“With less than a percent standard gravity between the lot of them?” Esposito shook her head. “Not worth mentioning. Any captured object would’ve had to be moving in a nearly identical orbit at a relative velocity you could measure in meters per second, otherwise it would’ve just sailed right on by or pulverized one of the members of the cluster. The locals would’ve spotted it years ago. This was placed recently. That’s why the locals are so sure. We just got really, extremely lucky the bugs picked a pile of rubble Grendel had already mapped to park their tender in.”
“But why could Grendel see it at all?” Susan asked, but the answer presented itself before the OoD could correct her. “Because it’s not stealthed. We don’t coat our oilers in expensive adaptive camo, why would the Xre? They’re logistics ships, not frontline combatants.”
“That was my thought as well, mum. They probably figured bringing it in cold and setting it on a wide orbit would be stealth enough. There’s no way we would’ve spotted it if they’d picked almost any other place to put it. Just bad luck on their part.”
Susan’s thoughts came to an abrupt halt as the marine at the hatch announced Mr. Nesbit’s arrival.
“CL on deck!”
“Jesus, son, people are trying to sleep,” Nesbit said as he stepped through the hatch. For once, Susan sympathized with him.
“Good to see you, Mr. Nesbit,” she said.
“Wish I could say it was good to be seen. What’s going on?”
Susan beamed. “Grendel’s astrogation department believes with a high degree of confidence that they’ve located the fleet oiler the Xre cruiser has been using for UnRep for its ongoing operations in system. We’re in the process of confirming their findings.”
Nesbit rubbed at his left eye. “English, Cap.”
“We found the bug’s gas can.” Susan bared her teeth. “And I’m going to blow it up.”
“You’re what?”
“It’s where they’re storing their antimatter and reactant mass. Take it out, and they have to schlep all the way to Blumenthal and back to refuel and refit. That’s a three-week round trip. Damn inconvenient.”
“Where is this ‘oiler’ now?”
Susan pointed at the shrinking yellow cone on the main plot. “We’ve marked it as Bogey Six.”
“I thought confirmed enemy targets were called ‘Bandits.’”
“They are. The astrogators on the surface have only had intermittent sightings, but there’s nothing else it could or should be. We’re still resolving its drift course, but it’s definitely somewhere inside that cone. Scopes will have a precise location for us shortly, won’t you, Mattu?”
Her drone integration officer pumped a fist in the air. “Yes mum!”
“See?”
“Where is it in relation to the treaty line?” Nesbit pressed.
“Charts?”
Broadchurch toggled an icon at their station and a red line representing the treaty boundary appeared nearly an AU behind the bogey.
“It’s in open space,” Nesbit barked.
“Yeah? And?”
“Aaaand blowing up a ship in fair trade space is a treaty violation and an act of war, Captain.”
“So is sending armed drones past the treaty line to destroy our remote platforms, Mr. Nesbit. We didn’t ask for this dance, but it’s time we took the lead.”
“Can’t we wait until it swings back over the treaty line?” Nesbit asked.
“That would be impractical, as its elliptical orbit won’t bring it back across the line for … Charts?”
“Ninety-two years,” Broadchurch said.
“Ninety-two years,” Susan repeated. “Which is a bit longer than I’m willing to commit to this enterprise.”
“I can’t advise this course of action, Captain. It’s exactly the sort of thing that could spark an interstellar incident.”
“We already have an interstellar incident, Javier.” Susan took off her top cover and ran a hand through her hair to scratch a sudden itch. “What if we don’t blow it up? Would that make you happy?”
“That’s exactly what would make me … wait a minute. Why did you stress ‘we’?”
“What if something else destroys the oiler?” Susan asked, thinking out loud.
“What, you expect to convince them to obligingly blow themselves up?”
“Not at all. But the outer system is a dangerous place. Lots of uncharted meteors and asteroids tumbling around out there.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting we—” Nesbit started, but Susan’s brain was already moving under its own power.
“Lieutenant Warner,” she called into the com.
“Go for Warner,” came her weapons officer’s sleepy voice.
“Get up to the CIC. I need a rock.”
“Are you proposing to me, mum?”
Susan smirked. “If you manage to pull this bullshit off, my dear, I just might.”
It took them the rest of a duty shift working with their civilian counterparts on Grendel to locate an appropriate meteor for the task. It was harder than Susan had first assumed. Despite a decade of constant human occupation, and many years of intermittent survey missions prior, they still didn’t have anything like a complete catalogue of all the rocks in Grendel’s outer system. Normally, this wouldn’t pose a huge problem because any asteroid or comet that did wander into the inner system could be intercepted and safely diverted or destroyed, so long as it was spotted with a few weeks’ notice.
For Susan’s purposes, they needed a rock in a specific orbit, at a specific period in that orbit, moving within a specific velocity range, that wasn’t so small that the oiler’s automated defenses could take it out, but not so big the booster packs Ansari had in inventory couldn’t overcome its momentum enough to adequately alter its trajectory.
But, in the second miracle of the day, find one they did.
It took a week for a three-person engineering detail to sneak out to the rock on a marine recon shuttle crammed with equipment, and another day and a half on the surface setting everything up for the attack. They were still making their way back to the barn.
“I almost feel bad,” Warner said as the rock they’d appropriated entered its terminal approach and the booster packs bolted to its surface used what was left of their propellant to self-destruct. There couldn’t be any trace left of their involvement when the rock struck the oiler. Naturally, the thruster packs had been arranged on the far side of
