Edward M. Lerner by A New Order of Things Page A

ship? Easy as pie: from its heat. The firing of ship engines could not be masked. Any ship that slingshot around Jupiter and, within IR-view of the hypothesized satellites, changed course to reemerge on a substantially different track than the one pre-filed, was betrayed by its own fusion drive. And the surreptitiously re-vectored ship that also disabled its STC transponder and didn’t appear on radar? If he was correct in his speculations, the supposedly hidden Lucky Strike had practically screamed “Follow me!”
    Which the bastards did, no doubt also stealthed, needing only visual or IR tracking to stick to his unsuspecting rear end.
    “I said, care to join me in whatever is the last meal we skipped?”
    Helmut twitched mightily in his seat, less from Corinne’s raised voice than the paper wad just caromed off his head. Only a loosely fastened seat belt prevented his bouncing from the chair. His hat, not tethered, sailed off. “Damn, I wish you’d quit doing that.” But he said it without feeling, his thoughts mired in the past. From long habit, within seconds of opening his eyes he’d scoped out the 3-V situational display. More gapers and gawkers had departed for fuel while he dozed. Snake scoopships continued to take their turns diving for fuel.
    In his mind, time slowed to a crawl. “Ho … ly … shit .” He waved off Corinne’s inevitable question. “Wait a sec.” The data he needed was all in the ship’s memory. As his subconscious had been grabbing him by the figurative lapels and shaking him about, the courses taken by the Snakes’ auxiliary vessels failed to pass muster as refueling runs. Yes, the scoopships were dipping into the atmosphere, but their paths were grossly inefficient for their stated purpose. By inference and reverse engineering of the observed parts of their trajectories, the scoopships were diving very close to Jupiter, then slingshotting, with plenty of fusion-drive assist, far out from the planet, often well out-orbit from the starship. Oh, to tap into the Jupiter-girdling constellation of snooper satellites of whose unproven existence he was so certain.
    Helmut snagged the old hat as an air current nudged it back within reach. Any net gain in ET’s fuel by these maneuvers was surely incidental. He would have bet everything he had, had he still owned anything, that the purpose for all this activity was tactical. Several smaller vessels were always discreetly in position to militarily support the starship, if needed. None had yet transferred fuel to the mother ship, nor could they have—the docking platform on which the shuttle full of diplomats had landed remained spun-up throughout the human visit.
    The smaller ships weren’t stealthed, of course. The Snakes had to know human radars were in use for space-traffic-control purposes, and that the UP military would notice any alien spacecraft disappearances. He had been following the smaller alien ships on radar himself.
    “Are you going to explain?” Judging from posture and expression, Corinne had reverted to investigative mode. Good instincts.
    He doffed his cap at the 3-V display. “We’ve been had, I think.” He explained, omitting the personal history that had triggered his suspicions. “ET doesn’t trust us. I wonder why?”
    Corinne nibbled thoughtfully on her lower lip. “It worked to their advantage that you spotted their approach. Without our announcement, the navy wouldn’t be playing traffic cop.”
    His skeptical subconscious did not yet feel fully appreciated … something, he decided, about her last comment. He linked again to the shipboard AI, requesting a full-spectrum scan. “It’s interesting,” he finally decided. “The aliens aren’t using radar themselves to track the chaos around them. Lots of radar out there from human ships, but nothing from the Snakes.”
    “How odd. We know they use radar.”
    “Uh-uh. We know they pulsed us in RF, in a freq they could reasonably expect us to monitor. If