She paused to let that sink in, and Tamman nodded. Harriet's stealthed sensor remotes, operating from a circumspect forty light-minutes, had given them proof of that. The Radona-class yard was no longer on standby; it was rebuilding the weapon platforms Sandy had destroyed.

"Another thing," she continued. "Those platforms' passive defenses are mighty efficient by Empire standards, and that razzle-dazzle trick by the ground source is pretty cute, too. It's not standard military hardware, but it works. Maybe its designer was a civilian, but if so he was a sneaky one—not exactly the sort to give anything away to an enemy. And if a sharp cookie like whoever set this all up built in defensive systems at all, why arrange things so they didn't come on-line until after our third salvo?"

"So what do you think happened?" Tamman countered.

"We don't know; that's what worries us. It's almost like there was something else in the command loop—something that really was slow, clumsy, and stupid. If there is, it probably saved our lives this time, but it may also surprise us, especially if we make any wrong assumptions."

"Fair enough," Sean said. "But given how long it waited to bring its weapons on-line, whatever it is must be pretty myopic, right?"

"There we have to agree with you," Harriet replied wryly. "But it's what you're planning on after we arrive that scares us, not the approach."

"Whoa! Hold on." Tamman straightened in the engineer's couch. "What approach? You been holding out on me and Brashan, Captain, Sir?"

"Not really. It's only that you both've been so buried in Engineering you missed the discussion."

"Well we're not buried now, so why don't you just fill us in?"

"It's not complicated. We came in fat and happy last time, radiating as much energy as a small star; this time we'll be a meteorite."

"I knew I wouldn't like it," Brashan sighed, and Sean grinned.

"You're just sore you didn't think of it first. Look, it let us get within twenty-eight light-minutes before it even began bringing its systems on-line, right?" Tamman and Brashan nodded. "Okay, why'd it do that? Why didn't it start bringing them up as soon as we entered missile range? After all, it couldn't know we wouldn't shoot as soon as we had the range."

"You're saying it didn't pick us up until then," Brashan said.

"Exactly. And that gives us a rough idea how far out its passive sensors were able to detect us. Sandy and Harry ran a computer model assuming it had picked us up at forty light-minutes—a half hour of flight time before it powered up. Even at that, the model says our stealth field should hide the drive to within a light-minute if we hold its power well down. That means we can sneak in close before we shut down everything and turn into a meteor."

"Seems to me you've still got a little problem there." Tamman sounded doubtful. "First of all, if I'd designed the system, it wouldn't let a rock Israel's size hit the planet in the first place. I'd've set it to blow the sucker apart way short of atmosphere. Second, we can't land, or even maneuver into orbit, without the drive, and we'll be way inside a light-minute by that point. It's going to spot us as a ship at that range, stealth field or no."

"Oh, no it won't." Sean smiled his best Cheshire Cat smile. "In answer to your first point, you should have made time to read that paper I wrote for Commander Keltwyn last semester. Our survey teams have looked at the wreckage of over forty planetary defense systems by now, and every single one of them required human authorization to engage anything without an active emissions signature. Remember, over half these things were set up by civilians, not the Fleet, and the central computers were a hell of a lot stupider than Dahak. The designers wanted to be damned sure their systems didn't accidentally kill anything they didn't want killed, and none of the system's we've so far examined would have engaged a meteor, however big, without specific authorization."

"So? The whole point is that we will have an active signature when we bring the drive up."

"Sure, but not where it can see us long enough to matter. We come in under power to two light-minutes, then reduce to about twenty thousand KPS, cut the drive, and coast clear to the planet."

"Jesus Christ!" Tamman yelped. "You're going to hit atmosphere in a battleship at twenty thousand kilometers per second?"

"Why not? I've modeled it, and the hull should stand it now that we've got the holes patched. We come in at a slant, take advantage of atmospheric braking down to about twenty thousand meters, then pop the drive."

"You're out of your teeny-tiny mind!"

"What's the matter, think the drive can't hack it?"

"Sean, even with one node shot out, my drive can take us from zip to point-six cee in eleven seconds. Sure, if we program the maneuver right and leave it all on auto we've got the oomph to land in one piece. But we're gonna be one hell of a high-speed event when we hit air, and the drive'll create an awful visible energy pulse when you kill that kind of velocity that quick. There's no way—no way!—a stealth field will hide either of those!"

"Ah, but by the time the drive kicks in, we'll be inside atmosphere. I doubt whoever set this up programmed it to kill air-breathing targets!"

"Um." Tamman looked suddenly thoughtful, but Brashan regarded his captain dubiously.

"Isn't that a rather risky assumption—particularly if, as Harry and Sandy argue, there's an unpredictable element to the control system?"

"Not really." Harriet sounded a bit as if she were agreeing with Sean despite herself. "This is a quarantine system. It's probably programmed to wax people trying to escape after the bio-weapon hit as well as anyone coming from outside, but Sean's right. Every one we've seen before has required human authorization to engage anything that wasn't obviously a spacecraft. It shouldn't care a thing about meteors, and it's almost certainly not set to shoot before a target leaves atmosphere. Even if it is, you're forgetting reaction time. It'll take at least two minutes just to spin down the stasis fields on its platforms. There won't be enough time for it to see us and activate its weapons between the time the drive cuts in and we cut power, go back into stealth, and land."

"I suppose that's true enough. But what do we do once we're down?"

"That's where Sandy and I part company with our fearless leader. He wants to put down on top of the power source and take it over. Which sounds good, unless it's got on-site defenses. We won't be able to tell ahead of time—we can't use active sensors without warning it we're coming—but if it does have site-defense weapons, they may be permanently live. If they are, they'll get us before we can even go active and sort out the situation."

"We could just waste the whole site from space," Tamman suggested. "Coming in that slow, Harry should have plenty of time to localize it on passive. We could pop off a homing sublight missile from a few light-seconds out. And, as you say, even if it spotted the launch, it wouldn't have time to react before the bad news got there."

"We could, and it's something to bear in mind," Sean agreed, "but I'd rather take the place over intact. We can't use active scanners from stealth, but we can carry out visual observations once we come out of stealth. That's a huge power plant, and there must be some reason the automatics kept it running after everybody died. Let's take a peek and see if it's something we can generate any additional support from before we zap it. I'd rather not kill any golden egg-laying geese if I can help it."

"A point," Tamman conceded. "Definitely a point."

"Which brings us back to Sandy's and my objection," Harriet pointed out. "If we don't want to take the place out from space, then we shouldn't be landing on top of it, either. Not when we don't know whether the site's armed or what that 'something else' in the command loop is."