"Shit!" he said, scrambling out of his seat and back up the hatch ladder into the Prowler.

29

"All ships accounted for, Admiral."

"Thank you, Captain," Jackson said. "Com scan?"

"OPS?" Barrett asked.

"Com scan underway, sir," Lieutenant Commander Ayko Hori reported from OPS. "CIC says preliminary results indicate the situation in the system is normal. No emergency calls or unusual hails."

"Is Commander Hawkins still your CIC OIC?" Jackson asked.

"Yes, sir," Barrett said. "Tried to promote him, but he said he likes it down there."

"The man has no sense of career advancement," Jackson muttered.

Despite the sense of urgency, the taskforce had transitioned in well outside the outer boundary of the system and now drifted in slowly, letting the passive sensors absorb the details of what was happening below them. Being able to count on the warp hopping capabilities of his ship to rapidly reposition them within a system made the tactic workable, otherwise they'd be weeks away from the inner system even at full burn.

Since he wasn't even sure what Kohl was supposed to do in the Xinjia System, it was impossible for him to do much more than wait and watch. A Federation taskforce appearing over the ESA's capital world preemptively would be problematic, to say the least. Jackson still wasn't convinced their intercepted Bluebird messages weren't part of some elaborate counter-intelligence operation on the part of the ESA.

Perhaps it was always their intent to leak enough compelling information that would cause him to charge into the system, weapons primed and making demands, thus swaying public opinion in the Alliance firmly behind an all-out war effort.

This was the problem with fighting humans. They added an entirely new dimension to strategic planning that didn't exist with the Phage or the Darshik. The aliens hadn't known enough about humans—nor did they care to—for them to bother with any sort of mind games or tricks with letting com traffic leak.

Those two wars had been brutal but honest. One side wanted the other to no longer exist, and that side fought to keep on existing. Now came a conflict with other humans and now motivations became complex and abstract as did the way they fought each other.

"It would be some trick if Fleet R&D could fit a warp hop drive to a Jacobson drone," Barrett said. "You could practically transport it to any place in the system and have it send back real-time data."

"I'm sure that's coming," Jackson said absently. They'd toyed around with the idea of sending a few of their drones down loaded up for a recon mission but, in the end, Jackson had killed the idea as too great a risk for very little reward. Xinjia was certain to have advanced passive and active detection grids down in the inner system, and the Jacobson was a piece of equipment only used by the Federation. They'd be tipping their hand for no real reason.

The Nemesis sat out by itself as it was the ship in the group that was the least stealthy. The five Super Valkyries were scattered randomly along the same arc, separated by a few hundred thousand kilometers from each other. Jackson had worried all of the ships bunched up together could create a thermal or gravimetric anomaly that crossed a threshold on the enemy's passive sensors, causing them to come investigate. The risk in spreading out was that the ships were too far away to provide any meaningful backup if one of them was jumped, but Jackson thought the risk of that was so low it was statistically nonexistent.