“Yessir,” she beamed. “I’ve spotted our interloper.” She transferred the feed from her station to the CIC main plot. A red sphere hovered at the center of the plot less than a light-second from the Ansari’s current position, slowly pulling away from the debris field of their ill-fated recon drone.
“Visual acquisition?” Miguel asked, but Mattu shook her head.
“Their adaptives are just as good as ours. This thing could be sitting on the far side of our boat bay and you wouldn’t see it.”
“Then how did you?”
“Simple; it’s trying to slink off under ion drive, keeping its ion trails pointed far enough away from us so we can’t pick them up.”
“But?”
“But we’ve got it surrounded by enough recon birds now that I was able to work out an emissions triangulation. I don’t think it spotted any of them or it would’ve been smart enough to just go cold and drift.”
“They must not know we held back a reserve of recon platforms,” Miguel mused.
“Thank Shiva for the extra capacity we got out of the last refit,” Mattu said.
A recent technical briefing floated to the top of Miguel’s mental queue and triggered a smile. “That’s not all we got from the yards. Get the captain up here, double time. And Warner, it might do you good to warm up one of our new fog machines.”
“Captain on the deck!” the sentry announced as Susan put boot to floor of her CIC. The staffing situation hadn’t changed since she’d pinched off for a little rack time four hours earlier.
“Didn’t any of you get relieved?” she asked incredulously.
“We were offered relief, mum,” Miguel said.
“I see.” She pointed at the big red ball hovering at the center of the plot. “What’s that?”
“That’s our phantom drone killer, mum.”
Susan grinned the sort of grin that serves only to reveal teeth. “I was hoping you’d say that. We have confirmation? Scopes?”
“As certain as I can get without a directed X-ray ping, mum. It still doesn’t know it’s been spotted, didn’t think it would be prudent to tell it.”
“Good thinking. How long have we been tracking it?”
“Less than five minutes,” Miguel answered. “I thought this might be a good time to test one of our new toys.”
Susan arched an eyebrow. “The fog machine?”
“The fog machine.”
“Risky. Probably ill-advised. The suits will be angry we rushed it into deployment.”
“So, warm one up?” her XO said.
“Would be an awful waste not to.”
“Already in the tube, mum,” Warner announced.
“It’s like I don’t even need to be here,” Susan announced with mock indignation.
“CL on deck!”
“God dammit!” Nesbit bellowed from underneath a bird’s nest of mangled hair, his lapel-less suit jacket forgotten in his cabin. “Twice in one day, Kamala? That’s a formal protest.”
“I only just arrived myself, Mr. Nesbit, I assure you. Now, I’ll have to ask you to control your temper on my bridge. We’re still in an active combat zone, and…” She pointed a slender finger at the plot. “… we’ve got something on the hook.”
Nesbit’s eyes flitted over to the red icon and locked on. “Is that—Is that the hunter/killer?”
“No other reason for it to be hanging around the crime scene,” Miguel said.
“It’s not, you know…” Nesbit adjusted his shirt collar. “We’re not at risk, right?”
“Not at all. It can hurt our drones, but it’s a mosquito to the Ansari’s elephant.”
“And I was just about to swat it,” Susan said. “So, Mr. Nesbit, if you could observe from over to the side, please.”
“Hmm? Oh, right. Yes, of course.” Nesbit stepped into the hatchway, as if poised to make a quick escape if things didn’t go as smoothly as Susan’s quiet confidence promised they would. “I’ll just … be right here.”
“Excellent. Lieutenant Warner, isn’t there supposed to be a fog rolling in?”
“Ready and waiting, mum.”
“Excellent. XO, live fire is authorized. We’re going for a hot-zone field test of the CLVL Mk … what was this damned thing, Mk II, III?”
“III, mum,” Miguel said.
“Mk III. Fire when ready.”
“Weapons officer, fire the CLVL,” Miguel shouted.
“Firing CLVL, sir.”
Somewhere deep within Ansari’s quarter-million-ton mass, a single, five-meter-long missile accelerated along electromagnetic rails to three hundred meters per second and was thrown clear into the harsh vacuum, cold, and radiation of space. In accordance with Newton, the great ship lurched sideways almost imperceptibly in response to the toss. Station-keeping thrusters fired automatically to cancel the movement.
“CLVL away,” Warner announced. “Internal tracking has acquired the target. Clearing safe minimum distance. Fusion rocket coming online. Missile is burning hot. Man, look at the bitch go.…”
The Communications Laser Vector Locator Mk III was a weapon tailored for a singular, limited purpose. Indeed, it would be difficult to categorize it as a weapon at all if it weren’t for modifications added to the Mk III model after trials of the Mk I and II units. It was the sort of military appropriations project that only ever made it from drunken symposium “what if” conversation to deployment if you had a lot of bored engineers with absurd budgets looking for something to do with their time.
Fired from a standard counter-missile launcher, and encapsulated inside a standard CM casing, guidance system, and fusion-drive rocket, the CLVL deviated from its defensive brethren only in its warhead and purpose. Instead of tracking incoming ship-killer missiles and blowing them out of space before they could harm Mother, the CLVL tracked hostile recon drones and illuminated the way to their mother.
Seven seconds after launch, and the CLVL was already accelerating at nine gravities, piling on velocity with every passing moment. Its internal radar and external telemetry feed from Mother both pointed it in the general direction of the target a few tens of thousands of kilometers ahead. An ablative conical shield acting as the mounting plate for its fusion rocket
