Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (44 page)

Something about Alex’s manner, though, told the linguist that he would not be open to re-discussing policy at this point. Those decisions had already been made.

‘Excellent.’ Buzz was beaming with pleasure as he saw the Samartian ship taking up that wary escort position, like a well-trained guard dog seeing them off the premises. ‘
Just
as we hoped.’

Alex nodded. Damage control screens were showing that they’d taken some slight scrapes to their paintwork, but that had already been looking quite battered after the Ignite test and their journey through the nebula. It was entirely superficial. All that mattered here was that they had made contact with a Samartian ship, and were establishing their willingness to respect Samartian authority within their territorial space.

‘So – analysis?’ he asked.

That was quickly forthcoming.

‘The mix cores appear to be of the same kind as our own,’ Morry Morelle reported. ‘And on core to mass ratio, I would estimate their top speed to be around L46.’

Everyone stared at him.

‘No hull ever designed could
take
that kind of speed,’ Davie objected.

‘No hull
we’ve
ever designed.’ Morry pointed out. ‘All I’m telling you is that that’s how the numbers work out.’

‘The missiles launched at L48 and maintained that speed,’ Very Vergan said. ‘They detonated at 2.03 exojoules each - 4.2% faster and 1.6% bigger detonation than our own starbursts.’

‘Based on the size of the ship, I would estimate a crew of between fourteen and eighteen,’ Misha Tregennis said. ‘I believe it is a single deck ship with three or four inner compartments. Significant temperature differences in the immediate aftermath of firing missiles indicate that the compartments are sealed off and that they have little or no heat exchange on missile tech, and given how long it took for those temperatures to return to base levels, poor levels of atmospheric management.’

Alex considered the implications of that, looking back at the blurred image on heatscan. That was the first indication that they might have
any
kind of edge on the Samartian ship, other than sheer size. Heat-producing technology on their ships always had heat exchangers built in as a basic safety system. If any failure of that did raise air temperature in a section, too, air processing would kick in and restore optimum temperature within a second or two.

Alex did not kid himself, though. If the Samartians hadn’t fitted heat exchangers or powerful air processors aboard their ship, it was a safe bet that this wasn’t because they didn’t know how to make them. It was simply that they didn’t consider them important enough to include in the design. That in itself said a great deal about them, the risks they were prepared to take and the discomfort they were prepared to consider normal aboard their ships.

They had time to discuss those observations over the following eight hours, as they continued on their steady course away from Samart. In all that time, the Samartian ship maintained its watchful station on them, just forty three seconds away.

It was nerve-racking. Even though this was what they’d planned for and hoped for, the reality of having that ship hovering just out of sight would have tested anybody’s nerve. Many people glanced at least once at the image of the skipper, on the command deck, and felt comforted. It wasn’t merely that he was calm – any Fleet officer would have been expected to project an air of calm authority at such a time. It was, Simon observed, the air of honest, relaxed enjoyment that the skipper had.

And Alex
was
frankly enjoying himself. He was not unaware of the stress his officers and crew were experiencing, but his own confidence was high.

‘I feel with every hour that passes, our relationship gets stronger,’ he commented.

‘Relationship, skipper?’ Jermane was mystified. They couldn’t even
see
the other ship, and had made no attempt whatsoever to communicate with it.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ Alex said, and reminded him of the basis on which he’d already made this decision. ‘We’re going along with them, not just in leaving their territorial space when ordered to do so, but in respecting their obvious desire not to be harassed by unwanted efforts to communicate with them. Every hour that goes by with us behaving in a courteous manner is building a relationship of – well, let’s not say trust, we’re nowhere near trust yet, but of calm.’

He held that calm, too, when a second Samartian ship appeared on scopes. It appeared to be the same kind as the first, with an identical heatscan image. It swung in alongside their first escort and remained there.

‘That’s a well-established procedure,’ Alex commented, watching this with interest. ‘This is what they’re trained to do when an unknown ship enters their space, and they are doing it, for sure, strictly by the book.’

Buzz nodded. You could tell a great deal about the character of a skipper simply from how their ship was handled. Those neat, precise movements and perfect station-keeping indicated a disciplined mentality.

The Heron held discipline, too. Whatever stress the crew might be feeling, they handled it well. There was absolute calm and quiet on board for the eight hours and forty seven minutes the Samartians were escorting them out of their space.

Then, just outside the zone of their sensors, the Samartians peeled away. They flipped about with astonishing speed, somersaulting back along their own line of flight more like fighters than warships. Clearly, they had now seen the invading warship out of the space they considered theirs to defend, and were moving away.

‘Showtime,’ said Alex, tapping his finger onto the control which authorised their combat skills display.

For the next seventeen minutes, the Heron put on a show that would have stunned any League world and left the rest of the Fleet speechless.

At various times in its long history, Fleet ships
had
taken part in displays, particularly to mark major events such as millennial celebrations. At the time of the last such event, however, the warships taking part had merely ‘dressed overall’ with rippling lights on their hulls as they processed in stately convoy. There was no record of a ship the size of a frigate taking part in acrobatic display – the Fleet, always mindful of dignity, would not consider that to be appropriate.

The Fourth, however, had been practicing unorthodox manoeuvres even back when they’d had the corvette Minnow, and had been working up a whole range of combat skills to work most effectively with their fighters since getting the swarms the year before. Now, they had spent weeks putting together those manoeuvres into display sequences that would demonstrate their skill in spectacular style.

When the Fourth went for ‘spectacular’, they did not go for half measures. From the moment when their fighters launched and began to interlace around the spinning frigate to the grand finale seventeen minutes later, the choreography would make even hardened spacers ooh and aah with astonishment. The frigate fired several broadsides during the display; all of the gunfire and missile fire directed away from Samart. At one point they launched a hundred tiny scatter missiles and destroyed them in a blaze of gunfire. In agility displays, frigate and fighters trailed plasma, ribbons of fire weaving in their wake.

Throughout, it was clear that they had their audience’s attention. The Samartian ships had obviously turned back towards them as the frigate began to fire guns, and were lurking at the edge of their scopes. They slipped in and out of the Heron’s range, but were never off scopes for more than a few seconds.

For the last three minutes, the Heron was clearly building to a finale. They made quite a point of firing the Ignite, drawing attention to it and the fact that it was heading directly away from Samart, slow, but very difficult to detect even when you knew it was there. Once it had left their scopes, the Heron went into a routine that took them through a vertical loop, through which the Samartians could see the fighters diving through deceleration to go sublight.

They dropped to hypersonic speed, spraying water droplets as they span in tight formation, spiralling so fast that their image blurred. The fighters had been specially adapted for this, with additional hydrogen and oxygen tanks aboard, along with a combining unit and a broad-angle spray nozzle fitted externally. The water droplets froze instantly, creating a fine mist of ice particles. The mist had a density of fewer than a hundred million particles per cubic metre; two hundred kilograms of micro-droplets sprayed within a region of around five thousand kilometres in diameter. That was far below the level at which it would become visible to human eyes – less than a hundredth of the density of the nebula they’d traversed to get here. It would, however, show up on astrogation scanners, a rapidly forming swirl that showed up red on their own scopes, as an area too dense for safe navigation.

The fighters span apart and accelerated on precise 120 degree angles, shooting out of the sphere that they’d made. As they shot back into superlight speed they looped, trailing plasma, creating a petal effect as they came back to the Heron. Frigate and fighters carried out the manoeuvre designated ‘Cascade 9’, a tumble that carried them around the ice cloud at a distance of a million klicks.

Exactly on time, as they peeled apart with a simultaneous broadside salute from the frigate and all three fighters, the Ignite detonated. This time, even they couldn’t see it coming back in – for the last few vital seconds, it flooded with coolants which effectively wiped it even off heatscan.

Again, there was nothing to see of the explosion on visual scopes. Heatscan, however, lit up with the radiance of a supernova burst, a sphere of highly energised tachyons surging outward from the point of detonation. It was the biggest explosion League technology could produce. It would certainly be apparent to the Samartians that it was a stealth missile with an explosion which could utterly destroy a planet.

‘Orbital course,’ Alex commanded.

‘Sir.’ Gunny Norsten had already got that programmed. As soon as they knew the limit of Samartian defended territory, the astrogator had modelled a sphere around Samart and plotted a course that would take them in long orbit around it.

It took the Samartian ships several seconds to respond to that, seconds during which nobody moved or spoke aboard the frigate. Everyone was watching scopes, holding their breath – Jermane Taerling even had his hand clasped over his mouth. No order had been given for silent running, but he’d learned enough by now to recognise that the skipper did not need to give such an order at such a time. There were contingency plans, of course, for everything that they’d been able to think that the Samartians might do in response to this move. Full on attack was certainly one of those possibilities – a
strong
possibility, if the Samartians saw this swinging into orbit round their homeworld as defying their order to leave.

The reaction they were all hoping for, though, was for the Samartians to swing into a mirroring orbit their side of the border, tracking them.

Six seconds, seven... Alex could almost sense the discussions taking place on the other ships, the question in the air, ‘Do we attack, leave, or track them?’

In this, the last eight hours became crucial. They had not responded to being fired upon in that first warning blast of missiles. They had obeyed the order to leave Samartian space and had done so directly, no posturing. They hadn’t launched fighters or probes, and had made no attempt to negotiate. That might just, Alex hoped, be sufficient to have convinced the skippers of those ships that the frigate was not an immediate threat.

‘
Yes!’
Davie was the first to see that the Samartian ships were spinning onto a parallel course. He gave Alex a delighted grin, mixed with some relief. ‘
Good
call, boss!’

A gleam of amusement showed in Alex’s eyes, briefly.

‘Thank you,’ he said, with a dry note which effectively conveyed that he did not need, or want, anybody else’s approval. All his attention was on the two fuzzy blips on their long range scopes.

Everyone was watching the Samartian ships. They had to have been able to see what the frigate was doing, and if that hadn’t impressed them, nothing would. Nothing that the Heron could do, anyway. It was their finest effort, displaying both combat skills and the technological reach of their weapons. And now, they waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

‘They’re just not going to respond, are they?’ said Mako Ireson sadly, as an hour came and went, with no communication from the Samartians at all.

‘Perhaps it’s time to consider contacting them, now,’ Jermane said, with more hope than realism.

Several of the crew within earshot laughed at the civilians.

‘We waited eight and a half
weeks
for the Gider,’ Ali Jezno pointed out. ‘We may well have to wait for them to send to Samart, showing them what we did, and for people there to make a decision on whether to talk to us, and send that back out to them. It’s more likely to be days than hours.’

They did not, however, have to wait that long. Just nine hours and eighty three minutes after the conclusion of their display, a signal carrier was fired from the Samartian ships. Again, it shot past them, broadcasting a short text message.

‘Manae atalos.’

The translation matrix that Jermane had been working on, based on a combination of the languages believed to be related to Samartian, rendered that in direct translation as ‘Species identity’. Jermane himself, with a whoop of delight, suggested that the most probable reading should be, ‘Identify yourselves.’ Davie, though, went for a rather more colloquial interpretation, with his ‘Who
are
you people?’

Alex grinned. However things might go from here, they had already achieved more than any other ship known to have approached Samart in the last two thousand years. They had established First Effective Contact.

‘Wait five minutes,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll launch the probe.’

The five minute wait seemed like a very long time. Alex was relaxed, noting with thanks a report from the tech observation team telling him that the signal carrier fired out by the Samartian ship was on a long ellipse which would take it back to them.