Counter strike

“Note, André, the ship is ready,” commented Yoon Gao on the scout’s observation, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it leaves the dock today or tomorrow. Look, they’re loading pursuit planes into it… stop! They’re not pursuit planes, Lieutenant Colonel. It’s something bigger, but not torpedo bombers.”

Yoon Gao enlarged the image and finally recognized the outlines of the ships that were slowly loaded into the belly of the enemy aircraft carrier. They were ships, not pursuit planes.

“I remember them. These are probe carriers for anti-torpedo networks, part of a system for protecting heavy ships from torpedo attacks. They’re being loaded into an aircraft carrier, so the quargs are not going to use them for defense. Our «Invisibles» will get a nasty surprise, André.”

“Yoon, notice where this dock is,” thoughtfully said Mbia, “It’s not near the gas giant, as is usually the case with us and the quargs. They dragged it to the third planet, a central part of the system. Apparently, they didn’t want us to see it. It was the same in other places, and we were all wondering why they were building aircraft carriers in such a secret. Yeah, well, these ships are a lot bigger than we’ve been used to, but an aircraft carrier is not a battleship, the size of the aircraft carrier doesn’t really matter. Looks like it wasn’t about the size, it was about the stuffing.”

“Well, they’re building battleships, too, but the quargs are intentionally placing the shipyards with battleships on the outskirts of star systems. This is all very bad. I wish we could have built a chain of hyper-beacons, as we did last time, they would have known about this threat on Earth by now. We have to get back quickly.”

“We’re not done here yet, Yoon,” Mbia has shaken his head, “The second part of the task has not yet been accomplished. Let’s see what the other probes have brought.”

Kappa Ceti’s first planet was of no value to the scouts. A stone ball, like Mercury, spinned at a short distance from the star, turning towards it with one side, on which the eternal fire day reigned. The quargs did not even try to go there, limiting themselves to sluggish activities on the night side of the planet, where they apparently found something useful for themselves, but not enough to be overzealous.

The probe then skirted the star and reached the second stone ball circling the local yellow dwarf at a much slower pace, and it was much more interesting for the quargs, and therefore for Mbia with Yoon Gao. There was no artificial sun in the orbit of the planet. Apparently, Kappa Ceti’s natural radiation was enough to create acceptable conditions on the surface. However, the quargs have obviously worked on the atmosphere of this planet, because normally such small planets do not have such a representative air coat. The probe’s scanners confirmed this suspicion by reporting signs of a gravitational correction on the planet. The abundant cloudiness of the world made it impossible to get a visual image from the surface, but the probe’s equipment, using different scanning ranges, clearly indicated that there was a fairly well-developed infrastructure at the planet. Only the word «developed» was not very suitable here, rather it was underdeveloped. First of all, this was due to the low concentration of energy there. Modern cities consume lots of energy that is used to ensure the comfort of their inhabitants. This energy is generated somewhere, transmitted to consumers, and partially dissipated in the form of thermal radiation during utilization. No matter how much energy efficiency increases, no matter how the transmission lines are isolated, good scanners will immediately determine whether they are facing a modern mega-city, a pre-space era city, or a medieval settlement. However, here we were faced with something completely incomprehensible. There were signs of modern technology, but it was kind of fragmented and lost in the mass of something that seemed to be very much outdated and clearly insufficient to sustain normal life in such large settlements.

The probe’s flight program was not directed to climb into the atmosphere and descend below the cloud layer, nor was it designed to fulfill such tasks. Mbia again scrutinized the scanner readings and turned to the ship’s commander.