2954-02-11 – Tales from the Service: A Snare in the Dark
As Raywhite weaved around, its sensors blaring every frequency into the dark, a better picture of what they had discovered remained elusive. Georgi Rye found at least that the cloud, or web, or whatever it was struggled to turn and accelerated slowly, which given its extent was not a real surprise. As long as he changed the ship’s heading every few minutes, its dogged pursuit was no real threat.
“Whatever it is, it isn’t very smart.” Lieutenant Kato muttered, after yet another hairpin turn left the cloud far behind.
“Must be automated, Skipper. Or a lower-order lifeform.” Sokol shrugged. “I’m not seeing any sort of main body. Maybe the net is all it is. A mass of thread organs with simple senses, chasing our thermal signature.”
Georgi, not liking that mental image any better than his own, nevertheless shook his head. “I think it could have caught us when we jumped in if that’s all it was.”
“Whatever it is, we’ve got nothing on visual scopes.” Sokol threw up his hands. "It’s got almost no reflection on any wavelength. It doesn’t occlude. It’s probably not much denser than the gas cloud we thought it was at first.”
“Then if there was a main body somewhere, we could go right by it and not notice. What made me think that was-” Georgi stopped, his eyes flitting over to the gravitic flux reading on his console. “Skipper, how invested in finding out what this is are we?”
Kato was silent for several seconds before replying. “I’m listening, Mr. Rye.”
“As we got closer to whatever it was, the gravitic flux spiked higher, and perhaps a bit more often. We can use that as sort of a warmer-colder indicator.”
“Interesting. Can you plot the grav-flux readings against our position?”
“Position readings this far from any points of reference are inaccurate.” Georgi shook his head. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
A few minutes later, Georgi had something to show. After looking at it from a few angles, he sent it as an overlay to the main tactical plot.
“What am I looking at, Mr. Rye?” Kato asked, after a moment.
Georgi queued up the next few evasive turns, then stood up and approached the tactical plot. “Color is the flux spike amplitude – redder is larger. Radius around the center is duration, each one set at approximate location at peak intensity.” He pointed to the two reddest pips off to one side of the display. “These were just before and after our first evasive run. If I’m right, that’s the closest we’ve gotten to the main mass.”
Sokol shook his head. “That’s not much data. We could blunder right into it if we try to go fishing for more of your flux spikes.”
“How close do you think we got?” Kato asked.
“Well.” Georgi held out his hands. “As Mr. Sokol said, position data out here in the interstellar is pretty inaccurate, but gravitic flux is an inverse square function. You can use these data points to estimate a position.” He tapped a control on his wristcuff to add the second overlay, which painted a hazy gold bubble in the extreme margin of the plot. “With the position error factored in, the main body is somewhere in this area.”
“And the same math can estimate how big it is.” Sokol nodded.
“Correct. But gravitic flux shouldn’t spike at all, it should be a uniform field. So whatever this thing is, it’s not going to be significantly massive. My bet is, it’s folding space somehow, intermittently. In any case, the number that computation provides is insane.”
“Technological, not biological. All the more reason to get a piece.” Kato nodded. “But what was the mass?”
Georgi winced. “Point zero five to point one seven Ter.”
Kato’s eyes widened, and for good reason. An object that big would classify as a small moon, and there was no way they could possibly have missed it from any practical range.
“But if it’s a point source, like a star drive, it’s operating at about thirty Mahans of flux. That’s comparable to the disruption we’d see from a small cruiser's Himura drive, only it’s cycling far faster, and it’s obviously not going anywhere fast.”
“Some sort of rudimentary star drive jammer, probably.” Sokol’s voice was low, as if he was mostly talking to himself. “Once you get close, you can’t just jump away.”
“Possible.” Georgi nodded. “If it can pulse faster it may also impede our normal gravitic drive at close range. Which would-”
“Would let the net catch us, assuming there are no other surprises.” Kato nodded. “Mr. Sokol, get our visual-light scopes on Mr. Rye’s target area. Something with enough power to put out cruiser-drive level gravitic flux is definitely going to occlude the background stars.”
Astute readers have already asked why a single cutter, not even one of the stealthy assault cutters designed for long-range independent operations, was out so far on its own. This is one of the elements of this story which made me doubt it at first, but it turns out Raywhite is in fact a former Survey Auxiliary vessel which has been subsumed into Seventh Fleet as a long range scout. What it was doing that cruise I still don’t quite know, but it is a vessel equipped for solo operations.
One shudders to think what might have happened to a vessel without advanced Survey-grade sensors encountering what this crew did (again, assuming this story is true, as it seems to be).