Cook, Glen - Starfishers 04 - Passage at Arms by Cook Glen

Author:Cook, Glen [Cook, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1985-04-19T22:00:00+00:00

6 First Contact

Pushing hell out of two months now. Same old zigzag. One step back, two forward. But...

Our baseline has twisted around. We’re headed toward Canaan now. More or less. Westhause figures about twelve years to get there at our present rate of approach. We’re not taking it in one big rush.

We’re turned around. That’s the point. Something has happened. We have hunting orders. At last.

Like everything else about this patrol, they make no sense.

Command has targeted us a vessel crippled more than a year ago. She’s been rediscovered, running in norm. Must be a crafty bunch, to have kept their heads down this long.

The Old Man doesn’t like it. He keeps mumbling, “Coup de grace,” and, “Why waste the time? The poor bastards deserve better.” I’ve never seen him so sour.

None of the others are excited, either.

I’m nervous as hell. It’s been a long time.

Yanevich says it could get complicated. The target is running for the hunter-killer base we called Rathgeber before the other firm took it away. She is pushing. 4 c. That’ll mean some fancy maneuvering when we engage her.

And some trick shooting. That’s a lot of inherent velocity. We haven’t the time or fuel to match it. “What are they doing for fuel?” I ask.

“Ramscooping, probably,” Yanevich says. ‘They may have tankers dumping hydrogen ahead of her.”

Still, she must have been fat to start. Maybe she’s a tanker herself. “Why the hell didn’t they abandon her? Or, if she’s that important, why didn’t a repair ship come fix her generators?”

Yanevich shrugs. “Maybe they got a lot of pressure from our people back then. Maybe running in norm was their only option.”

Our first chore will be to relocate the ship. Those aren’t dummies running the other team. They’ll know she’s been spotted. She’ll be running a jagged course.

First we’ll run a search pattern surrounding a baseline drawn from the target’s last known position to her suspected destination. During the search, Piniaz will decide how to tackle a vessel traveling almost too fast to track. Point-four c in norm. That’s smoking.

The obvious tactic is to drop hyper ahead and shove a missile flight down her throat. Hitting the tiny, necessary relative motion window would be a trick, though. The target is moving too fast to hit from even a slight angle. Knowing that, she’ll be running a constantly changing course.

Shooting down the throat means shooting blind. The target is moving too fast. (That’s an endless refrain, like a song with only one-line lyrics.) She’ll run over us if we take time to aim. The Fire Control system needs a quarter second, after detection, to lock and fire. In that split second our target will traverse more than thirty thousand kilometers.

“You’re right,” I say. “They aren’t dummies. I don’t see how we can stop them. I suppose Command says we can’t waste missiles.”

Yanevich smiles. “You’re thinking Climber now. Damned right. Never waste a missile on a cripple.” More seriously, “We couldn’t use one. No time to target and program

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