"Yes, Sir," FitzGerald agreed, and Kaplan nodded.
"But that's going to mean getting them in a lot closer," the exec went on. "I think Abigail's right, and these people aren't any bigger than a pair of cruisers. In that case, taking them with missiles would be fairly straightforward. Unless they're Peeps with heavy pods on tow, of course, which is sort of unlikely this far from home."
Terekhov's lips twitched in a smile at FitzGerald's massive understatement, and the commander continued.
"Range advantage or no, though, we don't want to be throwing full broadsides at them unless we intend to go for quick kills and risk destroying them outright. And unlike their merchie, these people will have hot nodes and generators, despite the wear on the components. If they're outside the hyper limit, they'll probably have time to duck back across it before we can disable them with smaller salvos. So we need to let them in deep enough to give us some time to work on them before they can make a break over the hyper wall."
"At least." Terekhov nodded. "And, while taking out the actual pirates may have a higher priority than retaking the freighter, I fully intend to attempt both."
All three of his subordinates looked at him in surprise. Surprise, he noticed, which held more than a hint of incredulity, and he smiled again, thinly.
"No, I haven't taken leave of my senses. And I'm not at all sure we can pull off what I have in mind. But there's at least a chance, I think, if we play our cards properly. And if we can pull the preparations together fast enough."
He set down his coffee cup and let his chair come fully upright, and all three of his officers found themselves leaning forward in theirs.
"First," he said, "we have to deal with Bogey One and Bogey Two. As you say, Ansten, that's going to require getting them close enough to Hexapuma for us to work on them. If I were in their place, I wouldn't come inside the system hyper limit at all. If these ships are as modern and capable as their stealth capabilities seem to suggest, they probably have the sensor reach to get a good read on any active impeller signatures from at least twelve or thirteen light-minutes. So they could stop that far from Pontifex, which would leave them at least two light-minutes outside the limit, and easily spot any of Commodore Karlberg's LACs which happened to be under way. They probably wouldn't be able to pick up anything in a parking orbit with its impellers down, but if they're really modern units and they're prepared to expend the assets, they could punch recon drones past the planet. And they could feel fairly confident that nothing Nuncio has could intercept their drones even if they managed to detect them in time to try.
"At the moment, we know where they are with a fair degree of certainty. Moreover, we're pretty sure what course they intend to follow, and I think Lieutenant Hearns is right that they intend to coast in ballistic all the way. So it wouldn't be very difficult to accelerate out on an interception heading. We'd be able to localize them with our remote arrays, and they wouldn't be able to see us with their shipboard sensors until it was too late for them to avoid action. Unfortunately, that would mean we'd encounter them well outside the hyper limit, where they'd have the opportunity to escape after the first salvo, and we'd also have a high relative velocity at the point at which we overflew them if they didn't run. Our engagement window would be short, and we'd be right back with the options of either destroying them outright or letting them escape.
"The only other possibility is to entice them into coming to us . Which suggests that it's time we consider a Trojan Horse approach."
"Use our EW systems to convince them we're a freighter, Sir?" Bagwell asked.
"Exactly," Terekhov agreed.
"Pulling it off would depend on how stupid they are, Sir," Kaplan pointed out from his com display. Her diffident tone suggested she had her doubts about that, but her dark brown eyes were intent.
"I've had a few thoughts on that already, Guns," Terekhov said. "The biggest problem I see, actually, is that I want to hold our accel down to something that would be on the low side even for a merchie."
"How low were you thinking about, Skipper?" FitzGerald asked.
"I'd like to hold it to under a hundred and eighty gravities," Terekhov replied, and the exec frowned.
"That is on the low side," he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "I'm assuming you want them to think we've panicked and we're trying to run away from them?" Terekhov nodded, and FitzGerald shook his head. "For us to be 'running' at that low an acceleration, we'd have to be up in the six- or seven-million-ton range. I don't see them believing a freighter that big would be here in Nuncio. Merchant traffic may be picking up in the area, but no shipping line I can think of would tie up a hull that size this far out in the sticks."
"Actually, Sir," Bagwell said, "I might have an idea there."
"I hoped you might," Terekhov said, turning to the EWO.
"There are a couple of ways we could approach it," Bagwell said. "We're going to have to get Commander Lewis involved in this, but taking some of the beta nodes out of the wedge and playing a few games with the frequency and power levels on the ones we leave in should let us produce an impeller wedge that's going to be pretty hard for anyone to tell apart from the wedge of, say, a three- or four-million-ton merchie. And if Commander Lewis is as good as I think she is, she ought to be able to induce an apparent frequency flutter into the alpha nodes, especially if she lets the betas carry the real load."
"You think these people's shipboard sensors would be able to pick up a flutter from far enough out to make that work, Guthrie?" Kaplan asked. The electronics warfare officer looked at her com image, and she shrugged. "If they can't see it with their shipboard arrays, then I think they'd be likely to go ahead and pop off one of those recon drones the Skipper was talking about a minute ago. That might pick up the flutter, all right, but it would also probably get close enough for a look at us using plain old-fashioned opticals. In which case, they'd recognize what we really are in a heartbeat."
"We'd need to discuss it with Commander Lewis," Bagwell agreed, "but this is something Paulo-I mean, Midshipman d'Arezzo-and I have been kicking around for a couple of weeks now. And-"
"A couple weeks?" Terekhov interrupted, with a quizzical smile, and Bagwell smiled back with a small shrug.
"Skipper, you told us one of our jobs out here was anti-piracy work, and Paulo and I figured that sooner or later we'd have to deal with a problem pretty much like the one we're looking at here. So we started playing around with simulations. If Commander Lewis-and you, of course, Sir-are willing to put a little extra wear on the ship's alpha nodes, I think we can generate a pretty convincing normal-space flare. The sort of flare a failing beta node might produce. Nice and bright, and clearly visible to any modern warship at at least ten or twelve light-minutes. And just to put a cherry on top, we could simulate successive flares. The sort of thing you might see if an entire impeller ring that was in pretty shaky shape was overstressed so badly its nodes began failing in succession."
"I like it, Skipper," FitzGerald said. Terekhov looked at him, and the exec chuckled. "I'm sure Ginger won't be delighted about abusing her impeller rooms the way Guthrie's suggesting, but I'm willing to bet she could do it. And it would explain that low an acceleration rate out of a relatively small merchantship."
"And if it's visible from extreme range," Kaplan agreed with gathering enthusiasm, "the bad guys won't see any reason to expend a recon drone to check it out. They'll be too confident they already know what's going on to waste the assets."