Maybe, just maybe, getting a prize crew aboard a CORE would be the first step toward humanity’s reclaiming control of its destiny. The second stealthship, the Highwayman, was nearing completion, down in the Terra Nova’s massive holds. If this first attempt worked, they would be ready to capture another CORE almost immediately. If the first stealthship worked.
Hijacker was supposed to be invisible to radar, built with every possible trick of stealth technology that the crew of Terra Nova could manage. But no object could be made completely invisible at all detection frequencies, and the closer Hijacker got to the CORE, the more likely it was that the CORE would spot her. In fact, never mind radar. If the CORE used visual or infrared, it would be all over. There was no evidence that COREs had any sort of infrared or visual sense—but there was no proof they didn’t, either.
Hijacker was painted matte black to make her hard to spot visually, but there was damned little they could do to hide the fact that Hijacker was warmer than empty space. After all, if the Terra Nova could track her on infrared from a range of a half million klicks, there had to be some chance that the CORE could spot her three klicks away.
Dianne wished to hell she knew how things were going on the little ship. But Hijacker had to maintain radio silence, and she was not large enough to carry the sort of pointing and tracking gear required to keep a comm laser pointed accurately over long range. There was no way to know more than what the screen and the tracking officer could tell her.
Now came the worst part, the most dangerous part. Hijacker was moving slowly in relation to the massive CORE, but she still needed to match velocities with the behemoth. That meant firing some sort of reaction thruster. Standard fusion rockets were out of the question, of course—they would light up a radar screen like a Christmas tree. But there were other choices besides fusion rockets.
“She should start braking any time,” said Gerald MacDougal. “I pray to God this works.”
Hijacker used cold gas rockets—nothing more or less than compressed-air jets. The jets were hideously inefficient and awkward. The engineers had had a devil of a time preventing the tanks of supercompressed air from throwing their own substantial radar shadows. It was a terrible solution. There had to be a better way. No one had found it, though. The best that could be said of the compressed-air rockets was that no one could think of anything less bad.
But, still, it ought to work. Radar of any sort was going to have trouble detecting rocket thrust that was literally nothing more than cold thin air.
The tracking officer spoke again, relentlessly calm. “We are showing change-of-rate on Hijacker. She has commenced her braking maneuver.”
And now came the moment of truth. There had been no way to know until now. No way to be sure the CORE could not detect a compressed-air jet until they tried it.
“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked again.
“Nothing, sir. Hijacker still braking.”
“Come on, Hijacker,” Dianne whispered, staring at the screen. Seconds turned to minutes, and the tiny brownish dot crept toward its target, a flea on its way to attack an elephant, moving more and more slowly as its braking maneuver continued. Time itself seemed to stretch out, expand.
Until it moved all too quickly.
“Change in backscatter pattern!” the tracking officer cried out. “Beam transmission seems unchanged, but we are reading a new interference pattern. I say again, a new backscatter pattern.”
“What the hell sort of pattern?” Dianne demanded. Backscatter meant that whatever was causing the change was directly between the CORE and the Terra Nova, illuminated from behind as it was detected by the TN’s sensors.
“Searching archives for pattern match,” the tracking officer said. “Oh my God.” For the first time, the young officer betrayed emotion. Suddenly fear hung heavy in her words. “Dust, ma’am. We… we have a pattern match on a radar beam reflecting off rock dust. And the cloud is expanding.”
And Dianne’s insides were suddenly nothing more than ice. She knew what was happening, what happened next. There was no way around it. Hijacker’s gas jets had struck the surface of the CORE, dislodged dust that had no business existing on that surface, kicked it up into open space. The CORE’s radar beams were striking that dust—and if the Terra Nova could read the change in the beam, so could the CORE. Hijacker’s designers had considered the danger, and rejected it as minor. After all, this very CORE had been seen undergoing the most violent maneuvers. Surely the massive accelerations would have dislodged any dust layers long ago.
But no, they had been mistaken. And the Universe was about to extract its usual penalty for being wrong. The CORE would detect the dust cloud, refocus its radar beams to bear down on Hijacker, and that would be that. If the CORE focused its complete attention on the tiny volume of space that contained Hijacker, there could be no escape.
There was silence on the bridge. There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Perhaps the tracking officer should have kept up her reports, but silence said more than any words she could offer.
The CORE started to turn, coming about, bringing its nose to bear on Hijacker. The tiny brownish spot on the screen, the spot that was ten men and women, ten of their friends and lovers and colleagues, the spot that was months of planning and years of hope, hung helpless in the sky.
And then the CORE moved, crossed the distance between itself and Hijacker in the space of five heartbeats. The brown dot vanished, brushed aside as the CORE swept into the space it had occupied. Light flared in the display, and that was all. The display system’s Artlnt faded out the target circle that had highlighted the ship’s position, and the CORE resumed its previous heading.
Five hundred thousand kilometers away, there was a cloud of debris, of smashed bodies in torn pressure suits, of crumpled machines and ruined engines. Perhaps not all of them were dead yet, perhaps the gods of luck had been cruel enough to catch one or two of them in their pressure suits, leaving them to survive for a time, beyond all hope, but still breathing, hearts still beating, helpless to do anything but watch the wreckage and the bodies disperse into the black and empty space of the Multisystem. Could there be a lonelier death?
Captain Dianne Steiger still stared in the direction of the view-screen, but she saw nothing at all. “Nothing is changed,” she said at last, in a voice that was cold and hard. “That CORE is still our best chance. Our only chance. It could be years before another one goes on a trajectory we can follow. We either solve this problem, board that CORE, or give up and die.”
Gerald MacDougal looked over at her, and she looked back at him. After close to five years aboard ship together, she knew what he would say, how he would say it. She answered the words he did not need to speak.
“I know, Gerald. They are dead. We will mourn when there is time,” she said. “But if we do not break out of this trap, find a way to get this ship to a planet, we might as well be as dead as Hijacker.”
She slumped back in her command chair and stared at the terrifying emptiness in the screen, the emptiness where the Hijacker had been. “Find a way,” she said. “Find a solution. We were nearly, nearly, there. Find the solution and give it to the second stealthship, the Highwayman.”