“Trevor, what are you—?”
“You said it yourself, Caine. We’ve got to follow orders. We’ve got to get out of here and report. If those drones are close by, and if we go active—if we even juice up the tight-beam laser relays—we’re likely to be vaporized before we can send.”
And then it didn’t matter. Without having to listen to Hazawa’s nervous sitreps, it became quite evident that their theory was horribly correct. The nearby ships started taking crippling damage from drones that popped up on their sensors at only two and three thousand kilometers range, making targeted strikes on engineering sections, missile bays, sensor arrays. Secondary explosions of munitions and fuel were reported on every hull.
Trevor had only heard one thing like it before: when he had been coordinating the ROV oversight for a combined Spetznaz-SEAL operation that ran into an ambush in Uzbekistan. The casualties came so thick and fast that there was no time to think, to reconfigure the mission, to plan an extraction. It was like listening to an announcer doing play-by-play for a demolition derby. He had only been able to hope that, at the end of that litany of destruction and death, someone—anyone—would be left alive. That hope had been forlorn.
So it was here, too. The missile frigate was the first hit—naturally—and her skipper evidently knew he didn’t have much time left; he salvoed his bays in the direction of the enemy’s lead ship. He unloaded sixty percent of his ordnance before Trevor’s passive sensors registered a split-second, white-hot thermal bloom where the frigate had been a moment before. Then the invaders’ drones picked off the much slower human drones and their control sloop. Finally, the remaining enemy craft tumbled so they could keep firing at the human auxiliaries which were now aft of them as they kept arrowing toward The Pearl.
Hazawa’s somber voice broke the extended silence “We have the toroid back online, sirs.”
Trevor rubbed his brow. “Which, ironically, makes us the most intact and capable ship in this entire sector.”
Caine frowned. “How long do you think we should wait?”
“Before trying to make a getaway? Depends on what I see here in the next fifteen minutes.” Trevor tapped the proximity passive sensor sweep.
“What do we want to see?”
“Wrong question. The right question is, what do we not want to see? Answer: we absolutely do not want to see a second wave of drones that are moving more slowly, because those could retroboost and come back for us. We don’t want their main hulls to retroboost either, or even slow down, because that means they’re willing to make sure that they’ve finished business out here, even if that delays them in their push to The Pearl. And no small craft. They’d be the worst, because whereas a big hull usually can’t loiter because it’s been tasked with key strategic objectives, smaller craft are more likely to be sent on more generalized patrol or picket missions. And that’s my biggest worry: that they leave behind a sloop or a frigate to sift through the junk that used to be our ships, trying to gather technical intelligence.”
“How’s the rest of our side doing?”
“I can’t tell. When Hazawa shut down power, our tight-beam gimballing servos went offline. But that’s not a big loss. I think the niceties of lascom are about to become a thing of the past.”
“Because they’re going to be hitting The Pearl soon?”
“Yes, which will whack the snot out of precision communications. Not that The Pearl wants to talk with us anymore, anyway. They’ll have cleared their tracking and comm arrays to maintain redundant C4I with our effective fleet elements. And we no longer qualify as such. We’re on our own, for now.”
Caine was oddly silent. Trevor looked up, discovered that he was staring intently at the passive scan plot. “Trevor, what do you think that might be?”
Trevor followed Caine’s extended index finger to the thermal bloom that marked the drive of the approaching alien main hull—except now it was trailed by two small pinpricks, one of which was dropping behind very rapidly.
“That?” Trevor rubbed his eyes but could still see the decelerating pinprick. “That’s trouble.”
And, thirty minutes later, it still was. Caine was looking at the shining mote that was now plainly visible at the center of their view screen. “Still coming toward us?”
“Yep. It’s ignored the wreckage of the frigate.” Something’s wrong here. Trevor tapped his collarcom. “Lieutenant, are you sure our power plant is cold?”
Hazawa sounded more collected than he had when, twenty minutes earlier, the main attacking vessel had virtually grazed their hull at two hundred kilometers range. “Fusion is offline, sir.”
“And we’re not the only transponder in the water?”
“No, sir. Four others in our area alone.” Hazawa’s voice rose slightly. “Sir, this small enemy craft—it’s getting awful close, two hundred klicks and still retroboosting. Now maneuvering to match vectors with us.” Hazawa’s voice tightened. “Sir, if they close to within fifty klicks, my orders clearly stipulate that I must take them under fire. And if they attempt to board, I must—”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Trevor turned to Caine, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the craft’s now visible outline. “How long?” he asked.
“They’ll be alongside us in three or four minutes, tops. But how did they come straight to us?”
Caine looked out at the debris-field, most of it just winking bits of distant, rolling scrap metal, a few close enough that their tattered outlines were visible. He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. We are in slightly better shape than the remains of the closest fleet auxiliary, the San Marin, but she’s a bigger hull, and so should be more interesting to them. I think they’d be eager to get a look at the contents of a tender with half of her lading intact.”
Hazawa’s voice was slightly tremulous over the shipwide. “All personnel, all sections: watch personnel to the weapons lockers to distribute sidearms. Stand by to repel boarders. Enemy craft at one hundred kilometers.”
Repel boarders? In space? It was too ludicrous to imagine, but it was about to happen. The enemy craft, a rounded body bloated by a large number of fuel tanks and furnished with a sharp, inquisitive prow, kept approaching. The proximity alarm triggered automatically, set up a shipwide ululation which underscored Hazawa’s order: “PDF battery: acquire target.”
Trevor rose. “Okay, so no one has any idea how they found us. Any thoughts about—?”
Caine turned quickly. “Trevor, our distress signaclass="underline" will it be the same as the type emitted by, let’s say, the frigate?”
“Yeah, except it’ll be a lot longer. The frigate is a single hulclass="underline" one registry code. But this ship carries modules, each of which has its own registry.”
“So all the registries of all the carried modules are transmitted along with that of the carrier?”
“Yeah, they’re appended to the end of the basic transponder signal. That way, if there’s a wreck, rescue teams can figure out if any of the modules are missing, or—”
“And how does the cutter’s transponder know the registry of all the modules?”
“Well, as long as they’re attached, it polls their individual registry chips, and—”
Caine shook his head and interrupted. “Trevor, you changed our habmod’s registry, right before the attack, didn’t you?”