Free Earth Song: Twilight Serenade by Mark Wandrey Page B

We’ve had experience with these ships in improvised operations scenarios, and it didn’t end well.”
    Minu knew exactly what Lilith meant. Pip had been in control of one when he’d been forced into combat. The experience had almost driven him insane.
    The last days had been spent verifying the condition of the ship and that the improvised EPC would provide sufficient power. There were far too many of those improvisations for the liking of both Kal’at and Lilith. The newly salvaged combat intelligence off the wrecked Kaatan could easily operate the Ibeen. It was a waste though. Minu had her first salvage team aboard the Fiisk heavy cruiser making their initial assessments as salvage of the other four Ibeen continued. She was wishing she’d brought more personnel, even though the Kaatan had been stuffed full on the trip there.
    Later Lilith, Minu and Kal’at were discussing the timetable for getting the last four Ibeen active when Lilith suddenly fell silent and stared off into space. Minu recognized that look. “What is it?”
    “Another ship in range of my sensors.” The thin redhead instantly sped up, swimming through the halls to where their shuttle was docked.
    “Combat ship?”
    “Unable to ascertain that at this moment,” she said as the door slid open on their approach. Already the Ibeen was acting more like a fully functional ship. Lilith had the shuttle coming alive and the door already closing as Minu flew through. Kal’at snapped a curse and barely got his tale through without losing a centimeter as the hatch banged closed and the shuttle undocked. She hadn’t bothered sucking out the atmosphere from the connecting tunnel, just blew the seal and pushed away.
    “Ibeen Alpha, we are pushing away,” Lilith informed, rather after the fact.
    As she often did when flying the shuttles, Lilith didn’t bother going into the cockpit. Since she had no need of physical controls, where she did it was simply not a factor. With a hand she created a holographic tank in the center of the shuttle’s passenger cabin and there was space centered on their shuttle. The tiny dart shape moved away from the cluster of balls that was the Ibeen and towards a nearby ball pierced with a needle. The scale compressed to show the entire ghost fleet. Four more Ibeen, scattered fragments, the group of ruined Kaatan, and there the three balls pierced by three needles of the Fiisk.
    Still more compression to show the expanded debris field, and beyond that still more. The entire ghost fleet was only a fuzzy dot, telling Minu that the scale was approaching stellar scale. Sure enough, there was the bulk of the distant brown dwarf, all that survived from a star gone nova more than a million years ago. An arrow flashed green and left a slightly luminescent trail as it moved near the fleet.
    “Any more details?” Minu asked.
    “The tachyon wave front indicates speed below 100 times C.”
    “Not very fast.”
    “No,” Lilith agreed, “but residual wave emanations suggest it slowed just before entering sensor range.”
    “Something give us away?”
    “There was some risk. We’ve been doing high energy work on the exterior of Ibeen Epsilon to fix damage to its gravitic drive.” As they watched the arrow resolved into a blocky shape and an information bubble appeared next to it, the data in ancient script and English for Minu’s benefit.
    “At least a cruiser,” she read, “design profile suggests T’Chillen.”
    “Is that dangerous?” Kal’at asked.
    “Not to me,” Lilith assured them. “The danger is that it can summon reinforcements.”
    “What can it see?”
    “At that range, very little. Even powered our ships here have a small energy profile that will not carry far, and we are nearly black in the infrared. However it has detected the high energy from the hull work we were doing two days ago and is trying to decide what caused it. The ship is still outside the debris cloud from the nova, about three light