Angles of Attack (25 page)

The NCO mess is empty when I step through the hatch a little while later. I check my chrono to see that I’ve missed the fifteen-minute window by three minutes. I turn on my heels and race down the passageway to the staircase that leads below.

On the flight deck, the engines of
Indy
’s solitary drop ship are growling in standby. The tail hatch is open, and there are several people in the cargo hold, getting situated in the jump seats. Major Renner is standing at the bottom of the ramp. I trot down to the tail end of the ship, and she turns around when she hears my boots on the hard deck.

“Staff Sergeant Grayson,” she says. “You almost missed your ride.”

“I’m not going, ma’am.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t the skipper order you to go and get that hand fixed?”

“He didn’t order, ma’am. He strongly suggested.”

“So you’re staying with us for the ride back.”

“Yes, ma’am. I suppose I am.”

I hold up the two small standard mail containers I prepared hastily in my berth just a few minutes ago.

“I was hoping to pass these on for someone to deliver to Luna, drop ’em in a mail tube for me.”

Major Renner looks at the two sealed plastic envelopes, mild surprise on her face. Then she inclines her head toward the open cargo bay of the drop ship behind her.

“Hurry up,” she says.

I trudge up the tail ramp and look around in the interior. There are six sailors in the jump seats to my left and right. I don’t know any of them except by occasional sight in the ship’s passageways, but they are all wearing bandages or flexcasts, which means they are the sailors who were wounded when the Lankies shot up
Indy
a few days ago. There are four dark green body bags in the middle aisle—the KIA we suffered in the same attack. All of the fleet sailors are junior enlisted, and despite the fact that I’m in a hurry, I don’t feel comfortable entrusting any of them with what I carry. I wrote a letter to Halley and one to my mother, old-fashioned handwritten mail that will have to do in the absence of MilNet access. I can’t leave the system again without at least some attempt to say a few last things to the two people who mean the most to me.

The drop ship’s crew chief sits in his usual jump seat by the forward bulkhead, in a nook behind the onboard armory next to the narrow passage that leads to the cockpit. Outside, the noise level increases tenfold as the pilot revs the engines up to operational thrust.

The crew chief is an E-7 named Williamson. He wears a barely regulation mustache, and he has a rather large knife strapped to his flight suit’s chest armor upside down. I’ve exchanged a few words with him in the NCO mess on occasion. He looks up at me expectantly as I approach his jump seat.

“Would you drop something into the mail chute for me when you do the turnaround at Luna?” I ask. “I’ll talk the Russian out of some hooch to share if you do.”

Williamson smirks and holds out his hand. “You don’t need to bribe me, but I won’t turn it down, either,” he says.

I hand him the two envelopes, and he stuffs them into the chest pocket of his armor without looking at them.

“I’ll send ’em off for you, Staff Sergeant. Now get off this thing if you’re not coming along. You’re holding up traffic.”

I nod my thanks and get off Sergeant First Class Williamson’s drop ship. I’ve been with a drop-ship jock for long enough to know the true and proper ownership status of the ship—the crew chief owns it, and the pilots get to take it out for a spin every once in a while.

Major Renner is already up by the flight deck hatch. I jog up the stairs of the flight deck’s gallery to catch up with her. Behind me, the drop ship’s tail ramp rises with a hydraulic hum, and then locks in place. The orange warning light on the Wasp’s tail starts flashing.

“Clear the deck for flight operations,” an automated overhead announcement says. “Secure the flight deck hatch.”

I follow Major Renner out into the passageway, and the flight deck hatch closes and locks behind us.

Major Renner walks over to a comms unit on the bulkhead and picks up the handset. “CIC, XO. The bird is departing.” She listens to a reply I can’t hear this far away from the handset. “Six, sir. All the walking wounded. Plus the four KIA. Nobody else showed.” She pauses to listen for the reply. “Aye, sir.”

Major Renner replaces the headset. “And that’s that,” she says to me. “Last ride off this party cruise just left.”

She goes up the passageway toward the junction that leads to the topside ladder. I watch her leave while I listen to the sounds of the drop ship spinning up its engines to full power behind the flight deck hatch.

Some party.

Indy
doesn’t have any exterior windows. With optical sensors all over the outer hull, there’s no need for holes in the ship’s skin that would reduce its stealth and compromise hull integrity. There is no observation lounge, no way for me to look at Earth and Luna as we prepare to leave the system again. I can’t even go back to my berth and put on my armor to patch into the ship’s optical feed because I don’t have administrative access to the neural network. All I can do is to climb down to the lowest deck and go aft, where the auxiliary network cluster was before the Lankies shot a penetrator through it. The damage-control teams have patched the holes in the hull and put a mobile airlock in front of the torn-up section of the passageway.

I walk up to the bulkhead and put my hand against it. Right now, only a few dozen centimeters of laminate armor, neural wiring, insulation, and spall liner separate me from the vacuum of space beyond. Luna is on the other side of that vacuum, five thousand kilometers away.

“I’m sorry,” I say into the quiet, down here where there’s only the faint hum of machinery and the distant thrumming of the propulsion system.
Indy
is the quietest warship I’ve ever been on, so silent you can hear yourself think when no one else is around.

I don’t want to say good-bye. I don’t want to believe that this is the closest I’ll ever be to Halley again—to home—because if I end up giving in to that dread, I fear that I will just pop the seals on this mobile airlock and step out into space for a quick and very final glimpse of Earth. But there are close to a hundred people on this ship, and every last one of them would love to be off this thing and home with whomever they left behind, and I don’t have the first right to feel sorry for myself.

CHAPTER 14

Colonel Campbell looks up from the holotable plot when I walk back into the CIC. “I thought you were taking the shuttle to Luna, Mr. Grayson.”

“Didn’t want to run the risk of getting arrested or shot, sir,” I say.

“Bullshit,” he replies. There’s the tiniest hint of a smile showing in the corners of his mouth.

“I’m a combat controller, and I’m neural-networks qualified, sir. There’s a lot of stuff I can help fix if it breaks on the way back.”

“I appreciate that,” he says. “And I’m not just saying that. We’re running a short crew now. I’m down six more enlisted, and the XO is having to spread around what’s left. We’re so far out of our design mission that it’s getting ludicrous. A little OCS doing detached duty as a deep-space recon unit.”

I look at the plot display, which doesn’t look much different from the way it did a little while ago—small groups of ships from the various coalitions in orbital-patrol patterns. Blue for NAC, red for SRA, green for EU, even a few purple icons representing ships from the South American Union. The SAU ships used to have dark yellow assigned to them in our computers, but it looked too much like the orange they picked for Lanky ships, and spotting that color on a plot generally causes a great deal of anxiety in CICs all over the fleet, so they changed the SAU color code to purple. Other than the SRA and the NAC, none of the world’s fleets are deep space, which means a force that can conduct and sustain interstellar operations. The Euros and the South Americans are content to mine the solar system resources and limit their defense budgets to local defense units. After the destruction of the bulk of the SRA and NAC fleets around Mars, maybe we’ve been demoted to local defense capabilities as well.

“Sir, the
Murphy
is separating from Independence,” the tactical officer says. “Looks like they’re departing. They’re moving off at ten meters per, and accelerating.”

“Really,” Colonel Campbell says. He reaches into the plot display and pans and zooms the scale until the icon for Independence Station is in the center of the screen segment. A pale blue icon labeled “DD-770 MURPHY” is inching away from the station slowly but steadily.

“ETA on the drop ship?”

“Nineteen minutes, sir,” the XO says. “They’ve just finished unloading.”

“Tell them to expedite, skip the window-cleaning. Tactical, keep a really close eye on
Murphy
.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Think they know where we are?” Major Renner asks.

“
Indy
? No. We haven’t gotten anything on our active warning kit. We’re a hundred thousand kilometers away, and their passive gear is shit. But maybe they saw the drop ship pop up when the pilot lit the burners. We’ll see. Let’s be ready to hit the throttle if they come our way.”

“Aye, sir,” the XO confirms.

“The passive kit on this boat is the best I’ve ever seen,” I say. “We don’t even need radar with optics like that.”

“It’s the best in the fleet,” Colonel Campbell says. “We should have built a hundred more of these things instead of those stupid big-ass hundred-thousand-ton carriers.”

“Those are what makes a deep-space navy, aren’t they?”

“They’re too big and too damn expensive, and they’re one-trick ponies. They’re good for leading planetary assaults, and that’s it. This ship weighs five percent of that and has a tenth the firepower, and we managed to get past the Lankies when nobody else did. It sucks at offensive ops, but maybe that’s not where our focus should have been all these years. Look where it got us.”

“Where the hell is he going?” the tactical officer wonders out loud a little while later. The icon for the
Murphy
is moving away from the space station, but her new trajectory points right toward open space.

“He’s trailing air and debris, but he’s not making for Gateway or the fleet yard,” the XO says. “Where the hell is he going with that damaged ship?”

The tactical officer extends the current trajectory of
Murphy
on the central plot. “Nothing there. No fleet yard, no space stations, not even a mining outpost.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s not taking a ship full of holes for a little joyride around the inner solar system for the hell of it.” Colonel Campbell taps his fingers on the edge of the holotable.

“Track him. As soon as the drop ship is secure, we follow him at a safe distance. Just for a little while. I’m curious why they wanted us on such a short leash.”

The drop ship returns to
Indy
fifteen minutes later. While
Indy
is a stealth ship, the drop ship is not, and if they’re going to pinpoint the location of the OCS, the docking sequence is our most vulnerable phase. But no active radars light us up, and there’s no contact on the tactical display suddenly changing course to come gunning for us.