However, what the cold thrusters lacked in horsepower, they made up for in stealth. They neither required much in the way of electrical power, nor left a telltale trail of ionized, million-degree gas for enemy sensors to spot like a shooting star. After thirty seconds of “burn,” the Ansari was several widths away from where she’d been relative to the last course anyone should have seen her on, which would be enough to keep her from getting cored by a railgun projectile, or roasted by a laser beam fired at them in frustration.
“Warm up a decoy and have it ready to kick out. Just in case,” Susan said without taking her eyes off the plot.
Miguel cracked his knuckles. “Scopes, ready a decoy. Hold launch until ordered.”
“Prep and hold decoy bird, aye. Standing by.”
Susan stared at the plot, half expecting the bandit to bubble out at any moment, but instead it just kept plowing ahead at emergency flank speed, shining like a torch for the whole system to see. Even Grendel’s telescopes would be in on the show.
“Looks like the governor’s getting her confirmation after all,” she said.
“Not even half-blind civvy scopes could miss that plume,” Miguel agreed. “They’ll know in a couple of hours that we’re playing chicken with something big and nasty out here.”
“That might come in handy, actually.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking they wouldn’t be burning through A/M like a paycheck on shore leave if they didn’t have an oiler hiding in the black somewhere. Grendel can use its telescopes to look for it while we’re out here playing chicken.”
“With civilian scopes, that’s going to be the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
She shrugged. “It’s a long shot anyway, and it lightens our workload.”
Miguel leaned down to Susan’s right shoulder and pitched his voice lower. “Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? We still have to survive the next ten minutes. What’s our next move?”
“Nothing,” Susan whispered. “We wait until they make one, then respond appropriately. Just wish I had a better idea what in the hell they’re thinking over there.”
ELEVEN
“What in the Abyss are they thinking over there?” Thuk said to the mind cavern at large as he stared, slack-mandibles, into the tactical display. The Ansari, which had been there only a moment before, had suddenly disappeared from their eyes entirely.
“What do our husks see? Anything?”
“Nothing, Derstu,” Kivits said from the husk-monitoring alcove. “They cut their fires and slipped beneath the dark ocean.”
“There has to be something. They didn’t spin a seedpod. We would’ve seen it.”
“There’s a slight … fuzziness, Derstu, but it’s dissipating.”
“What do you mean, ‘fuzziness’?” Thuk took two long steps to where Kivits sat and pushed him out of the way. He’d trained on husks and sniffers before he’d been assigned to the Chusexx and didn’t want to waste the time waiting for a straight answer. One of their husks, unit seven, tracked a small cloud of, judging from its rainbow hashes, what must have been frozen water vapor. Thuk ran the data time-stream backward to the moment the cloud appeared. On the exact course the Ansari had been on before it disappeared.
“It’s propellant,” he said. “They’ve moved off course.”
“But there’s no ionization trail,” Dulac Kivits said.
“Because they aren’t using full-powered thrusters,” Thuk said as if to a child fresh out of their third molting. “They’re using steam rockets.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kivits said. “They’d have no thrust.”
“That’s not the point!” The fingers on Thuk’s primehands frantically danced across the interface, trying to extrapolate an approximation of the Ansari’s location by estimating the mass and speed of the vapor cloud and working backward, but there were just too many variables. Getting an accurate read of the mass of the cloud was impossible without multiple husks providing enough vantage points to model it in three dimensions. The closest he could narrow the sphere of possibility down to was more than a hundred markers. Useless for plotting an attack vector for anything but javelins. By the time they actually reached the treaty line, that uncertainty would have grown exponentially.
Thuk clapped his midarms in frustration and pushed away from the panel. “Am I the only one who’s read scrolls since the last war?” he demanded. “The humans have had these steam rockets in place for thirty years. They’re not meant to be powerful. They’re meant to be silent.”
“So they can run and hide,” Kivits preened triumphantly. “We’ve scared them into silence!”
Thuk stared at the dulac for a long, uncomfortable quiet before speaking again. The eyes of the mind cavern all turned instinctively to see what came next. Xre were very patient, but the one thing they couldn’t stand was silence in the company of others.
“Did the kunji beasts in the rivers outside your mound slip beneath the water because they were scared, Kivits?”
“You give these humans too much credit.”
“And you give them far too little. They fought us to a draw for three years using modified transports and bulk freighters.” Thuk pointed a primehand blood-claw at the tactical display running around the circumference of the mind cavern. “And that human has already thrown a light-spear at us. They’re not out here to, what do they say? Fuck around? Their derstu is patient, cautious, persistent, cunning, and eager to fight. What about everything you’ve seen since we arrived leads you to believe they’re hiding out of fear instead of seeking advantage?”
Kivits clicked his mandibles together twice in annoyed deference. “We will share a song when this is over, Derstu,” he said with a chill. “What are your instructions?”
“Cut the burn and spin up a seedpod for the
