"Goldman, we want to help you, but we need something from you. From what Green has told us, we estimate that you have between thirteen and seventeen Afterburner tablets-that's what you call this kind of stim, isn't it? Afterburners?"

Goldman nodded.

"We want you to turn them over to us. All of them. And wear a biomonitor for thirty days so that we know you are staying clean. In exchange, we will treat your withdrawal medically, give you support and counseling, and not impose any discipline on you for any drug-related conduct between when you joined the s.h.i.+p until the moment you turn the pills over to me."

"What if I don't go along? You mean I don't get treatment when I run out of pills?"

"I'm going to pretend that I didn't hear that," Sahin said stiffly. "I have taken a sacred oath as a physician. I would never withhold treatment from anyone who needed it. Ever. You will receive the appropriate treatment at the appropriate time irrespective of whether you cooperate with us. But I am given to understand that the captain would discipline you for possession of dangerous drugs, consumption of dangerous drugs, and reporting for duty while impaired or under the influence of dangerous drugs. I am also given to understand that he would bring a separate count for possession of each tablet, for each time you took a tablet, and for each watch for which you reported while under the influence. My estimate is that we would be contemplating at least three hundred counts, and more likely something like a thousand. I shudder to think of how long your sentence would be upon conviction on all those charges."

Goldman pondered that for a minute. "Ohhhh, I see. I get it now. This isn't about establis.h.i.+ng discipline and proving to us that we can't take drugs in defiance of the captain's wishes. You have to understand, that's what it would have been about with Captain Oscar. What your guy is trying to do is to restore combat effectiveness in the shortest possible time. Right. That's got to be it. You need everyone to turn in their pills now, so you can get everyone through withdrawal or recovered from that slowing down thing you get with people on the Chill, and get everyone back on duty ASAP. Am I interpreting my readings correctly?"

"I'm not going to tell you that you are wrong." Dr. Sahin could not help but smile. Even with his mind disordered by the stimulants, Goldman had a.n.a.lyzed the fragmentary evidence at his disposal and rapidly arrived upon the correct conclusion. If he could break the shackles of drug dependency and his self-defeating att.i.tudes, this man could become an exceptional officer.

"I sank a lot of money into those pills. I'd be throwing away several hundred credits."

"There are more important things than credits. Do not think of this as a matter of throwing the money away. Rather, I invite you to characterize it as, shall we say, tuition, the money one pays to receive a valuable education."

"There may be something to that, Doctor." He paused, considering. The doctor didn't rush him, as he knew that this man was weighing the alternatives, using the best rational a.n.a.lysis he could bring to bear. Sahin sat in silence. He had seen this man's mind at work and was confident of the outcome.

"Okay. Deal. Oh, Doctor, as one person who evaluates data to another, kind of a professional courtesy, I want you to know that your estimate is off."

"What do you mean?"

"In calculating the number of pills I have left, you made an erroneous a.s.sumption. You a.s.sumed that I am taking the pills only to prop myself up near the end of a watch. I'm also taking them to get myself going after a short sleep period too."

Sahin made a note to revise his calculations with regard to other stim users.

"I have ten tablets left, exactly. Where do you want me to bring them?" Sahin had no doubt that Goldman was telling him the truth.

"To me. Personally. Put them in my hand. I will expect you back here in less than five minutes. And if you take any of them before you come, I will know."

"Five minutes." He paused and turned back to meet the doctor's eyes. Was that fear? "Bones, I tried to stop taking them before. It was pretty bad."

Yes, it was fear. While the doctor was reading Goldman's eyes, Goldman was reading his. For the first time he could remember, Goldman looked into the eyes of a superior officer and saw sympathy, understanding, and-of all things-kindness.

"Goldman, the entire staff of the Casualty Center will be here to help you through it. I am here to help you as well. We will give you medication to ease your symptoms. If they become severe, we will put you in the Casualty Center where someone will be watching over you every moment. Remember, young man, you are in the Navy, and in the Navy you are never, ever alone."

CHAPTER 13.

05:17Z Hours, 25 January 2315 "Verify destination." The XO could not hide the excitement in his voice.

"Destination is Alfa jump point in unnamed system, catalog designation Uniform Sierra Nebula Galaxy Sierra 4-1195-1486-5912-4109. Coordinates as displayed." Even Stevenson's reading of unexciting star catalog designations seemed to carry with it a hefty dollop of adrenalin.

"Very well," said the XO.

"One minute to jump," Stevenson called out.

"Jump Officer, safe all systems for jump," said Garcia.

"Safing." Around the CIC, console after console went dark or to static or flat gray.

"I want the s.h.i.+p stealthed as soon as possible after we come out of the jump," Max interjected into the routine. The order was promptly acknowledged.

Everyone watched the jump clock. Then the jump officer began the countdown. "Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Jumping."

This time, no one retched. That was always a bonus. One man at point defense systems looked a little green, but he looked almost that green before the jump. He was on the closely held list of men who were going through withdrawal. Five men, so far, had been taken off active duty: three were in their quarters and two were in the Casualty Station. The rest were standing their watches and doing their duty, with the help of a meticulous, individually designed medication regimen put together by Dr. Sahin, whose skills as a physician Max was beginning to suspect were nothing short of the genius level.

"Jump complete, restoring systems," Stevenson announced. The now-familiar routine progressed as one system after another stirred from enforced slumber; sensor information started coming in; drives were restored; and the s.h.i.+p inched into tentative motion to clear the datum. But this time the routine was not routine at all.

The Vaaach map had shown the expected routes and schedules of four Krag freighters as they moved through the Free Corridor. As best could be told from a.n.a.lysis of the file, the original source of the data was the computer of a Krag vessel. Apparently, the Vaaach had met the Krag vessel somewhere in deep s.p.a.ce, hacked the computer, and downloaded the file. This wasn't surprising given that they had sufficient skill to penetrate the c.u.mberland's intricate system of serially redundant firewalls and lockouts to place a file in her systems without anyone being the wiser. Perhaps they hacked the computers of every s.h.i.+p they met, in which case the Vaaach must have acc.u.mulated an amazing body of intelligence.

Two of the Krag s.h.i.+ps were positioned so that the c.u.mberland could not reach them before they crossed into the Romanovan Imperium, a neutral power whose s.p.a.ce Max was ordered not to violate. However, two s.h.i.+ps appeared as though they could be intercepted, and Max was going to try.

As always, Max needed to hear from Kasparov. Fortunately, the man and his back room had progressed by leaps and bounds in only a few days. Minutes elapsed with no s.h.i.+p contacts other than a few freighters crawling across the system at 0.05 c. Sensors typed and cla.s.sified them anyway, and Comms pulled up their transponder information in less than ten seconds. They turned out to be a heavy ore carrier operated by Shoulder Freight Lines, ridiculously named Shoulder's Boulder Holder, and an eighty-five-year-old, bare-bones, barely able to pa.s.s inspection microfreighter bearing the improbable name Queen Mary, its tiny hold full of small but high-value items: gourmet coffee, something known as Beluga caviar, precision machine tools, and surgical instruments.

By the end of this cruise, this crew might turn out to be moderately proficient.

Max saw Kasparov's shoulder muscles tense and his hands fly to the controls for his console. He must have heard something from his back room.

"Distant contact. Designating as Uniform seven. Bearing two-seven-five mark zero-five-three. Reading a bearing change from right to left and from bottom to top. Range is still uncertain, but the weakness of the ma.s.s detection indicates it is in excess of two-five AU. Bearing change is rapid for such a distant contact, and I'm getting a hint of a high Doppler as well, so I'm cla.s.sifying contact as fast-probably a wars.h.i.+p. Request course change to zero-niner-five mark zero-five-three to get a cross bearing on contact."

"Maneuvering, make it so. Make your speed zero point two five," Max ordered. The s.h.i.+p came about to a heading perpendicular to the contact's bearing. If the line of the first bearing to the target was the "b" side of a right triangle, the idea was for the s.h.i.+p to now travel along "a" side, or the base, and then take a cross bearing down the "c" side, or hypotenuse, allowing it to calculate the range. Of course, with active sensors Max could have the range measured to the meter in a few minutes, targeting the enemy with a sensor beam. But like submarines in the oceans of Earth centuries before, stalking wars.h.i.+ps, rarely gave away their positions by using active sensors, preferring to detect their prey by the target's own emissions, while they remained hidden until the last second. The deadliest attack was the one you did not see coming.

Minutes pa.s.sed, then the better part of an hour. Working a target takes patience and nerves of steel. With all the coffee Max had been drinking these past few hours, it also took a bladder the size of a beach ball. Max had needed to take a leak for the last twenty minutes but hated to leave his station for more than ten seconds. If he didn't go now, though, he'd be forced to leave to change his uniform. "XO, I'm headed for the head. You have CIC."

"Understood, I have CIC."

He was back in less than ninety seconds.

"XO, status." Tradition demanded that he ask, as if there were anything that could have changed meaningfully in a minute and a half that would not also be immediately obvious from the main status display and the condition monitors.

"No change, sir," Garcia responded.

Max would have been willing to kill or to die himself to get more and better information from Kasparov, but the man couldn't tell what he didn't know. He was talking furiously to his back room, so they must be learning something. Max itched to know. He was used to being in the trenches, not back at the chateau drinking champagne, talking on the field telephone, and moving markers around on a map. If he chose, Max could listen to their voice loop, or any other of the circuits between any of his CIC officers and their back rooms. For that matter, if he had the patience to navigate his way through all the levels of all the menus, he could pull up any display from any console in the s.h.i.+p. But no captain with any sense did that (Max noted, though, that Captain Oscar had configured his console with easy navigation shortcuts to do exactly that-monitor loops, scroll through every display of every CIC console, and all sorts of other ludicrous micromanagement). Max relied mostly on what his CIC people told him, plus what he could tell from a few of the normal "CO Displays" that were on the standard main menu for the commander's console.

"Captain," Kasparov said, "cross bearing indicates range to target is twenty-six point seventy-four AU. Target motion a.n.a.lysis indicates target is bound for this system's Bravo jump point at speed of approximately zero point five two c. Naturally, as we acc.u.mulate more data, we will be able to refine that estimate.

"And sir, this is a very dusty system. Both we and the target are in the plane of this system, so our line of sight right now is right through the bulk of the dust, and it's obscuring visual imaging. At first, we thought that the target was enormous, but as we start to get a better angle, the target image appears, under extreme magnification and enhancement, to be resolving into three s.h.i.+ps in a line abeam formation. Configurations are not visible at this time, but from the amount of light reflected from each, our best guess right now is that we are looking at the fast military ore carrier we were expecting and two escorts of some kind. Probably destroyers, but they might be large corvettes or small frigates at this point. So, the largest s.h.i.+p retains the designation Uniform seven and we are designating the apparent escorts as Uniform eight and nine."

"Thank you, Mr. Kasparov." Oh, yes, thank you so b.l.o.o.d.y much, Mr. Kasparov. Two-count-em, two-probable Krag destroyers. We wouldn't want to make things too easy, would we?

"Maneuvering, plot a course at a forty-five-degree angle to the plane of this system with an azimuth that will put us on the six o'clock of that little Krag convoy while keeping us more than half a million kills away from them at all times. We'll slide into their six and sneak up behind them from that far back." Max wouldn't normally give such a complex order to Maneuvering; instead, he would break the order down into a series of simpler steps and give each as the previous one was completed. But LeBlanc had impressed him so far. This man could handle what was just thrown at him, plus some.

LeBlanc acknowledged the order, spent a minute or so working with his console, and then projected a proposed course in the tactical display. Max saw that it was exactly what he wanted and nodded to his fellow Cajun. The old chief began giving orders to his people, and the c.u.mberland started once again to crawl the duck pond.

"Sensors, you will let me know when you get a better ID on the Krag vessels, won't you?"

"Affirmative, sir. It's going to be a while. They are still very distant, their drives are masked from us so we can't get a specident on them, and we are still too far for optical scanners to resolve a configuration." Max had served his time in Kasparov's position, so he knew all that. It didn't make it any less frustrating.

Patience. Max was tempted to run the main sublight up to full and go charging into battle, guns blazing. It would be better than taking all these hours to creep into position and make a sneak attack. No, it wouldn't. Chances were, in a fair fight those two Krag escorts would mop the floor with him. Max remembered the words of Commodore Middleton: "A fair fight comes from poor planning. Your goal is an unfair fight. You want to use every trick, artifice, and deceit possible to make every fight an outrageously unfair contest tilted completely in your favor, every time. If you are above using surprise, guile, stealth, and misdirection in battle, you are too n.o.ble to be in the Navy. Consider a career in education."

An hour and a half of creeping. "Skipper," Kasparov said, "we've finally got an angle that lets us do a specident on the targets' drives-all Krag signatures. So all three targets are now posident as hostile. Redesignating the probable ore carrier as Hotel One, and the two probable escorts as Hotels Two and Three. We should have the IDs narrowed down to cla.s.s before long."

Whatever their precise designation, the three targets had been keeping a ruler-straight course across this star system since they were first detected, and were making no effort to make themselves hard to detect. Whether it was because of Max's strategy of getting into his patrol area several days early, or sheer luck, these s.h.i.+ps appeared to have no idea that there was any chance of a hostile s.h.i.+p in the neighborhood.

Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted it to look as though they weren't expecting trouble.

"Mr. Kasparov, I want you to put two men in your back room on optical scanners. Watch the area like hawks, from twenty thousand to five hundred thousand kills behind our little convoy. Look for any occultations, reflections, glints, glimmers, tiny flashes from att.i.tude control thrusters, flicking cigarette lighters, toddler's nightlights, or any artificial light source of any kind. Tie the computer detectors into those circuits too-sometimes they will spot something that eyeb.a.l.l.s miss. Then, I want you to take two more men and align the main ma.s.s detector on that azimuth, and ignore everything else."

The main ma.s.s detector usually scanned in all directions, allowing it to detect approaching vessels but greatly decreasing its sensitivity. By training it in one direction only, Max was increasing the chance of detecting even a distant target that was taking active measures to conceal its ma.s.s signature.

"Crank up the gain way above the background noise threshold, and then have those men watch the noise. Look for any repeat detections more than one standard deviation above random. If there is something hiding in that s.p.a.ce, you are going to slowly build up a pattern of higher than average detections along the other s.h.i.+p's line of bearing."

"Aye, sir. What about EM detection? We can orient the high-gain array that we use to monitor low-power eavesdropping devices from long range."

Designed with the idea that she might someday be used to penetrate enemy s.p.a.ce and collect intelligence, c.u.mberland was equipped with an exquisitely sensitive broadband EM sensor capability that allowed her to receive signals from covertly planted "bugs" at extreme range. The same equipment might pick up faint electromagnetic signals escaping from the hidden enemy vessel.

"Good idea. Do that. Maybe they have some signal leakage they don't know about." Kasparov started giving orders to his back room.

"Maneuvering, let's crawl that duck pond from the west instead of the north."

"You want to come up behind this hypothetical trailing s.h.i.+p?" LeBlanc was instantly on the same page.

"You got it. a.s.sume the trailer is less than half a million kills behind the ore carrier. Let's give him a wide berth and put ourselves on his six. Hopefully, he's going to be watching the backs of the s.h.i.+ps he's protecting, rather than his own."

"Aye, sir."

"Captain, if I may?"

"Yes, XO?"

"What makes you think anything's back there?"

"Call it a hunch. Well, it's more than that, actually. This little mini-convoy just smells fishy to me. You see, it's very hard to use a single s.h.i.+p, no matter how powerful it is, to protect a gigantic target like an ore carrier that has no point defense systems. If we want to attack that formation, we just use our superior stealth to sneak in to missile range, fire, and then use the combination of high speed and an exit vector screened by the exploding target to get away before we can be fired on. But if they put two escorts in there along with the ore carrier, then it's a different ball game."

"I get it." The XO caught on quickly. "With two escorts, the old 'crawl, maul, and haul' tactic won't work because at least one escort will have the right firing geometry to cover our exit vector. We would need to get a guaranteed kill on both escorts at the same time, and the Krag know that our standard tactical doctrine for doing that is to sneak up on their six o'clock and hit them simultaneously at close range with a missile, one from each tube. That way, they don't even know they are under attack until the missiles are too close for them to evade."

"Exactly, so if they have a third very stealthy s.h.i.+p...," Max prompted.

"He can sit back there, behind our firing position, silhouette us against the drive emissions of the ore carrier, and blow us to h.e.l.l just as we are setting up our shot. Those sneaky rat b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Putting two escorts right where we can see them dictates our tactics. He knows exactly what we are going to do and exactly where we are going to go-and we generously oblige him by putting ourselves right in his cross hairs."

"Bingo, XO. And when you add in that these guys aren't zigzagging to throw off our firing solution, and they don't seem to be making any effort to hide their drive emissions or their EM signature, they start to look more and more like bait."

"I see it now. And Skipper, how much you want to bet that when we type those escorts they turn out to be very old destroyers ready for the boneyard?"

"Or even corvettes, just powerful enough to be credible escorts for an ore carrier but not so powerful as to deter us from thinking we can attack successfully. No, XO, I wouldn't dream of taking that bet.

"So, here's a command training exercise for you. a.s.sume that there is a s.h.i.+p where we think and that the Krag really, really want us dead. They're serious about it: it's a cruiser. Make it a Crustacean cla.s.s. With their good performance under compression drive, they've been slipping through open s.p.a.ce into rear areas and ambus.h.i.+ng people right and left. And the two escorts we see are corvettes: Cormorants or Cottonmouths. What's our attack profile?"

"Tough exercise, Skipper." He thought for about twenty seconds. "Okay. Here's what we do. We load a Raven in tube one and a Talon in two, with an Egg Scrambler in tube three."

The Raven was a heavy antis.h.i.+p missile with a large warhead capable of destroying s.h.i.+ps up to cruiser size with just one hit. They were precious-the c.u.mberland carried only five. The Talon was the standard antis.h.i.+p missile with a smaller, variable yield warhead-the c.u.mberland carried twenty of those. And the Egg Scrambler was a device fired from a missile tube that, when exploded, scrambled the interface between normal s.p.a.ce and metas.p.a.ce such that for nearly an hour it was impossible for a s.h.i.+p to operate its compression drive; more important to the present situation, the s.h.i.+p wouldn't be able to transmit any comm signal faster than light, to alert anyone about the attack or call for help.

"We come up behind the cruiser and fire all three tubes at about fifteen thousand kills-time on target firing with the Raven targeted on the cruiser and the Talon at one of the corvettes. a.s.suming that we kill both, we bore in on the second corvette at flank and open up with the pulse cannon as soon as we're in range, while we reload all three tubes with Talons. We fight it out with the second corvette until we destroy it, then use the cannon on the ore carrier."

"Good plan. Give the orders."

Garcia gave the order to Weapons to change the missile load out. Normally, "three-tube" destroyers carried Talons in all three tubes, which meant that this attack would require the unloading and reloading of one of the forward tubes as well as the rear tubes. Max looked at the tactical display-he hadn't glanced at it for a good forty-five or fifty seconds-and saw that his s.h.i.+p was slowly curving around behind the still theoretical location of the hidden enemy s.h.i.+p. As of yet, the three visible s.h.i.+ps had held to their previous course and speed, plowing on straight and stupid, looking more and more like the bait Max suspected them to be.

Every now and then, Max would look at Kasparov, who would shake his head to say that he had no news. An hour pa.s.sed. Then two. Max had finger food delivered to CIC and the chiller restocked. The coffee pot was getting a workout too. Every now and then, someone would leave his station for a few moments to relieve himself, his position being taken over for that interval by a petty officer reasonably proficient on all stations, known as the "Shortstop," standing watch in CIC for that purpose. Now the tactical display showed that the c.u.mberland was nearly at the six o'clock position relative to the convoy.

Kasparov tilted his head as though hearing something in his headset. He said a few words to his back room and listened again for a few seconds. Somebody saw something.

"Skipper, we're getting a very faint ma.s.s detection in the zone, about sixty-five thousand kills behind the ore carrier, right on his six. The ma.s.s profile is definite but very flat, as though they're running a highly efficient graviton capture field to suppress their signature. No way to guess their ma.s.s, sir."

"Very good, Kasparov. Keep your eyes peeled.

"Maneuvering, now that we have an idea where they are, adjust your approach to bring us in closer. For now, keep us fifty thousand kills behind Kasparov's best guess on a position for the trailer."

"Aye, sir, fifty thousand behind." LeBlanc entered some commands into his console to pull up the data channel from the ma.s.s detector so he could put the s.h.i.+p just in the right spot.

"And when we get situated in the slot, talk to Kasparov and get his best guesses on an exact position relative to the other s.h.i.+ps; then make some minor course adjustments to try to get lined up to see if we can image the trailing s.h.i.+p against the glow from the ore carrier's sublight drive. Wiggle us around a bit and see if we can spot him."

"Aye, sir."

"Sir," Kasparov said, "our EM array is starting to pick up some leakage from the trailer. Internal comms, wireless devices, and so on. The Krag usually s.h.i.+eld these things very well, but I've seen reports that they sometimes leak EM dead astern in some of their larger cla.s.ses-something about ionized gases from their waste gas ports creating tiny gaps in the s.h.i.+elding. Anyway, I've got their location pinpointed within about a hundred meters now. Revising the plot to incorporate the new data."

The tactical plot of the trailing s.h.i.+p s.h.i.+fted almost imperceptibly forward and to the left. "Thank you, Kasparov," Max said. "Talk to LeBlanc and see if the two of you can use this better position to give us a look at these guys."