The Silent War

ORE CARRIER CROMWELL

Despite his outward show of confidence as he sat in the command chair on the bridge, Cromwell’s skipper felt decidedly nervous as the creaking old ore ship cruised toward Vesta inside the radiation cloud. As surreptitiously as he could, he kept an eye on the console that monitored the radiation levels inside and outside his ship. A glaring red light showed that the sensors outside were reporting lethally high radiation, enough to kill a man in minutes. Next to that baleful red glow on the control panel a string of peaceful pale green lights reported that radiation levels inside the ship were close to normal.

Good enough, the captain said to himself. So far. We still have a long way to go.

He had worked out with the special weapons tech how close they would have to be to Vesta before releasing the twin missiles that contained the nanomachines. They had developed three possible scenarios. The first one was the basic plan of attack, the flight path they would follow if everything went as planned and they were not detected by Humphries’s people. That was the trajectory they were following now, sneaking along inside the radiation cloud until they reached the predetermined release point.

If they were detected on their way in to Vesta, or if the ship developed some critical malfunction such as a breakdown of its radiation shielding (a possibility that made the skipper shudder) then they would release the missiles early and hope that they would not be seen or intercepted by Vesta’s defense systems. The skipper and the weapons tech had worked out a release point for that contingency. It was only six hours from where they now were.

Their third option was to call off the attack altogether. That decision would be entirely—and solely—up to the captain. Only a major disaster would justify abandoning the attack, such as a serious malfunction of the ship’s systems or an interception by HSS vessels.

Cruising blind and deaf inside the radiation cloud, watching the sensor readings on the control panel, the skipper thought that of the three options before him he much preferred number two. Let’s get to the early release point, fire the damned missiles at Vesta, and get the hell out of here before something goes wrong.

He got up from the command chair. All four of his crew turned from their consoles toward him.

“I’m going to catch some zees,” he said gruffly. “You take your normal relief, one at a time. Ms. Yamaguchi, you have the con. Wake me in five hours.”

“Yes, sir. Five hours.”

The captain ducked through the hatch. His quarters were immediately aft of the bridge. Five hours, he thought. I’ll make my decision after a good nap, when my mind is fresh.

He knew what he wanted that decision to be.