The main screen switched over to a projection of the star system. Six planets, with one gas giant and one habitable world in the inner part of the liquid-water zone.
“Our freighter was not a covert ops ship or anything remotely unusual,” Shvets reminded everyone. They tapped a command, highlighting the habitable world. “They visited Greyhawk, sold their cargo of agricultural and industrial machines and parts, and purchased a cargo of refined titanium and local fish.
“From Greyhawk, the ship did not get a solid view of Kenku, the gas giant,” they continued. “There was no unusual industrial activity at Greyhawk or at Paladin, the planet much of the system’s heavy industry is anchored around.”
The third planet in the system, a frozen, uninhabitable rock similar to Sol’s Mars, flashed on the screen.
“Nothing in this suggests that there’s a secret Republic military base and antimatter supply station here,” Milhouse noted. “Except that any base like that would be at the gas giant, and they encouraged the ship not to go there.”
“A lot of systems have assorted expensive crap at their gas giants,” Kelly said. “Especially the UnArcana Worlds. The rest of the Protectorate uses antimatter for a lot of things, and we don’t have quite so immense a demand for hydrogen and helium.
“The cloudscoops at the gas giants are the only things fueling the power stations of an UnArcana World. Keeping them from prying eyes is pretty common.”
“But it still leaves a gap in our intelligence that must be filled,” Xi Wu replied. “Do we have a plan?”
“We do,” Kelly confirmed. “Apologies, Jalil, we’re keeping your people as passengers for now.”
The immense shaven-headed cyborg woman grinned.
“Just how we like it,” she noted. “Quiet, easy cruises where you lot do all of the work.”
“It’s a standard scoot ’n snoop,” Kelly continued, glancing around her crew. “Mage Foster will jump us in and Xi Wu will take over stealthing us immediately. We’ll sweep around Kenku to make damn sure of the presence or absence of our target, and then we’ll do a long drift over to Greyhawk and Paladin to do detailed scans of the orbital industry.
“If everything goes perfectly, we’ll be in-system for about thirty-six hours and have full information on every planet, every ship, and every space station in the Gygax System.”
“And what if things don’t go perfectly?” Milhouse asked.
“Then we’ll be spending a lot less time in Gygax but might be leaving with a lot more useful information,” Kelly told him. “We are the sneakiest starship in existence, people, and there are only a handful of ships like Rhapsody. The Republic might have figured out we exist, but they still can’t track us, and they can’t fight what they can’t see.
“If Gygax is the Republic’s fallback position, we will know very shortly.”
“And if they’re not?” her husband asked, the ship’s senior pilot having been quiet so far.
“Then there are two more ships doing the same thing we are in other star systems,” Kelly replied. “We rendezvous back at Legatus with them and we collate data. We know the Republic leadership went somewhere.
“We’ll find them, Mike. We are the invisible eyes to see what they think they’ve hidden, and they have nothing to stop us.”
3
“Jump complete,” Liara Foster reported. The video link from the bridge to the simulacrum chamber showed her wavering slightly as she stepped back from the simulacrum itself. The standardized spell that teleported a starship a light-year at a time was immensely draining—and Kelly was told that short-jumping was in some ways more so.
She had to trust her Mages on that. Like every child of the Protectorate, Kelly LaMonte had been tested for the Mage Gift at eleven years of age, and like the overwhelming majority of them, she lacked even the tiniest fragment of the power her wife wielded.
Xi Wu stepped up to replace Foster, laying her hands on the semiliquid silver model of Rhapsody in Purple suspended at the exact center of the jump ship. Kelly knew the other woman had silver runes inlaid into her palms that linked her into the rune matrices woven through the ship, allowing her to project her magic around the vessel.
“Stealth spell up,” Xi Wu reported after a moment. “Liara, go fall over,” she ordered her subordinate. “We’ll need you soon enough.”
There were four Mages on Kelly’s ship, three of them answering to Xi Wu. Two were RMN Mages seconded to MISS. Two, including Xi Wu, were full-time MISS agents.
“Milhouse, what are we seeing?” Kelly asked her tactical officer.
“Still pulling data in from the arrays,” Milhouse replied. “No one should know we’re here yet, not for another couple of minutes.”
“Shvets, put some distance between us and the jump flare under Xi’s shield,” Kelly ordered.
“On it,” they replied, the stealth ship vibrating as her engines came to life. Antimatter engines would obliterate the ability of the technological solutions to hide the ship, but the spell woven around her could conceal them.
For a while, anyway. Kelly knew her wife well enough to pick out the signs of strain on Xi Wu’s face as the Mage adjusted her spell.
“I’ve got something at Kenku,” Milhouse reported. “Multiple energy signatures. Trying to get visual resolution, but we are a long way out, skipper.”
Four light-minutes was enough to keep them safe from initial observation, but it also limited how much data they could grab. Foster had dropped Rhapsody in Purple almost exactly halfway between Greyhawk and Kenku, which meant they had a view of both.
“What about Greyhawk and Paladin?” Kelly demanded.
“Greyhawk is more active than our old reports, but nothing major,” Milhouse reported. “Hard to say for sure, but I’d guess that they’ve installed some new orbital forts. Paladin…is significantly busier, but that could just be civilian industry.
“Kenku, I’m looking at something new. There were cloudscoops there but not on this scale.”
“Shvets, set a course that will sling us around Kenku and get us close enough to Paladin to pick out details as well,” Kelly ordered. “Sounds like we’ve found something interesting at least. Let’s go see what it is.”
The main display shifted as the new course was laid in. What information they did have on each cluster of signatures appeared by each of the three planets as Milhouse worked through the data.
It wasn’t much. Their old intel said there were four cloudscoop gas-extraction and refining facilities in orbit of Kenku—but even their years-old most recent scan data of the system hadn’t seen them.
Right now, it looked like there were either ten times as many extraction platforms as there had been or someone had moved in a good-sized fleet. Since they could only see one side of the gas giant, they could be missing as much as fifty percent of the orbitals, too.
She started an analysis in her computers. The captain’s seat on any ship had a number of screens attached to it, usually called the “repeater screens” as they could be set up to mirror any station on the bridge. Kelly, who had been an engineer and a computer programmer before she’d been a covert ops commander, was more active in using them than most.