Chapter 27

The AIs had told the Confederacy that the Sa'arm had been on the planet Silvat-3, for approximately three months. They were evasive, however, as to how they knew that. Nevertheless, the team accepted that this was a legitimate example of an early Sa'arm invasion.

Sancho Panza, with Dolores in mission command, established the relay point and hideout went smoothly. She remained in-system, between the planet and the relay point, when Jervis Bay arrived.

The ship would make several sorties: one to set up the relay point, one for the first observations, and additional sorties for more observations. Nevertheless, the first mission against known Sa'arm called for redundancy. Programming for the various orbiters could be sent to the surveilled system, and then propagated via the integrated navigation & communications satellites.

Jervis Bay approached the planet in stealth mode, covered by ZIRCONIC optical and radar shields. It was a tense time, for they did not know even if the Sa'arm had planetary patrols, much less active sensors that would shower them with fire as soon as they were in range. Nevertheless, Terry took a deep breath, and began moving in. "All stations from command. Remember the command relationships. Captain Berg is responsible for the status of the ship, the squadron, and systems mounted in the ship or controlled by stations in the ship. I will direct the pod-mounted systems.

We will start with passive scans of near-planet orbits and signals from the surface. Captain from command, roll ship to point passive sensors to the surface.

"Command, captain. Rolled into position.

"Electronics, first, use your long-range passive electronic sensors. If clear, use radar to scan areas where we have not detected enemy presence.

"Small craft department, deploy the NAVCOM birds. Next, deploy the electro-optical search and tracking pods, then the KH-12 imaging pods. Within a single orbit, KH-12 imagery was showing a picture of a Volumna-class sphere, in the location given by the AIs.

Catherine hit her microphone, concerned but not afraid. Her equipment warned of the existence of possible radar, although no indication that it saw them. "Command, EW. RIVET JOINT reports VHF emissions from the sphere. Some appear to be a fixed beam, as in azimuth search, and others oscillating as with a height-finder. Preliminary evaluation is radar comparable to Soviet S-75 Dvina, late sixties. We are also getting weaker emanations in the same general frequency range, which are moving and might be airborne radar."

"Communications and EW, command. Create a spot report with that ELINT information and send it to the supraluminal relay point for immediate transmission. This is critical information.

"EO and missiles, Command. Keep passive track on the mobile sources, and feed the approximate position to the battle station. Prepare main radars to lock onto trajectory if it closes with us. Start updating HGM-120B's with midcourse information.

"If we can avoid it, I don't want to fire on the Sa'arm and confirm the our existence. We'll do it if we are threatened, but I want to be damn sure we don't leave witnesses."

Actual pictures would tell more than radar and infrared measurements, although the latter would still complement the former if the Sa'arm used camouflage. "EO, Command. Drop the MS-177 close-look cameras into lower orbits in the vicinity of the spheres. We want detailed pictures of the sphere itself, and the ground near it."

After several MS-177 passes, Harry called out, "Command, Imagery. Multispectral scans show areas of greater-than-background heat, on ground near the sphere. These drop in intensity with distance, in a pattern that reminds me of a sloping tunnel. The hot areas are three lines spaced 120 degrees apart."

"Imagery, command. Put that together into a spot report and send it to the supraluminal relay. EW, any indication we've been detected?

"Command, EW. No, the levels hitting us are quite low, and the sweep patterns have not focused on us."

"Radar, command. Set up the synthetic aperture radars to aim at the apparent signal sources. Once you think you've got a decent image, let's get out of here.

"All stations, command. Speak up if you have any reason to believe they've detected any satellites." There was no response.

"All stations, pull any low orbit birds into an orbit to hold them for at least 60 days. Sync them up with communications relays, and verify the relays are passing data to the superluminal point. Destroy any sensors that don't pass data. Arm the self-destructs on everything else." They spent the next four hours checking the remote monitoring, and then pulled back.

Sancho Panza jumped first, and then Jervis Bay returned to superluminal space, and, ten days later, arrived at the Blue Light.

While in the relative safety of superluminal space, Catherine subvocalized to Terry. <<Terry, it's Catherine. Could we spend some time talking and relaxing? I have some ideas.>>

<<Of course, dear.>>They met in his stateroom, where she excused herself to "change into something not for the corridors." When she returned, he was a bit surprised by the outfit, which was a new style for her, which reminded him of brightly colored silken nightwear. It was unquestionably sexy, but also conveyed something he could not quite name -- an etherealness?

"Terry, my love, I've been thinking a lot about the way we interact, in a good way. I'm starting to think that we do have some kind of psychic energy exchange, not necessarily linked to bondage or pain as I once thought. If we were in a safe place to experiment, which we aren't, I'd even consider sharing some traditional hallucinogens, as in an alternate shamanic reality. What we can do, though, is use drumming, light, and so forth, as we touch one another. There are ritual foods. We may experiment with some Western sex magic.

"However we do it, I see it as a growing closer. Here on a mission, I don't think we can get relaxed enough for the deepest parts, but we can start to explore.

"You're right that there is what could be called a spiritual component. I think I can offer an unconventional therapy or meditation, although I'm but a beginner. I have a strong sense, however, that I could make childbirth gentler for the mother. That hit me while Gayle was having your children; I wish I had been able to be quietly in the room, sensing."

Back aboard Blue Light, Terry opened the briefing analysis. "While we learned a number of things, and I think we'll discover more as we analyze our results and what the remote sensors continue to send to us, I think the single most important thing learned is that they use VHF. It's probably radar, but we need to explore that. Catherine, your first priority is to analyze the signals we have and recognize what additional information we need. Clearly, when we go back, we need much better VHF sensors.

"We also learned some things about our organization. I think we are drawing too sharp a distinction between mission crew and ship crew. At this point, I'm inclined to give the ship control of weapons and targeting sensors, while leaving search and midcourse to the pod-based specialists. That gives the ship control of anything that will need the ship to maneuver before than they can operate.

"Returning to our findings, the next most important is confirmation that the Sa'arm go underground. Catherine, would you go into what we know, what we can guess, and what we should do about the VHF signals we observed?"

"Yes, Terry. We can make a good estimate that they can do long-range, low-resolution search with the signals we detected. Think Battle of Britain signals, but with better antennas. The measured beam shapes suggest mechanically scanned Yagi antennas, something like a Vietnam-era Soviet radar.

"We don't know if these can be used for fire control. If it's something like the S-75 system, the VHF didn't independently track targets to send position to the weapons, but mostly steered the missile into places where they thought the proximity sensor would trigger. They might be usable at shorter ranges, they might have shorter-wavelength radar we didn't observe, or they might use electro-optical or other non-radar methods for aiming weapons. We were able to use synthetic aperture radar to look inside the possible radar housing, and again, it has two Yagi antennas are mounted, one range/azimuth and one height finding. This is consistent with radiofrequency MASINT of the beam shapes. Don't ask me how the Sa'arm could have gotten an old Soviet radar to reverse engineer, but our results do point that way. The good news would be that if that's what it is, we know a lot about electronic attack on it.

"Let me mention that if you want to use standoff radar-homing attack on the systems, you're going to have to modify the HARM missiles so they have antennas and receivers that go down to VHF. We have a handle on that. I'd also suggest trying to get some British ALARM anti-radar missiles into that range. Let me set up a team to discuss whether the third radar killer mode, that of the French ARMAT, would have any role in our tactics. My guess is that at best, it would be a decoy that has a warhead that just might get through.

Terry asked, "May I assume we are going to have to go into the atmosphere to get better analysis of those signals? The vehicle operations people will get involved here. Put appropriate antenna on the SIGINT Galileos, and start modifying HARMs with VHF seekers.

"Catherine, my understanding is that you think HARM, modified to attack VHF radar, needs to have pop-out directional antennas perpendicular to the body? I understand that they are too long to fit into the regular missile nose."

Catherine said, "We need a month or two to develop the VHF seekers. I think it's time well spent, if that's the only way we can counter a Sa'arm ship in flight. I'm to get together with NVT -- Master Sergeant Thanh, that is, and work out a set of antennas. As I think about it, a third way to rig the antennas, which would be more mechanically complicated, would be to pop out sets of winglets perpendicular to the body. From those winglets, we'd then swing out helical antennas parallel to the body. That definitely would give us better horizontal separation, with a decent directional monitoring pattern."

"That's right, boss. Possibly, we might try an enlarged nose, with helical antennas in VHF, but I don't know if we can get enough horizontal separation between them. The pop-outs won't be a problem in space, and, from my initial simulation, wouldn't be a huge performance hit in atmosphere. Still, NVT -- Master Sergeant Thanh -- is the antenna guru. At least on missiles, it's his call.

Terry agreed. "Until we have those antennas ready, take the HARMs out of the launchers and replace them with Mavericks and AMRAAMs. Put in a few MALD decoys. Catherine, check the MALD and see if its geometry is enough to make it a VHF beacon.

"I'd note that we very well might want to have dipole arrays in space or on Galileos, and data link to the HARM or whatever else we use. If we just were going to attack the radars on the ground, I still would want a good direction finder to program the Common Tri-Mode Seeker, probably with millimeter wave imaging.

Terry continued, "During the time away from Silvat, we want to keep watching for any patterns. Meanwhile, our first priority is getting more detail of the sphere itself, as well as changes in the last month.

"I'm kicking myself for not looking into this earlier, but my impression is that we could have AIs control drones if they are doing pure reconnaissance. It definitely would be nice to be able to order some lower-altitude platforms to start looking at things before we go back in ships."

"We now have two ways to do it. Based on the U.S. Army's RC-21 system, we have units of three Mini-Gals with a fourth backup, to orbit at high altitude. They will have high-gain antennas that measure time of arrival.