within five and twenty kleng. Unless, of course, they were powerful enough to save his ship.
“Home again,” Berg said, collapsing into his bunk. For a wonder, there wasn’t a caterwauling of Asian tortured cats from overhead. He had made his peace with Portana and could even handle the armorer’s sister’s singing. Didn’t mean he enjoyed it.
“God, I’m glad to get out of armor,” Himes replied. “How’s the chick we picked up?”
“How the hell would I know?” Berg asked. “Last I saw of her was last you saw of her, being carted back to the ship.”
“Mail call,” the first sergeant said from the front of the compartment. “We’re in commo with Earth through the gate. Nobody’s going home, though; they’re not opening up the other side. But you’ve got Family Message Forms on your systems. If you want to respond, you have about thirty minutes. Then we’re out of this system.”
“What’s the mission, Top?” Corwin called. “We’re done here, right? We going home?”
“Negative,” the first sergeant replied. “We’re going to go Dreen hunting. Now read your mail.”
Berg wasn’t really expecting any. His parents weren’t in the loop of Navy communications. They could get an emergency message through to him, but by their very natures emergency messages were rarely put into FMFs. “Dad died” was right up there with “I want a divorce.”
So he was surprised to see the message light blinking on his system when the first sergeant left. He hit the “Receive” icon and a short message popped up.
“Love you Miss you Be Homeward Bound in Time Brooke”
FMFs were limited to ten words but the short message pretty much covered the subject. Except for the last bit, which was puzzling.
He opened up a search function and typed in the last, puzzling, phrase. The search function was actually built by GooCharn, the Adari-human corporation that had absorbed Google and a similar corporation on Adar. The Adar servers on-board the Blade only stored about thirty percent of the combined human-Adar hypernet. But that was a lot of data. Much of it was useless, but occasionally somebody needed a scrap of really esoteric information that was stored away on it somewhere.
About halfway down the first page he found it, a poem that was linked to a flash animation.
He watched the animation, wondering where Brooke had dredged it up. It was from way back in the War On Terror, mostly shots from Iraq. It was kind of like watching a film clip from Vietnam. The gear they were using was so antique he had to wonder how they’d gotten anything done. No Wyverns, no Mojos, no particle detectors, no scanners. Just Kevlar body armor and peashooters. Of course, the terrorists they were fighting didn’t have any better.
But the sentiment of the piece was timeless and he quickly found himself tearing up. He dashed the water off his face and sucked it up to the end. Okay, now he knew how Brooke felt.
And the more he examined the lyrics, the stronger he felt. She was asking him to come home, but only when the time was right. She was saying she wouldn’t hold him back, that he was “free to find his calling” but that she would be there when he returned.
And his calling was right here. He wondered if she understood just what that meant. How could she? He didn’t even know what it really meant. Except a lot of separation.
He considered the undersize keyboard for a moment then typed rapidly, hit “Send” and vowed that if she had the strength to let him “find his calling,” he had the strength to find a way home.
“No messages for you, Commander Weaver?” the CO asked as he sat down in his chair in the conn.
“No, sir,” Bill replied. “Footloose and fancy-free bachelor. I get an occasional e-mail from my parents, but they don’t even know how to access the FMFs.”
“Admiral Rickover would have approved,” the XO said, grinning. “He felt an officer should be married to his career and not ‘chick hatching’ all the time.”