Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (43 page)

Jermane had to accept that – Alex was the Presidential Envoy, after all – but it was clear that he was shocked to find that the Envoy held such radical views. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Alex von Strada’s dedication to the service of the League was beyond question, indeed, he might even have gone so far as to call such opinions unpatriotic.

As it was, he just had to accept that this was how it was going to be, focussing his own attention on the technicalities of the translation matrix.

So, on and on, the journey continued, busy with training and debate, but with a feeling of timelessness, of wandering within a labyrinth. It began to feel as if they had been in the nebula for months and might never get out of it again.

Then, all at once, they burst through into open space. There was tremendous cheering as they saw the star-field ahead, the brilliant swirl of galactic centre. They were out, they were free. And they were on the Samartian side of the Ranges.

Simon baked them a celebratory cake in honour of their achievement. The Van Damek Society awarded plaques to any ship which registered a previously un-navigated route – obviously, the Fourth would not be able to register
this
traverse with the civilian society, but Simon made them a replica of the Society Plaque, in triple layer sponge and bronze icing.

Alex ate his on the command deck. From now on, either he or Buzz would be there round the clock. The ship was being held at standby alert, as near to action stations as they could get while maintaining normal operations.

All the drills had stopped, now, other than the routine freefall session during morning clean-through. This was it, now, the moment they had come all this way for and been training so hard for.

They had emerged just six days from the point at which it was believed that the Samartians could detect and would respond to incursion of their space. Exactly
how
they managed that level of detection and rapid response was one of the questions Alex was hoping to get an opportunity to ask. Even the most sophisticated deep space scanner arrays could not give League worlds more than a few minutes warning of incoming ships. The Samartians had several hours, at least. And they were able to respond far more rapidly than Fleet ships could, perhaps even hinting at some kind of communication system beyond the League’s current capability.

The Heron approached on a zigzag course. As Buzz had observed, a heavily armed warship of unknown origin barrelling straight at your world would make even the friendliest of people react defensively, so it was best to make as non-threatening approach as possible. The broad tacking trajectory made it clear that they were not on a direct, attacking strafe. Or at least, they hoped it made that clear. It was hard to be sure of anything when much of the information you had was either ten thousand years out of date or so vague as to be more legend than fact.

Alex was, however, confident in his approach. They had looked at this from every conceivable angle, with a wide range of expertise, and had come to a very good idea, at least, of how
not
to go about this. Anything that looked like an attack would, naturally, be repelled. Going in there broadcasting any version of ‘we come in peace’ messages was evidently a waste of time, too. These were not, clearly, people who wanted to talk. An approach founded on non-verbal communication, therefore, was their best option.

The only person on the ship who didn’t agree with that decision was Jermane Taerling. The linguist found it so hard to understand how anyone could approach first contact on the basis of
not
trying to talk to the other party that it was several days before he could be brought to believe that Alex was serious. Even now, as they zigzagged into Samartian space, Jermane was watching scopes worriedly. He had his battery of first-contact broadcasts ready to hand, just in case, he said, the skipper changed his mind.

Alex, though, was not second guessing himself, here. There was just no point trying anything that they knew had been tried many times before, but failed. There was no information suggesting that anyone had tried this kind of approach. Logically, therefore, it gave them their best chance. Either it would work, or it wouldn’t. Either way, though, Alex could say hand on heart that it had been the best idea he or anyone else on the ship had been able to come up with, and that they had given it their very best shot.

At a far less logical level, however, he felt instinctively that this approach was the right one. It was dangerous to try to put yourself inside the head of a people who might not even be human any more. Alex knew that he didn’t really have enough information
to
imagine what they might be like or how they might think. All the same, he had a strong gut instinct here that told him these people would respond to action, not words. And it would have to be the right kind of action, too, to get their attention, win their respect and open up the possibility of dialogue.

They solved one mystery on day four, when scanners detected a tiny object high above them. A brief diversion revealed that it was a nano-satellite. It was less than two millimetres across, but equipped with nanobyte sensors and transmitters.

‘It’s transmitting at L55,’ Martine reported, and managed to say it quite calmly, too, though that was nearly twice the speed of the fastest comm-sat the League had developed. ‘Estimated range…’ this time her voice
did
betray surprise, as the range of the satellite was tiny in comparison with the standard in the League, ‘0.28 LS - Light Seconds,’ she added, knowing that that was so incredible that people might well think she’d made a mistake.

Alex was also evaluating the technical sophistication of the sensor. Their own version of this – a micro-sensor which the Fourth themselves carried to scatter in areas where they wanted to monitor ship movements – was the size of a handball and had to be visited for its recorded data to be uploaded. Nanotech like this was not beyond their technical ability, but it would be very expensive to produce. The League preferred to invest in larger, cheaper systems. And while it was so much faster, that was, evidently, at the cost of operating on an extremely limited range.

‘It’s a global transmitter,’ Buzz observed, meaning that the signal was being broadcast in all directions, not focussed as League comm-sats always were.

‘That’s a number,’ Jermane said, running it through translation matrix. There were a hundred and eighty nine digits, repeating on a cycle.

‘That may be some kind of coordinate system, or a numerical code.’ Murg Atwood was running code-breaker software on the sequence. ‘I’ll keep working on it, skipper.’

Alex nodded acknowledgement without looking up. He was sketching in a tentative idea on a starmap, working out how many of the sensors it would take to entirely surround the space around Samart at this distance. The answer that came back was mind boggling;
quadrillions
. It was hard to imagine a world having the resources to manufacture so many. Even if they manufactured at the rate of a billion a year, it would take a thousand years to make enough. The cost of such an enterprise would cripple any economy, too – there was just no way any League world would even consider it a feasible idea.

Alex considered it, though. The Samartians had to have
some
method of detecting incoming ships, and a sensor cloud made as much sense as any of their other ideas.

‘That’s a
lot
of sensors,’ Alex looked up and gave Davie North an enquiring look. ‘Do you think that any world’s economy could support that?’

‘If their whole culture and economy is geared towards the defence of their world,’ Davie said, ‘perhaps.’ He was making notes, too, and gave a little shake of his head. ‘It would need very low cost labour, a low standard of living, perhaps even compelled work or food rationing.’

They found a second sensor a few minutes distant from the first. It too was transmitting by the time it came onto their own scanners. This time, though, it was transmitting both the code already broadcast by the first sensor, and an additional nine digits. Within another minute, they had come upon another one, scopes showing that the density of the sensors was increasing as they approached Samart.

‘Oh, I see!’ said Shion, coming to the same realisation several others on the ship did as soon as they saw that data. ‘It’s like a spider’s web, transmitting the identity of each sensor that’s picked up an incoming ship.’

‘But you can’t seriously be suggesting that the entire sphere of space, at this distance, is full of these things?’ Jermane was incredulous.

‘Well, there are indications that they had something of the sort in place even eighteen hundred years ago,’ Alex observed. ‘They would need both manufacturing and deployment on a scale beyond our current capacity, but we know they have to
be
more advanced than we are in some ways, or how else have they beaten off the Marfikians time and again? We can’t know whether the web goes all the way to Samart, but I do believe it will go at least as far as some point where there are ships standing by for rapid response.’

Just how rapid that was became apparent only a few hours later. It was mid-afternoon. The ship was quiet, many of the off-duty crew watching scanners with just as close attention as the officers and watchkeepers on the command deck. The instant that the first flicker of a blip appeared on the edge of their long range scopes, the ship came to action stations – people were already running and grabbing for survival suits even as Alex’s hand slapped onto the alert panel.

‘Action stations secured, sir.’ Buzz said, twenty eight seconds later. Everyone was in survival suits. All stations were manned. Guns were firing up in readiness. Fighter crews were aboard and prepping for launch.

‘Thank you, Commander.’ Alex replied automatically. His eyes were fixed on long range scopes. They were keenly alert, bright with suppressed excitement.

It was obvious from the start that the other ship knew exactly where they were. The Samartian ship was on a direct intercept course with them at the point where it appeared on their scopes.

They could tell a lot about it, even from heatscan. As the image clarified, they could see that it was a small ship – smaller even than a patrol ship, though long and thin by comparison. It had an extraordinary number of engines for its size. The League would not consider it either effective or safe for a ship of that size to have more than twelve mix cores. This ship apparently had twenty eight. It was travelling at L32, a speed way beyond that of the frigate and only just achievable by the League’s fastest formula one racing yachts and couriers.

This was a critical moment. It might have been expected that in that moment Alex would have been keenly aware of all the eyes on him, the lives directly in his hands. In fact, he was entirely focussed on the Samartian ship, trying to get inside the head of its commander from no more evidence than the way it was manoeuvring.

He was trying to imagine how that other skipper would be feeling right now, as they got their first sight of the warship of unknown origin which had appeared, approaching their world. The Heron was ten times their size, carrying fighters and bristling with guns.

Seeing how obliquely the ship was coming in to intercept them, and having a strong gut instinct, too, that it was not going at its fastest speed or anything like it, Alex sensed caution. The other skipper wanted to have a good look at them before deciding whether to fire.

It was, Alex felt, vitally important at this stage not to make any sudden moves.

Seconds slid by in breathless silence. Alex did not look up from screens. The other ship would come into their visual range in thirty seven seconds. By then it would already be within firing range of the frigate’s big guns.

Still eighteen seconds out from visual range, however, the Samartian ship fired a barrage of missiles. Ten of them spat from the other ship simultaneously. Gunners all over the ship tensed their hands on controls, ready to fire intercept if the missiles got past automatic deflectors, but the missiles were clearly intended as a warning. They detonated while still a good five seconds from the ship, a scatter of explosions in their path that did no more than send a tremor through the ship with a slight hissing noise along the hull as they ran through the debris. At the same time, a tiny object launched from the Samartian ship, targeted to go past them rather than at them directly. It was clearly some kind of comms device, ripping past them at L56 and broadcasting a blitz of electronic shriek which lasted for less than a millionth of a second.

Their newly refitted comms array processed the signal through to the computers as ‘kanta jay oris aballen’. The experimental translation matrix rendered that literally as ‘remove immediate destruction follows’ with a best-guess interpretation of ‘Leave our territory immediately or you will be destroyed.’

It was a text transmission, voiceless, devoid of emotion.

‘Exit course,’ Alex commanded, without looking up.

Gunny Norsten already had it laid in, and was passing those directions to the helm as soon as Alex started speaking.

The Heron turned – not too quickly but in a tight arc that turned them around in obvious compliance with the Samartian ship’s command. Within seconds, they were on a route heading directly away from Samart.

Alex smiled a little inwardly as the other ship fell into a shepherding position, keeping station on them safely outside their visual and gun-firing range. Alex could almost sense the relief aboard the other ship at their instant compliance. He could certainly hear the outlet of breath on his own ship as people saw the Samartian escorting them out of their space.

Jermane looked at the skipper with longing in his eyes. He felt more strongly than ever that it was just criminally irresponsible of them
not to attempt to open communication at this point. After all, the Samartian ship was right
there
, and what harm could it do for them just to slow a little in the hope that the other ship would come into their comms range? Or even drop a comms buoy broadcasting greetings and information about themselves.