Phil studied the projection as the squadron settled. All the ships in a ring facing outward, rather than the usual defensive formation. All the command centurions as small faces, projected from their own bridges.
Below them, metaphorically, the north pole of Carinae IV, a green and red gas giant with a massive collection of moons. In many ways, it reminded him of the great planet Jupiter, part of Earth’s system and the largest planet of the many there.
The records didn’t indicate any significant destruction in the Jupiter region, but he supposed that any number of small stations and colonies on various moons might have been attacked when the Sentient Fleets destroyed Earth itself.
Or not. They might have been ignored and allowed to wither, without supplies. That had been the whole point of the war those machines had fought. Without factories making parts, or ships carrying food, many places had been too inhospitable for people to survive.
And the machines had slammed asteroids into planets elsewhere, though even then Earth had gotten the special treatment of being rendered entirely uninhabitable, even today. That took a massive amount of rocks. And infinite patience.
Phil shook off the image and returned to the work at hand. He opened the squadron line and drew a breath.
“This is Kosnett, aboard Urumchi,” he said solemnly, still caught up in the edges of those emotions. “Markus, you have the flag.”
He turned to the man sitting ninety degrees off from himself and Harinder. Markus had even gone to the barber and gotten his hair trimmed short. And put on a nice uniform, rather than one of the ones that might have stains from something.
But Markus had long-since proven that his technical redneckery went far beyond making grenade launchers.
“All hands, this is Dunklin, I have the flag,” the man said. “You’ve got your zones of observation calculated, which is why I have you all spread out in a flat ring for this. Urumchi will ping. Viking and CM-507 will sit on their corners and listen. Everybody else will do the same, cataloging anything that comes up with any sort of reflection, regardless of size. Nobody will move until ordered by me or Heather, because we need to triangulate anything that looks interesting, and will probably deploy administrative shuttles with EVA teams, depending on the size for recovery. Are there any questions?”
He paused there and Phil studied everyone. Noted the seriousness on those faces, even for something so exotic and unusual as this. But then, Markus had started inventing new weapons and defensive systems that might be installed on warships soon.
And supervised the astronomical team that was calculating how to find sailable gaps in the Cluster walls. They existed, but short of finding one at random, they were usually more trouble than they were worth.
Unless you already knew exactly where to look.
“Urumchi. Science Officer Ekmekçi,” Markus called Leyla specifically. “First hard ping.”
Phil listened as the computers played a note. The sort of thing you could identify, even in the middle of a battle, just as each beam emplacement was aurally coded, to the point that you could follow a battle blindfolded if you needed to. Or were too busy with your own station to follow everyone else.
They waited a significant period of time. Markus and a small team had calculated the optimal position for a raider to be sitting on approach, in the days before the attack itself. That was all just mathematics and patience. Two things Markus didn’t like to admit he was good at.
Like many other things.
On the screen, signals started showing up as the pulse reflected. Four had an equatorial ring, as a result of a moon that had been mortally wounded by some collision in the last hundred thousand years, to the point that it had bled off parts and continued to do so in the complicated gravitational dance of so many other moons around it. Fortunately, all of that helped to mark an area to avoid, as the impacts of rocks on shields might cause enough of a flash that some distant scanner might notice.
Thus, they were high. People tended to act as if the galactic plane was up and down, and maintained that rough general orientation.
Orbital space around Four was a mess. But, as Leyla and Heather had noted previously, they could probably hand all this data to an Imperial Astronomer at some point, looking to publish papers. They had a lot of data already.
“Okay, Leyla, I have adjusted the focus of your ping,” Markus said after some twenty seconds had passed. “Put the second one down this corridor, please.”
Again, the note. Markus had shifted the target up, over, and out a shade, which seemed to be useful, because the clutter in that area got denser as the signal penetrated.
“Hey, that’s interesting,” Sunan Bunnag, Science Officer on Viking, said over the general line. “Markus, I’ve got a signal that doesn’t wash out. Extremely high reflective value. Way above the albedo of everything else we should see. Here.”
Phil noticed a targeting point appear in the mess. Markus dialed the magnification much tighter and Phil watched something grow to visibility. Impossible to identify from here, but they were at astronomical distances, and the target read as only a few meters across.
“Viking, hammer it with your targeting scanners now,” Markus ordered. “Send me an updated feed while everyone else watches everything else move around.”
“Coming up.”
Phil saw the calculated wavefront of lightspeed wash over the signal, reflect, and return to Viking. A few moments later, a still image appeared in a side projection, washing as the scanning systems depixelated it.
“Shit, that’s a box,” Harinder said. “Small shipping container that they kicked overboard rather than take the time to break down.”
Phil didn’t see it, but he trusted Harinder’s instincts. He turned to Markus. That man was in charge.
Markus pursed his lips.
“Li Jing, you are closest,” Markus said after a moment. “Send Guardian Ma with a team to recover it. Stunt Dude is not allowed to accompany them.”
“Why not?” Stunt Dude demanded from the bridge of Li Jing.
“Because you’re management now,” Markus laughed. “Ambassadors aren’t supposed to get their hands dirty, piratical raids on enemy platforms notwithstanding.”
“You were there, too, you know,” Stunt Dude snarked.
“And I don’t get to go today, so you don’t either,” Markus grinned. “Ma and his folks can handle it just fine.”
“Dunklin, would you like us to recover it, or transport it to Urumchi directly?” Captain Xue asked now on the same line.
Markus looked his way, so Phil shrugged. It was Markus’s operation. He got to decide.
“Bring it here,” Markus said. “Now, everyone else, we’ll keep pinging while that’s happening, so you might need to adjust your orbits for better parallax around the blind spots that the shuttle is likely to introduce. Let your Science Officers and Pilots handle that part. You hired them for a reason.”
Phil grinned. Markus refused to become a centurion, but he’d have been quite good at it. Look at how he handled flag operations today.
Already they had found something. Hopefully, something good.