Traffic had been a bit more brisk since the fiasco in the Monica System, but most of the "special investigators" and representatives of the Inspector General's office had already come and gone. Most of them hadn't even bothered to unpack, as far as Bristow could tell. The fact that they'd come all the way out to Meyers was sufficient proof of their devotion to duty, and there was no point actually investigating anything, since most of them had been informed of their reports' conclusions before they were dispatched in the first place.
But business had been picking up again for Meyers Astro Control lately. The arrival of Admiral Crandall's task force three weeks earlier had been as much excitement as Bristow had ever seen here in Meyers. Admiral Byng's battlecruiser squadrons had represented more firepower than any system out in the Verge was ever likely to see, but they were dwarfed by Task Force 496. Bristow couldn't think of the last time he'd seen even one actual ship of the wall all the way out here, far less an entire task force of them with appropriate screening elements! He wasn't sure what Admiral Crandall was doing out here, but he was fairly confident she hadn't made the trip just for her health, and that made every unexpected arrival interesting. One never knew which of them might be whatever the hell it was Crandall was waiting for.
"What do you make of it, Coker?" he asked.
"Hard to say from this range, Sir."
Petty Officer 2/c Alan Coker, like Bristow, was Frontier Fleet, and the lieutenant suspected that a Battle Fleet officer like the ones on Byng's staff or aboard Crandall's superdreadnoughts would have found the petty officer's tone lamentably unprofessional. Bristow didn't. Which probably had a little to do with the fact that he assumed that, unlike most Battle Fleet officers he could name, Petty Officer Coker could actually find his own posterior if he got to use both hands.
"We've been telling them for months that we need to replace the arrays covering that sector," the petty officer continued more than a little sourly, "and resolution's not anything I'd care to screen home about. If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's probably a destroyer from the impeller signature. Might be a light cruiser—some of the piss pot 'navies' out here still have some awfully small 'cruisers' in inventory—but I don't think it's anything bigger than that, anyway."
"A light cruiser?" Bristow straightened slowly, scratching one eyebrow.
"Maybe, Sir. Like I say, though, it's more likely a destroyer," Coker replied, and Bristow nodded.
"Keep an eye on it. Let me know as soon as it squawks its transponder."
"Yes, Sir."
Bristow patted him absently on the shoulder, folded his hands behind himself, and began to pace slowly and thoughtfully back and forth across the limited width of the compartment. Coker was right about the condition of the arrays in question, but the petty officer was also a past master at getting balky equipment to do his bidding, and he had a good eye for ship IDs. So if he said that was a destroyer, it probably was a destroyer. Which was interesting, since so far as Bristow knew, the only Solarian destroyers in the sector were all either off with Admiral Byng or already right here in-system.
"Permission to enter the bridge, Captain?"
Gregor O'Shaughnessy might have had his odd moments of disagreement with the Star Kingdom's military, but it was clear he'd learned the rudiments of naval courtesy along the way, and he was always careful to observe protocol aboard ship. It wasn't what Denton had expected out of someone with his prickly reputation, and the commander had found himself wondering if perhaps O'Shaughnessy was so careful because of that history of his. Whether that was the case or not, though, he'd gone out of his way—successfully—to be a pleasant passenger on the almost six-week voyage from Spindle to Meyers.
"Permission granted, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," Denton said now, and pointed at the chair at Heather McGill's left elbow. It would have been occupied by Ensign Varislav, the junior assistant tactical officer, at battle stations, but it was empty at the moment.
"Have a seat," he invited.
"Thank you, Captain."
O'Shaughnessy crossed to the indicated bridge chair and settled into it, careful to keep his hands well away from the console in front of it or the chair arm keypads. Heather turned her head to smile at him, and he smiled back. The ATO's place was where Commander Denton normally parked him when he visited the bridge, and Heather had gotten to know the analyst rather better than she'd ever expected to.
She'd also locked out the control pads he was so carefully avoiding, though she had no intention of telling him so. First, because she didn't want to risk rubbing in any perceived distrust in his ability to keep his hands out of trouble, and, second, because there was something rather touching—almost endearing—about how cautious he actually was.
She turned back to her own displays, watching the expanding hemisphere covered by her Ghost Rider platforms. As Reprise proceeded deeper into the system and the platforms closed in astern of her, watching her back, that hemisphere would become a complete sphere, but at the moment, CIC's attention—and Heather's—was focused on the leading edge of the surveillance zone.
Reprise's hyper translation lay thirty-five minutes in the past. The destroyer's closing velocity relative to the system primary had risen to 20,296 KPS, and she'd traveled just under thirty-two million kilometers farther in-system. In that same interval, the Ghost Rider platforms, loping along at the low (for them) acceleration of only five thousand gravities in order to stay stealthy, had already moved three minutes past their turnover time. They were over sixty million kilometers ahead of the destroyer, with their velocity back down to a mere 85,413 KPS, which also meant they were only seventy-three million kilometers from Meyers, and four light-minutes was close enough for their passive instrumentation to begin picking up more detailed information.
She waited patiently, since Commander Denton had decided they would rely on directed lasers rather than the platforms' FTL capability. As a result, anything Heather saw would be just over four minutes old by the time it reached her. Not that she expected the delay to have any significant consequences, and it wasn't as if anyone—
An unanticipated icon blinked suddenly into existence on her display. Another one followed, and another, and the data sidebar began to flicker and change.
"Captain," she heard her own voice say calmly, "I'm picking up some unexpected readings. A lot of them."
"You're confident about this, Captain?"
"Yes, Mr. O'Shaughnessy, I am," Lewis Denton said, speaking rather more coolly to Baroness Medusa's personal representative than was his wont.
"I'm sorry," O'Shaughnessy said quickly. "I didn't mean to sound as if I were challenging the competency of any of your personnel, and particularly not Lieutenant McGill's. It's just that I'm having trouble wrapping my own mind around the implications. I guess it comes under the heading of asking redundant questions while I spar for time to get my brain working again."
"No apology necessary," Denton said in a more normal tone. "And I don't blame you. I never expected to see something like this out in the Verge, either. And just between you and me, I'm not very happy to be seeing it now."
"Amazing how we're thinking the same thing, isn't it?" O'Shaughnessy replied, and Denton snorted harshly, then turned back to the updated tactical plot.
Reprise had stopped accelerating and started coasting ballistically twenty-six minutes earlier. During that interval, her recon platforms had reached their destinations, spreading out to englobe the planet Meyers at a range of barely fifteen light-seconds. At that distance, there could be no mistake. There really were seventy-one Solarian superdreadnoughts, accompanied by sixteen battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, twenty-three light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers orbiting the planet.