Chapter 33

The bridge of the UNS Spirit was humming with activity. The light cruiser, part of a two ship scouting element for the UNS Invincible's battlegroup, was involved in Operation White Flag and had observed a blacked out ship of unknown origin pass through their sensor net almost twelve hours ago.

Operation White Flag was a training mission and they were supposed to be looking for the members of the UNS Vigour's battlegroup as they moved into the sector designated for the simulated battle. This sector of space was empty, well away from commercial travel lanes and was considered to be a safe area for two huge naval groups to scrimmage.

Not sure it if was just a lost merchant ship or if the Vigour's commander had tried to pull a fast one on them, they treated it as a hostile contact and began tracking its movements. Union Naval Ships of the Light cruiser class were often used as scouts for the larger, capital class ships. They had rudimentary stealth capabilities and could cloak themselves from civilian grade sensors quite easily. Doing the same thing against military grade sensors was possible, but required much more patience and a high dose of luck.

Almost half of the internal space of the Spirit was devoted to reaction mass. Much more than the ship would need under normal power, it was devoted to massive maneuvering jets and would allow the ship to move quite rapidly, over short distances, without engaging their engines and alerting enemy sensors. The reaction mass was also used to fire small sensor platforms, creating a virtual net of sensors out in front of their position and extending their passive sensor capabilities.

Using an precisely aimed laser beam, they could communicate between ships with almost zero chance of the messages being detected or intercepted. The greater the distance, the harder that became, but inside of a half million kilometers, it was almost as good as stringing a hardline.

Notifying their sister ship of their intentions, the pair of light cruisers accelerated and put themselves on the trail of the slow-moving, blacked out ship they had spotted. Trailing the ship turned out to be simplicity itself. It didn't appear to have noticed the pair of ships on its tail and it made a beeline for a nearby navigation hazard.

There were spots in even the emptiest space that can be dangerous to ships passing through. Debris from the tail of a comet, corrosive gasses given off from nearby stars, even loose planetoids left over from the big bang, that were not caught by the gravitational field of a larger object or star. Despite what most laymen tended to think, empty space was not all that empty. Navigation hazard was a generic term for any of these conditions, and they were assiduously mapped and the information shared with all ships in space.

The blacked out ship was heading for a small planetoid, about a third as large as Earth's moon, that had been designated NH9980723 by whoever discovered it a couple hundred years ago. It was on the cruisers maps so they could avoid it and they were curious to see why any ship would deliberately seek it out.

The only reason that Stewie Green, the Captain of the Spirit, could conceive of was that a globally known navigation hazard also made a good meeting spot, especially when that meeting was planned for a deserted section of space. It was not something they expected other UNS ships to do, and that meant a clandestine meeting, probably by smugglers.

The UNS made it a point to investigate and apprehend smugglers whenever possible. Next to chasing pirates, it provided the most realistic training available for a peacetime Navy and the crews enjoyed the change of pace much more than they did the regular skirmish training they received.

When the target ship slowed and took up a station keeping orbit around NH9980723, the UNS Spirit send a series of probes in to bracket the planetoid and observe all approaches, wanting to try and catch whomever it was that their target was meeting. In addition, the Spirit's patrol mate, the UNS Placida Bay, sent out a drone equipped with a transmitter and aimed it towards the last known position of the battlegroup. The drone would travel out a pre-programmed distance and send a directional pulse message to the battlegroup, letting them know what the scouts were doing without alerting enemy units in the area.

Now the waiting began. The pair of scouts split up and each ship took up station equidistant from the planetoid, waiting and watching. A reply was received from the battlegroup, telling the scouts that the flag ship and her escorts would rendezvous with the scouts in about ten hours.

The scouts' patience was rewarded less than eight hours later by a sensor blip showing an incoming ship. Captain Green was a surprised at the size of the ship, it was almost as large as a Destroyer, though the drive signature was not the same.

Running the scan data through his computer took much longer than he though it should, and his presence over the scan officer's shoulder, though not actively helping, was a constant reminder that something was wrong. The closest match they could get was an old Constant Class destroyer, but with updated engines and, to his shock and dismay, active weapon systems.

There were no ships in the UNS Navy of that class, not anymore, and there were no registered ships, in his records, that were using that hull series with a new, more powerful engine suite. The smaller ship was a bit easier, though it too defied exact identification. It was definitely a pocket cruiser, smaller than even the light cruisers the scouts were using, though nearly as heavily armed.

The combination of sensor readings on the two ships brought a recent report to mind, and Captain Green spent a few minutes reviewing the routine advisory messages routinely sent to fleet units. There, in a batch from two months back, was a BOLO, a Be On the Look Out for six retired UN ships that had been sold out of inventory. They had disappeared between stations almost a year ago and hadn't been seen since. When he compared the stats of the missing ships, there was no doubt in his mind that he had found two of them and it was highly illegal for a civilian corporation to arm ships.

If they attempted to move in now, they would be seriously outclassed and the fleet units were still two hours out. The clandestine meeting would take place in less than an hour, and if the meeting was short enough, it was possible that they could be gone before there was enough fire power in the area to engage and disable, or destroy, those blacked out ships.

After a laser-based conversation with his teammate, Captain Bryan Mosler, Stewie Green made the decision that the pair would launch an attack if it looked as though the ships were preparing to leave. They would try and delay the departure until the fleet could arrive and back them up.