Defiance: Book 5 of the Legacy Fleet Series by Nick Webb

Author:Nick Webb [Webb, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-08-12T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Six

Orbit over San Martin

Shuttle

Proctor leaned forward in the shuttle’s copilot seat, peering through the port, searching for the ship that Admiral Tigre swore was there.

“Still nothing?” she asked. Lieutenant Whitehorse, piloting the shuttle, shook her head no.

“I’m just following the course the admiral gave us. We should be nearly there. Just three klicks away. But … judging from these sensor scans, if I didn’t know it was Admiral Tigre giving us these coordinates, I’d say we’d been had.”

Proctor leaned back and craned her head to talk to Rayna Scott, who was sitting across from Fiona Liu. Proctor wondered if she would regret bringing Liu along. Who knew what kind of intel she would absorb on this trip. But leaving Liu behind for Volz to deal with had seemed less than desirable. Besides, she wasn’t bringing any marines along—Tigre had assured her his very best were waiting for her on the new ship—and she already knew Liu was good in a fight.

Rayna was also good in a fight, in her own way, Proctor acknowledged wryly. Though the engineer was currently fidgeting with her seatbelt buckle. Proctor leaned in a bit more. “Rayna? Do you know anything about the new stealth tech IDF was researching? I authorized the initial spending fifteen years ago, but the early efforts were … not promising. I’d assumed they’d never amount to anything….”

Rayna spoke to her seatbelt buckle—as long as Proctor had known her, the brilliant engineer had always addressed whatever mechanical device was nearby rather than the person talking. Even in a meeting with top IDF brass, Proctor would notice Rayna subtly glancing over to the light switch and talking towards it rather than the generals and admirals. A quirk, but having her brain on their side was more than worth it.

“If you’re talking about actually bending light around an object, you’re right, on a large scale it’s not feasible. Bending a single wavelength around a small object? Sure. Bending all wavelengths around a large object? You’d have better luck using a hydrowrench for a circuit diagnostic.”

Proctor waved a hand towards the front viewport. “Then what do you think? Is it possible? Did IDF Research actually come up with a way to do it?”

Rayna shrugged, and actually glanced up to meet Proctor’s eyes. “Could be. They may have come up with another mechanism. Rather than bending light maybe they just painted the hull really, really black and prayed they didn’t occult any starlight.”

If their shuttle was moving at all, there’d be no way to tell, since to Proctor’s eyes the distant stars were fixed points. Except for the five fighters trailing them, there were no objects nearby to judge their speed. No point of reference. And so the subtly shifting stars directly ahead of them took her by surprise. The shift was so small she almost missed it.

The nav computer saw it too. “Coming to a full emergency stop!” called Whitehorse. She worked furiously at her controls, trying to figure out what had caused them to stop.

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