NABC Book 3: Chapter 57: Detection
Book 3: Chapter 57: Detection
Book 3: Chapter 57: Detection
Riker
April 2257
Sol
Eighty thousand observation drones generated a lot of false positives. Even with the filtering algorithms I’d worked out, I still had to check a significant number of flagged items every day. After all, false positives were tedious. Skipping a real positive would be disastrous.
Just the same, the process had become a humdrum routine, to the point where I almost went right past the first significant signal in twenty-seven years of monitoring.
I jerked in my seat as the details registered. Far too regular to be background noise, too persistent to be an instrumentation glitch. The readings were barely detectable, but they still screamed danger. I skipped forward through several hours of log entries, and finally had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to explain this away.
With a feeling of dread, I sent a text to Bill. Positive detection.
Within moments, Bill popped in. “Way to ruin my day, Will. Okay, let’s see it.”
Wordlessly, I gestured to the monitor window. Bill sat down, pulled the window around so it faced him squarely, and began to scan. I could see his eyes moving as he went over the readings, his expression turning into a frown.
He finally pushed the window away and sat back with a huff. “Well, that’s it. We’re being invaded. I notice that the incoming is well off a direct line from here to GL 877. They expected us to be watching for them.”
I nodded. “Or at least allowed for it. Too soon to get a good picture of numbers, but I think we’ll have that by the end of the day. Do we wait to make an announcement?”
“I don’t think so.” Bill scrubbed his face with his hands, then looked at me with a weary expression. “There’ll be a moot. We want to give people time to get organized. I’ll send something out, with a promise of more information in, what, three hours?”
I nodded, and Bill stood up. “Okay, I’ll get it started. Keep the drones well outside the Others’ detection range. No sense in letting them know we’ve seen them. And forward me the update as soon as you have it.” With that, he disappeared.
* * *
As it turned out, we didn’t get as far as the moot. The readings resolved into individual signals in less than an hour. I guess we’d all forgotten just how big the Others’ ships were. Fifty smaller objects, which were probably death asteroids, and one hundred larger objects, cargo carriers, most likely filled with fighter units of one kind or another.
“Well, hold on,” Garfield said. “Light-speed limitations work against them, but we could make it work for us.”
We all turned to him, and he continued, “If we can get some cloaked observation drones in close enough, we can track their location real-time and fire the lasers and spikes to intercept them.”
“Sure, but if they do that mega-ping thing, they’ll see the drones and know we’re on to them.”
Garfield shrugged at Thor. “But if they do the mega-ping, they’ll be announcing their presence. They might be reluctant to do that until the last second.”
I rubbed my eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Damn, I wish Butterworth was still around.”
Bill grinned at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard you say that before.”
“I didn’t dislike him, Bill. We just always seemed to be at loggerheads.” I shrugged. “Anyway, this kind of reading-the-other-guy’s-mind tactical stuff is what he was good at. Original Bob, not so much.”
There were quiet nods around the table. “Yeah,” Garfield said, “we really weren’t good at things like chess, for just that reason.”
The moment of contemplative silence was broken by Thor. “Yeah, whatever. Look, we can calculate when they’ll probably consider it too late for us to do anything. That’s when they’ll ping. We just have to make our move sooner.”
“Okay, Thor, you’ll handle that?” At Thor’s nod, Bill looked around at us. “Let’s try to get stealth drones out there. Let’s also send a salvo of stealth nukes as well. Anything that we can take out early will be one less item to worry about later. And send out the Jokers. Have them get into position early.”
I jerked as I received a ping, and Bill looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
“Seems Herschel and Neil are here.” I grinned at the others. “So at least we might be able to get the humans out of the way.”
Bill nodded, and swept his gaze around the table. “Right, we all have our tasks. Moot’s in two hours, let’s be ready for that.” He popped out, followed in moments by the others.