Angles of Attack (13 page)

“Alcubierre transition in one minute.”

This is the most dangerous part of the mission. We are going to blast out of the Alcubierre node at a few kilometers per second, with everything shut down except for the optical sensors, transitioning back into the solar system blind to whatever may lie in wait for us on the other side. If the Lankies have a seed ship parked right across the inbound node, we are hurtling toward a closed door at a full run, and we will disintegrate and turn into a smear on the hull of a seed ship in a millisecond. At least it will be over so quickly that my brain will never be able to process the nerve impulses from my body before I cease existing.

“On my mark, stand by to kill propulsion. Bring the optics online as soon as we are through. Anyone turns on a thing that puts out active radiation, you are going out the central airlock.”

“Standing by for propulsion shutdown,” the engineering officer says.

“Alcubierre transition in thirty seconds.”

“Don’t expect any last speech from me,” Colonel Campbell says. “I don’t intend to buy it today, and I don’t give any of you permission to do so, either.”

There’s some light chuckling in the CIC. Humans being what we are, I am quite sure that everyone on this ship is thinking about the possibility that we all may have only a handful of seconds left to live, including Colonel Campbell. But I also know that the skipper would rather pet a Lanky than show fear or doubt in front of his crew. If he’s making his peace, he has made it privately in his own mind.

“Ten seconds.”

I close my eyes and think of Halley. If I am about to end, I want her face to be the last thing on my mind before the lights go out.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Transition.”

I feel the momentary dizziness I usually experience after an Alcubierre ride ends, and the low-level discomfort that has been in every part of my body for the last few hours falls away. We’re through, and we’re not dead. Yet.

“Kill the drive now,” Colonel Campbell barks. “Get me optics on the main display.”

The thrumming noise from the ship’s fusion drive winds down quickly as the engineering officer shuts down the propulsion system. Nothing is shooting us to pieces, and we haven’t run into anything solid.
Maybe they left the doorway unguarded
, I think. We’re about due for some good luck for a change.

Then the optical feed comes up on the holotable display, and there’s a collective intake of breath all over the CIC. Behind me, Dmitry mutters something in Russian that can only be a swear.

Directly underneath
Indianapolis
, the huge glossy bulk of a Lanky seed ship stretches for what seems like miles. The optical sensors under the ship triangulate on the vessel and project a distance readout: 2,491 meters. The distance display changes as we hurtle away from the Alcubierre transition point and into the solar system. The Lanky is on a reciprocal heading, passing below and going the way we came. On the holotable, a polite alarm chirps, and a readout overlay appears on the display: “PROXIMITY ALERT.”

Indy
is coasting faster than the Lanky is going, but even with our combined separation speeds, it takes
Indy
eight or ten seconds to clear the bulk of the Lanky ship. In that time, nobody in the CIC makes a sound, as if we could draw the Lankies’ attention just by making noise. For all I know, we might—no fleet vessel has ever been this close to a seed ship and lived to tell about it.

“Bogey at six o’clock low, moving off at fifty meters per second,” the tactical officer says in a low voice.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Colonel Campbell replies. “Too damn close. Get me a three-sixty now.”

The holotable display changes as feeds from various sensor arrays organize themselves in a semicircular pattern, stitching together a panoramic tapestry of the surrounding space. The Lanky seed ship takes up a disturbingly large section of space below and behind us, even as we are coasting away from the behemoth at hundreds of meters per second.

“There’s more of them. Visual on Bogey Two and Bogey Three.” The tactical officer reads out a bunch of Euclidean coordinates. The tactical display at the center of the holotable’s array of overlapping imagery updates with three orange icons. One of them, slow moving, is almost on top of the blue icon representing
Indianapolis
, only slowly inching away from us. The other two are farther away, but moving faster. One is above and to our starboard, the other below and to our port side. Colonel Campbell shifts some of the holograms around with his hands and expands them until he has a good view of Bogey Two and Three side by side.

“Bogey Three is on a perpendicular, passing to port aft,” the tactical officer says. “Bogey Two is closing laterally from our starboard. Bearing five-zero degrees, closing at two hundred meters per second.” He looks up from his display and flicks a hologram over to the main tactical readout on the holotable.

“Sir, Bogey Three is on a collision course. If our speed and heading don’t change, our paths will intersect in twenty-three seconds.”

“Bring propulsion back online,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Hold the burn until the last second. We’re too damn close as it is. I don’t want to light off a signal flare earlier than we have to. Prepare for course change, make your heading zero-five-five by positive zero-four-five. At the last second, helm.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” the helmsman says.

“Is patrol pattern,” Dmitry says behind me. “Like sharks.”

“Exactly like sharks,” Colonel Campbell says. “They’re circling the node, waiting for food. And we’re the minnow.”

I watch as the orange icons for the Lanky seed ships and the lonely blue icon representing the
Indy
shift around on the plot gradually. One of the orange icons inches closer to our blue one by the second. The computer, ever helpful, has drawn trajectory lines for both ships, and the orange and blue trajectories intersect at a point in space 2,500 kilometers and twelve seconds away.

“Propulsion online,” the engineering officer announces. “Standing by for burn.”

“Burn in three, two, one,” the helmsman says. I swallow hard at the sight of the Lanky ship approaching from starboard, intruding into our section of space like a careless hydrobus driver. “Burn.”

The fusion engines come back to life with a thrum, and even with the antigravity deck plating keeping us on our feet, the sense of sudden acceleration is dramatic. The tactical display on the holotable spins as the
Indy
reorients herself to correct her trajectory with the thrust generated by her powerful main propulsion system.

“Come to new bearing, all ahead flank. Get us the hell out of here,” Colonel Campbell shouts.

The Lanky ship on the optical sensor feed grows larger and larger on the display. Even with the cameras at minimum optical zoom, the seed ship blocks most of the view to our starboard as the distance between us decreases rapidly. I really do feel like a minnow, but the Lanky ship isn’t a shark—it’s a whale, and it’s about to swallow us without intent, purely by accident of proximity. At this distance, I can make out details on the Lanky ship I’ve never seen before—elongated bumps, irregular patterns of texture that almost look like bark or wrinkles on wet skin. I know it’s a ship—I’ve seen plenty of recon footage of them deploying seedpods by the hundreds onto colony worlds—but it’s not the first time that I find myself thinking it looks like a living, sentient thing.

Indy
counter-burns her engines at full thrust to correct her path, then swings around to the new heading, which has us racing alongside the Lanky ship going roughly the same direction. The Lanky is going at a steady two hundred meters per second, but
Indy
is accelerating at maximum gravities, streaking through space like a guided missile. We are so close to the seed ship that it feels like I could open an airlock and touch their hull. Two more seconds of uncorrected trajectory, and we would have shattered against that hull at thousands of meters per second.

“Come to new heading zero-five-zero by negative four-five,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Give this asshole some space.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” the helmsman acknowledges.

Behind me, Dmitry curses in Russian again. We pull away from the Lanky ship—not nearly quickly enough for my taste—and the
Indy
turns slightly, pointing her bow at the space below and to the left of the Lanky. Despite our difference in speed, we are still not completely clear of the seed ship.

“Too close,” the tactical officer warns. “They spotted us, I think. I see activity on their port hull.”

The camera feed shows the flank of the Lanky from an upside-down angle. I can clearly see movement—not the mechanical opening of missile tubes like on a human warship, but rather dilations, small holes opening in the side of the Lanky ship in a cascading wave of what looks like contractions on the flank of an animal.

“Go active on all sensors,” Colonel Campbell shouts. “Weapons, set the CIWS to Condition Red. All hands, brace for incoming.”

I turn around and grasp the railing of the CIC pit. More displays come to life as the various stations around the pit have their functions restored, the ship regaining her eyes and ears, and what few teeth she has. The CIWS, the ship’s close-in weapons system, is designed to swat enemy missiles out of space before they can reach
Indy
and blow her up. I don’t know if they work against Lanky penetrators, which don’t show up on radar and move at insane speeds, but anything is better than no defensive measures at all.

“Bogey One and Two are changing course,” the tactical officer warns. “They’re starting to come about.”

“Cat’s out of the bag now,” Colonel Campbell says. “Get us the hell out of this neighborhood.”

“Incoming,” the tactical officer shouts. “Visual launch confirmation. Vampire, vampire. All hands, brace for—”

There’s a series of thundering bangs, and
Indy
shudders perceptibly. All over the CIC, warning lights and alarms start going off.

“Multiple impacts! Explosive decompression in multiple compartments.”

“Roll the ship,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Come to new heading one-zero-zero by negative four-five, zig and zag evasive pattern. Weapons, go active on the rail gun and return fire. I’ll be damned if I let them shoot holes in my ship without shooting back.”

“Aye, sir.” The weapons officer activates the ship’s rail gun mount. I can’t see the control screen, but I can hear the metallic clang of the projectiles transmitting vibration through the hull as they leave the electrified rails of the cannon barrel at Mach 20. Then I see the impacts blooming on the hull of the nearby seed ship. The super-dense penetrators from the rail gun would shear through a fleet frigate from bow to stern at such close range, but as far as I can tell, they’re not even scratching the hull as they shatter into stardust on whatever unearthly material the Lankies use for armor plating.

“We took some major hits,” the engineering officer says. “Half the damage board is red.”

“Collect reports and have damage control stand by. We’ll sort this shit out when we’re in the clear.”

“Incoming,” the tactical officer warns, not quite as urgently as before. “They’re spraying blind at this point. We’re out of their weapons envelope.”

“Keep our course and don’t let up on the throttle,” Colonel Campbell orders. “And go full EMCON again. Visual kit only.”

“Aye, sir.”

Whatever the Lankies hit, the propulsion system and main reactor are not among the destroyed systems.
Indy
is running from the area around the Alcubierre node as fast as her fusion drive allows, and that’s all that matters right now. The Lanky seed ships keep circling around in irregular search patterns, but it’s pretty clear from the optical tracking that we’ve turned invisible to them again. Ten minutes pass, then fifteen. After twenty minutes of sustained maximum acceleration, the seed ships are small enough in the optical feed to not invoke a feeling of imminent demise in me anymore. All around me, there’s hectic activity in the CIC as department heads collect reports from their subordinates and issue orders.

“Throttle back, let us coast for a while,” Colonel Campbell says. “Damage reports.”

The XO consults her display. “Looks like we took two hits. Both penetrators nailed our lower aft starboard side and went right through to the top fore port side. We have decompressed compartments on Alpha, Bravo, and Echo decks, and seven compartments forward of frame twenty-five are open to space.”

She scrolls through the data on his display with the flick of a finger.

“Missile tubes one and three are gone. The secondary data bus got shredded. We lost the forward water recyclers and the entire port-side freshwater tank. Officers’ mess is gone. And the auxiliary neural-networks cluster is offline. We have four KIA. Would be more if everyone hadn’t been in vacsuits.”

“That was sort of the point,” Colonel Campbell says. “After
Versailles
, I’ve become a firm believer in vacsuit ops. Have those damage-control teams patch what they can with what we have.”

“We’ll need a month in a fleet yard just to plug the holes,” the engineering officer says.

“Well, ain’t none of those nearby. Where the hell are we, anyway? Astrogation, give me a fix. And then I’m going to need a fucking drink after all this excitement.”

“More bad news, Skipper,” the XO says.

“Well, don’t make me wait.”

“The number-two parasite fighter bay took a direct hit. The fighter’s scrap, and the refueling nodes in number two are shot to shit.”

“There goes half our offensive fighter power.”

Colonel Campbell sighs loudly and runs a hand through the short stubble of his regulation-length buzz cut.

“Well, I suppose it could have been worse. Welcome back to the solar system, I guess.”