Wasteland of flint

glare icily at him. The weapons officer became rather pale.

'I agree,' Hadeishi said quietly. Kosho turned her head fractionally, her eyes narrowing.

'We are following Fleet doctrine,' she said in a clipped, toneless voice. 'Which is sound.'

'It's too slow,' Hadeishi said, leaning forward. 'We don't have time to run down every particle trail and false reading our drones find. We do not have time to quarter this entire belt and peer in the radar shadow of every asteroid. We need to find the refinery now.'

'Without going to active combat scanning,' Kosho stated. Hadeishi nodded.

'What,' the sho-sa said tentatively, 'if we broadcast a message on the commercial comm channels, indicating a systemwide emergency. We could promise not to pursue or attack any ship immediately making gradient to hyperspace.'

Hadeishi considered the proposal for a moment. Then he looked at the weapons officer. 'Hayes- tzin, do you think the commander of the refinery ship would respond to such a message?'

Hayes blinked, stole a look at Kosho and then faced the chu-sa again. 'Ah…probably not, sir. He'd think it was a trick.'

'If the Palenque made transit immediately upon receiving the message,' Kosho said, rather stiffly, 'the wildcatters might become worried. The clumsiness of our message could be interpreted as honesty in a moment of crisis, rather than a ruse to draw them out.'

'And then?' Hadeishi was almost smiling at his exec. 'What happens if they appear on our sensors, engines hot?'

'If they are in weapons range,' Kosho said, eyes glittering, 'we disable their ship. HuГ©mac's Marines storm the refinery and we bring these criminals before an Imperial court.'

Hayes looked questioningly at Hadeishi.

'Unfortunately,' the chu-sa said, 'we must operate under a constraint of silence. A broadcast message is out of the question. We cannot draw attention to ourselves with any kind of broad-spectrum event.' Hadeishi nodded to Kosho. 'So we cannot saturate the belt with mines, hoping to drive the refinery out of hiding.'

'Very well.' Kosho, to her credit, did not seem to have taken the rejection of her plan personally. 'Then we will have to scan the entire belt very quickly, hoping to pick the refinery out of all this debris and rubble.' The exec looked expectantly at young Smith-tzin at the end of the table. The sho-i ko-hosei swallowed nervously and nodded to both Hadeishi and Kosho.

'Leave to speak, sir?' Smith's voice was a little thin, but steady.

'Granted!' Hadeishi was impressed with the boy. Most midshipmen in the presence of command authority could barely stand up, much less speak. 'You're sure you don't want some tea?'

'I'm fine, Hadeishi-tzin.' Smith nodded in thanks. 'I've been thinking about the same problem the last couple of watches. I mean – we can all see how slowly we're moving now – and I was wondering if there was a way to speed things up, search more of the volume at a time, you know, and I mentioned something to Kosho-tzin and she suggested I look at the specifications for the absorptive mesh on the skin of the ship and…' Smith had to stop and take a breath.

'Sho-i Ko-hosei Smith,' Kosho said, smoothly interrupting the midshipman's rush of explanation, 'has devised a means of improving the sensitivity of our gravitational field sensors.'

'Go on.' Hadeishi fought to keep from smiling broadly at his officers. In particular, at Kosho and Smith, who had obviously been trying to anticipate his wishes. What a blessing is a good exec, he thought, considering Susan Kosho fondly. For all her cold demeanor, she is a fine officer.

'Well, um, sir – you know we have a series of gravitational field sensors which let us track hyperspace transits, since they 'dimple' the g-field in the area where a ship made gradient. We also use them for navigational purposes, to avoid black holes and hyperspace eddies and so on. Well, a ship has mass so there is a faint distortion of the g- field around even the Cornuelle. I think…' Smith held up a v-pad showing a page of system circuit diagrams and equations. 'I think we can tune the g-sensors on the Cornuelle to detect the mass displacement of a Tyr.'

'Even if the refinery drive is shut down?' Hayes raised an eyebrow at the younger officer.

'Yes, Hayes-tzin, because we're going to be searching for the g-dimple caused by their antimatter pellet storage, not for an active A/M reactor.' Smith started to grin, then composed himself.

'Storage? A/M doesn't mass more than any other particle -'

'True, true,' Smith interrupted, 'but antimatter is difficult to produce, so its packed super-densely in storage – I mean, positive particles are easy to find – and that makes a difference we can see. Well, I think we can see.'

Hadeishi looked questioningly at Kosho. 'Effective range?'

'Five or six light-minutes,' she answered. 'A very substantial volume.'

The chu-sa nodded, fixing Smith with a considering stare. 'Smith- tzin, why don't we use our gravity sensors this way as a matter of course? Why isn't this Fleet doctrine?'

'Speed, sir.' Smith's face fell. 'There's a lot of data to process. Normally, the system just watches for big differentials – a ship entering normal space throws a huge, easy to detect spike – but we need to reconfigure for a mass/density differential.' He paged through his v-pad to another screen of equations and diagrams. 'In this case, we're looking for an object making a sharper than expected g-dimple in local spacetime. So we've got to program the sensor comps to look for a specific, rather subtle scenario. And processing all this is going to take hours.'

'How many?' Hadeishi was watching Kosho.

'Twenty to thirty hours to complete the first scan,' the exec answered. Obviously, she'd already quizzed Smith to within an inch of his life about this proposal. 'We need to extract all the gravitation and density readings from the navigation survey, then build a model of the area within range, then resample with the reconfigured g-sensor array. Then we can see if something falls out into our hands.'

The chu-sa started to frown. 'How extensively will sensor systems be degraded by this change?'

Smith swallowed nervously and looked hopefully at Kosho. The corner of the exec's wine-colored lips twitched. Hadeishi recognized the motion as the equivalent of a wry smile.

'While the array is in this mode, Chu-sa, we will be blind to gravitational events outside the immediate area of our detection sweep.'

'So a ship could make gradient into, or out of, the system and we would be unaware.'

Kosho inclined her head gracefully. 'Yes. But inside the five to six light-minute range, we will have an excellent picture of the g-field and any related events.'

'How long to switch the array between normal operation and this special mode?'

Smith shrank down in his chair, but Kosho merely gazed steadily at the chu-sa. 'Five to six hours for the initial changeover, Hadeishi-tzin. Each skin array node will have to be reprogrammed and tuned by hand. We will, however, retain a comp image of the previous configuration for each node. Then, if we have to reset the nodes, we can do so very quickly.'

Hadeishi gave her a look. He'd gone through more than one shipboard comp upgrade in his time. 'Very quickly' meant one thing during normal operations and quite another in the heat of combat. He had a momentary vision of plunging into battle with the shipskin sensor array out of action. That would be unfortunate.

'Hayes-tzin, what do you think of this approach?'

The weapons officer's broad face was conflicted. 'I'm worried, sir. If we take the g-array offline we'll be partially blind. I don't like that. On the other hand, we'll be able to search the belt far faster than we can now with the drones. And this way will be really, really quiet.'

'What if we segment the shipskin nodes and only reconfigure half of them for this detailed search?' Hadeishi mused. 'Leaving the other set for normal sensor work?'

The suggestion drew a slight frown from Kosho and hopeful looks from Hayes and Smith.