“Stay on this line, Countermeasures.” Wolf hit a touchpad and cut his microphone. “Beadle. Tell me. What are the countermeasures for this ship? What will happen? What will we see?”
“Well, sir, we will commence by firing chaff bombs.”
“Chaff bombs? What are these, please?”
“Chaff is small strips of aluminized plastic, highly reflective to radar. A very old defense against radar systems. The ship launches the bombs, which move out ahead of the cargo carrier and explode, producing a cloud of chaff. That blinds the CORE’s radar. Then the ship fires a cluster of decoys, each designed to display a false radar image that mimics the ship’s. While the CORE is blinded, the decoys and the cargo craft all maneuver. The decoys try and draw the CORE off, get it to attack them instead of the ship.”
“And this will work? This will protect the ship?”
Joanne looked at Wolf Bernhardt, looked him in the eye, knowing the expression on her own face was the answer he did not want. Just for a heartbeat, the mask fell. All the fear, the strain, the guilt shone through. Then, just as fast, all trace of emotion vanished. “We don’t know, sir,” she said. “In theory, it ought to. In practice, it’s a rush job. We cobbled the system together in a hurry—and the COREs are fast and powerful. My guess would be that—”
“Yes? Yes? Your guess would be what?”
“That the CORE will be agile enough to smash the decoys and the ship long before the ship can get out of range. Even if the ship escapes for now, there’s nothing to keep the CORE from making a second pass.”
The mask flickered once more, but this time it did not fail. “Thank you, Beadle. I appreciate your candor. Now let us hope that you are wrong.”
Yuri Sakalov woke from fitful slumber. Some sort of noise, some vibration transmitted through the ship’s hull, had awakened him. There it was again, a muffled, far-off thud. Something being ejected off the ship, out into space? What the devil was—
Then an alarm sounded, and a mechanical voice blared out of the speaker at him. “WARNING. WARNING. ACCELERATION WARNING. RESTRAINT SYSTEM ACTIVATION. MAKE SURE ARMS AND LEGS ARE IN RESTRAINT POSITION.”
It took Sakalov a moment to remember that meant making sure his arms weren’t pinned to his body by the airbags. His arms had been half-floating over his body as he slept, and he pulled them back to his sides just as the bags inflated, grasping him tight. The neck restraints filled, forcing him to hold his head straight.
He felt a new vibration and a sharp, high hissing noise. The attitude control jets, he realized. His head was pressed down into the padding, and slightly lighter pressure held his feet. The aft port and forward starboard thrusters, he decided. Setting the ship into an end-over-end spin. Then the hissing noise cut off, and the pressure stopped. Was that what all the fuss was about? That one little tap on the jets. There had been no need to—
But then the main engines roared to life, slamming him down into the padding with incredible force. Sakalov gasped, the wind knocked out of him. It had to be at least eight gees. Why in the world would the ship need that hard a kick? It took him a moment to realize the attitude rockets hadn’t fired a second time to counteract the rotation caused by the first burn. That meant the ship was still under that end-over-end spin. But firing the engines without the ship being stable on all three axes meant it had to be corkscrewing all over the sky. What possible reason could there be for such an insane maneuver?
And then he knew. He knew. And in that moment, with the engines still roaring, the acceleration still crushing him into the padding, his body cocooned in the restraint airbags, Yuri Sakalov was suddenly at peace.
Calm. He felt a remarkable calmness that surprised him even as he felt it.
And then he understood. It was the certainty of the thing. For the first time since the Charonians had appeared and stolen the Earth for their own mysterious reasons, there was something certain, clear, definite, in his life. And that was a great comfort. Even if the certain thing was his own death.
Suddenly, a cloud of blinding-bright reflectance burst into being in the Guardian’s radar sense, dead ahead, just in front of its target. The target itself vanished in the glare, completely hidden from view by the shimmering mass as it swelled to many times the Guardian’s own size. For a brief instant, the Guardian knew fear, thinking the cloud was as solid as it seemed, that the Guardian would smash itself into it, be reduced to a mass of useless rubble, dying wastefully, accomplishing nothing. It decelerated violently, prepared for evasive action.
But the cloud continued to expand, and began to dissipate. The Guardian retuned its radar sense, in effect squinting at the cloud in order to see it better. It was nothing but a shimmering illusion, millions of low-mass bits of high’reflectance material. The cloud was harmless. But its target, its quarry, was hidden behind that cloud—and this deception made it clear that the target was controlled by the Adversary. It must be destroyed at all cost. The Guardian re-accelerated, diving straight for the center of the cloud and the target’s predicted path.
The Guardian braced itself for impact with the edge of the cloud, but the flurry of tiny impacts was so slight as to be almost undetectable. With a feeling of triumph, the Guardian sped through, clearing the rearward edge of the cloud—
—To find seven targets, each presenting a radar image identical to that of the original target, each maneuvering in a different direction. Had the enemy duplicated itself somehow? Reproduced? Or was this another illusion, another deception?
No matter. If there were suddenly seven enemy targets, then the Guardian would simply have to destroy all seven. All were maneuvering, but none at even a tenth of the Guardian’s normal acceleration.
The Guardian came about and aimed itself at the first of them. It rushed forward, gathering velocity, focusing its radar sense on the target, bracing itself for impact with an object large enough to produce such a bright radar reflection.
But then, at the last moment, just before impact, it refined its radar imagery once again, and discovered the astonishing truth—the target was a quite small object that somehow produced the radar image of the original large target. A decoy. Truly, the Adversary was full of cunning.
It smashed into the decoy, the impact nothing more than a slight jolt, a shudder.
But now. Now it had learned the subtleties of the Adversary’s gambit. There were tiny differences between the false image produced fry the decoy and the image produced by the true target. Now the Guardian knew enough to distinguish one from the other, even at a distance.
It examined the remaining targets, ignored all the decoys, and moved in on the true agent of the Adversary.
“The devil take it!” Bernhardt muttered under his breath, but Joanne barely heard him. She was staring at the same image he was, the same image the was being displayed on nearly every screen in the control room. The red dot that was CORE 326 was heading straight for Sakalov’s ship, ignoring all the decoys that lay in between. “The thing learns too quickly,” Bernhardt said, his voice weak and powerless. He pulled a chair out from the console and slumped down on it. He leaned his arms on the counter top and sat there, staring at the screen, shaking his head. “Too fast.”