The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (33 page)

A fledgling smile played across Spencer’s mouth. “Yeah, but that part of the plan didn’t work so well,” he said. “They found time to shoot at both of us, didn’t they?”

Suss looked deep into his eyes, and knew that if it was ever going to happen, she would have to make the move.

She leaned over him, and kissed him.

After a long moment, he responded, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight. Suss opened her eyes at the same moment he did, and they looked at each other from a handsbreadth away. She could read it in his eyes, the fear that this was some part of her KT training, the thought that perhaps her AID was monitoring his heartbeat, telling her through the mastoid implant how to play him, soothe him, control him and guide him in the best interests of the Pact, or the KT, or the Navy, or the High Secretary, whoever that was by now.

No,
she thought.
No.
This was
her,
not them. This was a woman touching a man, and let the rest of the Universe go hang. At least for now, at least for a little while. She rolled over, pulling him on top of her, and kissed him again as she struggled with the buttons of his shirt.

He seemed to see the meaning in her eyes and suddenly he reached for her, no longer passive, no longer just letting it happen, but eager, willing.

Even as he touched her, kissed the warm bare skin of her body, he found himself amazed at how much he had lost, how much he had forgotten—how much had been
taken
from him by the pact. He made the discovery even as he made good the loss. He could never forget Bethany, but now, for the first time, there was something more than emptiness in that part of his heart that had been hers.

###

Idylls do not last, especially on warships. Suss and Spencer both knew that, and they were determined to squeeze every moment available out of their time together. The long wait for the search to conclude suddenly seemed all too short.

Privacy could not last long either.
Banquo’s
rumor mills carried the news rapidly. It started with the steward who was ordered to deliver
two
dinners to the captain’s cabin and leave the meal cart outside the door, though protocol required him to wheel the food in. He heard
two
voices and high laughter as he made his delivery.

Mere hours after Suss arrived at Spencer’s cabin, word had traveled down to the lowest-ranking enlisted man and up to Commander Deyi himself: the KT agent, the captain’s woman in name, had become his woman in deed as well.

It was a comment on how highly the crew and officers regarded their commander, Tallen thought, that the news was regarded as news for celebration, cause for glasses to be raised in toasts to the couple. If there
were
any dirty jokes, any smears, any insults being bantered about belowdecks, everyone was careful that they not reach the upper ranks. That in itself was a compliment of sorts.

Tallen Deyi knew that a lot of his associates regarded him as a bit of a prig, a prude. Deep in his heart, he knew they had a point. There were a lot of things that he didn’t approve of—and captain’s courtesans were normally high on the list. He was nearly tempted to interfere.

But this goddamned expedition had cost Captain Spencer a hell of a lot already. Deyi had seen what a handful of the parasites could do—what would happen when they came up across a whole asteroid full of them? In all likelihood, none of them had long to live.

A prude he might be, but Tallen Deyi was not about to deny a condemned man and woman their last moments of happiness.

###

Ensign Peever looked even more pudgy and nondescript than usual. After being awake for five days straight, his uniform was rumpled as an unmade bed, and his wispy man-child’s whiskers grown out almost enough to be visible. By now about thirty percent of the search volume had been checked. As the remaining search zone was reduced, the odds were going up every second that they were going to nail the
Dancing Bear now,
this minute. It had to happen soon, Peever told himself. With every passing minute, millions of cubic kilometers were swept.

He lived in the improvised search control room, barely leaving it since the moment of the war council. Peever was blissfully unaware that he was driving Wellingham, Dostchem, and everyone else assigned to the job half-mad. The ensign’s enthusiasm was not infectious.

Search Control was a rathole anyway, an improvised operation wedged into a small compartment near the bridge, with cobbled-together equipment jammed any which way, cables snaking everywhere, and too many bodies taking up a too small room. Search Control operated not only the
Banquo’s
sensors, but those aboard the
Macduff
and
Lennox
and the auxiliary craft, keeping the ships linked with each other, ensuring that every cubic meter of the search envelope was swept.

Peever was all over every aspect of the work, eagerly reaching over other people’s shoulders to push the buttons, shoving senior officers to one side to check a read-out.

So it was with a distinct note of relief in her voice that the G-wave sensor technician reported a series of incoming
optical
traces. Optical and radar search were on the main bridge. Thirty second later, so was Peever.

For the first time in days, Dostchem felt she could let her tail hang down without it being stepped on. The humans in Search felt a similar relief over toes that had been quite literally trodden upon. Peever was not a graceful young man.

###

Dalliance or no dalliance, it did not escape Tallen Deyi’s notice that Spencer was on the bridge, well-groomed and in proper uniform, every bit as quickly as the unkempt Peever. Suss showed up as well, arriving a few minutes later via a different corridor.

Deyi determinedly ignored the delicate entrances. “We’ve got a strange one, Captain,” he said. “Optical tracking processed the situation just now. We’ve spotted a lot of engine lights, all over the sky. All of them outside the search radius.”

“There are always lots of engine lights,” Peever objected.

“Mind how you address the CO,” the senior optical tracker snapped.

“Thank you, Tzu, but I think I can cope,” Deyi said mildly, though he did briefly fantasize the pleasures of clapping Peever in irons. “The point is,
Ensign
Peever, that we have watched all those normal engine lights right along. They are all accounted for, regular traffic or private craft that are following flight plans, sending ID beacons and responding to our challenges. The optical tracking display system masks them out.
Now
we have at least twenty tracks suddenly popping up—all of them a bit hard to read, because they are all virtually nose-on to us. In other words, headed straight for us, down to three decimal places. Coming from every quadrant of the sky.”

If Tallen Deyi was expecting some reaction of upset or fear from Spencer he didn’t get it. Instead, the captain smiled and laughed out loud. “We’ve just been told we’re on the right track. The enemy has analyzed our flight pattern, realized we’re in a search pattern, and come in to interfere. And they wouldn’t have any reason to do
that
if we weren’t getting warm, if we wouldn’t learn something worthwhile from the
Dancing Bear.
They’re coming to scare us off. Optics—what sort of specs can you give me on those tracks? Are there parasites aboard?”

“Sir, reading their fusion temperatures, accelerations, and so on, they match the profile of intrasystem freighters. The range is still too great for us to spot any parasites on the G-wave detector.”

“Are the freighters robotic or manned?”

“Ah, practically all the freighters in the belt are robots.”

“And our friends like to use robots—we’ve learned
that
much about them,” Spencer said. “Suss’ inside agent at StarMetal uncovered some strong evidence that StarMetal was arming freighters with heavy weapons. They’re either trying to scare us off, or engage us and distract us from the search—during which diversion one of them could head for the
Bear
and finish her off. They must know where she is.”

“Why don’t they dive straight for the
Bear
and ignore us?” Peever asked.

“Because then we could predict their flight path, track forward along it, and know precisely where to look for the
Bear,”
Deyi replied. “Which would not be good from their point of view, when you consider a destroyer is a lot faster than a robot freighter. And more heavily armored.”

Suss looked over the tactical plot. “This isn’t right,” she said. “They’ve enveloped our fleet too far out—ten times too far out. Too much space between us and their perimeter, too much space between ships. We can escape easily. How could they get it that wrong?”

“They haven’t,” Spencer said. “They’re not trying for an envelopment. They’re trying to draw us off the
Dancing Bear.
But they can’t let us know where they’ve come from. They
must
be deployed from the command asteroid. All of those freighters must have been modified—and a shipyard that big would need an asteroid-sized base. But if they had launched their fleet direct from the command asteroid, they would have given us a backtrack and revealed the asteroids location. Coming at us from all over the sky hides their origin point.”

“But getting to those dispersal locations must have taken
weeks,
especially boost at a thrust low enough for us not to track,” Peever protested. “Their start-points are scattered all over the inner system.”

“Which only means they were planning to attack us sooner or later,” Spencer said grimly. “I wonder how much longer we would have had to wait before the destroyers were attacked in orbit of Daltgeld? We’ve forced their hand, that’s all, made them show their cards early. Nice to be ahead of the curve, isn’t it?”

“So what do we do?” Tallen Deyi asked.

Spencer thought for a long moment. “I’m tempted to say ignore them. Even the closest of them won’t be at extreme range for attack for days. Unless they know we’re using long-range G-wave trackers, they have to be assuming it will be weeks before we complete the search. If we
were
going to be hanging around that long, the freighters might be a threat. Given a weeks-long search time, they’ve used a good tactic. As it is, we’ll have the
Bear
in a day or two, less time with any luck. So we
could
just let them be.”

Spencer was silent for a moment. “Instead, why we don’t we unnerve them a bit? Fire up the targeting lasers. Illuminate each of the targets in rapid sequence, bright enough to overload their tracking optics. Repeat that at random intervals. Show them we know where they are, and that we don’t care.”

Tallen Deyi chuckled.
“That
ought to rearrange their little metallic brains. Let’s do it.”

It was a good move, Suss decided, both in terms of tactics and morale. It would tweak the opposition while telling the Navy crews that their commanders weren’t running away. They were
shooting
at the enemies, even if it was only a few photons’ worth of targeting laser.

###

Once the freighter-spotting was dealt with, Spencer, Suss, and Peever all headed toward the Search Control compartment. This was where the word would come, and everyone had the feeling that something was going to happen soon.

Exactly
when
they found Destin’s ship was coming to have some importance. The later they found the
Dancing Bear,
the less time they would have to discover and evaluate whatever information was aboard before the freighters got too close and it was time to run.

Peever wasn’t willing to admit it, but he was starting to wonder
if
they would find the
Bear.
He had secretly held to a belief that the projections were pessimistic, that luck rode with
Banquo,
that they would find the missing ship almost at once. That wasn’t happening.

It was also starting to sink in that finding the
Bear
might not be a pleasant thing. The consensus aboard the
Banquo
was that the
Bear’s
crew was almost certainly dead by now. What data was aboard would be contained in the ship’s logs, in its black-box type recorders.

Peever, as ranking intelligence officer aboard the flag ship of the task force, would have to be part of the boarding party. The only other intel-trains persons were Nanabhuc and Captain Spencer. Suss wasn’t Navy, and they couldn’t send the captain. Peever had a vivid imagination, and he didn’t really relish poking around in a cold, dark ship, with corpses floating their grisly way past him as he struggled with a bollixed recording device. Especially with an enemy fleet driving in toward them.

It was enough to give him the creeps in advance, and he suddenly lost a lot of his enthusiasm for the search. Instead of bouncing all over the cramped compartment, he settled down and sat in front of his own monitor station, for which the rest of the G-wave search team was eternally grateful.

***

Spencer was likewise beginning to have doubts about the whole idea of mean-time-to-search. They were long hours past the time when they should have spotted the
Bear,
and the first of the freighters was getting uncomfortably close. Spencer had no fear that the
Banquo
could easily defeat one or two of the freighters—but suppose the opposition decided to bring eight or ten craft to bear at once, or charged in on a suicide run?

And still the search computers cheerfully assured them all that they had found the
Bear
already, statistically speaking.

It was an effort of will for Spencer to tear himself away from Search Control long enough for a quick bite to eat and a brief nap. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if he were exhausted and hungry if and when they did spot their quarry. He ordered a sandwich brought to his cabin and tried to sleep.

Spencer had just dozed off into a most unrestful doze when his AID started squawking loudly.

“What! What!” he shouted in alarm, sitting bolt upright in bed. He woke a bit more thoroughly. “Shut down that alarm noise and tell me what’s going on.”

The alarm shut down. “Sorry,” his AID said. “But they’ve spotted the
Bear.
Commander Deyi is preparing the ship to maneuver over to her.”