0954 hours CST, June 22, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

A flight of four fighters was not a big threat for a torpedo boat like the Skate; its point defense systems could handle the small flight without worry. There were other fish to fry in the pond of the SD-Four system. The big question was, where did the flight of fighters come from, and what they were doing so close to the sun?

“Do you have an identification on the fighters?” Murphy asked.

“They look to be old NTF Halifax class light fighters, though they are not in any standard configuration in the database,” Petty officer Yosufzai responded. “I swear that the wings on one are from a RoT Eagle fighter.”

“That’s not surprising if they are pirates. They are probably put together from junk and salvage. What about their formation? Are they flying tight or loose?”

“They appear to be in a standard two-by-two formation, two elements of two. The fighters of each element are about a kilometre apart. The two elements are five kilometres apart.”

“That’s awfully loose,” Murphy muttered to himself. He turned to the right and looked at the ESO. “Able Miller, are there any emissions coming from them?”

“My sensors are detecting the occasional bits of radio chatter, but no radar or other active sensors.”

Murphy waited for a few moments as he watched the readings on his console; he checked the ambient temperature of the hull, the current level of vibration, and other key readings that monitored how detectable the Skate currently was. The only item that was higher than it should have been was the visual cross-section. The flat black hull of the torpedo boat was good when away from the sun, but closer to it, there was a higher chance of reflection and being caught between an observer and the sun.

“Leading Spaceman Hart, rotate the boat so that the bow is pointing toward the fighters. Do it slowly, but I want the bow pointed toward them as much as possible.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The manoeuvring thrusters at the bow and stern of the boat fired, and the long hull started to rotate till the bow was pointed toward the fighters. Even if the fighters were not using radar right now, there was no rule saying they could not. By pointing the bow of the boat at the fighters, Murphy reduced both the radar and visual cross-section, lowering the probability of being detected that way.

All the crew’s eyes were on their stations. Murphy had split his console view between the cameras and the electronic detection screens. Everyone kept his words to a minimum, hoping that stillness would help them get overlooked by their commanding officer.

While vibration was an issue this close to the sun, the sensors to detect it were too large for the four fighters to carry. The silence aided in the crew’s concentration and attitude toward their duties.

The boat was almost seventy-five million kilometres from the sun, but it was still very close to the entrance point. In the hours it spent moving away from its ingress, it had travelled less than nine hundred thousand kilometres. That was less than three light seconds, which was not much when dealing with four fighters out hunting for them.

Murphy watched his console as the fighters moved toward the ingress point and then turned to go into an orbit around the sun. He breathed a sigh of relief as they did so. The Skate went the other way and was still travelling away from the ingress point. It would be unlikely that the fighters would spot the torpedo boat now, but yet he still worried.

“OK, it looks like we’re free of them this time.”

“Shouldn’t we follow them back to their base, sir?” Lieutenant Bell asked.

“No, not yet. We need to know the current lay of the system first. We know where the asteroids are supposed to be, and what orbits they’re following, but we have to make sure before we go chasing after the fighters. I do not want to be dodging rocks we don’t know about while we pursue them. Besides, if their base is behind them, they’ll be on us if they turn around and go back to base.” Murphy’s explanation helped him solidify his instincts into thoughts and reasons for his decision.

Murphy waited another hour for the fighters to get far enough away that he felt completely safe—as completely safe as he could be in a system that had an unknown base for at least four fighters.

“No need to call general quarters right now. We’re clear of them. Lieutenant Bell, lay in a half-G survey route of the system. Standing orders are for an active watch on all camera stations. Have the HHE do two-minute sweeps as we survey. Also deploy the GAD and MAD pod.” The Gravity Anomaly Detector, known as the GAD, looked for fluctuations in gravity. The Magnetic Anomaly Detector looked for high concentrations of ferrous material by its magnetic characteristics.

“I’ll be in my quarters. Copy all camera logs there and any other sensor logs we have. Also prepare a message pod to go back to the fleet. Lieutenant Bell, you have the watch.”

* * *

1254 hours CST, June 22, 2673; Baker Flight

Captain Jorge Wilmore, formerly of the forces of the Democratic Commonwealth of New Terra Firma, was the lead pilot of a group of craft that could loosely be called fighters. The four fighters of the group were made up of spare parts. About the only piece of the fighters that was whole and original was the pilot’s seat. Even the cockpit, a bastion of consistency in most craft, was put together from components of other salvaged and junked fighters. The main components of the craft came from what could be gathered. The weapon pylons came from Eagle fighter bombers, the fuselage from Halifax interceptors. Even the three main engines came from two different classes of fighters.

They were a challenge to pilot. There was no way the mechanics who built them were able to properly line up the three forward-thrust engines with the centre of mass. Jorge constantly had to fire the manoeuvring thrusters to bring the nose back in line to where he wanted it. The three other members of the flight were also suffering from the same lack of control. Not only did it waste fuel, but it also wasted concentration.

Captain Wilmore had been a member of the Fourth NTF Expeditionary Fleet, along with the rest of his flight. Their mission had been to set up a forward base close to the Terrace Republic’s holdings during the last war. That was eleven years ago, and the Fourth had lost contact with their government during the closure of the war. They had been on their own ever since.

The fleet had expected to be mostly on their own without supplies for several years, but about five years ago, the expeditionary force had started to run low on requisite supplies and took up commerce raiding to fill in the gaps. Several messages had been sent to the Commonwealth’s government, but the messages had gone unanswered. The Fourth was on its own, and it had to do something to keep the ships in repair and the men fed.

The area around the Clearwater system was a prime location for commerce raiding, and the fleet was able to get together enough spare parts to bring all the remaining ships back into service, along with some of the other ships they had been able to salvage during their pirating.

Wilmore was leading a patrol that monitored the exit vector for ships travelling from Clearwater. He was on his way back to the hanger when his radiation sensors caught the indication that something had entered the system. The four fighters had flipped over and accelerated back toward the contact.

It took them close to three hours to get back to the sensor contact, and by that time, whoever had entered the system was long gone before the four fighters got close. The other members of the flight cursed as they brought the fighters into orbit around the sun. That was the most likely course a ship entering a new system was going to take.

Heading into orbit around the sun in the same direction as most everything else was safer. A ship could avoid hazards easier by moving in the same direction as the hazard. Also, the most likely egress routes from SD-Four were along that orbit as well. A merchant vessel going to the next system would take the shortest path, and that was the direction the fighters went.

The group searched for another three hours and found nothing. Either the ship was accelerating faster than one G, it had already left the system, or it went to the one egress point that was in counter orbit from the Clearwater transit point.

Wilmore’s flight was running low on fuel and oxygen. The New Terra Firma ships and fighters were not known for their endurance. Most large ships were only outfitted for a month in space away from a tender or home base. The fighters were usually only good for eighteen hours. The cobbled-together fighters were even worse.

Jorge cursed the gods again and aimed his flight of fighters back toward their mother ship. The flight controllers were not happy, and he was not happy. It seemed like it was going to be a very unhappy day back on the ship, and the only thing that cheered him up was that the contact was probably not a Terrace patrol boat.

The Navy of Terrace had become lax of late, and they had lost the edge that they had gained in the war with the Commonwealth. The Clearwater fleet was far from the core systems of the Republic. Terrace itself was over thirty light-years away from Clearwater, with a standard trip leading to four other star systems. This put the forces around Clearwater out of close communications with the capital.

News of the pirate attacks took close to a month to reach the core systems. The time and distance lessened the impact of the reports and lowered their priority with the admiralty and with the general population. The reports were mostly used as a way for the navy to fight for its budget and were used for hardly anything else.

Clearwater was isolated, and the fleet was alone. The pirates could raid without worry of being chased. Interstellar distances prevented the fleet from going in hot pursuit of the pirates since it would take them days to reach the site of an attack. After years of pirate activity, the Terrace Navy had stopped patrolling the systems farther out than one jump from Clearwater looking for the pirates.

The chances of the new contact being a patrol boat were low, even with Clearwater being the next system over. Every other time a patrol boat was sent to SD-Four, it followed a standard entrance and exit strategy, and it patrolled the system by using a standard search pattern. The torpedo boats that usually did the patrolling were not driven by the Terrace Navy’s best and brightest officers.

Jorge was unhappy, and he was mildly disappointed. The current orders from command outlined a more aggressive strategy. The flight had hoped to catch one of the patrol boats from Clearwater and make it disappear. Specifically, they were hoping to make the patrol disappear here in Stellar Delta Four. Jorge was only mildly disappointed, as he expected they would need to hit more ships right next to Clearwater before the fleet would send out more patrols.

The flight was four hours from home, six hours behind schedule, and Jorge was looking forward to handing the fighter over to the next lucky pilot and going back to his regular fighter.

* * *

1500 hours CST, June 22nd, 2673; the bridge of the Skate

Surveying a system, even one that had been previously mapped and explored, took some time. The immediate area around the torpedo boat had been surveyed; all the cameras that were buried just beneath the hull of the boat were tasked for the job. The distances between each camera were known down to the micrometre. A camera’s aim was accurate to a tenth of an arc second. If an object was seen in at least two cameras, simple trigonometry could be used to figure out how far away the object was. Once the distance to an object was known, the size could be mapped out, and with observation the velocity of the object could also be determined.

The computers, while having advanced programming and artificial intelligence, were still prone to errors and often had difficulty determining what to point the cameras at. Human judgment proved to be much better than a computer for this type of work, so each camera was monitored by an enlisted man or woman.

Human operators grew tired, bored, or distracted. The discipline of the Republic Navy helped with this, but the main reason the survey was going smoothly was the visual sensors operator on the bridge: Petty Officer Second Class Sabeen Yosufzai. Sabeen had been born on the planet of Rosswood, the same planet that the boat’s lead mechanic had hailed from.

Rosswood was a brown and blue planet, one of the few to have more water area than land area. The brown came from the rugged terrain of the Pangaea continent. The world was young and active, with hardly any native flora or fauna. The mountains were high and ran from coast to coast. Mining was the main provider of the economy; the tall mountains were filled with untapped resources. This focused the small population into the mining trades and the jobs around the mines. Mechanical aptitude and attention to detail were the defining characteristics of the inhabitants.

Sabeen could almost literally watch the output from four different cameras at once and guide each of them to the right location to get proper sightings for distance measurements. She could also look at the differences between the images in two cameras, and using the background stars as a guide, could tell roughly how far an object was. The computers gave better parallax readings but were not as fast as the PO from Rosswood. She was as perfect a fit for the VSO role as anyone on the boat could be. The role made her the supervisor for everyone manning a camera, and on a boat designed for stealth like the torpedo boats, there were a lot of cameras. Contacts were usually reported through her station before they were discovered by the electronic sensors.

The survey of the system was mainly handled by Sabeen, but with the HHE and the other sensor pod sweeping the system, she was not overworked. The HHE helped her instincts in guiding the cameras, so combined with her training, she was not going to miss a lot. She did not have to have the cameras constantly focusing on completing the sphere around the boat; instead, she tasked the cameras as the HHE guided her.

The combined MAD and GAD pod was also used, though they were mostly passive sensors and did not have the detection capabilities of the active HHE pod. The two sensor pods were used to find targets, and the cameras were used for final identification.

Four hours into the survey, they discovered another flight of fighters, this time heading away from the ingress point, and Murphy was called back to the bridge. The afternoon watch had just started, and Lieutenant Ridgard was sitting in the watch officer’s chair.

Murphy came onto the bridge and asked for the situation report as he climbed up the ladder on the right and relieved Ridgard from his seat.

“Visual just spotted another patrol of fighters heading toward a group of asteroids. They look to be similar to the ones we saw before.”

“Similar fighters, or the same ones we saw going to our ingress point?” Murphy asked as he settled into his chair and pulled the seat belt into place. The seat had a five-point harness, but habit and general laziness meant that usually only the waist straps were used. It was only during combat that the other three points of the harness were generally used.

“I can’t confirm they’re the same, but they appear to be, sir,” Sabeen reported from her console.

“Very well.” Murphy turned to look at the tactical plot on the main screen at the front of the bridge. The time was getting close to 1530 hours, a half-hour since the morning watch had left the bridge. Murphy turned to look to his left. The signals officer chair was empty. Lieutenant Kostya was the watch officer for the night watch.

Murphy keyed his display over to the ship-wide panel and sent a message to the junior officer’s quarters, and to the mess, keyed for Lieutenant Bell. Murphy did not want to make a ship-wide announcement for his astrogator. That would have woken up the night watch, who should have been sleeping in their bunks, and it would have started more rumours flying throughout the boat.

He was still examining the tactical chart when Bell arrived on the bridge. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yes, thank you for showing up after going off watch. The cameras have detected a patrol of fighters moving away from the sun and heading toward a group of asteroids. Their base might be nearby. Petty Yosufzai, what is your confidence that you have the system mapped out to two light-seconds centered on those fighters?”

“We are about eighty-five percent confident that we have all objects plotted. Everything matches to ninety percent of the last survey of the system. The sun is reflecting off the rocks, so we should have spotted everything by now. The fighters also have some bare metal, and we caught some glints off of them that allowed us to detect them before the HHE picked them up, sir.”

“Good, but it’s not surprising the HHE isn’t good for small things like those fighters. We’re still going to try to sneak up on them and follow them back to base. Lieutenant Bell, let’s see if we can work out a plot that will have us using the asteroids as cover. Too bad there aren’t any comets in the area. We don’t want to lose those fighters, so make sure the plot is aggressive, but not too aggressive.”

“I’ll get right on it, sir.”

“Helm, adjust course, starboard fourteen degrees, upward by six. Move us toward this asteroid,” Murphy said as he selected an asteroid above the elliptical plane of the system. “Keep acceleration at half a G.”

“Starboard fourteen degrees, up by twelve, aye.” The helmsman for the afternoon watch, Able Spaceman Watson, repeated the instructions and moved the controls slowly, bringing the boat around toward the asteroid and the waypoint that Murphy had set.

“Lieutenant Bell, the fighters are accelerating at one G, and we’ll be losing ground. We’ll have to cut the corner, but we don’t want to be too close either. We can’t afford to be seen just yet. Only break above half G if you need to catch up to an asteroid to get us into its shadow.”

“I think I have the course now, sir.”

“Very well, send it to the main screen. VSO, make sure you keep two cameras on the fighters at all times. The other cameras should be scanning for anything out there. If those fighters get within ten percent of the maximum traverse of a camera, make sure to take another one for it.”

“Aye sir, entering the orders now.”

Murphy looked at the time, 1546 hours. “Sabeen, who is your designated relief for the afternoon watch?” With the VSO station only officially manned during the morning watch, Sabeen was overdue for relief. During the night watch, the ESO station handled the reporting of the camera contacts, but with it being the afternoon, both stations should have been empty.

“Able Spaceman Davis. He’s on station in the RSG turret, sir.”

“Have him report to the bridge and your console. I will have someone here in the bridge reporting contacts. When he arrives, get some rest.” Murphy made a note in his logs. He did not like the tasking and allocation on the bridge. It left significant holes, from his perspective. He had felt he was too new for the job of senior officer to make major changes, but he definitely felt the need for them. He just did not know what exactly, as he had been in command for less than a week.

Murphy turned his eyes to the course on the main screen. “Be a bit more aggressive there, Kory,” he said and looked down at Bell’s station. “You know how a t-puma hunts?”

“Not really, sir. I’ve only been to Terrace for training, and there aren’t many of them on Midway Station,” he said with a tight smile that his commanding officer could not see, but could still hear.

“I’m surprised there were any there at all. They aren’t really the type to leave Terrace. You’d see t-wolves more off planet. That’s beside the point. A t-puma hides in the trees or behind the rocks. It always parallels the track of its prey, crossing back and forth occasionally to make sure it knows just where its quarry is. It cuts corners to get closer, always hiding until the last moment. Then it leaps and strikes when the conditions are right.

“You need to think like that in the asteroids. Move from asteroid to asteroid, brush up against them if you have to, but get us into a position to strike. While we’re hidden behind an asteroid, bring us up in acceleration, and then back down when we aren’t so hidden. We should be able to catch up when they start to decelerate.”

“All right, sir. That’s a bit different than they taught us at the Academy.”

“Not all right, Kory,” Murphy said, letting a touch of his excitement get into his voice. “You have to get past the mind-set of playing it safe all the time. We’re the hunters here; we’re the t-puma. Those fighters are the prey, got it?”

“Yes sir!”

* * *

1657 hours CST, June 22nd, 2673; lead fighter of Baker Flight

“Lead, this is three.” The sudden communications startled Captain Wilmore out of a doze.

“Three, lead here. Go ahead.”

“I think there’s something following us.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’m not sure. It could also have been a camera glitch, but something black passed in front of the sun. I couldn’t tell what,” the leader of the second element of Jorge’s flight responded. The wording was a bit jarring to his ears.

“It couldn’t have been an asteroid, three?”

“I don’t think so, lead. It looked like it was going toward one of the asteroids.”

Jorge had to think for a moment. The fighters were getting low on fuel. They would have to drift back to the carrier if they turned back to investigate. Three’s contact might have been what caused the ingress signature, but it could have also been a glitch.

“One moment, three, I have to call this in.” He switched channels. “Control, this is Baker Flight Three.” He had to wait a few seconds for the response.

“What is it, Baker Three?”

“No positive confirmation on ships entering the system, but we have a possible contact behind us going to one of the asteroids. We are low on fuel and lox, requesting instructions.” He tried to keep his report brief and objective.

“How possible, Baker Three lead?”

“Low possible, it could have been a camera glitch.”

“Roger, proceed as you were, out.”

Jorge switched back to the patrol channel. “We’re continuing on our vector back to base,” he said to the other three pilots. “Keep an eye on those cameras and keep in formation. We’ll roll over soon. The nose cameras are better anyway. Let’s hope they catch something.”

The flight continued along its vector and did a rollover to start decelerating to their mother ship. There was no reason for them to deviate from the course they had set. As they decelerated, the next patrol flew out, accelerating to the sun.