Back into the Black

Anyone looking at the modern Alliance Military structure, from Infantry on the ground to the Cruisers in orbit supporting them, would think Electronic Warfare was a lost, neglected, art. For the most part, the Alliance relied more on throwing people at problems than technology. After all, people were cheap. For the cost of just the electronics package on my Ritter&Lau, the Alliance could equip a whole squad of line infantry. If you threw in the cost of training? A single well equipped sniper cost more to put in the field than an entire platoon.

Pound for pound, the sniper was more effective. But to the Alliance bean counters, losing one sniper meant the entire investment was lost, whereas losing, say, two fire teams, just meant the platoon was weakened. It was a lot cheaper to replace a few lost infantry than to train and equip a replacement sniper.

The view may not have been especially popular with the men and women on the line, but it was certainly practical. Which led to the lost art of Electronic Warfare. Top shelf equipment was anything but cheap and it took a well trained crew to interpret the results. Intel was important, to be sure, but when you didn't care about loses and your primary enemies were backwater colonists who were lucky to have rifles, let alone encrypted FTL comms, you could afford to skimp on the EW suite.

I wasn't in the mainstream military.

Electronic Warfare ships were a wildly mixed lot, based on a variety of hulls with an even larger variety of specialties. General purpose ELINT boats like Saule Silencieuse, for example, had a different mission and, thus, a different load out than, say, an Early Warning Picket or a dedicated communications monitoring ship. The differences lay as much in crew specialties as differences in antennas and signals processing equipment. Fortunately, a creative crew could gather quite a bit of information from a target regardless of what their arrays were originally designed for.

The Corvette's EW officer contacted me shortly after we cleared Beaumonde's traffic control area. Between intercepting navigation beacons and the ELINT Corvette's own arrays, they'd managed to identify and track the transport through two more stops before losing it to the deep Black between Kalidasa and Qing Long.

"They shut off their pulse beacon after the last port, but we were able to track their power plant signature until they got out of range. Our navigator worked out the probable destinations given their known course. Qing Long's navigational net is incomplete but we'll update you if they come across the net."

I thanked him, then signed off. Qing Long, Blue Sun, was the most sparsely inhabited, most distant, star in the 34 Tauri system. The isolation was a mixed blessing though. You were far from prying eyes, but you were also far from resources and support, and travel times could become tedious.

"You play chess, Seana?" Niki asked after I set course and filled her in on our destination.

"I little. Though I suspect I'm about to be schooled on the finer points." I had to laugh. Even with Wave Equation's performance it would be a long flight, but I could think of worse ways to spend the time than learning chess from a rated master.

Could think of better ways too. But that was neither here nor there.