Command Authority, page 14
part #5 of Last Hunter Series
Lisa thought about that. If the enemy could use their hyperdrive at that low rate of speed and sneak into a system without being detected, it would be problematic. Their idea of using hyperspace detectors to determine when anyone was approaching their systems was now flawed. The only solution was if the detectors could be tweaked to register vessels moving more slowly.
They’d have to run that past the engineering department. Regex would be able to help with figuring it out since he had knowledge of how the system worked, but she didn’t. She needed to focus on gathering intelligence that was useful for them now.
Do you know if their other vessels could travel at that slow rate of speed? If so, we’re in big trouble.
Once again, Regex began working on the system, and Lisa read what he was seeing over his proverbial shoulder. This time she saw when he opened the specifications for the hyperdrive in question. The Novarites called it the sneak drive. She could see why.
The technical details were over her head, but it plainly stated there was an upper mass limit, and the scout ship was right at it. There was no way that anything bigger could do that. Worse, from the perspective of the Novarites, the sneak drive took a lot of energy. That small vessel had to have two full fusion plants to feed the hyperdrive because a single one was insufficient.
No wonder the engineering compartment on that thing had been full. Commander Danek would definitely want to pull everything when she had an opportunity. With access to their independent quantum drives, they didn’t need something like the sneak drive, but understanding how it worked might grant them capabilities that would be useful in the future.
Once Regex was done, she sent a summary of the information to Danek. She also sent the navigational information to Calvo.
That accomplished, she turned her focus to figuring out what the Novarites were really up to. Had they only sent the single group, or were there others en route?
She and Regex had to dig into the data and follow numerous leads to get that information. The search functionality on the system was terrible. Perhaps she and Regex could concoct something better. It did them no good if they couldn’t find what they needed in a reasonable timeframe.
It didn’t take her long to discover the information the Novarites had about the Tardans leaving. It seemed they’d chanced across what they were doing while testing their scout ships. The Tardans had no way of knowing they were under observation as they built ships that the Novarites had not authorized, loaded them up with pods full of people, and sent them off into deep space.
The Novarites didn’t know what to think of that, so they immediately began making plans. Their assumption was that the Tardans were planning to betray them. Based on the ships’ trajectory, this would be a long journey, so they’d outfitted several warships with sleep pods and tasked them to follow and report back once they’d arrived at the final destination. That was the good news.
The bad news was this wasn’t the only group of Novarites tasked to follow the Tardans. It was the fourth and likely not the last. That meant that there were other Tardan colonization waves. If those earlier groups had been able to restrain their eagerness, the Tardans might not even have realized they were being followed before the ambush came. If they’d come out at their destinations yet, of course.
This was definitely not what she’d hoped to find, but they needed to know. She wrote up a summary and sent it off to Commodore Romanoff. The other colony ships were probably headed for Argent and the other major Tardan bases, but that wasn’t a sure thing. They could arrive anywhere.
They also didn’t know if any follow-up groups would’ve been sent after none of the original groups returned. If it had been her and she’d sent out scouts, and none of them had come back, she’d have gotten a larger group together and sent them along to make sure that whatever was there was taken care of. It would be foolhardy to assume the Novarites would do anything less.
One of the things working in their favor was that unless these groups had been leaving data capsules at prearranged locations—of which she saw no sign in the data—then any follow-up groups wouldn’t be able to discern their specific destinations.
She didn’t know the distance the Novarites and Tardans had come from, but their earlier guesses were that it was a one-way journey of a century. These Novarites had been on the way to the cluster for a very long time, and any follow-ups would still potentially be a great distance away. At least she hoped so.
We’ve reported everything we can, so now we wait. We’ll continue to go through the data on this computer, but we still need to dig into the Tardan military computer more deeply. If they have contingency plans or other things in motion, we need to know about them. Maybe they know where all these colonization waves are going.
Once they had all the data they could get, they could start looking for cross-connections. It was critical they knew what both of their enemies were doing and what their future plans might be.
She didn’t want to fight a two-front war, but it looked like they’d be caught up in the scrum. The Novarites weren’t going to tolerate the Tardans doing anything against their interests, and if they ran across any humans in the process, they’d undoubtedly kill them. When confronted by the commodore, their behavior made that all too clear.
She wasn’t a military person, and she wasn’t prone to violence, but even she could tell there would be fighting and that these enemies needed to be defeated.
What if the Novarite follow-up group—if there was one—missed the cluster entirely? It was possible they could find the rest of the Confederation and tear into them worse than the Locusts would have. With the dire state that Commodore Romanoff reported the modern Navy was in, they’d be in serious trouble.
No. They were in serious trouble. The Tardans had come with enough force to fight multiple battleships. Once they got the order of battle from the Tardan military computers, she was confident there would be a lot more motherships and drones than anyone had counted on. Potentially, there would even be many more warships. Add in the complications brought on by the Novarites, and things were about to get very hairy indeed.
She sighed and got to work. Not only did she have the computers to go through, but she had those data chips that she hadn’t cracked from the Novarite warship. Those couldn’t be copied with the tech the professor had rigged up, so she was being cautious. They had just become a higher priority.
Maybe she could have someone bring her something to eat. Maybe more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to appease her passenger. They would be swamped for the foreseeable future.
16
“That’s great resolution for a set of passive sensors,” Amanda said as she looked over his shoulder.
He couldn’t agree more. This was nowhere near as good as having a set of active sensors and being closer to the target, but now that they’d gotten the scout ship’s massive passive sensor array mounted at the front of their ship, he was thoroughly impressed.
They jumped to the edge of the Port Royale system and were examining what they could see from sixty light-hours out. Their passive sensors told them very little except about the star and potential planets in a couple of locations. None of the battleships in orbit around the gas giant were detectable at this range, and neither was Port Royale itself. Even its fusion plants weren’t visible on their passive sensors.
The same was not true of the Novarite passive sensors. It picked up the fusion plants operating around the gas giant, though not the battleships or the space station itself. That was sobering.
He and Amanda were at their stations on the bridge. With Lisa’s help, they’d rigged a hardware interface to translate the data they were getting from the sensors and had put it onto the consoles. The same was true of the new hyperspace detector.
Based on the specifications that Lisa pulled from the computers, the enhanced hyperspace detector was only marginally better than what Regex had built. The one from the warship was good out to about ninety light-hours. The scout ship was supposedly sensitive enough to pick up a vessel in hyperspace at about a hundred and twenty-five light-hours.
That was better than sixty, but not by much. The Port Royale system was about two hundred and eighty billion kilometers across, and the range on this enhanced detector was good for about eighty-four billion kilometers. It couldn’t even pick up ships arriving at the outermost planets reliably from deeper in the system. Posted around the gas giant where Port Royale was, it might get them better warning from that side but would be completely blind on the other.
If they ever wanted anything that would truly give them an early warning, they’d have to plant a lot of automated sentinels around the system. Considering they didn’t know how to build them, that would be challenging.
He turned in his seat and looked over at Amanda. “It will be good for scouting, but I can already see problems if we try to use it defensively. We’ll do the best we can, but for right now, we’ll have to keep punching people in the face.”
That made her smile. “I like the way you think. Now that we’ve got these systems operational, we need to start looking at potential ways to use them to enhance our ability to attack Argent. We can be pretty sure the system is swarming with motherships and drones. It will also have warships, but I’d wager those will be closer to the planet. How does that change what we do?”
“The new passive sensors are pretty good at picking up fusion plants, so if we can get moderately close with our quantum drive, we’ll be able to start counting the number of major warships in orbit. I suspect the fusion plants aboard the motherships will be more difficult to detect, but it still might be possible at closer range. I suppose we could launch the mothership we have and see if we can detect it.”
She considered him for a moment. “That’s not a bad idea. We need to know if this thing works and how effective our ability to detect both a fusion plant and a ship in hyperspace is. I wonder if this one is strong enough to detect a scout using their sneak drive? If so, that would be useful. Unfortunately, that’s not something we can test.”
He turned toward Captain MacKinnon, who had the conn. “Ma’am? Amanda and I have an idea to test the accuracy and sensitivity of our new passive sensors and the hyperspace detectors we took off the scout ship. I’d like to take our mothership out and let Hunter jump away from us and then start heading in your direction. It would take a couple of hours to be sure, but I could drop out at that point and see if you could pick up my fusion plant as well.”
The blonde woman considered his suggestion and then shook her head. “I don’t want to waste the time that would take. Instead, I suggest we jump out and leave you sitting here and come in until we can detect you with the passive sensors. Then we’ll know if we can pick up the fusion plants and at what range, without spending hours doing it.”
“That’s half the fight, ma’am. What about the hyperspace detector?”
“We’ll jump back to you and let you know to head in our direction. Once we’re gone, wait sixty seconds and then enter hyperspace. Stay in for half an hour, and we’ll find out what range we can pick you up. Once you drop out, we’ll pick you up. That’s good thinking, you two. Well done.”
Derek excused himself and went down to the small craft bay where the mothership was stored. Flying it out of the ship and performing the tests took about two hours, but it gave them the data they needed. It seemed they couldn’t pick up the smaller fusion plants from outside a system. They had to be almost half again closer than for the bigger plants, so that was something to keep in mind.
As far as the hyperspace detector, it worked slightly better than advertised, and they picked him up at a hundred and thirty light-hours. Not bad.
While he’d been out, Commodore Romanoff had taken command of the bridge and was setting up the final details for their trip to Argent. The older man was speaking with Amanda when Derek got back, and they were working on a plan that would be useful against a large number of motherships.
He resumed his station and listened in. As they worked out the details, he began setting up various options using both the independent quantum drive and the hyperdrive. In a heavily invested system, it would be suicide to get caught up in the gravity well. They needed to drag the enemy out to them.
Thinking about that, he found himself frowning. When they came to a pause in their conversation, he inserted himself. “Pardon the interruption, but what will we do if they don’t come out to meet us? What if they decide to keep their forces around the planet? If we have to go in, this becomes a much different fight.”
Romanoff considered that, and his frown soon matched Derek’s. “That’s a good point. We’ll have to reveal ourselves when we put in our appearance to draw them out, and if they decide not to take the bait, we’re not going to have any options other than going to them. Since their ships are faster than ours, that’s going to put us at enough of a disadvantage that they’ll be able to swarm us. I wasn’t seriously considering that as an option because they’ve never been known for showing restraint. Look at what they did at New Copenhagen. Why would this situation be any different?”
“I don’t know that it will be, sir,” he said with a shrug. “I’m just trying to plan for every eventuality. If the Tardan military decides to keep the motherships and drones near the planet, we’re not going to have a choice if we want to liberate it.”
I’m not sure there’s anything we can do,” Amanda said. “If they won’t come to us, and they outnumber us significantly, we’ll have to back off. We want to liberate Argent, but it can’t be a suicide mission since we’re the only vessel capable of offensive operations against the Tardans.”
“With Argent being so far from New Copenhagen, how do we defend if… when we take it?” he asked. “We’ve got Hunter as our primary weapons platform, but we don’t have anything else. Even if we perform a clean sweep—which seems unlikely—we’d have to continue worrying about new arrivals. That’s going to be a growing problem the more territory we liberate. It’s always possible there will be more Tardan ships arriving if the Novarites didn’t stop them from departing. Unlikely, but possible in the short run. And by the short run, I mean a period of years and an unknown number of ships going to God knows where.”
Romanoff nodded. “There’s something to that, but we can’t live our lives as if we’re going to have to defend every single inch of territory we take against all comers at all times. If we do that, we’ll be paralyzed into inaction. We’ve got to take the fight to the enemy, and that means we need to start freeing worlds and giving them the tools they need to defend themselves.”
Derek couldn’t argue against that logic, but he had reservations. What would they do when the inevitable wave of motherships arrived from one of the other systems? The Tardans came with enough military force to fight a dozen battleships, and even though it was scattered across the cluster and needed to move via hyperspace rather than gate, that didn’t mean they could ignore the massed firepower that would eventually catch up with them. Right now, they had an advantage, but that would change.
If the enemy came for New Copenhagen—even with the upgraded defenses—there was nothing they could do to stop them. That just wasn’t in the cards. Not yet.
Well, they’d known this wasn’t going to be easy, so he might as well accept that there would be setbacks. They’d deal with them when the time came. That wouldn’t make the accompanying loss of life easier, but there was only so much they could do.
“When are we going, sir?” he asked.
Romanoff crossed his arms and seemed to consider that. “I’m not sure delay is our friend, especially if we start by just scouting the area. Now that we can use those more sensitive passive scanners, I think we should set out as soon as possible. This isn’t going to get any easier, so start getting everybody ready, and we’ll head out within the hour.”
Derek returned to his console and relieved his replacement. There wasn’t much he needed to do, but he still wanted to familiarize himself with the new sensor controls and get more practice. When the time came, he’d have to get the details right the first time, and with brand-new equipment—particularly alien equipment—that wouldn’t be easy.
After an hour, the commodore gave the order to take them out. Derek had already plotted a roundabout course to get to their destination. They’d arrive coming in from a different direction than New Copenhagen. It would be best if the Tardans there didn’t make any assumptions about even the direction they were coming from.
They arrived a generous distance outside the jump limit and sat there with their fusion plants running at the lowest setting. Then he began collecting information about what was in the system. The first thing he noted was that there were no enemy ships near them. There were plenty of motherships and drones patrolling deeper into the system, and even some out further than he’d expected, but none nearby. That allowed them to take a long, considered look without worrying that someone would get a drop on them.
The difference in information between what the Confederation passive sensors and the Novarite scout sensors could pick up was considerable. Just like at Port Royale, the Confederation sensors could pick up some of the vessels moving through the system, but not nearly as many as the Novarite sensors did.
Also, their new passive sensors were able to get quite a bit of information about what was going on in orbit around Argent itself. There were a lot of ships there, and many of them were bigger than motherships, based on their fusion plants. A slow tally gave him a minimum of a dozen vessels. At least a couple were probably the ships that created the space elevators. The rest might be colony vessels the Tardan military had seized or military vessels. He wasn’t able to tell at this distance.
