Fleet Action (wc-3) William Forstchen (fox in socks read aloud .txt) 📖

said, motioning for Jason to turn into the wardroom off the bridge and indicating that Ian, Doomsday, Paladin, Geoff, and Kevin were invited to join as well.

"Just what the hell is a D 3S 5?" Ian asked.

"Deep Space Surveillance System Five," Richards said quietly, closing the door behind them.

"Something then with signal intelligence, is that it?"

Richards smiled and sat down on the small table that filled most of the room, motioning for the rest of group to sit down. It suddenly caught Jason that Richards was awfully familiar with light escort design, having made it straight from the hangar to the bridge wardroom without a single false turn.

"The sig intel department's been working on this new design for years, in fact they were just getting set to deploy it when the armistice hit. This system was a black project. The only ones who knew about it were the chiefs of staff and several hundred design and research techs working on a base buried inside one of Neptune's moons, and that was it. Security was so tight that the techs were only allowed to bring their spouses and children with them and then were listed as killed in a transport accident."

Jason noticed that Richards had neglected to say if anyone inside the civilian government knew of the project. Chances were not even the president fully understood it, nor perhaps did he want to.

"I should add it is strictly a military project," Richards said, as if reading Jason's thoughts. I think it's fair to tell you that we've suspected a mole in the inner circle of government for some time now. The money for this project has therefore been buried, and no one else knows about it.

"So what's so important about all of this?" Ian asked.

"Since this war started, signal and photo intelligence has been crucial. From the little bits of information that we've been able to occasionally get, victory or defeat in some of the major battles of the war has often been decided. Vukar started because of a recon survey and in a lot of those missions good people died as a result.

"We ve even got picket ships specially designed for the work, and they've been hiding on the edge of the frontier for years, quietly parked in asteroid fields. Hell, some of them are camouflaged to look like asteroids. Gods, it must be boring work, but to the sig intel crowd it's like a giant game, figuring out one puzzle after another.

"The problem is that we're trying to listen in on everything from old sub light ship-to-ship radio communication, through newscasts, right up to fleet command high density translight burst signals. It comes down to hundreds of billions of signals floating around, made even more complicated by old radio waves, signals maybe five hundred years old, drifting by. The Kilrathi of course, assume we're listening in, so throw in language and coding and you see how complex it gets.

"D 3S 5 might be a partial answer. It's not only the detecting equipment, it's also the analysis software which can sort through these millions of signals, crack codes, figure out which ones have certain things we're looking for and then give them as hard copy to intelligence. When they started the design work twenty years ago, the antenna nets were twenty miles across, it took five hundred personnel to run it, and it needed a ship bigger than a carrier. The early models were, as result of these limitations, well inside Confed space for security reasons, trying to squeak out information from as much as five hundred or more light years and ten or more jump points from the front. Now we've finally got it down to something we can deploy inside the flight deck of a light escort carrier, with a fifty meter antenna array mounted outside."

"So that's why the other ships got the fighters, leaving us just four, and you wanted them moved to a corner of the hangar?" Jason asked, looking over at Tolwyn.

The Admiral smile.

"Tarawa's got a different job, in fact the real reason behind our moving out here to the Landreich. The Landreich needed the carriers, to be sure, and some of us wanted to keep a light strike force ready and available on the edge of the frontier. But it also served as a smoke screen for the real mission, the mission you and your carrier have been chosen for. We re going to take our new ears inside the Empire, and get the evidence we need to pull the mask off what they're doing. When we have the proof of what they're doing, believe me, things will hit the fan."

"Just one question then, sir," Ian asked.

"Sure, what is it?"

"How the hell did we get this equipment? It must be worth hundreds of millions."

"Just roughly over eighty billion and some odd change." Richards replied. "What's inside those boxes piling up on the flight deck cost more than the entire Concordia."

"So how then?"

"Don't ever ask," Tolwyn replied quietly. "People have died for knowing a hell of a lot less and I suspect there's more than one person who'd be glad to kill all of us if they knew what we were up to."

"And my ship?" Paladin asked.

"Once we off load the equipment to Tarawa, we'll leave the Hell Hole and head off to a quiet corner a couple of jump points up, and then off-load your new toy."

"Off-load what?" Doomsday asked, unable to hide behind his usual mask of disinterest and depression.

"A light smuggler craft with Stealth technology," Paladin said with a grin.

"How the hell did we get that?" Kevin asked excitedly.

"Oh, let's just say a Kilrathi Stealth fighter they thought was killed somehow wound up in our hands," Richards replied. We've yet to really figure out how it works, but we did manage to take it apart and install it in one of our ships and the damn thing actually works!"

"Paladin's going in as our point man on this operation, so we thought we'd