“Captain on the bridge.”

Hunter took the center chair and lashed up his emergency harness.

“Zony, tell me everything I don’t already know.”

The signals officer was already hard at work, her fingers dancing over the impossibly elaborate bank of controls at the communications station. She wore old-fashioned over-the-ear headphones equipped with a small boom mic near one cheek.

“Annora, get flight one on the box. I want two Jacks and a T-Hawk in space in sixty seconds. Have flight two ready a Nemesis and park them on station one megaclick off our starboard wing. Everyone stays scanner passive until further instructed.”

“Affirmative,” Commander Doverly swiveled in her chair and began coding the flight orders.

“Helm, all stop. Thrusters at station keeping.”

“Aye, sir. Helm answering all stop.”

“CIC, report status of Kilo X-Ray One.”

“Contact slowing in space. Range now fifteen million miles. Vessel type still unidentified. Energy emissions suggest a warship in the 80,000-ton range. No active signals.”

“He can see us and he knows we can see him,” Hunter mused. “Skywatch, what have you got?”

“We confirm CIC’s report. They’re still closing, but they’re also slowing down.”

“Sir, flight two reports Nemesis Eight standing by to launch,” Doverly reported. “Space force patrol Cavalier Eleven is standing by on rails two and three.”

Hunter turned back to the tactical display. “Signal STC rails are green. Launch all alert spacecraft.” Doverly switched the launch board over and signaled clear space.

The twin-engine Yellowjacket fighter’s cockpit was filled with cool oxygen-rich air. The whines of the overbuilt fusion engines on either side of its main section rose in unison as the pilot’s tac suit inflated and normalized the ionization of its internal fluid circulation.

“Yellowjacket Ten, this is Skywatch. Spacelane control has cleared the rails. Stand by for full power launch in five.. four.. three.”

The cylindrical magnetically charged rail tunnel around the angry-looking little attack craft began to thrum with millions of volts of barely restrained energy. The pilot saluted the armored and receded bunker right next to the flightway, and the rail operator returned the salute just before the count reached zero.

The pilot’s anti-inertial circulation went to full pressure as his body was slammed into the flight couch. Yellowjacket Ten was pulled down the ninety-yard rail tunnel by impossibly strong magnetic forces until it was literally fired out the port side of Flight One at a speed of more than 350 MPH. Its powerful engines kicked in and rocketed the heavily armed little ship up to nearly 2000 MPH in a matter of seconds. Moments later Yellowjacket Eleven and T-Hawk Black performed a textbook rendezvous at the innermost combat space patrol range of 400 miles and began to circle the Argent.

Beneath the mighty battleship, the same ritual played out again, this time for the much larger Nemesis electronic warfare corvette. Her crew of five harnessed themselves to their shock frames before the rail launcher blasted the sleek vessel into a heading towards the starboard edge of the Argent’s command area. It banked its way through a tight maneuver before literally disappearing into the inky vacuum and vanishing from the Argent’s instruments. Only her pinpoint directional LOS datalinks remained active, transmitted across a shifting hyper-accelerated LASER impossible to detect from anywhere in space except a point directly between Nemesis Eight and her mothership. The datalink gave her both communications and telemetry without alerting any hostile ships to her position.

“Combat space patrol on station and standing by, captain,” Annora reported.

“Very good. Zony, have Ice Station start turning this region of space into channel three. Ops–”

Zony turned to face the captain’s chair, but didn’t say anything. She was listening intently, one hand on her headphones and staring at the floor.

“Zony?”

She held up her hand, as if trying to quiet sounds that might make it hard to hear.

“Wh–” Hunter stopped himself. He knew that look Zony had. She was doing that thing where she could figure out what note on a piano would match the sound of a door creak down the hall...

... in the building next door.

“Captain, I have a microwatt-strength signal coming from Barker’s Asteroid. It sounds like a human voice. They’re hailing us,” Zony said without looking up.

Hunter stared at the tactical plot. Barker’s Asteroid was far beyond the unidentified contact on the opposite side of the Argent’s projected Z-axis.

“Hailing us? At this range?”

Commander Doverly performed some quick calculations before getting to her feet. “That’s impossible. We would have detected active scanners, Even then they’d have trouble identifying us.”

“Let’s hear it, lieutenant,” Hunter said quietly.

The channel popped and sizzled with static and background noise. Buried deep in the electronic haze there was a thin, tinny-sounding voice clearly audible. Hunter couldn’t tell who the voice belonged to, but it sounded for all the world like a 1940s radio broadcast.

“Argent! You’re walking into a trap. It’s a set up. Run! Before it’s too late!”


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