“Once we have dropped off the Syndicate personnel,” Kontos continued, “we will return to Midway. We have no hostile intent toward Iwa and will not launch any attacks while here. Unless we are first attacked, in which case we will reply with all the force of which this battle cruiser is capable. For the people, Kontos, out,” he concluded, saying the last phrase with slow emphasis.
CEO Vasquez would not be happy with that reply, but unless she was a complete idiot she would limit her objections to bluster and legalisms. “Have we spotted any signs of possible hidden defenses?” Kontos asked.
“None, Kapitan,” Pele’s senior operations specialist replied. “The Syndicate records of the work being done here match what we can see, but most of that work is incomplete or clearly abandoned, showing no weaponry, no signs of human presence, and not even traces of power sources.”
“Some defensive weaponry had been installed,” Kontos said. “I saw those completed work orders in captured files.”
“Yes, Kapitan. But those installations are now vacant. From what our sensors are showing, it looks like the Syndicate has been recently again cannibalizing Iwa for weapons, sensors, and anything else that is easily removed.”
“It does,” Kontos agreed. “Is this right? Communications we are intercepting within the star system indicate that only a single company of Syndicate ground forces remain?”
“Several messages that we intercepted reference that, Kapitan,” the comm specialist replied, her voice confident. “There is only an Executive Third Class commanding them.”
“An Executive Third Class?” Kontos questioned. “That is the senior Syndicate ground forces commander in Iwa at this time?”
“Yes, Kapitan.”
It seemed impossible that even the Syndicate, overextended everywhere, would leave such a junior executive in command of the forces at Iwa. But, then, Iwa had little worth defending. “The Syndicate probably would have abandoned Iwa completely by now if Midway had not revolted,” Kontos commented. “As it is, they are doing the minimum necessary to keep it as a potential staging ground for further attacks on us. Try to spot any indications that the Syndicate has shifted resources from here to Moorea. And try to pick up any comm chatter about the situation at Moorea and Palau. Anything about Syndicate activity, or other threats. President Iceni wants to know anything we can discover about the warlord or pirate who rumors say is operating in the region near Moorea Star System.”
After that, it was only a matter of waiting as the battle cruiser and the troop transport crawled at point one five light speed toward the inhabited world. Forty-five thousand kilometers per second sounded fast on a planet, and was in fact impossibly fast in such a limited environment. But in space, where planets orbited millions and billions of kilometers apart, even such velocities took a while to cover distances too huge for human instincts to fully grasp. At point one five light speed, the three light hours that separated them from the inhabited world would take twenty hours to cover, but since the planet was itself moving through its orbit at about thirty-five kilometers per second, Pele and the troop transport had to aim to intercept the planet as it moved, their paths forming a huge arc through space.
“Kapitan,” the comm specialist reported, “we have intercepted a system-wide message from CEO Vasquez ordering a safety stand-down by all Syndicate forces.”
“That is certainly the safest course of action for them,” Kontos agreed with a smile. Technically, CEO Vasquez was not surrendering to Kontos’s demands. She could argue to her Syndicate superiors at Prime Star System that the safety stand-down had left her unable to fight. The senior CEOs at Prime probably wouldn’t be impressed by that claim, but Vasquez was making the best of a situation with no good alternatives for her.
Pele and the transport were still a light hour away from the inhabited planet when an alert sounded. The tension level on the bridge immediately jumped as the warning of a warship was accompanied by a bright new warning marker on Pele’s combat displays.
Kontos stared at his display, baffled, as the warning symbol appeared where no symbol should appear on the outskirts of this star system. The location was nearly five light hours distant, on the other side of Iwa Star System, so the unknown warship had appeared there five hours ago.
And then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“What was that?” Kontos demanded. “What kind of ship was that?”
Pele’s sensors had automatically recorded everything that could be seen of the other ship in every frequency of the visual and electromagnetic spectrum, then compared that to the information in its databases. The answer to Kontos’s question popped up on his display before he had finished asking the question. “An enigma ship?”
“Yes, Kapitan,” the operations specialist replied, sounding worried. “One of their light combatants, about equal in size to our light cruisers.”
“How could an enigma ship be at Iwa? The only jump point in a human-occupied star system that they can access in this region of space is at Midway. Iwa is too far from any enigma-controlled star system to be reached by them using jump drives. He must have been hiding from our sensors,” Kontos concluded.
“Kapitan,” the systems security specialist said, “we are scanning our sensor systems and all other ship systems now. No enigma-originated worms that could have hidden the presence of a ship have been found.”
Kontos shook his head, glaring at his display. “You are saying that the ship was not there, then it was, then it wasn’t? That could only mean it jumped into this star system, then jumped out again almost immediately.”
“Yes, Kapitan,” the systems security specialist agreed with clear reluctance.
“How is that possible?” Kontos demanded, turning to look at all of the specialists at their watch stations on the bridge. “There is no jump point at that spot in space.”
“That location is nowhere near the jump points that Iwa has, Kapitan,” the senior specialist said. “There are only two possibilities. Either the detection was a false one, something produced by a glitch in the sensor systems, or there is a jump point at that location that our own systems cannot identify.”
Kontos frowned. “Is that possible? A jump point we cannot detect?”
The operations specialist hesitated. Not long ago, when still a worker under the Syndicate system, he would have done his best to avoid providing any useful answer, instead saying whatever he thought his superior wanted to hear. Workers learned the hard way that Syndicate superiors did not want to hear bad news or unexplained events.
But under Kommodor Marphissa, and now Kapitan Kontos, they had been encouraged to think and to give their best information. The specialist spoke slowly, choosing each word with care. “Kapitan, if the enigma warship did appear there, then we would have to conclude that it is possible for a jump point to be at that location, a jump point that we cannot detect with our sensors. But it is also possible that the warship was not really there, that the detection is a ghost generated by a flaw in the sensor systems which was quickly cleared.”