Wasserman leaned far back in his chair. “Well, if the Dornaani can use any gas giant—and maybe any water world—as a gas station where they can tank up on hydrogen, then their experience with interstellar travel is going to be entirely different than ours. In every one of our systems, we have to maintain a multi-billion dollar infrastructure to provide fueling and cargo handling for our shift-carriers. But with a ship like theirs, you could conceivably go anywhere that there’s a gas giant insystem. Interstellar travel made fast, cheap, and easy.”
Trevor squinted at the arrowhead image of the Dornaani ship. “No sign of fuel booms or receptacles for tanker interface?”
“Maybe theirs don’t look like ours, or are hidden, but I’m guessing they work with internal fuel only. The architecture is all wrong for drop tanks.”
Caine turned to look at the ship again. “So that tiny hull also holds all the fuel they need.”
“Looks like it.”
“So how in the hell . . . ?” Caine let his astonishment swallow the many different technological puzzles posed by the ship they were staring at.
“How the hell, indeed.” Lemuel shook his head, kept scanning the data.
Downing frowned. “It’s disconcerting that they can put that kind of performance in this little box.”
“And it’s a damned mystery box,” interrupted Lemuel. “We’re hitting it with ladar scans, but I’m getting garbage back.”
“Garbage?”
“Yeah. Beam reflection is shot to hell. I’m just getting a froth of photons pushed back at me. And I’ve got no return at all on the radar—no, wait: radar is registering their hull, now.”
Caine studied the screens; he couldn’t make much sense of the reams of data. But he had a guess. He leaned toward the lieutenant who was the suite’s ranking officer. “Tell me: as you got radar contact just now, did it look like anything you’ve seen before?”
She thought for a moment. “No—wait, yes: like when you’re trying to get through electronic countermeasures and then the target’s ECM goes offline. The garbage straightens out and you’ve suddenly got clean data. Except here there wasn’t any signal at all—and then, all of a sudden, there was.”
Lemuel turned around. “What are you thinking?”
“That they decided to give us a better look by turning off their electronic stealth measures.”
“But active stealth measures would put out an energy signature—and we’re not getting any electromagnetic emissions at all from their ship.”
“That’s because they must have the system built right into their hull material: probably some kind of electrobonded matrix—”
Lemuel’s down-curving eyebrows reversed upward into an arch of surprise. “Sure, some kind of radar absorbing and reflecting material that only works when they’re pushing current through it. Like stealth materials, only you’ve got an off-switch, since the antiradar molecular structures—or whatever—only have that property when they’re getting juiced.” Lemuel smiled at Caine. “And now, I’m thinking the same thing regarding the problems with our ladar. Probably some kind of hull coating that works like a scattering prism: breaks up coherent light. Might be a good defense against lasers, too.”
“Could be—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Hey—it’s like you said about the Marine sergeant: I’m just doing my job.”
Caine smiled back. Good: Wasserman may occasionally be a jackass, but he doesn’t hold a grudge. And he may be right in another way about the parallel between him and the Marine sergeant: for all we know, the information he’s gathering in this dull little room may ultimately save us all.
The external commo screen was suddenly bright with data. Caine moved toward it, announced, “We’ve got activity on tight-beam commo,” and thought: Here I go, Speaker to Aliens.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
MENTOR
Downing turned toward Caine. “What is it?”
“Don’t know yet. If I’m reading this screen correctly, the signal we’re receiving is high-speed, high-compression encrypted.”
Downing turned to the suite’s operator. “Is it the same data protocol as their first communiqué, four months ago?”
“Looks like it, sir. Decompressing and decoding now.”
“Excellent,” affirmed Visser with a decisive nod. “Mr. Wasserman, you will please continue to share your findings with us so we can collectively assess their strategic significance.”
Downing suppressed a smile. Visser was trying to sound like she had a firm grasp of the military implications of scientific data. However, the past week of joint preparations had proven that she did not. On the plus side, she took counsel well and not only listened to all the facts, but all the conjectures and hypotheses. And that was more important in a leader than a mastery of the theoretical sciences—or of any other esoteric discipline, for that matter.