Angles of Attack (14 page)

The navigation fix places us right on the inner edge of the asteroid belt, two hundred fifty million kilometers away from the sun and sixty million kilometers from Mars. The plot on the CIC holotable updates with the plotted course back to Earth.

“That takes us awfully close to Mars,” the XO says. Major Renner looks like she hasn’t had any decent sleep in a month.
Indy
is at the limit of her endurance for interstellar deployments, and so is her crew. With the weather the way it is on New Svalbard right now, very few of the crew members actually got to catch some fresh air and a change of scenery while
Indy
played orbital bodyguard to the colony, so most of her crew have been on watch rotation for over three months without a break.

“What about the Titan fleet yards? They’re way past the asteroid belt. Maybe they’re still around.”

“Mars is the way we have to go,” Colonel Campbell says. “After that run through half of Fomalhaut, we don’t have the fuel left to try for the outer solar system. I wouldn’t want to try and take a damaged ship through the belt even if we did.”

He looks around in the CIC, where every pair of eyes is fixed on the holotable in the center of the room.

“We’re here to scout out the path to Earth, and that’s what we will do, folks. If Earth is still in human hands, we can rearm and refuel, get the dents hammered out. And if the Lankies have the place, none of this matters a good goddamn anyway.”

He studies the plot again and points to the computer-generated trajectory.

“We’ll coast for a bit until we have the worst of the damage patched up. Then we go for a low burn toward Mars, and use the gravity well to dogleg over to Earth. Helm, lay in the course. Tactical, let’s keep the active radiation to a bare minimum. It’s not like we can spot the bastards on radar, anyway. Optical recon only, and stay sharp. I want a recon bird out on our trajectory as a curb feeler. Maximum telemetry range, passive listen only. Let’s get to it, folks.”

The CIC crew tend to their new duties in a flurry of activity. I feel a little in the way now in my bulky armor, taking up a good amount of space down here in the pit.

“Sir, what can I do to make myself useful around here?”

Colonel Campbell looks at me and runs his hand through his short hair again.

“Hell, Mr. Grayson, you’ve been fleet long enough. Never miss an opportunity to grab some rack time if it presents itself. Take our guest with you and get out of armor for now.”

He looks at the holographic display in front of him and pokes at our trajectory line with his index finger.

“Mars is occupied space. And I’ll eat my collar eagles if the sixty million klicks of space between here and there aren’t lousy with Lanky seed ships. If they know where the doorway is, they know which way we have to come. Best keep that armor close, Mr. Grayson. You’ll be needing it again soon enough, I think.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” I turn to leave and signal Dmitry to follow me. The armed SI guard at the hatch opens it for us, and we step out into the corridor in the center of Charlie Deck. It’s only when I release my helmet seal and let the cool air of the environmental system replace the stale air in my battle armor that I realize my back is completely sweat-soaked, even though I haven’t moved more than a few feet since we got out of Alcubierre.

CHAPTER 7

It’s strange to be in the inner solar system and not hear any comms chatter at all.

The inner system is usually a busy, noisy place, despite the vast distances even between intersystem planets and moons. We’ve had a hundred years to put infrastructure into place, and you can place video comms from one of the asteroids in the belt to your family on Earth, provided they allocate you the priority bandwidth and you don’t mind holding a conversation with a six-minute delay between replies. But as we coast through the space between the belt and Mars, there’s nothing at all on the comms frequencies.
Indy
is a signal-intelligence ship among her other functions, so she has good ears, but nobody out there is talking.

“Got visual on another Lanky,” the tactical officer says. “Distance four hundred kilometers. Designate bogey Lima-7. Bearing zero-one-eight by positive one-three-eight. Reciprocal heading, moving at two hundred meters per second steady.”

“Stay on course,” Colonel Campbell orders. “He’ll pass with room to spare. We’ve dodged closer.”

In the past few hours, we’ve detected and evaded half a dozen Lanky seed ships loitering along our pathway toward Mars. Even with the excellent optical gear on
Indy
, the Lankies are all but invisible until they’re almost on top of us, astronomically speaking. We are coasting on our trajectory, using the momentum from our earlier burn that set us on our way, and without radar emissions or engine-exhaust signature,
Indy
is a hole in space, a black cat in a dark room.

“There’s no way the rest of the fleet can make this run,” the XO says.

“No, there isn’t. Even if they make it past that welcoming committee at the transition point, they’ll get chewed up before they’re halfway to Mars,” Colonel Campbell says.

The damage-control crews are still at work patching up the ship’s wounds. The penetrator rods fired by the Lanky ships are short ranged, but whatever ends up in their path gets foot-wide holes blown through it at hypersonic speeds.
Indy
’s agility and small size let her avoid most of the salvo from the seed ship, but the two projectiles that hit hurt the ship badly. They blew through
Indy
from our bottom right flank to the top left of the hull, wrecking everything in their path. Still, most of us are alive, the ship is moving, and most of the compartments have air in them.

As we make our way toward the gravity well of Mars, I use one of the CIC data consoles to go through the pictures of the Lanky seed ships we’ve encountered so far, studying them like an encyclopedia of advanced superpredators, and I realize that for all our struggles with them, all the ass-kickings we have doled out and received over the last five years, we know next to nothing about them.

“They’re all different, you know,” someone says from behind my right shoulder. I turn around and see the tactical officer looking over my shoulder. He’s sipping soy coffee from a mug with the ship’s seal on it.

“Different how?” I ask.

“You know whale pods, back on Earth?”

I nod.

“They’re all individuals, right? You can listen to them on sonar and tell them apart by voices. When they’re on the surface, you can see markings and scars and stuff.”

He points at the screen in front of me, which shows two seed ships side by side in profile.

“Those guys? Same thing. We’ve been cataloguing every one we spot. Speed, size, patrol path, optical profile. They don’t have hull numbers like we do, of course. But once you’re close enough for optical gear, you can tell them apart. A mark here, a bump there. Ripple in the skin. That sort of thing.”

He takes another sip of his coffee.

“Ours all look the same ’cause they all came out of the same fleet yard. Built to the same set of blueprints. These guys? They don’t look like they’ve been built at all.”

“They don’t look uniform enough,” I say.

“Right. Cheery thought, huh? Maybe there’s an even bigger mother ship pumping these things out somewhere. Like a whale birthing a calf.”

“Cheery thought,” I agree.

“Getting some traffic from Mars now,” the sergeant manning the signals-intelligence station in CIC says a few hours later. We are well into the second half of our parabolic trajectory that will slingshot us around Mars and toward Earth.

“Anything on fleet channels?” the XO asks.

“Uh, sort of, ma’am. All I’m getting right now is automated traffic on the fleet emergency band.”

“Crash buoys,” Colonel Campbell says darkly.

“Yes, sir.”

As we get closer to Mars and the signals burn through the interplanetary clutter, the plot on the holotable in the center of the CIC updates with the blinking pale blue icons of automatic emergency buoys. The computer assigns ship IDs to the signals as they are identified and sorted out.

“FF-478
Guadalupe Hidalgo
,” the XO reads out loud. “CVA-1033
Alberta
. Damn, that’s one of the Commonwealth-class carriers. CG-759
Vanguard
. DD-772
Jorge P. Acosta
. CG-99
Caledonia
.”

“I know the skipper of
Caledonia
,” Colonel Campbell says. “Jana Mackay. I went to Fleet Command School with her.”

Knew
, I think. Past tense, not present. Colonel Campbell knows as well as I do that the automatic emergency buoys don’t start sending until they are ejected from their host ship. No fleet skipper would have the emergency buoy jettisoned unless the ship is completely disabled and in the process of ejecting its life pods, and the computer will only release it if the ship is in the process of breaking up. If the
Caledonia
’s crash buoy is out there sending its distress signal, then the ship is almost certainly gone, and all her sailors with her. Then again, both the colonel and I survived the activation of the
Versailles
’s crash buoy some five years ago over the colony planet Willoughby, so maybe hope dies hard even in a seasoned, hard-bitten staff officer. Maybe the crew of
Caledonia
did manage to man life pods and make it down to the surface of Mars, and maybe they’re holed up down there waiting for a rescue, just like we were half a decade ago.

“Picking up Alliance beacons, too,” the SigInt sergeant says. “Lots of Alliance beacons.”

We watch silently as the plot fills with pale blue and red icons, all blinking their pulsing distress signals. We don’t know the identities of the SRA ships who released their own distress beacons, but there are—were—a lot of them. Ten, twenty, thirty—I try to count the mass of icons on the display but give up at thirty-five, and every few seconds the computer adds more of them to the holographic sphere hovering above the holotable. The space between our position and Mars is a sea of slowly blinking pale blue and red icons.

“What the hell is left at this point?” Colonel Campbell wonders out loud.

“Still nothing on active fleet comms,” the XO says. “We could go active, see if we can get anyone to talk back. There have got to be some surviving units in range somewhere. Ours or theirs.”

“That’s a negative,” Colonel Campbell replies. “If there’s Lankies out there in the dark, I sure as shit don’t want to broadcast a quarter-million-watt flare for everyone in this corner of space to see. Passive listening gear only, unless we know we have someone to talk to nearby.”

“Understood, sir,” the XO says. “Remain at full EMCON. Ears only for now.”

“Visual contact, Lanky seed ship,” the tactical officer calls out. “Bearing zero-nine-zero by positive zero-zero-three. Distance eighteen hundred kilometers, heading one-two-zero relative, speed two hundred meters per second. Designate new bogey Lima-8.”

“We’ll be passing a little too close for comfort. Correct our course, XO. Nudge us three degrees to port so we pass his stern with some room to spare. Son of a bitch is damn near right across our trajectory.”

“Three degrees to port, aye,” the XO says. “Helm, give me a two-second burn on the starboard-bow thrusters. On my mark. Three, two, one. Burn.”

I watch as the trajectory on the holoscreen simultaneously updates with the position and trajectory of the Lanky bogey catalogued as Lima-8 and that of
Indianapolis
as she fires her bow thrusters, nudging us onto a slightly different course to avoid swapping hull paint with the Lanky patrolling not too far ahead of us. The bow thrusters do their quick, controlled burn, and the line representing our trajectory bends to port very slightly. Physics being what they are, spaceships hurtling along at hundreds or thousands of meters per second can’t just turn or stop on a dime when something pops up in front of them. I’ve never paid enough attention in physics to be able to begin to make sense of conning a ship like
Indy
, but I know that in space, steering and braking require a lot of calculating and planning.