"I don't know. He might have headed for the strand behind Starbase. He might have shifted course up, down, or sideways. He might have stopped to wait us out."
Came word of a contact way off to the left, followed by word that it was just a piece of cold matter. Then to the right, before the nerves settled, a pursuit ship caught a ghost of an echo of something moving behind it.
Some secondaries had been out over three days. That was hard on fighter crews. Discipline flagged with endurance. Each contact drew some fighters out of position.
The ghost proved to be another missile. One that had gotten through, undetected till the last instant.
"And there's our problem," Strate told Aleas. "Even though we're not covering a large region, we're not covering it completely. He could fall through the cracks."
They had two riderships and a fighter on passive scan. Turtle kept making minute adjustments with the indetectable docking jets, holding a groove through the heart of the triangle.
Provik said, "They don't care who sees them, do they? They've got everything cranked up enough to cook eggs at a thousand kilometers."
Turtle grunted, bled a little more power into the Stealth, SCAM, and ECM systems. He gestured for quiet. He wanted to keep an ear on intercepted inter-ship chatter. Most was military gabble but he spoke gabble well.
"Passing the plane, Kez Maefele. Sixteen hours to the strand. Shall we take off the tumble?"
"Not yet." Ghosts off tumbling Stealth surfaces were more likely to filter out of a detection system than those off a steady surface.
One of his people said, "Been a long time, hasn't it? I forgot how tense it gets."
Turtle nodded. They had done this often in the old days, mostly going in to attack, usually against watchers less alert.
He tried to calculate the position of the rock causing the excitement. Not that far away. That was not good.
Course adjustments had the rider running straight at the false Guardship. What detection and comm capacity were mounted there? He would not have bothered, himself.
He would know soon enough.
He was tempted to take it out as he passed, as a rude farewell, but that was not a Ku sort of gesture.
Thirteen hours. The fighter had faded from detection and had become one probability point among dozens deduced from comm transmissions. The riderships were fading. Nothing lay between them and the strand but the decoy, four hours away.
Eleven hours. Nothing but probability points on screen. They were through. He gave permission to stabilize ship. "Twenty minutes to drive on line. Five percent." That would not generate enough emissions to stand out against the background of the universe. He would kick it up gradually....
"Kez Maefele!"
"I have it."
The interceptor had come out of nowhere, burning a hole through vacuum, headed toward VII Gemina, running with nothing but nav scan extended.
Crack! It was gone.
"The IFF steal worked." Turtle sighed. "I was afraid we hadn't gotten enough data." It was another old trick, stealing the enemy's mutual identification signals. "They must have an emergency aboard."
WarAvocat was exhausted. It remained only for Aleas to cry uncle....
"Anomaly, WarAvocat."
"Hunh?" The air had spoken.
Everyone in Hall of the Watchers froze, stared with wide, terrified eyes.
Damn! What a time for it to happen. "Explain, please."
Inbound interceptor DZ539, with a medical emergency, nearly collided with a rider. IFF exchange went normally but rider JV47 is supposed to be on station several hours away. Comm check shows JV47 maintaining station properly."
"Goma Maradak!" WarAvocat swore.
"What?" Aleas asked.
"The Goma Maradak waste space. We used it for training during the Ku Wars. It resembled places the Ku liked to hide. When XXV Iberica went in, the Dire Radiant was hiding there. They stole IFF signals, took a dozen ships into rider bays.... They stole IFF throughout the war. And now he's pulled it again, walking right through pretending to be one of us."
But when he ran data from the region, he could not find a hint of anything to support his suspicion. If Kez Maefele had come through, he had done so like a ghost.
Aleas thought, attacked the problem from a different perspective. She input the tumbling rider exiting the Starbase end space, the probe blossom, the missiles that had been detected at this end, and told Gemina to see if the known data forbade them being linked or made it impossible for that anomalous contact to be the Ku.
— 138 —
The rise in comm chatter was ominous. Turtle altered course a hair. "Get me a pod of missiles ready." His people knew what to do. It would be a twist on another old trick. Several began the complicated programming.
Before they finished, the probability points on screen had shown drive sign. "That IFF didn't fool them," Turtle said. "Though they had to think about it for a while."
"What're you going to do?" Provik asked.
"Put a pod of missiles out running the vectors we were making when the interceptor spotted us. On scan they'll echo like a rider. They'll provide an IFF feedback. Another old trick."
"What about us?"
"We'll vanish. If the pod does its job, they'll think we're dead."
Aleas had called in the secondaries to VII Gemina's right and had sent riders from the center to the left. It would be hours before recovery was complete and the Guardship could move to the center of action.
"Contact report came. Right where it ought to be. IFF responder IDing ridership JV47."
"That isn't a VII Gemina rider," WarAvocat said.
"Could the interceptor have made a mistake?"
"Of course. They were preoccupied. But I'll bet they didn't."
Aleas moved ships to close a pocket around the contact. "You want them alive?" She knew he did.
He was troubled. This had developed too passively.
Aleas ordered a fighter closer to the target. There was a chance the Outsider really was crippled.
It did not respond to comm attempts, except for the automated IFF. It looked too cold to support life. "You think they might be dead?"
"No." Because he did not want the Ku to evade him that way, either. Nor any of the others ... He tried not to think about the artifact.
"We'll know once Probe takes a look."
The fighter drifted closer, ignored. Then, "I'm getting weird drive readings. Like they're in bad shape. Starting to move. Turning toward the Web."
WarAvocat was acutely aware that he was hearing news twelve minutes old. Neither he nor Aleas could control what was happening.
The fighter reported the rider's drives behaving increasingly erratically. The senior officer present ordered the fighter to fire across the rider's nose. The fighter closed in. "Can't see them yet. Must be running high SCAM. Wait. There's a drive glow...."
A static blast overrode the signal.
Turtle eased the rider up to the array proclaiming itself a Guardship. It was bigger than he had hoped.
Provik and his girlfriend, Blessed and the Valerena, were EVA. Only they could squeeze into Outsider suits. They floated ahead, on tethers, opened a passage through the decoy's titanium and filament frame. Turtle nudged the rider through. The people outside closed up behind.
Provik and his woman anchored the array to the rider. Blessed and the Valerena made connections so its broadcast output could be controlled from the ship. Both tasks took hours.
Turtle greeted them when they returned. "Good job. The pod just blew. From all the cursing it looks like they bought it."
He went to the bridge, gently nudged the array toward the strand. He programmed the decoy's output to decline gradually.