Twenty-two minutes later, Ensign Truesworth calmly reported, “Captain, we have a tunnel drive disturbance at the Narvi point. The signal is a freighter’s beacon, twenty-two light-minutes from us. Her beacon color is green. It’s the Paragon, sir. She’s altering course… heading toward the RALF at point one light.” They’re now twenty light-minutes out from us adjusting for the time lag, Heskan thought. They’ll have received our automated communications transmission from the Narvi buoy informing them we’re halfway across the system and won’t be able to provide escort for their ingress or egress but to broadcast on the standard emergency frequency if they encounter a problem. “Everyone confirm that we are running silent,” Heskan ordered. Confirmations came from around the bridge, including the side stations occupied by Chief Brown and Ensign Elena Antipova, the rarely seen second engineering officer. Antipova’s battle station was normally commanding Auxiliary Control but Heskan had wanted an engineering officer on the bridge until it was certain that Anelace would actually see action. For now, he wanted a direct link to Engineering to ensure Anelace’s electronic profile was as reduced as possible. Heskan’s entire plan depended on the deception that the corvette was conveniently far away, affording the pirates an opportunity to resupply via Paragon that was too good to pass up. They must be critically low on supplies since we’ve been escorting every remotely suspicious freighter through the Beta Field the last five weeks, he mused. Anelace was relying purely on the Narvi buoy for detecting and tracking the freighter. She had shut down all emissions, including active sensors, three hours ago and without the buoy would have been blind. Even her power plant was running on minimum, with most of her power being pulled from her emergency batteries. With such minimal output lost inside the intense radiation generated by the asteroid field, Anelace was, in essence, a hole in space.
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