“Take us out and shadow that destroyer,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Mind your distance and stay on their stern. Make it ten thousand klicks.”
“There hasn’t been a lick of active radiation from them since we popped them in the snout,” Major Renner says.
“We took out their front array, which is probably why we’re still afloat. But let’s not take chances. The second it looks like they’ve spotted us, we’re turning about and going full burn. No point pushing our luck.”
We’ve been pushing our luck since we set out for Fomalhaut, I think, and look at the spot where my two missing fingers used to be. I can feel the pain throbbing underneath the chemical layer of fuzzy bliss from the painkillers, and I’m very thankful for modern chemistry right now.
Murphy leaves Earth and Luna behind, and Indy follows.
The destroyer pulls low acceleration, probably because of the damage we inflicted. The Blue-class destroyers are large ships, almost three times the size of Indy and much better armored and armed, but they are deep-space combatants and not even slightly stealthy. We are following in their wake, where the noise from their own engines make their passive sensors as good as blind.
We are under way and on Murphy’s tail for just a little under four hours when the tactical officer perks up and updates the holotable display.
“We have some active radar sweeps ahead. Two—make that three sources.”
On the holotable, three pale blue icons appear on the edge of our scanning range. They have three-dimensional lozenge-shaped zones projected around them. Our passive gear is picking up the radar transmitters, but it hasn’t pinpointed the exact locations of the sources yet, so the lozenges mark the zones where the contacts are likely to be.
“Source?” Colonel Campbell asks.
“Military, definitely Commonwealth units. ELINT is sorting out the profiles right now,” the tactical officer replies. “Stand by.”
“There’s precisely squat out here according to the charts,” Major Renner says. “This is not even a travel lane. Military or civilian.”
“Let’s see what we have here,” the colonel says. “Just keep an eye on those active sources. We come even close to detection, we break off and leave them be.”
It takes the computer and the electronic-intelligence suite of Indy another twenty minutes to sort out the radar transmissions in front of us. One by one, the contact icons on the tactical display change from “UNKNOWN PRESUMED FRIENDLY” to actual class designations. The wedges that mark the location of the transmitting ships shrink with every second we spend in pursuit of Murphy.
“It’s another picket,” the XO says. “A frigate, Treaty-class. Another frigate, unknown class. And a Hammerhead cruiser.”
“All new stuff,” Colonel Campbell says. “Why are they a million klicks from Earth instead of in orbit?”
“Pretty sure Murphy is talking to them. I’m getting burst transmission noise,” the electronic-warfare officer says from his console.
“They’re talking on tight-beam.”
“Not tight-beam, sir. It’s encrypted ship to ship, but it’s not a fleet key. At least none we have in the computer.”
“Private conversation. Interesting.” Colonel Campbell leans over the holotable and rests his palms on the glass surface. His fingertips poke through the holographic orb of the tactical display, which re-forms itself around his hand.
“Change course to negative zero-two-zero by zero-four-five. Hold that for ten minutes and then return to the old heading, go parallel to Murphy again. And deploy the passive arrays, too.”
Over the next hour, the plot slowly shifts as Murphy approaches the picket line of unknown Commonwealth ships and we trail behind and below. The picket ships are in a patrol pattern, sweeping the space in front of them with active radar. Indy has to make several course corrections to avoid the invisible searchlights of the radar transmitters, and each turn takes us a little more off course from wherever Murphy is going.
“That’s about as far as we’ll be able to sneak in without getting lit up, I think,” Colonel Campbell says after the radar-warning-threat meter pegs from green into yellow twice in the span of a minute. “Bring her about and coast ballistic. Make your new heading positive one-two-zero by two-one-zero.”
“Hang on,” the tactical officer chimes in. “Multiple contacts on passive, bearing positive twenty degrees. Five . . . seven . . . ten . . . Sir, I have at least a dozen distinct contacts popping up on optical.”
“Go for magnification and verify,” the colonel says. Everyone in the CIC looks over at the holotable, where a cluster of pale blue icons has popped into existence on the far upper edge of our situational-awareness bubble. The picket ships are keeping us at bay, but Murphy is passing through the picket and heading right for that new cluster of contacts.
“Any of them squawking ID?”
“I’m getting IFF from the picket ships. The Hammerhead is the Phalanx. The frigates are Lausanne and . . . Acheron?” He looks over at the colonel with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “Sir, I’ve never heard of a frigate named Acheron in the fleet.”
“There is no Acheron,” Major Renner says.
On the holotable, the closest blue icons update with ship names and hull numbers: “CG-761 PHALANX,” “FF-481 LAUSANNE.” Putting lie to the XO’s statement, the letters on the third icon change from “UNKNOWN” to “FF-901 ACHERON.”
“What the hell is an Acheron?” our weapons officer says.
“A river,” I reply. “A river in the Greek underworld. Mythology.”
Colonel Campbell gives me a curt smile that looks slightly amused and a little approving. “Wonder if we’ll bump into Styx and Lethe out here, too,” he says.
The weapons officer’s look is blank, and the colonel sighs ever so slightly.
“Rivers,” he says. “More rivers in the Greek underworld.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s just hope that whoever named that thing just has a hard-on for the classics,” the colonel says. “That name’s a shitty omen otherwise.”
“Why is that, sir?” the weapons officer asks.
“Acheron’s the river the souls of the dead must cross to get to the underworld,” I supply.
The frigates and the cruiser are performing competent patrol patterns, with interlocking sensor coverage and tight execution. Indy maps out the area kilometer by kilometer, coasting on a parabolic trajectory just at the edge of the picket force’s detection range. Minute by minute, we close the distance a little, and our passive sensors yield more data bit by bit. One active sweep of Indy’s radar would map out our entire awareness bubble to the meter and centimeter and tell us the location of every scrap of metal bigger than a trash can in this part of space, but that would be like a thief in a dark building strapping a ten-thousand-watt flashlight to his head.