"Just coming up now, sir." Ten seconds went by. Finally, Kasparov said, "Bogie is very long and very narrow, somewhere between one-eight-zero-zero and two-three-zero-zero meters in length with a fifty-two to seventy-five-meter beam. He's got reactionless drive, so we don't have a drive spectrum to work with on identification. On the other hand, there aren't many races with that technology, so that narrows down the possibilities."

Reactionless drive was an exotic technology that gave its possessor sublight propulsion without having to shoot hot gases out the back end of the s.h.i.+p. Because a hot sublight drive emitting brilliant plasma flying out a thruster nozzle at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light tended to stand out against the dark, cold background of interstellar s.p.a.ce, everyone wanted reactionless drive, but only a handful of the most advanced civilizations had it.

There were only three known races with s.h.i.+ps that combined large size, long and narrow shapes, and reactionless drive: the Lakirr, who would randomly decide either to ignore you or vaporize you in a heartbeat with their obscenely advanced weaponry-no one could ever predict which; the Sarthan, who were not dangerous at all unless you let them try to sell you something; and the Vaaach, a very powerful but highly insular species who did not get involved in anyone else's business but who dealt swiftly and severely with anyone who got involved in theirs.

In any event, Max was not going to let pa.s.s an opportunity to gather intelligence and train his crew at the same time. Precious little was known about all three of these races, and anything learned from close observation of their vessels would be valuable to Naval Intelligence. Plus, his people needed practice tracking, identifying, and closing on s.h.i.+ps un.o.bserved. That was the best way to kill the enemy: sneak up on him and stab him in the back before he even knows you're there. Besides, his crew needed confidence p.r.o.nto, and the only way for them to get it was to do something difficult and live to tell about it. This was the chance to do just that.

"People, we are going to work up this target. Let's see how close we can get and how much we can observe without being observed ourselves. Maneuvering, reduce drive to 10 percent, and allow the target to get ahead of us, and then let's slip in on his six o'clock. Maintain range of at least eighteen thousand kills until I tell you to close." Max pulled up the sensors' best estimate of the contact's course plot, increased the scale to maximum, and squinted at it for a moment.

"Aye, sir. Reduce drive to 10 percent, slip in on his six, keep range in excess of one-eight-triple-zero kills until ordered otherwise."

"Skipper?" said Garcia softly, his voice carrying no farther than the edge of the command island occupied by only him and the captain.

"Yes, XO?" Max matched his volume.

"b.a.l.l.sy move, sir. Risky too. What if they take offense at being tailed?"

"This crew needs to practice these skills under conditions of risk, and they need to succeed at something. Anything. If we're spotted, we apologize, or we evade and escape, depending on who it turns out to be."

"They might not give us that chance, sir. If it's the Lakirr, and they woke up on the wrong side of the mossy rock this morning, they could hit us with their antiproton beam, and we'd evaporate in about three-eighths of a second."

"Between you and me, XO, it's not the Lakirr."

"How do you know, sir? We've got no drive spectrum, no comm traffic, no markings, and no read on configuration except that the s.h.i.+p is something of an alien phallic symbol."

"I can tell from their s.h.i.+p handling. If you watch the plot of their trajectory at large scale, you can see they're not moving in a smooth path." He pointed to a screen on his display, showing an almost imperceptible serpentine motion in three dimensions. "They slew their bow around ever so slightly to change the angle of their sensor beams relative to any target in their path. It reminds me of an animal following a scent by moving its nose back and forth. It's the Vaaach. I've seen them do that before."

"It's not in the recognition protocols."

"I sent it up the line, but Intel never included it in any of the official protocols, saying that 'the purported observation was not supported by sufficiently variegated phenomenologies to be regarded as an authoritative indicium of vessel origin,' which I think is IntelSpeak for 'We didn't think of it, so we're not going to sign off on it.'"

Garcia chuckled. "Been there. Done that. Bought the memory wipe."

"Anyway, trust me on this one. It's the Vaaach. I want to see how long it takes the children to figure it out and how they do it. And no prompting from the studio audience."

"My lips are sealed." Whatever a studio audience was.

Chief Petty Officer First Cla.s.s Claude LeBlanc directed the activities of the three s.p.a.cers at the Maneuvering Stations, giving drive and course change orders. The tactical display showed that the bogie was slowly pulling ahead and the c.u.mberland was tiptoeing around to get behind it. After a few minutes, the bogie was dead ahead.

"Captain, I think we have an ID on the bogie," said Kasparov. "But it's not by the book. We have only a single phenomenology, and the one we've got isn't even an accepted recognition protocol but, well, I think it's pretty solid, sir."

"Mr. Kasparov, when I was in Sensors, I made an identification or two that wasn't in the ARPs, so tell me what you've got."

"Now that we're nearly on her six, we're getting some good images of a few viewports the contact is showing aft. G.o.d only knows why they aren't shuttered, but there they are. Maybe they think that no one would ever be back here, or maybe it's an oversight."

"And maybe they want us to see them so that we can do whatever it is you just did," Max suggested. "I hear there are some species out there that are very much into the sport of tracking and being tracked."

"Anyway, the guys in the back room brainstormed that if we aggregated the light from all of those viewports, we might have enough photons to do a reasonably good spectral a.n.a.lysis."

This was pretty d.a.m.n smart. Max and Garcia smiled with approval as they worked through the concept. "So, you're thinking that the people who design lights for a s.h.i.+p are going to give the crew light that closely approximates the spectral balance of their sun as seen from the surface of their homeworld, right?"

"Exactly, sir, because that's what we do on our s.h.i.+ps."

"And did you get a match?"

"Yes, sir. The spectral curve from those viewports is a nearly perfect fit with what you would see at local noon on a partly cloudy day on the surface of Grrlrrmgkruhgror."

It sounded like he had something caught in his throat. "Growl... what?"

"It's the name of the Vaaach homeworld, sir. Sigint finally decrypted it from a civilian traffic routing message a few days ago."

"Good job. Never seen that one before. Write it up and I'll kick it up the line. Maybe in a month or two folks around the fleet will be taking spectra on viewports to do a 'Kasparov ID.'"

Kasparov beamed. Max knew he could be counted on to pa.s.s that information on to his back room and that the confidence problem in that department might well be solved for good.

"And Kasparov?"

"Sir?"

"Unless I'm missing something, you just identified this target, so..."

"Oh. Sorry, sir." He changed to his CIC announcement voice. "Target tentatively identified as originating from a neutral power, the Vaaach sovereignty. Redesignating Uniform One as Nebula One."

"Intel, now that we know we're dealing with the Vaaach, what does that tell us?"

The ensign at the Intel console, whom Max knew to be on his first war cruise after being promoted out of the twenty-seven-man Intel back room on a battlecruiser, could only manage to stare like a Volem Woodsgrazer caught in the vehicle guidebeams.

Once again, the wisdom of Commodore Middleton came to Max's mind: "A wars.h.i.+p captain is a lot like a teacher, with a life-and-death grading scale." School was in session today, and CIC was the cla.s.sroom.

"Mr. Bhattacharyya, you're one of the most intelligent people on this s.h.i.+p, not including myself and the XO, of course. I'm sure you could stand there and talk to me for fifteen minutes, summarizing everything known to Naval Intelligence about the Vaaach. That doesn't help me. You explaining to me about what their lawmaking process is like or whether their poetry rhymes doesn't help me do my job today."

Max stepped off the command island, crossed over to the Intel console, put his hand on the young man's shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye. "What I need you to do, and what a capable intelligence officer does, is take all that wonderful information you have in your head about the Vaaach, and apply it to our current situation, distilling from that vast body of data in your skull the few sentences of facts, conclusions, and informed conjecture that will a.s.sist me in making the decisions I'm going to make over the next few minutes. The ability to do that is what distinguishes a mere database from an intelligence officer. Now, Ensign, what do you have to tell me that I can use?"

Max could see the wheels turning in the young man's head. According to his records, he really was quite brilliant. "Well, sir, first, the Vaaach are an arboreal species, and the trees on their homeworld are more than a kilometer tall, with the Vaaach living in multiple levels in the forest canopy. Accordingly, one would expect them to be skilled at three-dimensional thinking. Their tactics would probably not be subject to the two-dimensional bias that humans and others descended from surface-dwelling species have to struggle with. Second, previous interactions with humans show them to be very deliberate. Our experience is that they tend to act slowly, after careful consideration, but are very sure and resolute about decisions once they are made and change their minds very rarely.

"Third, it is known that they have an elaborate code of honor and that, unlike some species who are honorable only in their internal dealings, the Vaaach conduct their dealings with other races under their code. You can expect them to be very honorable, for their word will be their bond, and that they will not lie to you or manipulate the truth to obtain advantage." He stopped, considering how he needed to qualify the previous statement. "On the other hand, they are tough negotiators and skilled bargainers, in part because they are very patient and are not afraid to walk away from a deal and come back days or even years later when the situation has turned to their advantage.

"Fourth, in combat they are tenacious, skillful, and extremely courageous. As best we can tell from secondary sources, they have never lost a war. If they are fighting, I would very much want to be on their side, and I would very much not want to be their enemy.

"Fifth, although we have had little contact with them, what little information we have suggests their technology to be significantly more advanced than ours, a fact suggested by their possession of reactionless drive technology." He stopped, apparently searching his mind for other relevant data. "Does that help, sir?"

"Very much. Thank you, Ensign." Max walked slowly over to the chief at Maneuvering. "Chief LeBlanc, you wouldn't happen to be a c.o.o.na.s.s, would you?"

Max used the slang term for a Cajun, one that, though it sounded insulting, was generally used in a friendly fas.h.i.+on, especially from one Cajun to another. The older man smiled, revealing a mouth full of large, only slightly crooked teeth. "Only if there is gumbo to be eaten, crawfish to be boiled, two steps to be danced, or beer to be drunk. Um, sir."

"Sounds good to me. You from Nouvelle Acadiana?" The chief nodded. "Moi, aussi. Maybe we'll both see it again, someday." Max did, after all, still have some cousins there he got along with pretty well, and his grandfather was still alive. "When we win this war and get back home, let's round up a yard of friends and family and boil us up a big pot of crawfish, with corn and potatoes, and a cooler full of beer on the side."

"And pecan pie for dessert," added the chief.

"You got it." Max got back down to business. "Chief, you ever crawl a duck pond?"

"Mais, yeah."

"That's what we're going to do today. Let's see if we can start closing that range up a little, Chief, lentement, like we're crawling a duck pond to jump us some Pintails. Increase our speed relative to the target by one hundred meters a second until the range is sixteen thousand kills. Then match the target and stay on his tail."

"Aye, sir, crawlin' dem ducks. Increasing relative speed one hundred feet per second, then matching speed with target when range is one-six-triple-zero kills."

Max had keyed his display so that the range to the target was constantly displayed on one of his screens. He watched warily as the number slowly dropped. A quick look around CIC showed that the same set of numbers was on a lot of displays beside his. As the numbers got smaller, the tension got higher.

"Kasparov, any sign the target has spotted us?"

"Negative, sir. He is sweeping his path with his sensors, but because of our angle, any returns he might get from our hull are far below any possible detection threshold. There have been some aft scans, but between me and Chief LeBlanc, we've been able to dodge them so far." Apparently, Kasparov had been getting readings on where the aft scans were going and was feeding them directly to the chief who was making minor "discretionary" course changes-slipping the s.h.i.+p a few hundred meters in one direction or another-to avoid them, changes deemed too small to require orders from the captain. Standard procedure, but a little bit more than Max thought Kasparov was capable of.

"Watch for an aspect change," said Max. "He may alter course suddenly, and we need to stay on his tail no matter what he does."

Most s.h.i.+ps, even those with reactionless drives, had a major blind spot immediately astern. When a s.p.a.ce vessel reaches an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, typically at 10 percent, it needs to clear the s.p.a.ce in front of it of all matter, even the rarefied hydrogen and helium that fill interstellar s.p.a.ce, because at those speeds the atoms pierce the s.h.i.+p's hull like bullets and shoot through the crew like particles of high-energy radiation. Accordingly, stars.h.i.+ps use a kind of interstellar "cow catcher" called a deflector, an integrated electromagnetic-graviton system that moves the interstellar medium aside to make a path for the s.h.i.+p.

In doing so, the s.h.i.+p leaves a "wake" of disturbed, ionized gas and particles behind it that confuse and block sensor readings in an approximate ten-degree arc behind the s.h.i.+p. There were ways to counter this problem, including high-power active sensor scans directed dead aft, towed sensor arrays, autonomous probes, and launching a smaller s.h.i.+p into the wake, all of which presented various disadvantages. Mostly, wars.h.i.+p captains dealt with the problem by making radical and unexpected course changes, suddenly bringing their sensors to bear on the area and causing the following s.h.i.+p to overshoot the wake and travel into clear s.p.a.ce, where it could be scanned.

"Kasparov, do you know how to tell whether a reactionless drive s.h.i.+p is about to change course? I mean, before you can see an aspect change."

"No sir. I didn't think anyone had ever followed one before."

"Let's just say it's been done once or twice."

Max got up and walked over to Kasparov's station. "Reactionless drive propels the s.h.i.+p by polarizing and amplifying gravity. Pull up a gravimetric flux profile. No, larger scale. Still larger. There. That's it. Now, see this slight notch in the outer isograv right in front of his bow? That notch is always aligned with the direction of thrust from his drive system. It's sort of like being able to see the rudder of an ocean vessel you are trying to follow through the water-the rudder turns before the s.h.i.+p changes direction. When this notch s.h.i.+fts, the s.h.i.+p is going to turn in the direction the notch moved. Put a marker dot in the notch, and have the computer tie the dot to the notch.

"Now go to a rear view so that the dot is in the center and project degree markings around it on the screen. Get the computer to project a bright green circle around that red dot-just one pixel more in diameter than the dot. There. Now, any motion of that dot will be clearly visible, and you can see exactly what the direction of the turn is going to be. When you see that dot s.h.i.+ft, you sing out the direction in degrees as fast as you can. You have to be fast. Only about a second-maybe two-elapses between the s.h.i.+ft in his drive field and the s.h.i.+p starting to turn.

"Chief LeBlanc," Max said, walking over to Maneuvering, "put an aspect outline of the Vaaach s.h.i.+p on your display." The chief complied.

"Good. When Kasparov tells you which way the s.h.i.+p is going to turn, you have to be ready to follow it. Go ahead and start your turn as soon as he sings out. Do not, repeat, do not wait for an order from me-and then adjust your rate of turn based on your observation of the aspect change on the target. Don't watch where the target goes. Watch for the s.h.i.+p's change in orientation, and let that tell you how hard he is turning. We have to stay in his wake or he'll spot us and the game is over."

"Aye, sir. Understood."

Max went back to his own station, sat down, and pulled up a few status readouts. Everything looked good. He heard LeBlanc order the man on drives to reduce thrust just as the range reached sixteen thousand kilometers. c.u.mberland was on the Vaaach's tail, right in his wake. Max hit the comm b.u.t.ton on his console, to let him talk to the Sensor back room.

"People, this is the captain. Kasparov has his attention fully occupied right now, so that's why I'm on this loop. We want to take this opportunity to learn as much about the s.h.i.+p ahead of us as we can. Do anything you can think of to learn more about the contact, except using active scanning. Use every instrument; apply every kind of a.n.a.lysis. Tie up as much bandwidth as your hearts desire. Just get the data. Captain out."

Half an hour went by, crawling like an arthritic snail on a cold day. "Maneuvering, inch us closer. Same closure rate. Bring us to fifteen thousand." For just over six minutes the c.u.mberland slowly closed on the Vaaach s.h.i.+p.

"Captain." It was Nelson at Stealth. "The heat sink is nearing capacity. Should we radiate aft?"

One of the hardest things to conceal about a wars.h.i.+p, or any working machine in s.p.a.ce, is its heat. Stealth requires that the s.h.i.+p's heat signature match that of s.p.a.ce itself; otherwise, it stands out on infrared detectors like a beacon against the near absolute zero background of interstellar s.p.a.ce. One of the functions of the stealth systems is, therefore, to prevent heat from radiating from the s.h.i.+p into s.p.a.ce. Doing so requires that the s.h.i.+p's hull be chilled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero (a process that paradoxically generates considerable heat), and demands that the heat from the fusion reactor, the electronics and machinery, the crew's bodies, and the heat removed from the s.h.i.+p's air by its cooling system must all be stored in a heat sink, essentially a large tank equipped with heat exchangers and filled with an exotic heat-storing granulated metal/liquid polymer slurry, to be radiated into s.p.a.ce later.

That heat sink was now reaching its capacity, becoming so hot that the liquid metal slurry it used to store the s.h.i.+p's heat was on the verge of boiling. If that happened, the s.h.i.+p would radiate large amounts of heat in all directions, making it immediately detectable. The solution, when the location of one's adversary is known, is to radiate heat away from him so that the body of your s.h.i.+p blocks his view of your thermal radiators, which is why stealth-equipped s.h.i.+ps have retractable thermal radiator fins all around the vessel, pointing in every conceivable direction, so that they can radiate heat in the direction or directions they choose.

"Affirmative. Radiate aft. Be ready to retract if the Vaaach get behind us."

Nelson keyed in a command that extended four radiator fins from the rear of the s.h.i.+p, fins that would soon be glowing red hot once they shed the s.h.i.+p's heat into s.p.a.ce.

"Radiating aft," said Nelson. About a minute later, "Heat sink temperature starting to drop."

"Let me know when the heat sink gets down to 50 percent. I may want to retract the fins then."

Nelson acknowledged the order and went back to watching his systems.

"Turn warning, angle three-one-five degrees," Kasparov snapped out.

LeBlanc quickly gave orders that got the s.h.i.+p yawing to port and pitching up at about half of its maximum turn rate. After about two seconds of squinting hard at his screen, LeBlanc told the pitch and yaw man, "Hard over, all the way to the stops; she's turning sharp." A few seconds later, "Ease off fifteen degrees in yaw and ten degrees in pitch." Forty-three seconds later, "All controls amids.h.i.+ps."

Apparently, the other s.h.i.+p was finished turning. The chief made slight adjustments to match the destroyer's course exactly to that of the Vaaach s.h.i.+p and stay in her wake. LeBlanc squinted some more. "Two degrees to starboard. Prepare to come amids.h.i.+ps. Straighten her out... now. Pitch one degree down for about five seconds.... There you go... amids.h.i.+ps... now." He practically put his nose onto the display and then nodded. "Skipper, turn complete. We're right in the groove and I can guarantee"-he p.r.o.nounced it "gare-on-TEE"-"that we didn't stick so much as a toe out of her wake."

"ca c'est bon, Chief."

"C'est pas rien, mon Capitain."

"Captain," Garcia spoke up.

"Yes, XO?"

"a.n.a.lysis of the turn, sir. The Vaaach vessel yawed to port one hundred and twelve degrees and pitched up ninety-three. Duration of the maneuver was seventy-three seconds. Pretty sharp turn for a vehicle travelling at 42 percent of lightspeed. She must have twenty times our ma.s.s, maybe fifty, but she almost out-turned us."

"I know. Pretty d.a.m.n impressive. And," he announced to the CIC in general, "we should not a.s.sume she can't turn any harder than that. We do not know the capabilities of this race's technology, and the fastest way to get into trouble is to a.s.sume that an advanced alien civilization works under the same limitations we do."

Max returned to Garcia. "If we could get them into the war with us against the Krag, that would turn the tide in a hurry."

"Sure," Garcia said, just as confidentially. "And if my uncle were made out of yellow corn, he'd be a taco." A few seconds' pause. "I think he knows we're on his tail, though. Expect another turn soon."

"That makes sense. Give the order."

"People," said the XO more loudly, "be sharp. She might try another turn soon. Her skipper probably feels us as an itch between his shoulder blades. If Vaaach have shoulder blades."

"Sensors, are we getting anything good out of this?" Max asked.

"Affirmative, sir." Kasparov was actually starting to sound enthusiastic instead of terrified. "They've been blasting everything in sight with every kind of active scan we know of and three or four no one has ever seen until now. We're not in the beams ourselves, or we would have been detected, but we're picking up reflections from bodies in the system and from the interplanetary medium, so we're getting recordings of frequencies, phase alignments, pulse length, waveform polarization-basically, their whole sensor profile.

"Plus they have sent two messages. Not a hope in h.e.l.l of decrypting them, but we got a lot of dope on their transmitter characteristics, what frequencies they use, their data bandwidth-things like that. We also have nearly enough data points for our computer algorithms to spit out a good estimate of their s.h.i.+p's ma.s.s, density, location of its center of gravity, and maybe even a few good guesses about its hull composition. We have nearly doubled what we know about them, sir."

"Well, at least Intel is getting something beneficial in exchange for my additional gray hairs." Max considered for a moment. "Maneuvering, resume closure maneuver, same rate. Bring our range to one three triple zero."

"Aye, sir, resuming closure maneuver, same rate, closing to one three triple zero." Thirteen thousand kilometers. Roughly the diameter of the Earth and, for most purposes, not that close, but for two wars.h.i.+ps from non-allied and potentially hostile races in a neutral star system, Max was practically crawling into the Vaaach's back pocket.

More minutes crept by. That's what being in the Navy in wartime was all about: weeks of unbearable tedium interrupted by hours of unbearable tension punctuated by seconds of unbearable terror. Max ordered sandwiches delivered to CIC. Everyone had already been getting good use out of the recently reinstalled coffee pot and chiller. Humans dealt better with tension if they could eat and drink a little. Or at least Max did, and what went for him went for other personnel under his command.

"Course change warning," announced Kasparov. "Turning one zero seven."

LeBlanc went with his instinct, betting that this turn would be as sharp as the last. "Yaw hard to starboard, all the way to the stop. Pitch down ten degrees. Drives, back off 10 percent." He watched his display for a few seconds. "Pitch, push her to the stop. She's out-turning us. We've got to slow to stay in his wake. Drives, null the main sublight. Engage braking drive and bring it to 50 percent."