Book 2: Chapter 72: Battle
Bill
February 2217
Delta Pavonis
All warfare is based on deception.
-- Sun Tzu, Art of War
The defensive crews were less than a week away from Delta Pavonis, and their tau was now down to the point where it was worthwhile having a conversation. Rather than asking them to jack up to our time rate, we would be slowing down to theirs. Because of the numbers, I was hosting the meeting in the moot VR.
“First and most significant,” I said, “is that we’ve cracked the cloaking tech. It took a lot longer than I expected, so Jacques has only been able to retrofit about half of his nukes. There’s no time for you to do anything, so all the non-stealthed hardware—including Bobs—is going to be considered decoys.”
I looked around the room at a sea of somber faces. We’d all gone into this with the attitude that it was probably a suicide mission. With remote backups, suicide missions weren’t as final as they used to be, but still… the person restored from a backup was not the person who created the backup. It was some comfort to know that your memories would go on, but it didn’t feel that it would be personal in some way.
I glanced at the status window that I had put up. It showed the Others’ armada only two days farther out. We had very little time to deploy a defense.