The outskirts of the Roqar system was fairly calm. Most of the the ship traffic transiting this system on the border of the Valkossan Empire was commercial, stodgily plowing through system space with cargo or people. Almost all of it was plainly visible on the scanners of Roqar Station, the system's main defense platform. The few that weren't visible (small pleasure craft and the like) used transponders to show the traffic controllers where they were. High above the system's ecliptic, Bhatan wasn't showing on anyone's scanners. And it didn't carry a transponder.
The Gataan class of light attack ships was a very new addition to the Valkossan fleet. Bhatan herself was only the seventh built of the 31 ships in service with the Navy. In the tightest of nutshells, the Gataans were space history's first stealth ships. By later standards almost hilariously primitive, the Gataans carried no active cloaking systems, due to the fact that they had yet to be invented. All the Gataans were built to passively evade scanners by being as small and scanner transparent as possible. And they were built around one main weapon - a set of paired tubes, designed to fire a torpedo with an antimatter warhead.
In essence, the submarine had arrived in space combat. And warfare would never be the same again.
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Bhatan 's bridge was small, dark, and occupied by five men and women. Captain, First Officer, Sensor Officer, Weapons Officer, and Helm Officer.
"Status, Mr. Fan?" Captain Renarr asked the man by the sensor boards.
"All quiet, Captain,", Fan replied. The squat , thickset man constantly scanned the dozens of displays and indicators, showing the ships around them and any scanners in the vicinity. "Nobody's reading us. On the scanners, we don't exist."
"We will in a minute, though," Renarr replied, looking at one display on his chair. He pushed a button. "Chief Engineer Tassler? How are the batteries holding up?"
Tassler's voice filtered back. "We've got fifteen minutes before we've got to switch to the fusion reactors. The batteries can handle the hypermotors for another ten. Miss that and we have to recharge the batteries insystem, and a blind man can see that with his eyes closed."
"Stand by, Tassler," Renarr ordered. "Fan, any sign of Jambo?"
"The schedule has her coming in any minute now, sir," First Officer Yanna pointed out. "Of course, we won't see them."
"Sometimes these Q Boats are too darn quiet," Renarr smiled, using the nickname for the Gataan 'Quiet' ships.
The Q boats represented a new twist for an old strategy in space warfare. Once upon a time, any admiral wishing to defend a star system from attack had to dispatch a substantial war fleet to each system he suspected was threatened. With the development of small, fast reconnaissance ships, he could use one fleet to cover several systems, and leave the recon ships in the threatened system with orders to run for the main fleet's holding area at any sign of trouble. Invading fleets often solved this problem by simply annihilating all the ships in a system as quickly as possible. Effective hyperspatial communication replaced these unreliable scout ships until effective hyperspatial jamming came along. The Q boats were a new twist on the old scout ship formula - the adage being, 'if you can't see it, you can't hit it'. And so the Gataan boats were the last word in passive stealth. Even the tracking systems were centered on detecting the number, pattern and power of the other ship's scanners and reactor exhausts. Along the way, someone had decided to put some antimatter weapons on the design, but the Gataans weren't designed to slug it out with an enemy. It was their job to escape detection and report an attack to the sector's main fleet.
And it was something that Admiral Hephaestus Garrin had never told Lord Gatreaux about, so with a little bit of luck, Kornax's Colonial contacts didn't know, either. It was his one ace in a poor hand of cards.
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