David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Anyway. Let us check ourselves out on them, then see about a few small-scale operations, somewhere away from the capital. We're going to have to do that sooner or later, Sister Alpha. Let's go ahead and get started."

No one else said anything, but she could almost physically feel their agreement with Drazen. And as she considered the proposal, she found herself sharing that agreement.

"All right, Brother Dagger. I think your suggestion has merit. I'll approve it. And since your team's that far along, and since you already know where the secure location is, I believe your cell should be the first to cycle through the training program. Is there any other business we all need to discuss?"

No one replied, and she nodded to herself in satisfaction.

"Very well then, Brothers and Sisters. I'll continue this in private with Brother Dagger. The rest of you should disconnect now. You know our communications schedule, and I'll expect to speak to each of you at the scheduled time. Go now."

There were no verbal responses; just a series of musical tones and the blinking of extinguished telltale lights as the other cell leaders disconnected, leaving only Drazen.

"This is a good idea, I think," she complimented him. "Do you have secure transportation, or do we need to work something out?"

"I've already got it arranged," he said, and she could almost hear him smiling. "I figured you'd probably approve it. And if you didn't, I could always just cancel the arrangements."

"Initiative's a good thing," she said with a chuckle. "How soon can you move your team to Camp Freedom?"

"This evening, if that's all right with you."

"That quickly? I am impressed." She considered for several seconds, then shrugged to herself. "All right, it's authorized. Go ahead and alert your team."

"That's odd," Sensor Tech 1/c Liam Johnson murmured.

Abigail Hearns looked up from her own console in CIC at the rating's quiet comment. She and Aikawa Kagiyama had just been reexamining-playing with, really-the sensor data on Kornati's orbital space activity Captain Terekhov had asked Naomi Kaplan to run down when Hexapuma first arrived in Split. It wasn't exactly exciting, but it was good practice, and there hadn't been a lot else for Aikawa to do during the current watch.

Johnson was studying his own display, and Abigail frowned. The sensor tech was responsible for monitoring the orbital sensor arrays Hexapuma had deployed around Kornati. Even a planet as poor and technically backward as Kornati had an enormous amount of aerial traffic, and trying to monitor it was a stiff challenge, even with Hexapuma 's sophisticated ability to collect and analyze the data. For the Kornatians themselves, it was more of a matter of brute manpower and making do, given their limited and relatively primitive computer capability. Air traffic control worked fairly well, but it really relied upon the fact that most of the pilots involved wanted to obey the traffic controllers, and the Kornatian ground radar stations weren't all that terribly difficult to evade.

But what was impossible for the Kornatians, was simply difficult for Hexapuma 's CIC. Sensors and computer programs designed to handle hundreds, even thousands, of individual targets moving on every conceivable vector in spherical volumes measured in light-hours, were quite capable of searching for patterns that shouldn't be there-and flaws in patterns that should be there-in something as small and confined as a single planet's airspace.

Abigail rose from her own chair and crossed to Johnson's station.

"What have you got, Liam?"

"I don't know, Ma'am. It may not be anything, actually."

"Tell me about it."

"It might be better if I showed you, Ma'am."

"All right, show me," she said, leaning one forearm lightly on the sensor tech's shoulder as she leaned over his display.

"I was doing a standard analysis run of yesterday's data," Johnson explained, tapping keys rapidly.

"Which data set?"

"Northern hemisphere air traffic, Ma'am. Quadrant Charlie-Golf."

"I didn't know there was any air traffic up there," Abigail said with a smile.

"Well, there isn't much, Ma'am, and that's a fact. Most of it's south of the Charlie line, but there's actually more local traffic than you might expect, given the population level, and about five or six regularly scheduled air transport routes that come up from the smaller continent-Dalmatia-and cross the pole on their way down to Karlovac and Kutina or going the other way on the return leg. They come straight through Charlie-Golf, but it really is what you might call a quiet chunk of airspace as far as through traffic is concerned.

"The local air traffic's so high because ground traffic's pretty nearly nonexistent in the area. The airspace's an awful lot less crowded than someplace like Karlovac, of course, but with no decent local roads, everybody who does move around, does it by air."

"Okay," she said. "I've got the location, now. And this was yesterday's data?"

"Yes, Ma'am. The time chop would be from about seventeen-thirty to midnight, local."

"Okay," she repeated, nodding to herself more than to him as she mentally settled the references into place.

"All right, Ma'am." Johnson tapped a last command sequence and sat back with his arms folded. "Watch this."

The data take from the array watching that portion of Kornati's airspace played itself out on Johnson's display at a considerable time compression rate. The little icons of aircraft went streaking across the plot, trailing glowworms of light behind them. The regularly scheduled transport aircraft were easy to identify. Not only were they bigger, and normally at a higher altitude, but they were also faster, moving on straight-line courses, and their transponder codes were crisp and clear.

The local traffic was much more erratic. No doubt a lot of it was nothing more than local delivery aircraft, dropping off overnight parcels to the isolated homesteads in the area. Others were probably joy-riding teenagers, buzzing around in old jalopies. And at least one larger, slower aircraft was identified by its transponder as a tour bus of high school students on a nature field trip. None of that traffic seemed ever to have heard of the notion of straight lines. They wove and twisted, plaiting their scattered flight paths across Johnson's display, and if there was any pattern to them, Abigail couldn't see it.

Johnson looked up at her, one eyebrow raised, and she shrugged.

"Looks like so much spaghetti to me," she admitted, and he chuckled.

"Trust me, Ma'am-I didn't spot it by eyeball, either. Assuming there's really anything to it, that is. I was running standard analysis packages, and the computer spotted this."

He tapped one of the macros he'd set up, and the same timespread replayed itself. But this time the computers were -obviously filtering out the bulk of the traffic. In fact, there were less than a dozen contacts, and Abigail felt both eyebrows -rising.

"Run that again."

"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and she straightened up, folding her own arms and cocking her head as she watched. There was no time association she could see between the contacts Johnson's data manipulation had pulled out. The first appeared at 17:43 hours local. The others were scattered out at apparently random intervals between then and 24:05 local. But what they did have in common was that regardless of when they crossed into the quadrant, they each terminated at exactly the same spot.

And they stayed there.

"That is odd," she said.

"I thought so, Ma'am," he agreed. "I'd set the system filters to show me any location where more than five flight paths terminated, and this was the only one that turned up, aside from a couple of small towns scattered around the area." He shrugged. "I've been trying to think of some reason for them to do that. So far, I haven't been able to come up with one. I mean, I guess they could all be going on a fishing trip together, and it just happened to take them six and a half hours to get together. But if it was me, I think I'd try to schedule my arrivals a little closer together than that. Besides, this is yesterday's take, and I've already done a search of today's. We still don't have a single departure from that location, so whoever they are, they're still there, right?"