Enigma Ship - J. Steven York [19]
“Stevens to away team.”
“Gomez here.”
“Commander, the deflector modifications are done, and we’re ready to take a picture of Enigma.”
Duffy saw Gomez’s eyes widen. “I thought you wouldn’t be ready for another two hours, or I would have delayed the mission. Should we head back to the shuttlebay?”
Stevens chuckled. “Somebody named Scott once told me to always pad my repair estimates. Anyway, no need for you to return to ship, the neutrino flux is harmless, and the direct EM burst from the torpedo will be very localized. In fact, this times out pretty well. Just pull back a couple kilometers and enjoy the show.”
“Soloman,” ordered Gomez, “get us out of the line of fire.”
“Yes, Commander. Firing main thruster.”
Duffy felt a slight push down onto the footrests, and the module began to accelerate away from the da Vinci. The ship grew slightly smaller for several minutes, until they rolled over, and the module braked to a stop.
“Gomez to Stevens, we’re standing by at a safe distance.”
“Stand by, we’re almost ready to launch.”
“Explain to me again,” said Pattie, “what this ‘X-ray’ is?’”
“Sure,” said Duffy. “It’s an internal imaging technique we used to use on Earth. Radiation was directed through a solid object onto some kind of sensitive receptor or film that could create a shadow image. It was used to test metals for cracks, even image people for medical purposes.”
“Bombarding living beings with radiation just to examine their insides? My people never developed such a thing.”
Duffy chuckled. “Not likely you would. All your bones are on the outside where you can just look at them. Anyway, Doc Lense mentioned this to me, and that gave me the idea on how to take a peek inside. See, the problem is that Enigma’s broad-spectrum holograms fool all our sensors. They seem to know when they’re being scanned and increase their resolution. The closer we look, the more realistic their holograms. Our sensors are too good. We hope if we take a big, crude, fast, shadow picture of Enigma, it will overwhelm their ability to cloak themselves. Instead of radiation, though, we’ll use a torpedo modified to produce an intense burst of neutrinos, and we’ve modified our deflector dish to be the image pickup.”
Duffy looked up as he spoke and saw the port over the da Vinci‘s forward torpedo launch slide open. “They’re getting ready to fire.”
“Stand by,” Stevens’s voice came through his speakers. “Fire torpedo on my mark.” A pause. “Mark.”
A bright object, the torpedo all but hidden behind its own thruster flare, shot from the tube, running in a straight line only long enough to clear the ship, then curving around the bulk of Enigma. They couldn’t see the hidden ship, but the curve of the torpedo’s course, for the first time, gave them a sense of its size. Duffy found himself whistling.
Intellectually, he had known it was big, but that was much different than having a feel for the thing. It reminded him of the time he’d first walked the wooden deck of the restored Brooklyn Bridge in New York, back on Earth, and imagined building those stone towers using nothing but steam and muscle. Then, as now, Duffy had suddenly felt very small.
He was surprised that he could tell when the torpedo crossed Enigma’s “horizon” and continued around its back side. At that point, something about the torpedo looked different in a way he couldn’t define. Perhaps the speed and brightness of the torpedo were already overwhelming Enigma’s holograms in some subtle way that the eye, an amazingly sophisticated instrument in its own right, could detect.
Then came the explosion.
There was no sound, of course, and his helmet visor automatically compensated for the glare. But the flash was brief, and his visor almost instantly reverted to a normal view. In that moment, he could swear he saw the stars behind Enigma shimmer slightly, as though the hologram had momentarily become unstable. Then it was gone, and Enigma was hidden in its cloak of secrecy. Almost.
“Away team,” said Stevens, “we’ve got good