With Your Shield by Chris Kennedy & Alex Rath

Author:Chris Kennedy & Alex Rath [Kennedy, Chris & Rath, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seventh Seal Press
Published: 2019-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Seventeen

Horde Transport Ship EMS War Pony, Hyperspace

Now that the ship was back in hyperspace, the team had gathered in the hangar with the Hoplite CASPer again. The name had caught on with the team, based on what Markus had heard. He approached the drones first. “Okay, I had our CASPer programmers take a look at the code, and we think we’ve solved the problem, so let’s give it another test.”

Specialist Burke nodded and turned on the small communications laser and transceiver they had set up for testing. Markus scanned the dragonfly drone with his slate and updated the software. After a moment, he set the drone back down and programmed its search pattern on his slate. Once he was done, the drone started flapping its wings. It took off, executed the search pattern it had been given, and flew through the laser beam. It alerted on Markus’ slate that it detected a communications beam and continued flying. He grinned and looked up from his slate.

“It worked.”

“Yes!” Burke exclaimed, then she coughed and cleared her throat. “Sorry, sir.”

“Oh, I think that was very warranted, Specialist. So how many more do we have?”

“We have 20 more, sir, and I’ve got them all here.”

Markus nodded. “Was there any indication in the communication traffic that the beam was interrupted?”

Burke checked her slate for a moment. “No, sir. It’s like it wasn’t even there.”

“Okay, let’s take things up a notch. Knowing there’s communication happening is nice, but what if we could track its origination point?”

Burke stared at Markus. “What?”

“Watch, let’s see if this works. Watch the traffic to make sure the drone isn’t detected.”

She nodded, and Markus got to work on his slate, programming in a new series of commands, most of which he had pre-programmed; he just had to line them up to execute. The drone turned in the air, repeating its original search pattern. Once it crossed the beam again, it stopped, then flew back across it. Then it started a sphere pattern out from there, crossing the beam at further and further distances along the beam’s path. The software in Markus’ slate kept track of each hit, and, given enough points, was able to calculate the path of the beam. In a real-world situation, it would give him a line of bearing on the location of the originating communications signal. After a dozen or so passes through the beam, it abandoned the spherical search and resumed its normal search pattern.

“What just happened, sir?”

“It gave me a map of the coordinates of each time it crossed the beam, and the software drew a nice line that shows the beam’s direction of travel.”

“So, we could follow it to its source…”

Markus grinned. “That’s the idea, specialist. We could call in a strike or send in additional drones to see what’s going on. We would know ahead of time what we’re about to hit so we wouldn’t send troopers into an ambush.”

She nodded. “Hell yes…sir.”

Markus shook his head. Perhaps the group was spending too much time around Hobo.

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