"Do the eggheads have any idea what types of ships these might be other than not frigates?" Jackson asked.

"Nothing I would want to use to develop a working strategy around," Trapp said evasively.

"What do you think?"

"I think they've kept working on perfecting their deployable stealth shrouds so they have overlapping coverage instead of just one big shield to hide behind," she said after thinking a moment. "This lets them hide the entire ship, so even though we're looking at the aft, we're not picking it up on radar. They may retract, or partially retract, the shroud when they detect we're not blasting the system with high-power radar so they can maneuver, and then close back up to drift."

"You're not accounting for the heat signatures," Jackson said.

"That's the main problem. A tiny ship like a Broadhead can get away with a low thermal signature, but a large ship has to vent its reactor every so often along with about a half a dozen other systems that generate heat," she said, then seemed to hesitate.

"Go on."

"They could be using quick-start fusion powerplants. The type they use in—"

"Yes they have those as emergency backups, and in some of the heavy-lift shuttles," Jackson said. "But those are small, underpowered units that aren't suited for use in a starship. They're not intended for extended duration use, either."

"But if you had a couple, you could fire up to power the engines while in stealth mode and then shut down for the drift…"

"You could keep your main reactor shut down and coast on battery power or fuel cells." Jackson nodded. "Hell, you could almost even open a part of the shroud and fire a missile through it depending on how good the radar absorbent material is. Eventually, they'll get close enough for burn-through."

"That's just speculation, of course," Trapp said hurriedly.

"That's all any of this is," Jackson said. "You think you could really dig in and give me a general area some of targets might have settled in at? I need it within the next two hours."

"I-I… How big of an area does general mean, sir?" she asked.

"No more than a hundred thousand square kilometers if you think you can narrow it to that," Jackson said. That was a veritable needle in a very big haystack he was asking her to find. "Just a perpendicular plane using the Broadsword as a perspective reference. The exact distance from Captain Risher's group isn't as important."

"I'll be back in two hours, sir," she said and hurried off the bridge. Jackson watched her go before slipping his headset back up and rejoining the conversation between the two Marine officers.

"—make sure they stay in the C&C Hab. That may be their one tactical error in this operation in that they centralized themselves there," Colonel Serra was saying.

"I'm not so sure," Beck said. "We have a fleet of cargo haulers that could be bringing reinforcements for their covert force. They're just running around the system right now, ignoring us for the most part, and could be waiting for a message from the surface to begin operations."