“It is not a new fleet, Senior Administrator,” explained the sensor operator. “It is the fleet we destroyed at Barnard’s Star.”
“What? How could that be?”
Yaargraukh merely looked at Caine, nodded, walked past him as the sensor operator continued his report. “I am reading transponders from the Commonwealth fleet carriers Enterprise, Intrepid, Courageous, and Federation fleet carriers Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. All are deploying their full complements of the latest generation of human high-gee capital ships—the President, Trafalgar, and Kursk classes—and the lighter, Bolton-class attack cruisers.”
Graagkhruud’s crest had flattened; his long shoe-box of a mouth hung open. “This is not possible. Four of those shift-carriers were destroyed at Barnard’s Star.”
Caine smiled. “Evidently not.”
Darzhee Kut’s “What?” was not quite drowned out by Graagkhruud’s “Liar!”
Caine only acknowledged Darzhee Kut. “I’m just going on a hunch, now, but let’s check something else. Do you have a record of the transponder signs of the individual capital ships you destroyed at Barnard’s Star?”
Darzhee Kut bobbed. “Yes.”
Caine turned to the sensor operator. “Check those tail numbers against the ones you’re reading now.”
The Arat Kur did, turned to face Hu’urs Khraam. “Esteemed First Delegate, the ships we destroyed are leading the van of the inbound fleet.”
Urzueth Ragh burbled and wheezed. An Arat Kur snort. “Nonsense. We did destroy these ships. I was there and saw it at Barnard’s Star.”
Caine shook his head. “No. These are ships that you were led to believe you had destroyed.”
“Preposterous. This phantom fleet is the deception, not the events at Barnard’s Star. This is a human plot to make us believe ourselves in greater danger than we are, being carried out by small ships equipped with sophisticated image makers.”
Caine shrugged. “Believe what you like, but any minute now, I expect that your sensor operator is going to inform you that the exhaust signatures and mass scans are a match for what the transponders are telling you. You’ll only be sure when the ladar starts showing you silhouettes, but by then it will be too late to change your course of action.”
“But it makes no sense,” insisted Urzueth. “If these are the real ships, then what did we destroy at Barnard’s Star, and why did you let us?”
“I’m just continuing with guesswork,” admitted Caine, “but, at Barnard’s Star, I believe you destroyed specially constructed decoys: ships which had the shape of these craft, and their signatures, but were otherwise only moderately armed and probably uncrewed. Had you examined the wreckage—what little there was—I suspect you would have eventually discovered evidence that you had destroyed unfinished hulls fitted with only those basics necessary to fool your sensors.” Caine remembered all the strange and secretive activities he had heard whispers about in the weeks before Convocation. “Those decoys were probably built secretly. Out in the Belt, I’d guess, and with their fusion drives rigged for triggerable containment failures. That way, you wouldn’t have much wreckage left to study.” And suddenly Caine realized why the quarantine on DeePeeThree had not been lifted after he had discovered primitive exosapients there. “What you thought were shift-carriers were just frames, superstructures, and fusion engines, turned into finished decoys out at Delta Pavonis Three or beyond, where, due to quarantines, there wasn’t enough deep space traffic to stumble across them.”
“But why? What was the purpose of all this—waste?”
“To make you believe that you’d destroyed all these ships at Barnard’s Star. Because that, in turn, made you believe you’d achieved far more than you had, made you believe you were safer than you were.”
Yaargraukh nodded from the other side of the holotank. “Of course. The humans predicted that after our victory at Barnard’s Star, we would want to move quickly, that we did not wish to lose the initiative. Which was, after all, a prudent strategy. So when we scanned the wreckage, we trusted our long-range sensor data, which matched what we expected. And, reassured, we did not wait to conduct a more detailed post-action analysis.”
Urzueth Ragh waved an impatient claw. “Which would have shown us that we had not destroyed the ships we thought we had. So. I accept this. But this waste of resources to build decoy hulls. To what specific end did the humans do it?”
Caine ran his gaze across the entirety of the strategic plotting holotank. “Right now, it looks to me as though you only brought about sixty percent of the forces that hit Barnard’s Star.”
“This is correct.”
“And that sixty percent is further split into three parts. The largest part, with all your interface and landing craft, is here in cislunar space. Almost as large, and containing an equal number of your capital ships, is the flotilla guarding the Solar System’s only remaining supply of antimatter: the refinery that we ‘failed’ to destroy in the Belt. And you left a small holding force at Jupiter, which is your best, but not your only, source of deuterium for your fusion plants and engines. Is that about right?”
Urzueth Ragh simply bobbed.
“Then I’d say your current deployment is what we were hoping to achieve by letting you destroy all those wasteful decoys.” Caine shrugged. “You’ve set yourself up for the oldest strategy in the book: divide and conquer. Or, in tactical terms, the outcome at Barnard’s Star made you so confident that you split your forces into small groupings that our returning fleet can now defeat in detail. You guessed that with more than half of our forces destroyed, what ships we had left were bottled up in Ross 154 or behind it, out along the Green Mains. So when you arrived in the Solar System, it seemed both operationally prudent and strategically safe to split your fleet into three parts. Any one of those elements was large enough to take care of whatever motley collection of human hulls might be able to somehow punch through to Earth.
“But now it turns out that the big fleet you thought you had destroyed was mostly made up of decoys, and that the real fleet has shown up on your doorstep. Which means that, here around Earth, you are now seriously outnumbered and you can’t recombine your forces in time. And even though our technology is behind yours, you’re about to be saturated with our very best systems.”
Urzueth Ragh’s polyps were writhing spasmodically. Hu’urs Khraam looked at Caine with a strange, slow calm in all this motions. “A question remains: how did you know the ships would respond to a request for their transponder codes? Granted, our sensors can discriminate the class of vessel by its engine signature, but still, why let us know that these ships still exist? Why not let us believe that we had underestimated your production capability, that you had produced so many more than we anticipated and that this was a new fleet—possibly the first of many?”
Caine shrugged. “I didn’t know they’d reveal their codes. But I guessed they might, because I think the World Confederation is trying to show you that this war is about to get a lot more costly—and bloody—for you, and that maybe this is the time to end it. Equably.”
Hu’urs Khraam raised up. “And you believe that by revealing your secret—now—that we shall be cowed?”
Caine tried a different approach. “Here’s another way to look at it. You’ve just been handed one surprise. So there could be more on the way. At any rate, you now have irrefutable proof that, within a few hours, you are going to have a real fight on your hands. Which, if you lose, would be disastrous for you, both up in orbit and down planetside. Because, if you lose orbital cover for even five minutes—”