David Weber - The Service of the Sword

"What's all that?" the second trooper demanded, his voice coming out hollow and slightly distorted from his suit speaker.

"What's what?" Cardones asked quickly.

"Those." The trooper strode past the manager straight toward Cardones. Cardones hurriedly backed up at his approach; and then the trooper planted himself in the middle of the room and swept a gloved finger over the half dozen cases scattered around. "That's a hell of a lot of suitcases," he amplified, his voice darkening with suspicion. "Way too many for two people on a four-day trip."

Cardones worked his mouth and throat. "Uh... well..."

"Open them," the trooper said flatly. "All of them."

Cardones threw a helpless look at Sandler, whose eyes were wide with guilty panic. She really was a good actress, he decided. "It's just that—"

"Open them!"

Cardones jumped. "Yes, Sir," he mumbled. Kneeling down, he popped the catches of the nearest suitcase and lifted the lid.

The manager inhaled sharply. "Are those—?"

"We were going to put them back," Sandler insisted, her voice coming out in a rush, all scared and miserable. "Really we were."

"We just wanted to see..." Cardones let his voice trail off.

"How they looked in your luggage?" the manager suggested coldly.

Shamefaced, Cardones dropped his eyes to the open suitcase. To the open suitcase; and the towels, wine glasses, and plates he'd packed inside, all of them proudly bearing the Sun Skater emblem. "They were just..." he mumbled. "I mean, it's so expensive here..."

Again, his voice trailed off. The trooper made a little snort of contempt and turned as his partner emerged from the bedroom. "Come on," he said. "Nothing here but a couple of small-timers."

They lumbered toward the door. The manager gave Cardones a look that promised this wasn't over, then turned and hurried to catch up with them.

The pressure door slid shut behind them, and Sandler exhaled in carefully controlled relief. "Congratulations, Commander, and brilliantly done," she said. "I didn't think we were going to pull that one off."

"Neither did I," Cardones said honestly. "But I guess when you go around robbing merchies, petty thieves are sort of kindred spirits."

"Or else they just found the whole thing amusing," Sandler said, retrieving an armful of linens from the suitcase and heading back toward the bedroom. "Still, definitely worth a commendation for quick thinking."

Cardones smiled tightly as he lifted out a set of wine glasses. "Which of course no one will ever see?"

"Probably not," she conceded from the bedroom. "Sorry."

"That's okay," Cardones said. "It's the thought that counts."

Half an hour later, the assault boats lifted away from the comet and disappeared back into space. An hour after that, Sandler and Cardones were closeted with the manager, who no longer had any capacity left for new surprises, but simply and numbly accepted the money Sandler gave her to pay for the damage to their suite.

Six hours after that, they were back aboard the Shadow .

"Well, there's good news, and there's bad news," Ensign Pampas grunted as he slid into a chair across from Sandler, Hauptman, Damana, and Cardones and spread a handful of data chips onto the wardroom table in front of him. "First bit of good news: this weapon of theirs really does exist."

"That's part of the good news?" Hauptman asked.

"It means we're not going to look stupid as the Intelligence service that fell for someone's disinformation game," Pampas said dryly. "The bad news is that I can't see any way of stopping this thing."

"Explain," Sandler said.

Pampas ran his fingers tiredly through his hair. He and the other two techs had been sifting through the Sun Skater data for the past twenty hours, and the skin of his face was sagging noticeably. Swofford and Jackson, in fact, had already been ordered to bed, and Pampas himself was only going to be up long enough to give his preliminary report. "Near as I can explain it, it's like a kind of heterodyning effect between the two impeller wedges," he said. "A rapid frequency shift that creates an instability surge in the victim's wedge."

"From a million klicks out?" Damana asked. "That's one hell of a stretch."

"This isn't like a grav lance," Pampas said, shaking his head. "That does actually push the wedge out far enough to knock out a sidewall. What this thing does is more subtle. It runs the attacker's wedge frequency up and down, alternating between a pair of wildly different frequencies, setting up a sort of rolling resonance. Even at a million klicks out, there's enough of an effect to throw an instability into the victim's own wedge, which manifests itself as a transient feedback through the stress bands back into the nodes. The current goes roaring through a handful of critical junction points—" He lifted a hand and dropped it back onto the table. "And as we saw, poof."

A hard-edged silence settled momentarily onto the table. "Poof," Sandler repeated. "Is it focused, or does it affect the entire spherical region around it?"

"With only the one target in this particular attack, it's hard to tell," Pampas said. "But I'd guess it's focused. There may be a spherical effect at a much closer range, but the million-klick shot has got to be aimed."

"Well, that's something, anyway," Damana said. "If we can keep to missile-duel range, we should be able to stay out of its way."

"Unless they set the things up in stealthed probes," Hauptman said darkly. "Or even in a mine field."

"That's the other thing," Pampas said, his lips puckering slightly. "If we're right about how this thing operates, it won't work against a warship."

Damana and Sandler exchanged startled glances. "You mean one of our warships?" Sandler asked.

"I mean any warship," Pampas said.

Damana was staring at Pampas as if waiting for the punchline. "You've lost me. Why not?"

"Because warships generate two different sets of stress bands, remember?" Pampas said patiently.

"Thank you for that lesson in the obvious," Damana said tartly. A bit too tartly, in Cardones's opinion; but then, Damana was tired, too. Certainly everyone here knew perfectly well that every warship generated two separate stress bands. The outer one was what kept an opponent's sensors from getting an accurate read on the inner one, because—in theory, at least—someone with an accurate read on the strength of a wedge could slip an energy weapon or sensor probe straight through. Preventing that from happening was one reason warships' impeller nodes were so powerful for their size. "So why can't it just take them down one at a time?"

"Because there's no specific frequency for a resonance to latch onto," Pampas explained. "The two wedges act like weakly coupled springs, with their frequencies in effect flowing back and forth into each other. Same reason it's impossible to scan through someone else's wedge. We —I mean the guys inside—know how the wedges flow into each other, because we've got the nodes and the equipment running them. But there's no way to figure it out from the outside."

"If you're right, that would explain why we haven't seen this thing used in combat before," Hauptman commented.

"Maybe," Sandler said. "But that doesn't make it any less of a threat to merchantmen and other civilian craft. You sure there's no way to block it, Georgio?"

Pampas held out his hands, palms upward. "Give us a break, Skipper," he protested. "We're not even sure we've got the exact method figured out right yet. All I said was that if we are right, the effect can't be blocked. It's like gravity in general, working through the fabric of the space-time continuum. I don't know any way to build a barrier to space itself."