No, I guess not. But why would you not expect us to react defensively?

A more rational species would spend more time gathering facts, evaluating options and risks, determining what is within the range of possibility, before selecting this strategy.

The worst part was that Ivan couldn’t honestly disagree.

His attention was drawn to another fusion signature, just leaving Olympus Station. The heat signature and spectrum indicated a larger ship than the observed acceleration allowed. He smiled to himself. That would be Captain Jennings’s hotrod.

He wondered if the Getting Ahead would make it on time. Or if they’d figured out what he was trying to tell them. Come to think of it, the SSE ships could be used to emphasize the point. Good for Plan A.

He looked at the two remaining chrome balls, one nacelle from the cruisers floating beside each. Destined for the Earth and the Moon they represented, one way or the other, the end of humanity.

Come on, Captain Jennings. Put some hustle on.

77.Surveil

77.Surveil

The spy drones sent in their views of the construction as they flew through the enemy’s arena.

Moore and Mandelbaum stood to the right of Captain Harding, who was closely following the activity of his bridge crew. As quickly as Surveil could clean up and integrate the transmissions, they were transferred to tablets.

Most of the images showed the remains of the Mad Astra and of the two cruisers. The two Navy ships had been stripped down to the point of being junk. They were obviously being used only for construction material. The Astra, on the other hand, seemed to be still spaceworthy, but with a much reduced size. The skin had been stripped off, the middle chopped out, and the ends stuck together.

A half-completed radio dish floated in the background, dwarfing the cruisers. In zero gravity, it was gossamer thin, its shape maintained by guy-wires and spring steel segments.

Moore stared up at the overhead, rubbing his chin. The engines of a mining ship were no match for a Navy vessel, but strip most of the weight away, and what you were left with was essentially a rocket engine with a steering wheel at the front. Moore was no engineer, but a lifetime working with ships had given him some seat-of-the-pants skills. He closed his eyes, moving his lips silently, then snapped his eyes open. “Commodore?”

Mandelbaum looked up from the tablet she was reading. “Yes?”

“The civilian ship. Or what’s left of it. It could, in principle, completely outpace any of our vessels. I’m guessing that’s his getaway machine.”

Mandelbaum frowned at the image on the monitor. “That’s a bit of a stretch, I think. He’d have to remove so much ship…”