Imperial Gambit: Archangel One by Evan Currie

Author:Evan Currie [Currie, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

NACS Odysseus

Eric examined the data that was feeding into their systems. The longer they lingered in the region the more detailed their lightspeed limited scans became, but very little of what he had was making a lot of sense.

There was clearly a gravity issue within the system. It was disrupting the orbits of the known worlds in a distinct enough manner to make it clear that they were dealing with, at least, a sizeable task group of Cruiser class ships. The problem was, thus far they hadn’t been able to find them.

That shouldn’t be.

“Scans are still coming up blank,” Heathe told him, her tone almost petulant as she too pored over the data they had, looking for the source of the anomaly.

He nodded, unwilling to say anything himself… mostly for fear of sounding petulant as well.

The issue was, of course, that a star system was a massive sector of space. This one was the better part of a hundred AU out to the Heliopause, filled with planets, asteroids, comets, and who knew what else…

Besides at least one enemy task group, Eric thought sourly.

The issue was that they probably had the group scanned, to one degree or another. It was pretty difficult to hide, per say, in empty space. That didn’t make it easy to find a group of ships, however. Just because they couldn’t hide, didn’t mean they were easy to find.

The Space Paradox, I suppose we could call it.

Getting sufficiently high-res scans of the entire star system for even the impressive computing of the task group to filter through was a titanic task. It wasn’t enough to just sweep the entire sector and tell the computers to find a ship. No, each section of space had to be scanned… in detail… which mean adjusting focus for each sector thousands of times, looking through the depth of the scan before you could even think of moving on to scan the next sector.

This is going to take forever.

That wasn’t hyperbole, either. A complete scan of a star system was a very nearly impossible task. If they ships were hiding near a point of interest, such as one of the planets or more curious moons, there was almost no chance of getting a visual image of them.

That meant that they had to reverse engineer the location from the ships’ effect on system gravity… and that…

It might not be as impossible, but it wasn’t something to be taken lightly either.

“The Priminae records give us a gravimetric baseline to work from, but I’m not sure it’s precise enough for this work,” Eric grumbled after a moment.

“I know,” Heathe responded. “They did a survey as part of their mining efforts, of course, but no follows ups afterwards, and the survey only covered the primary system gravity sources. There are probably hundreds of potential gravity sources out there that could have dropped in the system since the survey and thrown off the system motion. I don’t think we can find them this way either, Commodore.”

Eric nodded grimly, coming to the same conclusion himself.

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