0400 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

Walking to the bridge from the RSG turret was like climbing a forty-story building. Like most small boats and ships, there were no crew lifts. Only ships that were more than five hundred metres long contained any form of locomotion for people to get around the long hulls. The trip was not hard for Murphy, since the torpedo boat was docked to an asteroid, and there was no apparent gravity. The trip still took some time. Every hatch he opened had to be closed and sealed behind him. Murphy called for a report even before he closed the hatch to the bridge and climbed up to his chair.

“One heat bloom detected,” reported Able Miller from the ESO console. “Looks to be a shuttle or a passenger transport of some sort.”

“Are we on the side of the asteroid facing the shuttle?”

“No sir,” Lieutenant Bell reported from astrogation, directly in front of Murphy. “We thought it would be best to keep us out of camera sight.”

“Understood. Can we move to where we can get a view of the shuttle and still be in the shadow of the asteroid?”

“For the most part, sir.”

“Good, take us there slowly. Try to keep us hidden.”

The Skate lifted off from the asteroid and crept around to the other side. Its black hull was visible during the transition.

“Bring the shuttle up on my console when you get sight on it again,” he said to the ESO.

“Aye sir.”

He waited for the camera operators to find the shuttle again. It took several minutes, even though they had a good track on it before. It had started to accelerate at 1.5 G, which was faster than they expected.

“How many cameras have it now?”

“Three, sir. We’re calculating the range now.”

“Very well.” More waiting; it seemed that most of his career was spent waiting for something to happen. He had hoped that when he achieved a command position that people would start to wait on him for a change.

“Range is two-point-two-forty-two light seconds. Acceleration is holding at one-point-five Gs,” the ESO reported.

Murphy put the track up on the tactical view on the main screen. He started to work the controls on his console to extend the projected flight path backward and then forward. He overlapped the cones of the shuttle’s projected flight path and the flight path of the four fighters. He had a decision to make: he could pursue the shuttle, he could try to find the origin point, or he could stay where he was.

He looked at the time—0420 hours. It was getting close to the time when he would have to send out a message beacon, but thanks to Lead Hart’s daredevil dive to interstellar travel, he had some time before the fleet would be expecting him to send the beacon.

“Bell, what are you still doing on the bridge?” he asked suddenly.

“I haven’t had a chance to take a break, sir.”

“I commend your dedication to duty, but get off my bridge and get some rest. Get at least two hours of sleep before you come back. We aren’t going anywhere till then.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said and unbuckled himself and worked his way to the hatches to leave the bridge. Murphy was also tired and should have gotten some sleep as well. He gave control of the bridge over to the watch offer, with instructions to keep the Skate in the shadow as much as possible before he left the bridge himself to return to his quarters.

Three hours later both Junior Lieutenant Bell and Lieutenant Murphy were back on the bridge. The watch had changed, and the morning watch was on duty. Able Spaceman was at the helm. The VSO station was manned by the lead camera operator, Petty Officer Yosufzai. Both officers looked more awake after they had a chance to sleep and freshen up.

Murphy brought up the tactical chart with the overlapping cones from the projected flight path of the shuttle and the fighters. He tagged the area.

“Lieutenant Bell, plot us a course to this area. Take it slow; I want to sneak toward it. Make sure you stop us no less than half a light second away. VSO, make sure there are no contacts in the area. The shuttle should be long gone. From the pictures we grabbed, it looked like an NTF personnel shuttle, but if you can get any better matches from the database, let me know.” He knew he should have ordered that before he got some sleep.

The Skate moved away from the asteroid and accelerated slowly toward the area that Murphy had highlighted. Lead Hart set the throttles just a little forward of their neutral point, setting the acceleration to be 0.25 G, giving some semblance of gravity, but not a great one. The small amount of acceleration made sure things did not float around the boat anymore, but fell to the “floor.”

Murphy checked the hull temperature and the ambient background temperature of the area that the boat was in. “Tell engineering to push more cooling through the hull. It’s time to be as sneaky as possible.”

The black-hulled boat crept toward the area that was deeper into the asteroid belt. It moved slowly and definitely would not win any races at the rate it was going, but Murphy did not want the raiders to know that the Skate was in the race to begin with. As the boat moved forward toward the designated area, his eyes were constantly on the camera output.

“Lieutenant Bell, how long till we roll over and decelerate?”

“Another twenty-two minutes, sir.”

“Thank you. Lead Hart, make sure you take it slow during the rollover. I don’t want the exhaust from the manoeuvring jets to give us away.”

The clock showed 0754 hours when Bell called for the rollover. Lead Hart took it slow, and the crew was weightless for two minutes before the deceleration started. Now the boat’s largest source of heat was pointing directly at the potentially hostile force. More time passed as the boat decelerated relative to the stellar area that Murphy had highlighted on the tactical display. By the time the deceleration had started, the shuttle had been positively identified as an NTF shuttle. The skin accessories and body styling showed it to be a model that had officially left production seventeen years ago.

The cameras had lost track of the shuttle hours ago. Murphy was disappointed, but the shuttle was accelerating at 1.5 G and taking a vector that moved it behind the torpedo boat. He set it out of his mind for the moment, though he did worry why it was accelerating at such a rate. Could they have spotted his boat? Even if he decided to catch up with the shuttle, there was no way he would be able to do so without breaking the stealth of the boat. Without some sort of confirmation that the shuttle knew he was there, he was not about to put his boat into danger.

Another half-hour passed as the torpedo boat slowed down at a gentler rate than it had accelerated. Murphy had changed the position and velocity readings of the waypoint he had set. He ordered the deceleration stopped when they reached 9,500 metres per second relative to the target.

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“New contact!” Yosufzai shouted a few minutes later.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet, we just got a reflection. Hold a second…operators are reporting five more—no, ten more contacts out there, sir!”

“Helm, one-G deceleration. Get us to a relative stop.”

“Aye sir.”

The boat decelerated for over a minute and a half till it came into a drifting orbit roughly the same as the contacts that the crew had spotted. It hung there in space, moving among the asteroids and other debris, silent and hidden, as the personnel and computers operating the cameras reported more and more contacts in the area.

Murphy waited impatiently as the reports came in. There was a fleet in front of him, and from the looks of it, the fleet was a large one. The crew observed the fleet for half an hour, sitting like a hole in space. They floated freely, so they were not worried about the boat’s vibrations being transmitted to an asteroid, but the crew was still quiet in anticipation.

“So what do we have?” Murphy asked when the clock hit 0900 hours.

“Sir, it looks like a fairly large pirate fleet. We’ve seen fighters being launched and recovered from the largest vessel; it looks to be a converted cargo hauler, but it also has a lot of weapons on it. Six more cargo vessels only slightly smaller are around it. No fighters have been seen docking or launching from them, but they have enough turrets to give a dreadnought a run for its money.

“Next to the dreadnoughts”—the VSO put a little scorn into her words when she said that—“are smaller ships acting like cruisers. Most of them look to be configured for raiding, with anti-ship weapons. They are light on point defense turrets. We’ve seen eight like that. There are six others in a protective sphere around the carrier and dreadnoughts that look to be configured as point defense platforms.

“There are two that we aren’t fully sure of yet. They are working closely together. One seems to be heavily loaded with sensor antennas, stuff you would only see on defense stations. If they were operating in an active mode, there’s a good chance they would detect us. It has very minimum point defense turrets, probably nothing that could hurt us. The other cruiser near it, we can’t identify apart from it being a converted bulk transport. The cargo doors have been removed, and the sides have been covered with hundreds of smaller cargo doors. It has no major sensor antennas.

“Around them—”

“Hold for a second,” Murphy interrupted. “Put up the visual on that last ship.”

A magnified image was brought up on Murphy’s terminal, and he examined it closely. The cargo doors were small, only about a metre in diameter, and packed closely together in a hexagonal fashion.

“Those doors are too small for it to mount anti-ship missiles. That ship could still be an arsenal ship, and it’s carrying hundreds of anti-missile and anti-fighter missiles. VSO, continue with the other ships.”

“Farther out are about twenty frigates and destroyer-size vessels. They all look to be the sort of vessels used by solar system customs and patrol. They’re all pretty beat up. None of them should have an interstellar drive, but we haven’t found any interstellar tugs or unmodified cargo vessels that could transport them here. All told, we’ve identified forty-three contacts so far.”

“Any word on communications from them?”

The VSO switched her panel over to the electronic sensors view. “They aren’t squawking anything that looks like IFF. And the computer doesn’t recognize any of their communications coding.”

Murphy looked up at the tactical display again and the forty-three ships that were displayed with red icons. Forty-three unidentified ships this close to Clearwater made no sense to him. Especially with half of them unable to leave the system without help. The fleet was strong offensively, from the looks of the turrets, but defensively they would be no match for the dreadnought squadron he was attached to before taking over the Skate. They might have strong stand-off point defense, but if anything got through, those unarmoured hulls would not last.

The Skate drifted for another thirty minutes, but no other ships were discovered. Murphy had to make a decision on whether to report his findings or investigate more. The torpedo boats were supposed to send back a message beacon after twenty-four hours of patrolling. The expected time to send the report was coming soon. There were too many unanswered questions to make him happy with reporting right away, and he dare not send off a message beacon with so many fighters on patrol.

“Lieutenant Bell?”

“Yes sir?”

“Plot us a course to follow the track of the shuttle.” Curiosity had killed the cat; he was about to see what it would do to a torpedo boat and its crew. “Also plot out the fighter patrol patterns.” He decided to see if he could sneak a beacon out, trailing along behind a fighter patrol.

* * *

1000 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673; inside the NTF pirate shuttle

The four fighter pilots had missed the shuttle they had been scheduled to take and had to wait five hours at the Hades’s Conqueror for the next shuttle out. The shuttle they had grabbed was on the deceleration portion of its trip, and it was still pulling 1.5 G. Jorge had no idea why they were pushing so much. Something must have happened to cause the shuttle to take the trip fast.

“Well, we’re almost there,” he said. “We won’t have to drive those fighters for at least another two weeks.”

“Hopefully by then there won’t be any need for them. I hate those bastardized hunks of junk,” Sara said. They had all changed into standard utilitarian jumpsuits that were in better shape than those they wore on the pirate carrier.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Jorge said. “We’ve sent out another wave of raiders to other stars near Clearwater. Hopefully, they’ll take the hint and come investigate this one soon.”

“They haven’t yet. I’m thinking that radiation spike we saw wasn’t a ship coming in after all, and I was seeing things in the static on the camera screen. Charlie Flight would have said something.” Sara then held up her hand to keep Jorge from interrupting. “I know, I know, the Rakes are good at staying hidden, but all the captains who could do that were forced to retire after the war. All they have left are has-beens that they couldn’t push out as quickly. They’re all administrators who are getting good padding for their after-navy resume.”

“Right, so let’s not worry about it. We’re off duty for at least three days; we should enjoy our time off.”

“I don’t know about you three,” said the taller of the two pilots, William Walker. “But I don’t know what good three days will do us. It’s not like we can go anywhere. When we get back to the Franklin, we’ll just be there.”

“It’s better than nothing, Bill,” Jorge said.

“Not much,” he said with a grunt and settled back into his chair.

The shuttle was not too far away from docking with the carrier. All the passengers filed off and made sure they still had a berth on the ship. The carrier had not been back to a dry dock for refitting in eleven years. Technical faults were often creeping up, and the atmosphere alarm had triggered in the pilot’s quarters several times over the past couple of years.

The carrier was a long ship, about three kilometres from bow to stern. At full capacity it carried four squadrons of fighters, two squadrons of bombers, and a bunch of other craft. Wear and tear over the past decade had taken their toll; the carrier was only equipped with roughly 60 percent of its normal craft wing.

The trip to their squadron berth took the better part of an hour. The fighter bays were spread all over the carrier, each fighter having its own launch tube, with a squadron’s fighters lined up right next to one another. Pilots were berthed near their fighters to help promote fast launches. The boat bay where the shuttled landed was at the aft of the boat, about two kilometres from the squadron room.

The carrier was not accelerating or going anywhere, forcing the trip to be done without simulated gravity. This was made easier by slider rails built into the side of the corridors. A person just needed to grab onto the rail and let it drag him down the hallway at three metres per second. The top of the right handrail always took a person down the corridor; the bottom moved the person the other way.

The four pilots used the shipboard convention of grabbing the right rail, allowing for two-way traffic in the corridor. The only time the convention was broken was during an emergency when the corridors were filled with people all going to the same spot.

Rumours were rife as the four pilots travelled to their destination; the rumours filled in most of the details for them. Torpedo boats had been dispatched to the four systems leading outward from Clearwater. Some rumours said only one boat to each system, while some said they were operating in pairs. Other rumours said that the boats were surveying in squadron strength, fully armed and looking for trouble.

The Clearwater fleet had moved to take up position on the side of the Clearwater sun that would lead to SD-Four. It was ready to pounce on any raiders that would come through and ready to go through to attack any raid in progress. Another rumour said they were getting ready to retreat back to Terrace.

The only facts that Jorge was able to get from the rumours were that torpedo boats had been dispatched, and that the Clearwater fleet had been moved. How the rumours got started, he had no idea. He looked at the other members of his flight when they found an empty section of corridor to talk in.

“Maybe it wasn’t a sensor ghost. Maybe there is a torpedo boat out there.”