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A few moments later, they were underway at a steady seventy-five gravities. At that absurdly low acceleration rate it would take them a full ninety hours—almost four T-days—to reach the eighty percent of light-speed that represented the maximum safe normal-space velocity permitted by available particle shielding, and it would take them another three T-weeks, by the clocks of the rest of the universe, to reach their destination, although the subjective time would be only seventeen days for them. Another ship of their size could have attained the same velocity in a little more than thirteen hours, but that was all right with Admiral Topolev. The total difference in transit time would still be under six days—less than four, subjective—and unlike the units of his own command, that hypothetical other ship would have been radiating an impeller signature . . . which his ships weren't.
"What've you got for me, Clint?"
Lieutenant Clinton McCormick looked up from his display as his supervisor, Lieutenant Commander Jessica Epstein, appeared at his shoulder. McCormick liked Epstein, but he sometimes wondered why in the world she'd ever decided to pursue a naval career. Born and bred on Gryphon, the dark-haired lieutenant commander was an avid backpacker, camper, and birdwatcher. She also liked cross-country ru
At least her assignment to Hephaestus meant she spent her time someplace big enough that there were actually perso
"Probably nothing, Ma'am," he told her now. "Looks like a ghost to me, but it popped through the filters. Right here."
He used a cursor to indicate the faint, almost invisible light splotch, then zoomed in. At maximum zoom, it was evident that there were actuallytwo light splotches, each tagged with the time it had appeared, and Epstein grimaced at the telltale sign of a ghost footprint.
"I take it that this thing was strong enough the computers classified it as a genuine possible?" she said.
"That's what happened, all right, Ma'am," McCormick agreed.
"Well, better safe than sorry." Epstein sighed, then flicked her head in a sort of shorthand shrug. "I'll kick it upstairs, and they'll roust out some poor cruiser or destroyer division to go take a look."
"Hey, they ought to be grateful for us for finding them something to do instead of just sitting around in orbit," McCormick replied, and Epstein chuckled.
"If you think that's the way they're going to react, should I go ahead and tell them who spotted this in the first place?"
"Actually, now that I've thought about it, Ma'am, I think I'd prefer to remain anonymous," he said very seriously, and her chuckle turned into a laugh.
"That's what I thought," she said, then patted him on the shoulder and turned to walk back to her own command station.
Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.
It seemed like an awfully long way to go for very little return. There'd been no sign of an impeller wedge, which meant no one was out there accelerating towards the star system. If there'd been an actual hyper footprint in the first place—which Epstein frankly doubted was the case—it had to have been some merchantship coming in with appallingly bad astrogation. Whoever it was had popped out of hyper a full light-month short of his intended destination, and then promptly (and sensibly) popped right back into hyper rather than spending the endless weeks which would have been required to reach anyplace worthwhile under impeller drive. And when she did arrive in the star system, or at the Junction, she wasn't going to tell a single solitary soul about her little misadventure. That kind of astrogation error went beyond simply embarrassing to downright humiliating. In fact, if Astro Control had hard evidence of a Manticoran astrogator who'd been that far off, they would undoubtedly call her back in for testing and recertification!
But, as she'd said to McCormick, better safe than sorry. That could have been the motto of Perimeter Security Command instead of the official "Always Vigilant," and Epstein, like virtually all of the officers assigned to PSC, took her responsibilities very seriously indeed. They were there, maintaining their endless watch, precisely to make sure everyone knew they were, which meant no one would even make the attempt to evade their all-seeing eyes. Checking out the occasional ghost was a trivial price to pay for that.
Commander Michael Carus, the commanding officer of HMSJavelin, and the senior officer of the second division of Destroyer Squadron 265, known as the "Silver Cepheids," sighed philosophically as he contemplated his orders.
At least it was something to do, he supposed. And he wasn't surprised they'd gotten the call. The squadron had earned its name from its demonstrated expertise in reco
"Here, Linda," he said, handing the message chip to Lieutenant Linda Petersen,Javelin's astrogator. "We're going ghost hunting. Work out a course, please."
"To hear is to obey," Petersen replied. She plugged the chip into her own console, then looked over her shoulder at Carus.
"How big a hurry are we in, Skipper?" she asked.
"The datum is already almost thirteen hours old," Carus pointed out. "I feel sure our lords and masters would like us to go check it out before it gets a bunch older. So I'd say a certain degree of haste is probably in order."
"Got it, Skip," Petersen said and began punching numbers. A couple of minutes later, she grunted in satisfaction.
"All right," she said, turning her chair around to face Carus. "This is going to be a really short jump, Skipper. Not quite a micro-jump, but close, so if we build up too much velocity—"
"Once upon a time, in the dim mists of my youth, all of, oh, three years ago, I was an astrogator myself, my daughter," Carus interrupted. "I seem to have a vague recollection of the undesirability of overru
"Yes, Sir," Petersen acknowledged with a grin. "Anyway, what I meant to say is that I'd just as soon not get much above forty-two thousand KPS as our base velocity. That gives us a total flight time of about three hours—a tad less than that, actually—if we hit the theta bands."
Carus nodded. As he'd just said, he'd been an astrogator himself, once, and his own mind ran through Petersen' decision tree. Translating steeply enough to hit the theta bands in a relatively short hop like this would probably take a couple of hours off the ships' hyper generators and alpha nodes, but it wouldn't be too bad.