Finally, the Weston is dropping probes. Those sensor-filled stealthy little drones will vanish into the black around us and race ahead. With a night black skin that drinks up light and radar, and a hull a couple of degrees above absolute zero, they’ll just coast on ahead of us on our path, looking for any trouble.
Anything could be out there.
I pan the view back out to the whole solar system map. The Saturnine ships have all finished whipping around the Sun at high gravity and are now decelerating toward their final destinations, too. Some are heading to Vesta, Mars, Venus, and even Terra. As expected, a few are going to be dangerously close to our Trojan asteroid settlements, and even Jupiter space itself. Are they trying to provoke a response? There’s a lot of ships heading to various locations in the Asteroid Belt, for one reason or another.
You can’t hide a ship under acceleration in deep space, but you can make it hard to tell what’s going on. We can tell the speed, acceleration, and destination of everything out there, sort of. Those ships are too far away for a good reading on a gravity detector, so we have to guess at their mass by drive emissions and acceleration. We also can’t get any kind of reading off those hulls from this far away with their drive flames washing everything out with their glare. We have a detailed database on the emissions spectra of various ships, but Saturn often disguises their emission signatures to appear to be different kinds of ships. Even knowing what went out in the first place, we’d be clueless once they swung past the glare of the Sun. Old Sol puts out everything, not just light, but radio and radiation, so good luck seeing anything too close to our central star. Since they could have swapped drive signatures after going past the Sun and changed course where we couldn’t see them, we’ve got a giant shell game, where almost any one ship could have been swapped out with another. We’ll know when they’re close, of course…once it’s too late.
Then there’s the disturbing little bit that some of those Saturnine ships have disappeared. Maybe they cut their drives and found some way to cool way, way down fast. Maybe there were decoys in the first place, making us look in the wrong direction. Maybe they have a new cloaking technology. There’s no way to know for sure.
So while it doesn’t look like Saturn is massing their ships at any one point, I still can’t tell exactly what’s going on. This could be some new kind of deployment prior to an attack, it could be a redeployment to a new defensive position, or it could be an elaborate game of gunboat diplomacy.
I’m worried about those missing ships. There’s something else that’s bothering me, too: what if all of this was just to distract us? You can’t put all your ships out at once on maneuvers and not have a rival go on alert, too. Especially when major warships just drop out of sight. That’s forcing us to concentrate on looking everywhere. So where are we not looking that we should be? If it’s a distraction, what are they distracting us from?
I’ve no idea.
So, with patterns of space tactics dancing in my head, I get some sleep while we fall into the unknown.
* * * * *
Chapter 3 Ceres
This is the only way to fly.
Space all around my exo-frame is alive. Stars in their billions shine diamond hard and immaculate. Asteroids and other ships are distant points, gleaming in the darkness, indistinguishable from stars save for my intuitive knowledge of the sky and my frame’s supporting systems. Over there, that faintly yellowish star is Jupiter. My home is so far away, it’s reduced to a dot. That blue one there is Terra, where we all came from so long ago. That bright dot directly below is Ceres, still distant, but closing fast. The fleet above me is a constellation of fierce blue stars. The other frames of my squadron are invisible, of course, until they flash and spark with the light from their maneuvering engines.
With light amplification and moderation, the universe comes alive as the dim becomes clear and blinding glare is wiped out. The Milky Way becomes a river of cold fire set with glittering diamonds. The zodiacal light of the solar system becomes a soft band of transparent gold wrapping all around space. The Sun is moderated to a pleasant disc of light peppered with sunspots, reaching out with tendrils of wispy, pale coronal filaments. Arcing over the solar system is the faint, hazy blue and green light of a comet just beginning to out-gas on its long fall toward the Sun. Beyond, the glowing clouds of the nearest nebulae shine with the brilliant colors of emission spectra. Beyond even that, Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds shine with the distant fire of their billion stars.
Other senses I never had before are expanding around me. Infrared appears as a brownish deep red that paints the universe in the colors of heat. Ultraviolet dazzles brighter than any blue that makes the Sun’s corona glow with an eerie spectral shine. X-ray and gamma emissions appear as stark points of light, crackling with high-energy photons. I can feel the solar wind of protons and the cosmic rays from deep space hitting my frame’s radiation detectors as warm winds.
Radio and microwave come through mostly as sound. The low hum of the Sun dominates, but the deep, echoing
