“No mum. They’ve spread out a bit, and Bogey Three is burning harder than the others, but they’re not heading down-well for Grendel. If anything, it looks like they’re starting a search pat—” Mattu stopped. “Hang on, those are CCDF jamming frequencies and rotation algorithms.”
“Are you sure?” Warner said from the weapons station.
“Spot me on it. Transferring feed from Platform Seven to your station.”
Warner dug into a fresh screen to inspect the raw data. Mattu was officially responsible for managing the Electronic Warfare suite aboard ship, but it was Warner’s job to defeat the enemy’s EW capability with her beams, bangers, and booms, so both women had an excellent working knowledge of the systems and could back each other up in a pinch. Skill set redundancy was always a good thing to have on a ship of war.
“I’ll be whipped, she’s right,” Warner said. “Not only that, but that little frigate piece of shit is running the old K-7 suite. It hasn’t been in for refit yet. Probably a Zephyr.”
“So they’re friendlies? Confirmed?” Susan pressed.
“Yeah, they’re CCDF hulls all right.”
“Oh thank God,” Nesbit said from his corner.
“Well, then why the hell are they running dark and throwing out jamming in the first place?” Miguel said.
Susan rubbed her chin. “This is damned peculiar.”
“Wait one,” Mattu said. “They’re dropping stealth systems. Okay, getting IFF ID on the bogeys and receiving challenge codes now.”
Susan looked back to the plot. Bogey One’s icon flipped green to the CCDF Paul Allen, a Mjolnir-class planetary assault carrier and one of the newest, baddest ships in the inventory. It was flanked by the Mosaic-class heavy cruiser CCDF Carnegie and, just as Warner had said, a familiar, venerable Zephyr-class fast frigate, the CCDF Halcyon, serving as a screening element.
“We’re getting a coded hail from Admiral Perez on omnidirectional. She’s asking us to drop our stealth and send our coordinates, heading, and velocity. She wants to rendezvous as soon as possible with urgent new orders.”
Susan leaned back in her chair and glowered at the main plot. A hand rested on her shoulder. “Centi for your thoughts, mum?” Miguel whispered.
“I think the map I’m looking at makes no goddamned sense.” She pointed at the two clusters of ships. “An unscheduled, unannounced, planet-wide evacuation begins an hour before an unscheduled, unannounced PAC task group shows up in my system. No one dirtside bothers to tell us anything, and the task group which you would assume is here to give cover to the mystery evacuation takes no notice of the civvy ships at all and instead pokes around dark for a while before deciding it wants to chat. I mean, what the hell? How many regulations and procedures were just ignored? Eight, nine?”
“Eleven, mum.”
“See, that doesn’t sit super well with me.”
“It makes sense if we’re the objective,” Miguel said just above a whisper.
“Veering into tinfoil-hat territory there, XO,” Susan said. “It’s probably just an overabundance of caution. They know Chusexx is around here somewhere. They’re probably just spooked.”
“Then why tell the civilians but not us? The skip drone could’ve sent us the same coded burst. We were deliberately kept in the dark.”
Susan had to admit, she didn’t have a good answer for that.
“Regardless,” Nesbit inserted himself, “we have to answer the hail, unless you want to make it twelve?”
“Quite right, CL.” Susan turned to Mattu’s station. “Scopes, send the Paul Allen our current coordinates, heading, and velocity in a coded omnidirectional burst.”
“Yes, mum. Burst away. They’ll have it in”—she checked the distance—“eighty-seven minutes.”
“Excellent. Charts?”
Broadchurch perked up in her chair. “Yes mum?”
“In ten minutes, go to flank speed until we’ve added twenty-thousand kph to our delta-v, then throttle back to standby and flip the ship to face opposite our current heading.”
“Wait ten, flank speed, add twenty k, Crazy Ivan. Got it.”
“Ah, mum?” Mattu said. “Do you want me to update the Allen with our, er, course correction?”
“Not really, no.”
“Understood.”
“Cap,” Miguel leaned in. “What are we doing?”
“We’re putting a respectful distance between us and our guests. Admiral Perez’s command is brand new and I wouldn’t want to scuff her paint. It hurts the resale value, you know.”
“Ah, okay. Because it sounded to me like you just ordered your navigation officer to put thirty-thousand kilometers or so between us and where our newest flagship expects us to be an hour and a half from now, which just happens to be outside its effective weapons envelope, but too close to make a safe micro jump, forcing them to close the distance with fusion rockets before they could engage, and then casually told your drone integration officer to lie about it.”
“You have a very suspicious mind, Miguel. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“It’s been mentioned, yes. So we’re not standing down from battle stations, then?”
“That’s a hard no.”
“Aaaaand I’m not recalling the flight of missiles we just floated,” Warner posited.
“I don’t see the need. Spin them around and put them in a parking orbit at zero-zero relative to our current position. We’ll come back and get them after Admiral Perez has finished.”
“Right.” Miguel stood up to address the rest of the CIC. “Somebody get a pot of square dog going. We’re going to need it.”
“I’m going to need something stronger than coffee,” Nesbit said.
TWENTY-THREE
“Another husk update, Derstu,” Kivits called from his alcove. “The Ansari is burning, hard. At or near maximum normal acceleration for the class.”
“Toward what?”
“Along its original orbit. It hasn’t changed heading.”
“That doesn’t flow.”
“It all flows perfectly, Derstu. The exodus from the planet, the arrival of these new human warships. They’re preparing for a battle, limiting the exposure of their civilians and drastically increasing their forces. They’re coming after us. We have to leave. Right now.”
Thuk scratched at an itch between two plates. Kivits wasn’t wrong, exactly. Indeed, it was the most obvious explanation for the highly unusual movements within the system. Still …
“Why save us and let us go only to swoop back in a few days later? We were on the wrong side of the treaty line. They were within
