Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [85]
Or, worse still, be found.
In any space patrol, there was an irreducible risk of being seen by an enemy they could not see. That risk was multiplied many times over by the richness of Koornacht Cluster’s starfields.
Even with the best available instruments, an Imperial-class Star Destroyer was undetectable against the background of a first-magnitude star at a range of only six thousand kilometers. A ship the size of Vanguard could creep within three hundred klicks without being spotted. Any inattention, any errors of assessment, any deficiencies in the systems, and those margins would narrow still further.
Active sensing—a laser pulse, a radar ping—could remove that vulnerability, separating a nearby ship from a distant star. But active sensing created a vulnerability of its own, announcing their presence like a shout in the night.
As they had been for the last nine system entries, the active sensors of the patrol group were silent. Brand was counting on the skill of the seven officers seated at the passive-sensing stations in Folna’s darkened elint compartment—the bug box, in ship slang.
Sharp eyes and clear minds, Brand thought as he restlessly paced Indomitable’s bridge. The debacle at Doornik 319 had been embarrassment enough to his command. No more surprises. No more mistakes.
“Look after your station, Lieutenant,” he barked, stopping behind a Hrasskis officer and leaning in to jab a finger toward the console. “You’ve got a yellow on your check board.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Twelfth planet entering our scan radius in one minute,” called out one of the cruiser’s own elint specialists.
Brand straightened and turned toward the forward viewpanes. “Helmsman, how is our velocity?”
“Beginning to pick up some measurable stellar gravity assist now, Commodore. Base velocity is one-third formation standard.”
“Let her roll,” Brand said—altering, on a sudden impulse, the procedure they had used in the past. “I don’t care what the engineers at Technical say—I don’t believe that the braking thrusters don’t light us up,” he added. “Let’s just be a rock this time.”
“Infalling in formation, sir?”
“Loose formation—we’ll let ’em drift. It won’t amount to much at this point. Signal the patrol.”
“Yes, sir.”
By the time the patrol group was closing on the sixth planet, the gravity of the star ILC-905—with some minor assistance from the system’s outer planets—had boosted the group’s velocity to 41 percent of formation standard.
An angry and puzzled Colonel Foag had long since registered his displeasure, signaling Brand from Folna’s bug box by means of ship-to-ship laser. “You’re shrinking our safety radius,” he complained. “The faster we go, the more pressure there is on my people—with the analysis lag and their reaction time, we lose a thousand, two thousand kilometers at least. Why the impatience?”
“It’s not impatience, Colonel Foag. I’m just adjusting the tradeoffs slightly,” said Brand. “I’m well aware that if elint ran the show, we’d make entry at one-tenth formation standard with engines cold and ninety percent of the ship’s systems shut down.”
Later, recording his mission debriefing, Brand could point to the fact that all the ships destroyed during the mass recon of the cluster were making constant-velocity passes through their target systems:
—This suggests that the Yevethan sensor grids are capable of detecting even very small vessels when they are following a flight profile requiring the use of braking and maneuvering thrusters—
But the truth was that in the moment before he ordered the change, Brand had experienced a sudden, inexplicable spike of fear. Coming from a tribe that respected instinct as much as reason, Brand treated that fear as information. And the only response available to him at that moment was to make the group’s system entry as stealthy as possible, even if it hindered the work of Foag’s crew.
Brand had done