The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 137 —

Turtle was not surprised by the third corona.

Provik said, "They want us bad, don't they?"

"Kez Maefele, we will pass within a million kilometers of the one on the right," a watchstander reported.

"Feed me the data." He retreated inside himself, put everything to the wizard. The way they had done in the old days, never depending on the infallibility of computation systems. Let intuition bear the load.

It took an hour to fall into place.

"There is only one Guardship. They could not have gotten three together. The one in the middle will be real. We will maintain our present heading."

He wished he had not launched those decoys.

He ran calculations. He could reach them with a carefully aimed tight-beam pulse without betraying himself.

"Use the docking jets to put the tumble back on," he directed. "We'll take our radiation profile down till we can barely stand the cold. We'll try sliding through as a wreck."

Watchers reported an intercepter had a contact, on the time mark and not far off the Ku's projected track. Riders converged.

"A missile," Aleas grumped. "Hell. All that excitement for nothing."

WarAvocat doublechecked. It was enemy. Seemed unlikely that the Ku would have used so passive a decoy. He went back to Gemina's visuals of the fighting. He could find nothing that argued one way or another. The resolution was not fine enough to discriminate missiles and projectiles.

Next contact came fourteen hours later. Another loose missile.

WarAvocat frowned. That seemed a long coincidence, but they did not fit the Ku's style. They should have come in a hurry, making a racket. Serials and other markings might show from which ship they had launched. But there was no reason to expect their proximity fuses to have failed.

Twenty hours after the second contact Aleas asked, "Could he have turned back?"

"I don't know. He might have headed for the strand behind Starbase. He might have shifted course up, down, or sideways. He might have stopped to wait us out."

Came word of a contact way off to the left, followed by word that it was just a piece of cold matter. Then to the right, before the nerves settled, a pursuit ship caught a ghost of an echo of something moving behind it.

Some secondaries had been out over three days. That was hard on fighter crews. Discipline flagged with endurance. Each contact drew some fighters out of position.

The ghost proved to be another missile. One that had gotten through, undetected till the last instant.

"And there's our problem," Strate told Aleas. "Even though we're not covering a large region, we're not covering it completely. He could fall through the cracks."

They had two riderships and a fighter on passive scan. Turtle kept making minute adjustments with the indetectable docking jets, holding a groove through the heart of the triangle.

Provik said, "They don't care who sees them, do they? They've got everything cranked up enough to cook eggs at a thousand kilometers."

Turtle grunted, bled a little more power into the Stealth, SCAM, and ECM systems. He gestured for quiet. He wanted to keep an ear on intercepted inter-ship chatter. Most was military gabble but he spoke gabble well.

"Passing the plane, Kez Maefele. Sixteen hours to the strand. Shall we take off the tumble?"

"Not yet." Ghosts off tumbling Stealth surfaces were more likely to filter out of a detection system than those off a steady surface.

One of his people said, "Been a long time, hasn't it? I forgot how tense it gets."

Turtle nodded. They had done this often in the old days, mostly going in to attack, usually against watchers less alert.

He tried to calculate the position of the rock causing the excitement. Not that far away. That was not good.

Course adjustments had the rider running straight at the false Guardship. What detection and comm capacity were mounted there? He would not have bothered, himself.

He would know soon enough.

He was tempted to take it out as he passed, as a rude farewell, but that was not a Ku sort of gesture.

Thirteen hours. The fighter had faded from detection and had become one probability point among dozens deduced from comm transmissions. The riderships were fading. Nothing lay between them and the strand but the decoy, four hours away.

Eleven hours. Nothing but probability points on screen. They were through. He gave permission to stabilize ship. "Twenty minutes to drive on line. Five percent." That would not generate enough emissions to stand out against the background of the universe. He would kick it up gradually....

"Kez Maefele!"

"I have it."

The interceptor had come out of nowhere, burning a hole through vacuum, headed toward VII Gemina, running with nothing but nav scan extended.

Crack! It was gone.

"The IFF steal worked." Turtle sighed. "I was afraid we hadn't gotten enough data." It was another old trick, stealing the enemy's mutual identification signals. "They must have an emergency aboard."

WarAvocat was exhausted. It remained only for Aleas to cry uncle....

"Anomaly, WarAvocat."

"Hunh?" The air had spoken.

Everyone in Hall of the Watchers froze, stared with wide, terrified eyes.

Damn! What a time for it to happen. "Explain, please."

Inbound interceptor DZ539, with a medical emergency, nearly collided with a rider. IFF exchange went normally but rider JV47 is supposed to be on station several hours away. Comm check shows JV47 maintaining station properly."

"Goma Maradak!" WarAvocat swore.

"What?" Aleas asked.

"The Goma Maradak waste space. We used it for training during the Ku Wars. It resembled places the Ku liked to hide. When XXV Iberica went in, the Dire Radiant was hiding there. They stole IFF signals, took a dozen ships into rider bays.... They stole IFF throughout the war. And now he's pulled it again, walking right through pretending to be one of us."

But when he ran data from the region, he could not find a hint of anything to support his suspicion. If Kez Maefele had come through, he had done so like a ghost.

Aleas thought, attacked the problem from a different perspective. She input the tumbling rider exiting the Starbase end space, the probe blossom, the missiles that had been detected at this end, and told Gemina to see if the known data forbade them being linked or made it impossible for that anomalous contact to be the Ku.