Angles of Attack (40 page)

A very short time later, a group of officers in flight suits come running into the hangar from one of the access hatches. All of them have pilot wings on their suits. The officer in the lead is a soft-around-the-edges major who looks like he sits in a chair much more often than in a cockpit these days.

“This facility is not open for regular flight ops,” he says as the group approaches us. “What are you doing here in full combat gear, people?”

“Getting ready for combat, obviously,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re going to need every last drop ship in this hangar and enough pilots to fly them out of here.”

“Those are training ships,” the major says. “They’re out of the regular fleet rotation. I couldn’t sign those out to you even if you had the authority to ask.”

“Training is over. We have a Lanky seed ship inbound. They’ll be here in four hours. There’s a carrier with three thousand troops in need of a lift. If you want to start playing protocol games, I will shoot your ass and ask the next ranking officer in this place.”

The major looks from Sergeant Fallon to me, the only person in the group who is wearing fleet instead of Homeworld Defense armor. “Is this a joke?”

“I wish it were, Major,” I say. “I really do.”

“You are now part of what’s left of the global defense,” Sergeant Fallon says to the group of pilots. “Authority of Colonel Aguilar. He’s in charge of that big carrier floating in space nine hundred kilometers that way. How many pilots can you get on deck in the next fifteen minutes?”

“We have twelve instructors left on duty,” one of the officers behind the major says. He’s wearing the three stars of a captain. “We’ll be lucky if we can find all of them right now. It’s 2100 hours.”

“Get whoever can fly a drop ship,” Sergeant Fallon says. “What about the flight students?”

“None of them are qualified yet,” the major says. “The senior flight have solo hours, but they haven’t graduated. It’s still a month away.”

“They don’t need to fly combat,” I say. “Gear up whoever can get a Wasp out of a docking clamp and ferry it down to Earth. Tell the rest to take shelter. This is the big one, sir.”

“Sweet mother of God,” the major says in a shaky voice. Then he turns to the captain behind him. “Full alert, all hands on deck. Pull the qualified Shrike instructors, too. And all the flight deck crews you can find. Have the senior flight students assemble in the mess hall. Move it.”

The captain and two of the other officers dash off without even a salute. A few heartbeats after they’re gone, the base alarm sounds.

“Sir.” I catch the major by the sleeve of his flight suit as he turns away. “I need to find one of your instructors. First Lieutenant Halley.”

The major gives me a puzzled look. For just a heartbeat or two, I am convinced he’ll tell me that Halley was ordered off to active duty, or that she’s on leave down on Earth, or that he has no fucking idea who I am talking about.

Then the major looks over to one of the other flight suits, this one a first sergeant with a steel-gray buzz cut.

“Where’s Lieutenant Halley right now, First Sergeant?”

“Pretty sure she booked the last simulator slot for her class,” the first sergeant replies. “They’re in the simulator berth on sublevel three.”

I am past them and running for the hangar’s access hatch before he has finished speaking his sentence.

It takes me a little while to find the staircase to the lower levels. I take the steps four, five, and six at a time. I have no idea which room down here is the simulator berth, so I look into every open hatch as I run down the hallway. Overhead, the base alarm starts warbling, and the lights flicker once and then shift from white to amber.

A door opens down the hallway, and people in flight suits start pouring out of a room to my right and twenty meters ahead. They rush toward me, but I’m wearing battle armor and carry a PDW slung across my chest, and the group parts like water against a ship’s bow when I rush through them to go the other way. I reach the room with the open door and step inside.

The simulator berth is at least twice as large as even the generous CIC on
Regulus
. There are simulator cockpits set up in rows along both walls, and there’s an instructor platform with a control station on an elevated platform in the middle of the room. Over by the last simulator in the left row, Halley is helping a student out of the cockpit of his fake drop ship, unbuckling fasteners and undoing straps. She turns and sees me, and the expression on her face is equal parts irritation and concern. I notice that she has put her hand on the shoulder of the student who was just about to climb out of the simulator.

“What the hell is going on?” she shouts from the back of the room over the noise of the alert klaxon.

I realize that she doesn’t recognize me even with my visor raised. I pop the fast-release locks on my helmet and pull it off my head.

“I’m early,” I shout back, feeling relieved and happy enough to burst, and more than just a little smug and heroic. “Told you I’d be back on time.”

Halley exhales with a shaky cry when she sees me, and I can see the tears welling up in her eyes. She covers the distance between us at a quick walk.

Then she slugs me in the face, hard.

The hit is such a surprise that I can’t even think about blocking it. Her fist connects with my cheekbone, and I see stars for a moment.

“You asshole!” she shouts.

Then she grabs me by the straps of my armor, pulls me toward her, and kisses me on the mouth, roughly and with intensity.

“What the fuck,” I say when she lets go.

“I thought you were dead,” she shouts, and moves her arm to punch me again. This time I raise my armored glove to be ready to deflect, and she doesn’t follow through with the punch. Behind her, the flight student still in the simulator looks at us as if we’ve started growing tentacles from our foreheads.

“I sent you a letter!” I protest. “A month ago!”

“That’s why I thought you were dead,” she shouts. “What the fuck, Andrew? You said good-bye to me in that letter. Why the hell would you do that if you were planning on showing up here and being alive? Did you know I grieved for you?”

She raises both fists and holds them up, as if she can’t decide whether to punch me, herself, or the nearby bulkhead. Then she lets out a very angry-sounding sob, reaches for my harness again, and kisses me, even more roughly than the first time, a salty and wet kiss that feels like she wants to drain the life from me.

Behind us, the flight student has decided to continue his climb out of the cockpit after all. Halley disengages from me.

“Can’t you hear that noise, Stillson? That means alert stations. Get the fuck out of here and topside, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” flight cadet Stillson says. He unfolds himself out of the cockpit and rushes past us and out the door.

“We need to go,” I say. “Things are really bad. The Lankies are coming to Earth.”

“After you,” Halley replies.

We rush for the door. My cheekbone is throbbing, but I’m happier right now than I’ve been since I left Gateway in that shitbucket
Midway
over four months ago, even if the whole world is coming apart around us.

“Give me the short version,” Halley shouts from behind as we run up the corridor to the staircase.

“We’ll all be dead by midnight,” I shout back.

The Combat Flight School’s hangar deck is noisy with frenzied activity when Halley and I arrive. At least a dozen Wasps are already lined up on the deck facing the hangar doors, and more are being shuttled into ready spots by half-dressed deckhands and pilots working together. Sergeant Fallon is over by the tail ramp of the
Regulus
’s drop ship, speaking into her helmet headset and pacing. She sees Halley and me as we come trotting across the hangar, and gives me a slight eye roll and a gentle shake of her head. Several of the flight instructors spot Halley and come running toward us.

“Who’s here?” Halley asks one of the pilots when they’ve all gathered around us.

“Everyone but Ricardelli, Carini, and Horner,” the pilot replies. “And the major is putting on a vacsuit, too.”

“God help us all,” Halley says, and several of the pilots chuckle.

“We have a dozen of the senior flight suiting up. I don’t feel good about putting them into the command seats, but we have way more birds than pilots.”

“They’ll be fine,” Halley says. “It’ll be a milk run. Okay, here’s what we’ll do.”

She points to the ships on the flight line in turn.

“The instructors take the four Dragonflies and half those Wasps. Garner, you take Whisky Nine. She’s a bit twitchy when she’s cold, so watch the lateral boosters. We don’t want to give her to a cadet. The other cadets get the Wasps starting with Whisky Thirteen. The boss can pick from whatever’s left. No shortage of ships tonight.”

“Please tell me you have pilots for every last one of those ships.” Sergeant Fallon comes trotting up, rifle bouncing against the chest plate of her armor.

“We can get twenty-four off the ground,” Halley replies. “We have thirty-six Wasps, but six are grounded for maintenance, and I’m flat out of qualified pilots for the rest.”

“I thought this was Flight School?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“I’m not putting cadets with ten solo hours behind the stick for a combat drop,” Halley says. “And you don’t want to be in the back of the bus with one, trust me.”

“First Lieutenant Halley, Master Sergeant Fallon,” I interject. “Master Sergeant Fallon, this is my fiancée.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t break her,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Pleasure, ma’am. Now let’s get these birds in the air. We have three hours and fifty minutes until we are in the middle of a planetary-level shitstorm. Excuse me.”

She walks off again, listening to whatever transmission just got her attention in her helmet’s headset. Halley looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

“My old squad leader,” I say. “Combative is her default setting.”

The HD troopers are gathering at the tail ramp of the
Regulus
drop ship for boarding. I look over to the ride in which I arrived, but Halley sees me and shakes her head.

“You are coming with me, mister. You think I’ll let you skip town again out of my sight, you are mistaken. Come and watch the door while I change into my vacsuit.” She points to one of the Dragonflies the ground crews are rolling into position on the flight line.

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply. “It’s the apocalypse, and you are worried about propriety? Just change on the flight deck.”

“I don’t care if it’s the apocalypse, Andrew. I’m not about to bare my ass in front of my students, even if the world ends in three hours.”

CHAPTER 24

For only the second time in my military career, I am riding in the copilot seat of a drop ship, with Halley behind the controls. There’s nobody else to claim the second seat in the cockpit, and the cargo compartment behind us is empty. We have seventy tons of spacecraft all to ourselves.

“Remember
Versailles
?” I ask. “You were barely out of Flight School then.”

“And you were a green network-console jock,” she says. “Yeah, I remember
Versailles
. The good old days.”