Free Dark Space: Origin by Jasper T. Scott

artificial eye gave him away. It was Hoff’s XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali.
    As Hoff watched, the commander touched the comm piece in his ear and said, “Good work, Corporal Vossa, now pass that message on to Gor Squad Two.”
    Hoff saw that the training environment was a rocky, sand-swept red landscape. There were groups of green and yellow friendly contacts on the grid, each separated by their color. The green was for human commandos and the yellow for Gors. They advanced slowly on a seething mass of red enemy contacts which were clustered at the base of a rugged red mountain. Abruptly, Hoff’s gaze was drawn away from the bird’s eye view by a holo display which flashed up in the air above the table. It showed more than a dozen colored bars, each of them labeled with letters. Some of the bars were grayed out, minimizing their importance, while others remained bright. All of their levels were constantly fluctuating. As Hoff watched, one of the bars spiked up out of nowhere and then began to diminish. It was a yellow bar, labeled with the letter “T.”
    Donali caught Hoff’s eye and nodded to the display. “You see that?” he whispered.
    Hoff nodded. “What does it mean?”
    The commander held up a hand as if to say, wait and see . “Same message, Vossa, but this time to Gor Squad Three.” A moment later the yellow bar spiked again, and this time a shaded red circle appeared on the map, overlaying one of the clumps of yellow icons.
    “That bar you see labeled with a T represents the level of tachyon radiation around Corporal Vossa,” Donali explained, pointing to the slowly dropping levels. “Every time he communicates with his crèche mates, we detect a micro burst of tachyons. It’s the same thing we see after a ship has jumped to superluminal space, but the radiation is obviously much weaker.” Donali smiled, and he leaned close over the holographic glow of the captain’s table, bringing his features into sharp relief. “We can detect when they are communicating with each other, Admiral. We can pinpoint the origin of the radiation to within a five klick radius, and we can even calculate a vector from the fan-like spread of the radiation.”
    Hoff’s eyebrows elevated only slightly, but his heart raced and his brain buzzed with the possibilities for such a technology. “What about when they’re cloaked? Or . . . are they already cloaked?”
    “Unfortunately not. Somehow their cloaking shields hide even T radiation from our scanners.”
    “Are we sure that the Gors actually can communicate with each other while they’re cloaked?”
    Donali nodded. “Carefully timed and coordinated missions have confirmed that, but we remain unable to detect communications between cloaked Gors.”
    Hoff felt his impatience rising. “If tachyon radiation is useless for detecting cloaked Gors, then what did you bring me down here for, Commander?”
    “Well, it’s not entirely useless. If an uncloaked Gor contacts a cloaked one, we can detect that, and based on the vector, we might be able to find the cloaked one, too.”
    Suddenly Hoff understood the significance of the discovery and his eyes lit up. “So when and if one of our Gors calls home, we can tell that he didn’t contact one of his crèche mates on Ritan, because the vector will point off planet, into the middle of empty space.”
    “Exactly. Unless Gors can fly, there’s no way that telepathic communications with a space-bound vector should correspond to inter-Gor communications in this system.”
    “Unless he’s contacting one of the Gors in orbit aboard Dominic’s ships.”
    “But we’ll see the vector cross through them, and we can dismiss it.”
    Hoff nodded. “So we have an early warning system.”
    “Assuming the Gor who calls for help isn’t cloaked when he does so, yes.”
    “But we have no way of controlling that.”
    “We just have to hope that we’re lucky, and that the Gors don’t understand the limitations of our