“Swing set, or the warehouse,” Miguel said.
“Pardon?”
“Sorry, mum. When I was a kid in Recife, we had rules for different kinds of fights. If you needed to defend your honor, you did it by the swing set during recess where the teachers would break it up before anything got out of hand. If you demanded blood, you met behind the old warehouse after school let out.”
“Did you meet behind the warehouse a lot, Miguel?”
“Only once,” he said solemnly. “No one wanted to meet me there after that.”
Susan realized in that moment that her reserved, polite XO probably had tattoos under his uniform that would break all sorts of fleet regs. “So what’s your advice for our upstart friends here? Swing set, or the warehouse?”
“Swing set should do. No blood has been spilled. This is all still for the sake of appearances.”
“So it is. Helm, reduce our acceleration to intercept Bandit One on our side of the Red Line.”
“By how far, mum?” Broadchurch inquired.
“Whatever distance you think long enough to hold up under a board of inquiry.”
“One hundred klicks it is, mum.”
Susan smirked as she felt the acceleration change as a slight easing of pressure on the balls of her feet. At this distance, the Xre would be aware of any changes they made in course or speed in less than half a second. Susan watched the plot carefully to see if cutting her accel prompted any change or adjustment on the part of her opponent, but they just kept barreling forward, throwing antimatter into the furnaces at their tail.
It wasn’t just dangerous, it was wasteful as hell. Susan got nervous whenever her antimatter stores dropped below eighty percent and either started looking around for a place to top off her tanks, or call in a fleet oiler for an UnRep. Fortunately, she had a ready supply of both in orbit around Grendel. But the Xre ship didn’t exactly have docking privileges at a CCDF antimatter factory, and the nearest Xre-controlled system was almost three dozen light-years away.
Either their new supercruiser was built with simply ridiculous endurance in mind, which might explain some of its size, or they had their own refueling ship or even a forward operating depot hiding deeper in the system.
Or, they didn’t expect to be coming home.…
Susan swallowed hard. Watching Bandit One’s blinking red icon barreling toward her position, it was a disquieting thought, but it didn’t fit the facts. They’d been hiding at the edges of the system for a month already, at least since the Ansari had lost its first drone. They needed to be thoughtful and meticulous to stay in the shadows. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the fog machine giving Susan the edge, they’d probably still be prowling the system with hunter/killer drones slowly and methodically eroding her recon platform fleet. And they’d been downright devious in the ensuing escape. That wasn’t the modus operandi of a kamikaze mission.
But then why the hell were they on an emergency burn now? It just didn’t make any sort of tactical sense. She was missing some important part of their thinking. Or someone else’s thinking. Lord knew ship captains sometimes had to make the best out of bullshit orders from on high. That was probably universal.
“Why are they still under emergency burn?” Susan finally asked aloud. “It’s obvious now we’re not rising to the bait. Why keep burning A/M?”
“Maybe they’re holding it a little longer, hoping to call our bluff,” Miguel suggested. “They burn up another couple minutes of A/M pretending to be serious, we second-guess ourselves enough to change our minds and run out there.”
“Maybe…” Susan crossed her legs and leaned an elbow on her knee. “Or maybe they have a resupply floating around out there and don’t care about the fuel burn. They’re only trying to look desperate.” Her hands absently rubbed at the top of her legs as she chewed on the multidimensional chess moves lying before her. “Cut our accel to zero. Go on the drift. Quick Quiet. We’re passive in five.”
“Charts, blow out our candles! Scopes, Quick Quiet!” Miguel repeated her orders, then keyed into the 1MC. “All hands, Quick Quiet, Quick Quiet. This is not a drill.”
Everyone grabbed the crash-webbing built into their chairs and buckled up in anticipation of the disappearance of gravity. Overhead lights shut down, replaced by the green glow of phosphorescent lights. EM dark was only the first level of emissions dampening. It meant shutting down all active sensor arrays and radio communications. Quick Quiet was the next level, and meant cutting power to all noncombat systems to reduce the ship’s electromagnetic signature further still.
There was a third level. Blackout. Which was exactly what it sounded like. All electrical activity onboard ceased except for minimal life support. The ship became a hole in space, utterly defenseless, its survival dependent entirely on avoiding discovery.
Nobody ever wanted to go into blackout.
“Accel zeroed out, fusion rockets at idle,” Broadchurch echoed even as the sensation of weightlessness washed over everyone present. The great nuclear fires at the tail end of the ship died away, leaving her to coast on what momentum she’d already built.
“Quick Quiet,” Mattu answered. “Active radar and lidar arrays powered down and on standby. Telescopes and receivers only.”
“Give me a burn to starboard minus five degrees,” Susan said conversationally, “Cold thrusters only, twenty-percent capacity. Just enough to get us out of the way of any railgun rounds they might have just fired against our last known course and heading.”
“Charts, cold thruster burn to starboard minus five. Twenty percent for thirty seconds.”
“Cold thrust starboard minus five for thirty ticks at one-fifth, aye sir.”
At eight points on the outside of the Ansari’s hull, highly
