“I think they’ve already made the call,” Mattu said. “They’re rigging for silent running. Detecting three fusion plumes, designating bogeys Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. Wait one … I’m seeing back scatter and particle wake interference off Bravo contact moving away. Possible fourth contact.”
“Boomers?” Susan asked.
“No, accel is too low. Probably decoys.” Mattu’s fingers moved in a flurry across her display. “Confirmed, now showing four mirrored contacts of identical radar signatures moving apart at two-point-three gs at ninety-degree intervals. Bogey four designated Delta. Delta’s headed straight for us, mum.”
“Ignore it,” Susan said. “And ignore the one moving dead astern, that’s too obvious. This one’s sneaky. Focus your active scans on the contacts moving to port and starboard.”
“Yes’m.”
“And kick out a decoy of our own. Send one straight at contact Delta. Make it loud, like we fell for their feint. Then switch to passive sensors and make like a hole.”
“Decoy running hot and loud for contact Delta. Switch to passives, aye mum.” Mattu hit no more than a half dozen points on her display before something deep inside the Ansari’s bones groaned. “Decoy away. Clearing minimum safe distance in three, two, one … deploying.”
In the open space a few hundred meters from the Ansari’s outer hull, three tons of sodium azide and potassium nitrate reacted in the blink of an eye to inflate the decoy’s ballute. In seconds, the Kevlar-reinforced mylar film expanded into a one-to-one scale, seven-hundred-meter-long, parade-float copy of the Ansari’s silhouette.
Its surface reflectivity across the EM spectrum was calibrated to be identical to its mother to all but the most powerfully invasive active scans above the X-ray range. It would even hold up to a cursory pass by visual telescopes if they were more than a couple thousand clicks away. Robust transmitters in its drive module mimicked its mother’s active EM emissions for a limited duration. On the beat of zero in an internal countdown, the decoy’s fusion rocket lit off and piled on acceleration toward its designated target.
“Fusion plant’s burning,” Mattu reported. “Plume looks good.”
“Good.” Susan took a breath to consider her options. “Move or die” had been drilled into her from the first day of naval combat tactics during officer candidate school. “Ships at rest rest in peace,” her favorite instructor had been fond of saying. But moving in the wrong direction, piling on delta-v that Newton didn’t let you just wish away, could be just as deadly.
The two most likely candidates for her quarry were moving away from each other on opposing bearings. The parabolic radiation shield mounted ahead of her ships’ fusion drive section not only kept her crew from being microwaved to death, but also provided a thirty-five-degree cone in the Ansari’s frontal aspect where an opposing warship couldn’t detect the gamma ray emissions from her hybrid antimatter/fusion rockets.
It was the same reason why Mattu could only deduce the existence of contact Delta from the interference patterns its rockets had on the plume of the decoy moving in the opposite direction. The trouble was, with the two most likely contacts moving away from each other on mirror headings, if Susan ordered pursuit of one, it would give the game away to the other one. Even if she picked the warship, the decoy would have to be completely blind not to see her drive plume and alert its mother.
Her own decoys mounted only a rudimentary sensor and coms suite, but they weren’t blind, and Susan couldn’t imagine the Xre would be so incompetent.
She couldn’t afford to reveal herself now that her decoy was in the sky. So, going against years of training, she settled on the least-worst option.
“Maintain position. XO, I need spreads of six cold boomers port and six starboard in the vac and ready to track. Laser array on standby.”
Miguel nodded. “Yes’m. Weapons, prep VLS cells A1-S and A1-P. Launch six Mk IXs from each, cold drives. Designate flights Alpha and Bravo and link their telemetry into our passive sensor stream. Await orders to fire once target is resolved.”
Warner sat up straight in her chair. She didn’t say it, but Susan knew it was the first time the young lieutenant had put ship-killer missiles in space in anger. Indeed, the first time anyone had since before anyone aboard had been born.
Shooting down a drone was one thing. Firing on another proper warship filled with other sentient beings, no matter what naval law said, was quite another.
“Launch flights of six Mk IXs port and starboard, cold drives, awaiting target acquisition for order to fire. Yessir.”
Unlike the drone and decoy launch bays in the engineering section, the Ansari’s complement of offensive missiles were located in the four outer faces of the forward hull in four Vertical Launch System modules divided into ten cells of six missiles each, for a total of two hundred and forty missiles. The deck swayed under her feet as twelve of the seventy-ton monsters ripple-launched into space on electromagnetic rails, one from each side at one second intervals to make sure they didn’t collide.
“Flights Alpha and Bravo in the black and cleared for maneuvering. Data links established, telemetry looks good. Drives on standby.”
Susan considered the plot. They were within laser range, if only just, but the two bogeys were inching out of it with each passing moment and there wasn’t time to get monocle drones in place. Besides, no matter what she’d said to Nesbit, she wasn’t sure she wanted to draw first blood on a Xre mother out here when she was on one side of the treaty line and they were on the other. Lasers were functionally instantaneous; there was no way to know they were coming until the transfer energy was already boiling away armor.
But missiles, they not only had the legs to reach both bogeys, but the Xre captain would know they were coming and would have time to reconsider her order to surrender. She could call off the attack at anything
