“There’s a lot of ships out here,” Major Renner says. The cluster of blue icons on the edge of our sensor range is growing bigger—every few minutes, the computer adds an icon or two to the group as we get closer and the passive arrays sniff out more radiation sources and visual contacts.
“Eight, then, twelve . . . fourteen. They have a big-ass task force assembling in the middle of nowhere.”
“Something else, too.” The tactical officer brings up a window on the holographic plot and increases the size and scan range. “Too big for a ship, too small for a station. And it’s right in the middle of all that traffic.”
Colonel Campbell studies the image from Indy’s optical array. The ships we’ve plotted are mere specks on the screen, all clustered around an asymmetrical white-gray structure.
“It’s an anchorage,” he says. “They have a deep-space anchorage out here. Maybe a small fleet yard. Look at that. There’s the outriggers—that’s the central part right there.” He pokes at the display with his index finger and pans the image by moving his hand clockwise.
“Whatever they’re doing out there, they’re keeping really tight EMCON,” the tactical officer says.
“Yeah, I’m sure they are. How many recon drones do we have left on the ship?”
“Fourteen, sir. We used up half our loadout in Fomalhaut.” Major Renner looks over to the ELINT officer, who confirms the statement with a nod.
“Prep them for launch. I want to make a box with them all around this anchorage.” The colonel points at the display and starts marking locations on the plot.
“They’re picketing right here, and whatever they’re assembling is on the other side of that anchorage. Put four birds on the near side—here, here, here, and here. Then four more on the far side at these coordinates.” He marks the spots by poking them with his finger. “We’ll bracket the whole area, box ’em in. I want to keep tabs on every ship that comes or goes.”
“Aye, sir. Weps, let’s get those birds into the tubes and warmed up.”
Indy’s autonomous stealth drones are like miniature starships. They have propulsion, guidance systems, sensor packages, and a comms suite. I don’t know half the technological voodoo that goes into them because they’re superclassified secret tech, but I know from my Neural Networks days that a recon ship with the new drones tied into its sensor network is worth a whole squadron of the old ships that don’t have the drones and the new data-link infrastructure they require.
“Recon birds are ready in tubes two, four, five, and six,” the weapons officer says when the loading procedure is complete. The drones are sized to fit and launch from Indy’s standard ship-to-ship missile tubes—Indy lacks external launchers, so everything that leaves the ship has to go through the main airlock, the hangar bay, or the launcher tubes.
“Flight One ready to launch,” the XO confirms. “Float ’em out, minimal noise. Go for quarter-g acceleration once they’re at least ten kilometers away.”
“Aye, sir.” The weapons officer flips the safety covers off the hardware launch buttons on his console. Then he toggles them in sequence.
“Launching Two. Launching Four. Launching Five. Launching Six. Birds away, sir.”
“Confirm separation,” the tactical officer says. “Drones are coasting passive and ballistic.”
On the plot, the four drones we just launched appear as blue inverted V shapes. They slowly crawl away from Indy, fanning out very slightly as they go.
“We have good data link.”
“Prep Flight Two and launch when ready,” Major Renner says.
Almost as soon as the recon drones are away from the ship, our sensor input markedly increases in quality and resolution. The tactical plot does sort of a blip as it updates the holographic orb with new data, and ship icons shift around a bit to reflect the new data from the remote drones.
“They don’t have enough ships for a decent picket,” Colonel Campbell says after he watches the plot change for a few minutes. “Not for a chunk of space like this. They have those three right there”—he points at the picket force we just evaded—“and they’re walling off the likely approach from Earth and Luna.”
“Not meant to be airtight, just to keep nosy neighbors away,” Major Renner agrees.
“Well, it’s not like there’s a lot of traffic left around Earth.”
The drones coast out from Indy’s trajectory powered only by the magnetic acceleration imparted by the launch-tube system. Ten thousand meters away, and with Indy already a few dozen kilometers away from the launch point, they activate their own propulsion systems, and they speed off on their respective trajectories. Indy is sending out four more sets of eyes and ears on a very long leash, doing exactly what she was built for in the first place.
“Flight Two is going into the tubes right now,” the weapons officer announces. “Three minutes for prelaunch warm-up.”
When the second flight of recon drones launches, the first flight is already hundreds of kilometers away, making a fuel-efficient and stealthy path to their assigned positions. Flight Two separates from the ship, and the drones coast out to their activation points and shoot off to their own preprogrammed coordinates. Within two hours, the drones are roughly where we want them: above, below, and to either side of this uncharted deep-space anchorage. Indy has made a long, curved detour around the picket screen, which is now above and off our starboard stern. The anchorage is off our starboard bow, half a million kilometers away.
“Correct our trajectory,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Helm, nudge her fifteen degrees to port, neutral pitch. Let’s reduce our aspect a little. Just in case their sensors are as good as ours.”
We creep closer to the anchorage, like thieves staking out a mark on the dark streets of a PRC past midnight while the cops are patrolling nearby. There’s an anchorage out here, all right, and the combined sensor feed from Indy’s passive gear and the eight stealth drones that are bracketing this sector of space paint a clearer picture of its surroundings every minute we close the distance.
“Eighteen ships,” the XO counts. “Dang, that’s a respectable task force.”
“There are at least two more,” the tactical officer says. He highlights the anchorage on the screen above the holotable. “Right here, in the docking berths. And they’re big ships. I’d say carrier sized.”
“Any ID on them?”
“No, sir. I’m not getting anything from them at all, not even IFF.”
The cluster of ships on the far side of the anchorage gives up the identities of its members bit by bit. The drone network and Indy’s computer compare the electronic signatures of the ships and assign hull numbers or class IDs to the assembled fleet one by one as we get closer.
“There’s another carrier,” the XO points out. The ID tag on the contact icon reads “CV-2153 POLLUX.”