“Aye aye, sir.”
Emission controls were desperately important to a warship. Active sensors like radar and lidar required an echo from a foreign body to confirm its presence; but a sufficiently distant (or stealthed) body wouldn’t return an echo loud enough to pick up. Sending out the initial pulse gave away a ship’s position with great accuracy to any enemy who happened to be stooging around outside the return range but within passive detection range. By approaching Rochard’s World under emission control, the battle squadron had attempted to conceal themselves. The first ship to start actively radiating would make its presence glaringly obvious — painting a target on itself in the process of lighting up the enemy.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Marek?”
“What if there are more than two ships out there? I mean, we carry probes and a shuttle. What if we’re up against some kind of larger force, and the two we can see are just a decoy?” Captain Mirsky grinned humorlessly. “That’s not a possibility, Lieutenant, it’s a near certainty.”
“Mine intercept waypoint one, four minutes.” Vulpis read off timings from the glowing nixie tubes before him. He glanced up at the command chair; Captain Mirsky, seated there, nodded.
“Weapons, arm torpedoes, stand by on missiles. Remotes, status on red, blue, orange.” Mirsky was calm and collected, and his presence was a settling influence on the otherwise tense ops room crew.
The red telephone rang, jangling. Mirsky listened, briefly, then replaced the handset. “Radar. You have permission to radiate.”
Radar One: “Going active now, sir. One-zero-second pulse-doppler train, four octave agile spread, go to jamming sequence alpha afterward. Decoys, sir?”
“You may launch decoys.” Mirsky folded his hands in his lap and gazed straight ahead at the main screen. Beneath the calm exterior, he was seriously worried; he was gambling his life and his ship — and all those aboard her — on a hypothesis about the nature of their pursuers. He wasn’t confident, but he was sufficiently well informed to make an educated guess about what was after them. Maybe the UN
woman had the right idea, he thought gloomily. He glanced around the ops room. “Commander Helsingus. Status, please?”
The bearded gunnery officer nodded. “First four rounds loaded as per order, sir. Two self-propelled torpedoes with remote ignition patches on my board, followed by six passive-powered missiles rigged for EMP in a one-zero-degree spread. Laser grid programmed for tight point-defense. Ballistic point-defense programs loaded and locked.”
“Good. Helm?”
“Holding steady on designated fleet approach pattern, sir. No evasion authorized by staff.”
“Radar?”
Lieutenant Marek stood up. He looked tense and drawn, new lines forming around his eyes- “Humbly report, sir, active is on cold clamp. Passive shows nothing yet, except on infrared trace, but that should give us a fix in”—he glanced down— “about three minutes and counting. Decoy is overboard, running out to radiation rangepoint one.” The decoy — a small unpowered drone trailing behind the warship on a ten-kilometer-long tether — was preparing to radiate an EM signature identical to that of the ship: synchronized by interferometer with the active sensors aboard the Lord Vanek, it would help confuse any enemy sensors as to the exact position of the battlecruiser.
“Good.” Mirsky looked at the clock beside the main forward display, then glanced down at the workstation before him. Time for the checklist. “At waypoint one, be prepared to commence burn schedule one on my word. That’s four-zero gees continuous until we build up to six-zero k.p.s. then shut down, full damping, course three-six-zero by zero by zero on current navigation lock. Comms, notify all elements of squadron one. Guns, at time zero plus five seconds, be prepared to drop torps one and two, on my word. Comms, signal torpedo passive drop to Squadron One. Please confirm.”
“Aye aye, sir. One and Two”—Helsingus snapped a brass switch over—“are armed for passive drop at time plus five.”
“Good.”
‘Time to possible mine intercept, two minutes, sir.“
“Thank you Nav Two, I can see the clock from here.” Mirsky gritted his teeth. “Helm, status.”
“Program locked. Main engine is available for burn in five-zero seconds, sir.”
“Radar, update.”
“We should pick ’em up in about two minutes, sir. No emissions—” Lieutenant Marek stopped. “What’s that?”
Radar Two: “Contact, sir! Lidar registers ping one. Waiting for—” An alarm shrilled. “Something just pinged us, sir,” said Marek.
Everybody except the radar techs were staring at Mirsky. He caught Helsingus’s eye and nodded.
‘Track beta.“
“Aye aye, sir. Guns Two, track beta.” An almost imperceptible thump shuddered through the structure of the battlecruiser as the main axial launch coil spat twenty tonnes of intricately machined heavy metal and fuel out through the nose of the ship. A second bump signaled the release of the second torpedo. Drifting unpowered, cold but for their avionics packages, they would wait behind when the Lord Vanek began to accelerate.
“Minus three-zero seconds,” called Nav Two.
“Beg to report on the contact, sir,” said Marek.
“Speak, Nav.”
“We managed to get a look at the pulse train on the contact, and it looks, um, strange. Noisy, if you follow my meaning; they’ve done a good job of concealing their recognition signature.”
“One-zero seconds.”
“All posts switch to plan two,” said Captain Mirsky. “Nav, pass that contact info on to Kamchatka and Ekaterina. Get anything you can off them.” He picked up the phone to notify his squadron captains of the impending change of plan.
“Aye aye, sir. Plan two burn commencing in five … two, one, now.” There was no change evident in the ops room, no shaking or shuddering or sudden leaden-limbed feeling of acceleration, but inside the guts of the starship, the extremal black hole twisted in sudden torment; the Lord Vanek fell forward at full military acceleration, four hundred meters per second squared, more than forty gees.
Another alarm trilled. Nav: “Full scan running.” Twenty gigawatts of laser light beamed out in all directions, a merciless glare bright enough to melt steel at a range of kilometers. Down in the bowels of the ship, heat exchanges glowed red-hot, flashing water into saturated high-pressure steam and venting it astern; this close to combat, running out the huge, vulnerable heat exchangers would be suicidal.
Guns: “Track beta launch commencing.” This time a real bump-and-grind made the ship shudder; the two missiles Helsingus had preloaded back when they’d been on the track alpha heading. As they hurtled ahead of the ship, a tenth of its total laser output focused up their tails, energizing their reaction mass.
This was the time of maximum danger, and Mirsky did his best to maintain a confident demeanor for the benefit of his crew. As the Commodore had put it in the privacy of his staff briefing room: “If they’re smart, they’ll send out just enough assets to make us reveal ourselves, then use whatever they’ve got in orbit to dump a snowstorm of mines in our path. They know where we’re going; that’s half the problem of pinpointing us. When we start radiating they’ll get their solution — and it’ll be a question of how much pounding they can hand out, and how much we can take.”