Frozen Soul, and other works: Chapter 140

(BSN Shadowdancer, Amazon System)

The exercise was just starting, and already Slave-Captain Theylnn was leaning forward in her seat in anticipation. This Confederate ship was almost identical to her Shadowdancer, except for a few minor differences that they’d left out when making versions to sell to the Confederate Navy. But Shadowdancer was the first of the Assassins, and her crew was the first to ever man the ships. The Shinokage might be the flagship until the new ships come in, but Shadowdancer’s crew took pride in being the First. The Black Star Navy began with this ship, and that meant they had a reputation to uphold. Nyna wasn’t about to fail, even in an exercise.

She looked to her sensor operator. “Anything on the EM or Grav scanners?”

Both were passive, lightspeed sensor systems. While it was faint, an Assassin under power had a distinct EM signature that someone who knew what they were looking for could find and track. If you were close enough. The same was true of the Gravity sensors. Despite the reduced mass from the nonmetallic hull, an Assassin still had mass, and bent the fabric of space around it, if only slightly, even when coasting with no acceleration. Reading those sensors and coming up with a track for an Assassin in stealth was as much an art as it was science. For reasons no one understood, a human or knelfi trained on the sensors with computer assistance had a 21% better detection threshold than the computer alone. One operator said it was like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, and just knowing that there was someone there.

“Three possibles, Ma’am, designating Echo 1 through 3. Two small ones, but the EM is high enough that the computer is tracking it. The other one… might be the Gilrie, but I can’t nail a fix. Tracks on screen.”

Nyna looked at the plot showing the probable tracks of possible targets. She knew that these Confederates had a lot to prove to themselves. They surely felt the pressure of being told that Shadowdancer, a mercenary ship, was going to test their skills, with them being official navy and all. Their Captain wasn’t an idiot, either, so how was she going to try and play this?

“Tachyon pulse from Echo 1! Sensor ping, we’ve been lit up!”

“Match to the tracks on Echoes 1 through 3! Do we have enough for a fix on the target?”

“Negative, captain. But three target confirmed, and in the right area for our readings. Echo 3 is now designated Tango 1. That’s the Assassin, has to be. Echo 1 and 2 look like shuttles, ma’am.”

No way that they would just give away their position like that with a locator ping. There had to be a plan in place. “Adjust course, take us towards Tango 1. Minimal thrust, vector our emissions directly away from the target. I want to be leaning the right way when whatever they’re planning hap—”

“New tachyon pulse! Echo 2 pulsing this time! Captain, I think I’m seeing something in the ‘shadow’ of Echo 1. Unknown objects.”

Slave-Captain Nyna Theylnn’s eyes widened. Triangulation! Of course! That meant that the next pulse would be…

(CSN Luvon Gilrie, Amazon System)

Captain Zylna took a deep breath, and said, “Are the missiles ready?”

“Yes ma’am! Missiles are in space and ready to launch as soon as the tachyon pulse lights up the target. Estimated course and speed likely heading towards us due to the last track.”

“All right. Both shuttles, tachyon pulse on my mark. One, two, three, MARK!”

Both shuttles fired tachyon pulses, and in that instant, twelve shipkiller missiles fired off their drives, seeking to target that had just been painted for them.

(BSN Shadowdancer, Amazon Space)

Nyna leaned forward in her chair, waiting for the moment to come. The pride of Black Star’s first ship rested on the next few moments, and she refused to let her ship, or her Master, down. This would work. It had to.

“Tachyon pulse!”

“EXECUTE!”

(CSN Luvon Gilrie, Amazon System)

Zylna leaned forward in her chair, waiting for confirmation. She was the youngest captain in the fleet, and she needed to prove herself, both to the Black Stars, and to the admiralty back home. The time was now. The Shadowdancer would never see it coming in time to save herself.

“Missiles away! We have good launch on all twelve missiles. Tracking to target…”

There was a flash of light, as suddenly the Shadowdancer appeared on their scopes, visible due to their active shields, but they were in TWO PLACES AT ONCE? How?

Before she could yell out an order, the lights flickered, and died, going to emergency lighting. The controls locked, and on the main display an image of a red X replaced the tactical readout, signifying that their ship was ‘dead’. “S-sensors? Do you have anything on what happened before we died?”

The sensor tech shook his head. “It happened too fast. The light from the event was difficult to interpret. Best guess? The Shadowdancer decided to jump right on top of us, and hit us while the shields were down for running in max stealth.”

Her XO looked deathly pale at that thought. “A jump that short? Without knowing what was ahead? My gods, what madness would prompt them to do something like that?”

Zylna sighed, and said to Leoven, “They’re Black Stars. This is the kind of people they are. They like to take insane risks and make it work for them.” She shook her head. There wasn’t any shame in losing against someone better than you, so long as you learned from it. And she would learn from this. But for now, there were responsibilities she had to take care of.

“All stations secure from exercise. Send recall codes to the missiles, and have the shuttles pick them up. Open up a line to the Shadowdancer, and offer Slave-Captain Theylnn my congratulations on her win.”

“Incoming transmission from Starlight Raven. Captains’ conference in ten minutes for a debrief on the exercise, and analysis of our performance. Vid conference only.”

“Acknowledge it. I’ll be in my ready room when it is time.”

(BSS Starlight Raven, Amazon Space)

When I conferenced in Nyna and Captain Theylnn, I noticed that each of them had their first officers with them. Well, I had Raven with me, so that was fair. “Well, Ladies, Gentlemen, I would like to start by saying that this was a very informative exercise. Nyna, pass my congratulations to Shadowdancer’s crew for never failing to surpass my expectations. Captain Theylnn, it is my pleasure to say that your ship performed far better than expected, which is a testament to the training you’ve given your crew. Now, we’re going to do a simple debrief, so we can figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what can be fixed. Any questions?”

Nyna shook her head. “No, Master.”

Captain Theylnn chuckled darkly, and said, “If that was better than you expected of us, then I am slightly afraid of what you were thinking would happen.”

I looked over my shoulder to the android body standing there, and grinned. “Raven?”

Raven looked at the screen, and said, “Captain Theylnn, your ship engaged stealth protocols well enough that automated sensors were unable to detect your ship until the tachyon pulses, and even then they were not of a sufficient strength or duration to get a weapons lock. You were traveling without shields to minimize your EM profile, as well. These are points in your favor. Given records available to Black Star as a registered mercenary company, and experiences during the war, we concluded that there was a 18.54% chance that you would act in some manner similar to how you did, actually taking into account the information that had been provided to you and acting accordingly. Another 43.89% suggested that you would fail in some aspect of the stealth approach, including items like excessive maneuvering or raising shields. There was a probability of 12.63% that you would fail to find a way to attempt to detect Shadowdancer until she had found you. The remaining 24.94% was that you would allow pride as a naval commander of a national military vessel to blind you and cause you to make mistakes out of arrogance.”

Captain Theylnn slumped in her chair, and said, “Well, I’m glad we beat those odds, but it is a little frustrating that our getting slaughtered was the most likely outcome if I didn’t get stupid or prideful.”

I shook my head. “You are an untried crew going against the most experienced crew on your ship type in the galaxy. I literally threw you up against the absolutely best I had to offer. There was always a chance you could have pulled out a win, if you got lucky or outfoxed Nyna, but it was an uphill battle for you.”

I held up my hand to cut off any further talk along that line. “Now, on to the debrief. The use of the shuttles to provide triangulation while keeping your emissions low was a good idea. However, you and the shuttles were maneuvering too much, and showed up on the Shadowdancer’s sensor screens as indeterminate energy spikes.”

“WHAT? We were sure they would be under the detection thresholds!”

“Ah, Master, if I may?” I nodded, and Nyna continued, “The readings were indeed under the normal detection thresholds for the computers. Well, the shuttles strayed into the ‘marginal’ range as they were setting up for the pulses. But the Luvon Gilrie was under the threshold for the ranges we were at. However, our sensor technicians have had years of practice reading the emissions track of an Assassin or Reaper under stealth. Our computer classified you as background noise from a pulsar, but our tech tagged you as a possible and was working a general track before the first pulses went off.”

I cut back in. “These are the kind of things this exercise was meant to find, Captain. Find the areas where you’re strong and weak, and work on them. Frankly, your idea to use missiles remote launched from halfway points by the shuttles to reduce response time was inspired. I assume you were doing that to keep from risking the mass of the Gilrie tipping their scanners at closer range?”

“Yes, we didn’t know about the computer not being able to read the sensors as well as a person, so we figured a tachyon pulse was the only way to show up a stealth ship that we wanted found. But to ensure a kill, we needed to fire more missiles in a shorter amount of time than we were able to do, so this was the solution we came up with.”

“Well, tell your crew that Raven and I have gone over the numbers, and your plan would have worked under normal circumstances. You executed perfectly, and with exact timing. Against a less experienced enemy, that would have worked.” I paused, and then went on. “But as I said, you weren’t against an inexperienced crew, but the longest-serving crew in the Black Star Navy. They know the Assassin better than any other crew in the Galaxy.”

I looked to the screen Nyna was on, and said, “That said, Nyna, where in the infinite abyss did you get the idea for doing a microjump in the middle of combat, going from one engagement zone to another like that?”

Nyna looked sheepish, and said, “Well, while we were in the Empire during the Civil War, the Valkyries ‘liberated’ copies of some old Earth science fiction shows. We’ve been doing viewing parties ever since. The other night we were watching one of the shows, and there was something like this called the Picard Maneuver…”

I smiled wryly, and said, “Well, until anyone says different, we’ll be calling it the Theylnn Maneuver, a variant on the Picard Maneuver for stealth encounters. And you are ordered to ensure that copies of those shows are distributed to the fleet, and the company net, so people can see if they can’t get any ideas from ancient TV shows that are so crazy they just might work.”