Virtues of War by Bennett Coles (free novels to read .txt) 📕

There weren’t any natural objects that moved that fast, and very few civilian ones out in this neck of the woods. Jack immediately began comparing the gravimetric signature of the contact – allowing for the warping caused by its high speed – to known military contacts. The computer narrowed the search to less than a dozen in seconds, and Jack scanned each “spacetime fingerprint” carefully. It was impossible to be sure, but sometimes in this job you had to take your best guess.

“

This is Viking-Two; identify fast-mover as one Terran fast-attack craft,

Blade

-class. Speed point-one-c, distance between two and three million. She’s going somewhere in a big hurry.”

“

Viking-One, affirm: one

Blade

FAC. Longboat and I triangulate to make her distance three million. Not bad, Jack. I’m sure you appreciate us putting a little bit of reality in today’s exercise.”

Jack smiled. He watched as the fast-attack craft bent spacetime across his display, marveling at its speed. Normally such a small ship would barely register on his big dipper, and certainly not at three million kilometers, but her huge speed was high enough to affect her mass so that she had the spacetime cross-section of a Martian mining platform. Stripes couldn’t have arranged a more dramatic display of the effects of speed on mass in the anti-stealth world.

A new, female voice came onto the circuit.

“

This is Longboat: for your info, guys, that FAC is

Rapier

, based on spacetime signature. EM suggests she stirred up quite a hornet’s nest on Cerberus. Just thought you’d like to know. Longboat silent.”

Jack wondered for a moment what kind of secret mission

Rapier

had been conducting on Cerberus. He’d only seen pictures of the Fleet’s fast-attack craft, but he’d heard that they were quite something to fly. And there was no doubting they did some of the coolest missions around, getting into the thick of it while the rest of the Fleet conducted exercises and sovereignty patrols. Jack made a mental note to find out more about transferring to fast-attack.

“Viking-Two, we still doing ASW here?”

Stripes’ voice shook Jack from his thoughts. He did a sweep of the visual, of his flight controls, and then focused again on his hunt controls. The faint disturbance in spacetime he had marked before

Rapier’s

sudden appearance was gone. Then Jack reminded himself that he had displaced his own vantage point considerably since his first bearing line, and he shifted his focus. Sure enough, the disturbance was still visible down a new relative bearing. He typed in a second line. The red bearing popped into view on his display, intersecting the old bearing from his previous position.

“Viking-Two fishing true one-four mark zero-niner.”

He now had two lines of bearing on his possible contact, but there was still far too much uncertainty to start drawing conclusions. Despite the claims of the Fleet promotional material, his instruments were really only accurate to within fifteen degrees either side of the bearing when searching the Bulk. Some contacts, such as attacking gravi-torpedoes (or fast-attack craft on full burn) were easy to pinpoint, but ships in general were too small and too slow to nail down unless they were very close. Multiple bearing lines and a whole lot of time were required to prosecute a stealth contact.

In other words, Jack didn’t have much at all to go on so far.

But he was just getting started. Since he couldn’t have help from Viking-One or Longboat today, he would have to make his own multiple vantage points.

Loaded aft in the Hawk were fifty devices known as barbells. Like the big dipper, these barbells could reach into the Bulk to search for gravimetric readings while still maintaining a link to the brane. Disposable items, Jack could drop them at intervals behind his Hawk and leave them to listen at whatever Bulk depth he pre-programmed them to. They could last for days before their batteries finally died, and were invaluable in protracted stealth hunts. Jack’s main concern was that he only had a limited number of them, so he had to pick carefully where he dropped them.

“This is Viking-Two, I’m going to sow a barbell line to investigate bearing crossover two.”

“Roger.”

Jack knew he wouldn’t get much feedback from Stripes today, as the purpose of the exercise was to test Jack’s initiative as a solo hunter. Only when the exercise stealth pod revealed itself – either through his successful efforts or through a simulated attack on

Kristiansand

– would Jack know how successful he had been.

He set off on a course perpendicular to the bearing of interest where his two red lines intersected on his display. He kept his speed down enough so that his big dipper still had some ability to track in the Bulk, and he struggled with his greatest weakness in ASW – impatience. Based on his initial bearing crossfix, he needed at least a thousand kilometer separation between his barbells; ideally he needed more like two thousand. Prudence just managed to triumph over impatience, and he dropped a barbell every two thousand kilometers on a dead-straight run. This cautious approach took thirty agonizing minutes, but as the fifth barbell deployed Jack was able to come hard right and increase speed to separate his own sensors from those of his drones. If he had calculated right, his five barbells would now offer a good radial cross-section of the target. By re-positioning himself down another axis he could improve his chances of a pinpoint.

A short sprint to displace himself from the barbell line later, Jack slowed his Hawk to give the big dipper maximum clarity.

At first, the signals from the barbells were unclear. His hunt controls gave a separate readout for each drone, and it took time for Jack to interpret the slight fluctuations in spacetime. He lifted his helmet an inch and ran his fingers through short, sweaty hair, breathing deeply. He now had to pick any disturbance of note from each barbell and input the bearing into his display. It took about a minute per barbell, and when he finally looked up at his 3D display, he sighed in frustration: the “crossfix” was a mass of red lines all pointing in vaguely the same direction, with no more than two ever intersecting at once.

He checked his Big Dipper, focusing the search down a bearing that went through what best approximated the cross-fix of barbell bearings. There was certainly something out there, but whether it was natural or man-made, on the brane or in the Bulk, there just wasn’t enough information to tell.

“Viking-Two, what’s your status?”

Jack seated his helmet properly again and stared out through his windows at the stars beyond. “This is Viking-Two…” He struggled to think of a suitable report to give, considering he had probably just wasted an hour of his time.

A star blinked.

Jack froze, any possible words dying in his throat. One of the stars in the void before him had blinked. That meant that something had passed between him and the star. Something had passed close enough to him to actually eclipse a fiery ball of gas bright enough to be visible thousands of light years away. Every space pilot appreciated the inconceivable distances involved in space travel, and every military space pilot knew this one simple rule: stars don’t blink.

Jack kept his eyes frozen in place, dropped his visor and tapped the visual lock button on the side of his helmet. A red square appeared in the inside of his visor, marking the bearing and relaying the information to the Hawk’s computer. He transferred the image captured in the red square of his visor to one of the hunt screens formerly displaying barbell info.

He activated the Hawk’s long-range camera and pointed it down the bearing. The live image showed nothing but the usual starry background. He switched to infra-red. The picture became even more confused as the residual heat from thousands of suns mixed together in the cosmic background. He started shifting the viewer through the EM spectrum, looking for something that might stand out.

“Uhh, Viking-Two… Say again your status?”

“Viking-One, stand by. I think I’ve got something.”

The view revealed nothing in the visual spectrum of light, nor through the ultra-violet. It was only when it reached microwaves did the mystery object emerge. Everywhere in the Universe there is a background murmur of microwave radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang visible in all directions from everywhere. Stars and other celestial objects outshine this backdrop, but only two things actually make the microwaves dim: the coldest of deep space debris, and spaceships trying to hide.

“Uhh, Viking-Two, roger… Jack, we’re getting a little low on time here. I suggest you start your search again down a bearing from you of one-seven mark zero-eight.”

Jack recorded the microwave image.

“This is Viking-Two, tally-ho, one viper bearing three-five mark zero-eight. No duff.”

“Say again?”

Jack repeated his report of a visual sighting, and forwarded the image to Stripes and

Kristiansand.

Several moments of silence followed on the circuit, but Jack was already rushing to gather more information on this mysterious ship he had spotted. He had little doubt that it was a ship. Although the microwave silhouette was fuzzy, there was no mistaking the symmetry of form found only in man-made objects. And this man-made object was probably up to no good, considering how hard it was trying to hide itself. No EM emissions, no artificial gravity, no speed of note. This ship was moving in the brane, but it might as well be a stealth ship for its lack of signature. Civilian ships routinely blared across the full EM spectrum, and those with artificial gravity dug huge wells in spacetime. And even military ships maintained an ID beacon during peacetime.

Jack grinned. Those gaians could hunt their mini-asteroids all they wanted: he’d just bagged himself a bad guy.

Bennett R. Coles served 15 years as an officer in the Canadian Navy. His deployments took him around most of the Pacific Rim and included such highlights as being in the first Canadian task force to visit Vladivostok since the fall of the Soviet Union, and being selected as the liaison officer to the Chinese Navy for its first ever visit to Canada. He was the first Canadian officer to set foot aboard a Chinese warship in Canadian waters, advising the Chinese captain and admiral for the day-long passage.

Throughout his career he undertook a variety of roles such as bridge officer, boarding party officer, warfare officer and navigator. He served several years in staff positions, including the start-up team for Operation APOLLO, which initiated Canada’s decade of support to the post-9/11 mission in Afghanistan. The highlight of his career was a pair of tours in the Middle East as a UN Military Observer, the first in the Golan Heights and the second in South Lebanon.

He retired from active duty in 2005, but quickly realized that his new career as an author wasn’t going to follow the path he’d envisaged. With the traditional publishing industry broken and the self-publishing industry stillborn, he eventually found himself heading up a maverick publishing company that takes the best of both worlds and creates something better. He makes his home on Canada’s West Coast with his wife and two sons.

Learn more by visiting

www.bennettrcoles.com