Lines of Departure

by Marko Kloos

  “Why aren’t you in your bunk as well? You took part in that mutiny business, too, as far as I recall.”

  “I’ll go when Sergeant Fallon is up,” I say. “Somebody’s gotta be down here keeping an eye on things, in case the Indianapolis up in orbit has news to share. They’re sort of our eyes and ears right now.” I point at the admin deck. “That thing is linked with my armor’s computer so I can stay tapped into the telemetry.”

  “Is that your job? Communications? I thought you were, you know, a rifleman or something.” She nods at the M-66 carbine leaning against the desk.

  “That’s for personal protection. That”—I point at the screen of the admin deck again—“is for calling in the real guns. I’m the guy on the ground who calls in airstrikes, coordinates attack runs, that sort of thing. I can do a lot more damage with the data deck there than with that rifle.”

  “I see.” Dr. Stewart takes a sip from her mug and makes a face. “Lukewarm now,” she says. “And too strong. It’s been sitting out too long.”

  “So why aren’t you sleeping at this hour?”

  She puts down the mug and picks up her data pad.

  “Your little science homework,” she says. “I’ve been trying to think up a way to turn this dinky little water stop into a threat to Lanky ships, but so far I’m not coming up with anything. I guess I’m not used to thinking like a soldier.”

  “We could fight them on the ground if all those troops dirtside were in bug suits and had bug weapons,” I say. “We have a lot of boots on the moon right now. The trouble is that they all have guns for shooting people, not Lankies.”

  “So we can’t really take them on once they land,” Dr. Stewart says. “What about before they get into orbit? I mean, you’ve said that nobody’s ever destroyed one of their seed ships, but have they ever made one turn back, run away?”

  I shake my head. “They’re hard to kill on the ground, but impossible to kill in their ships. Those things are immune to anything we can throw at them.”

  “They’re using organic weapons, right?”

  “Yeah, some sort of penetrator. Get close enough to a Lanky ship, they launch a few thousand of ’em. Goes right through the laminate armor on our ships.”

  “Have we tried doing the same?”

  “Our main ship-to-ship stuff is missiles. Nuke-tipped for the Lankies. I don’t think they’ve ever made any difference in combat.”

  Dr. Stewart taps around on the screen of her data pad and furrows a brow.

  “If the fleet would be a little more forthcoming with data on the Lankies instead of treating every little thing as a state secret, maybe we would have found a solution already. But I guess they don’t want to upset the civilians.”

  She looks up at me with a frown.

  “Anyone ever hit one of their ships with something really big?”

  “Some cruiser skipper rammed one with his ship once. Didn’t work. Our biggest ships are a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand tons. Those seed ships are a few kilometers long. They probably weigh a few million tons. You drive a twenty-K cruiser against a seed ship, it won’t even slow ’em down.”

  “That would depend on how fast you drive it,” Dr. Stewart says. “Their hulls may be so tough you can’t crack them with shipboard weapons, but those creatures are living, organic beings. They can’t be immune to physics. I guarantee that if we hit one of those seed ships hard enough, it’ll kill every living thing inside.”

  “We haven’t made a dent with a few hundred megatons of nukes. You’d have to go pretty fast to hit them a lot harder than that.”

  Dr. Stewart smiles and slurps more of her cold coffee.

  “See, I may have a hard time thinking like a soldier, but you think too much like one. Forget gigatons. Start thinking like a scientist. Think exajoules. Petajoules. We don’t want a battle, we want to cause an astronomical event you’ll be able to see on Earth with a telescope in twenty-five years.”

  I can’t help but smile at the idea of turning a Lanky seed ship into a new star in the Fomalhaut system.

  “I’m all on board with that,” I say. “But how do we get there from here? All we have is that ancient unarmed freighter and a patrol ship. Like I said, not exactly a fearsome task force.”

  “Think physics, not guns. A fist-sized rock isn’t so fearsome, right? But throw it at something at one-tenth the speed of light, and the impact energy would be enough to make life really interesting on this moon for a short time.”

  She picks up her data pad again and starts scribbling on the screen with her finger.

  “Say, how much does that freighter weigh?”

  “Five, six thousand tons maybe,” I say. “Fully loaded, three or four times that. But you can’t just ram the thing into a Lanky ship.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you won’t find a crew to man it. Not for a one-way trip.”

  Dr. Stewart shrugs. “Who says it needs to be manned? All we have to do is to point it the right way and open the throttle. And if your visitor—our visitor—is coming in on an unchanging trajectory, we won’t even need to nudge the stick after launch. Those Lanky ships are huge, right? It’s not hard to hit a five-hundred-meter bull’s-eye even at high speed. Not for a computer.”

  “But someone needs to—”

  I look at the admin deck next to me. It’s showing tactical plots right now, but I went to Neural Networks School half a lifetime ago, and I know that only security firewalls keep me from controlling all the essential systems on the Indianapolis remotely. The old freighter with her has far less complicated systems. And it’s a military freighter from the auxiliary fleet, so it has military network hardware, not civilian gear.

  “Never mind,” I say. “It’s a super-long shot, but it may actually work.”

  “I do science all day,” Dr. Stewart says. “Astrophysics. ‘It’s a super-long shot’ is practically the motto of our profession.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Looks like somebody’s finally awake over there,” Colonel Campbell says over the tight-beam connection.

  Sergeant Fallon and I are standing in front of the ops center’s modest situational display. The Networks admin has routed the feed from my tactical computer onto the holographic display. The fleet units in orbit are still rendered in friendly blue instead of enemy red, despite our current less-than-cordial relationship. The icons representing the carrier and its two escorts are rapidly climbing out of the predictable orbital racetrack they’ve been on for the last day and a half. Their new bearing points them roughly toward the incoming Russian cruiser, still almost three AUs from New Svalbard.

  “Either their sensors are shit or their tactical guys have their heads up their asses,” I say. “They should have seen that boat twelve hours ago.”

  “Probably a combination of both,” Colonel Campbell says. “Half of that crew is fleet reserve.”

  “At least you won’t have to play hide-and-seek up there anymore,” I say. “And we only have to worry about that SI regiment they’ve crammed into Camp Frostbite.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about them too much right now. I count most of the drop ships back on the Midway. They’ve got a pair of Wasps on the ground right now, that’s all.”

  “It’s not exactly great flying weather out there anyway,” Sergeant Fallon says while eyeing the weather status display on the wall.

  We watch the display as the carrier group leaves orbit altogether and burns to accelerate away from the moon. They pull away at one-g—not a sprint, but certainly not wasting time, either. Fifteen minutes pass, then thirty. An hour after my comms alert roused me from the smelly little cot in the storage locker, it looks like the task force is well on the way to an intercept and not just playing a ruse to get back into New Longyearbyen.

  “What’s the plan?” I ask Sergeant Fallon.

  She lets herself drop into one of the nearby chairs and exhales warily.

  “I think we can stand down from full battle rattle a bit,” she
says. “Keep a watch toward the camp, make sure those SI grunts don’t get any super-dumb ideas. But let’s cycle the Dragonflies through a standby schedule for now. One bird on alert, one on Ready Five, one off for rest. Let those pilots get some rack time.”

  She looks up at me and nods over to the ops center’s main hatch.

  “Same goes for you. You’ve had three hours of sleep after standing the watch in here all night. Hit the rack and don’t come back until 1800 at least. Anything major goes down before then, I’ll ring you out of bed, don’t worry.”

  I know better than to argue with my old squad leader. Instead, I take my carbine, check for safe, and head toward the ops center hatch on heavy feet.

  When I wake up in my bunk a good nine hours later, it’s because my body wants to, not because some alarm goes off or my comms kit intrudes with an urgent message.

  I climb out of the folding cot and sniff my fatigues. I’ve been wearing the same set through the combat landing and the subsequent skirmish with the fleet, and not even the antibacterial fibers of the CDUs can mask the slightly rank smell of the body underneath. It gets hot under battle armor, and I’ve spent most of the time since leaving Frostbite in mine.

  According to my computer, it’s 2000 hours. I’ve slept soundly and without interruption for nine hours, and my brain is rested, but my body feels like it usually does after a hard battle, as if I had stacked heavy crates all day and run a five-thousand-meter race in full combat kit before bedtime. The hours I spent sitting in a chair in the ops center didn’t help things, either.

  I straighten out my wrinkly fatigues, put on my boots, and open the door of the storage room. I leave the combat armor in the corner by my cot, but I take the rifle and sling it over my shoulder before stepping out of the room.

  I’ve been in my chair in the ops center for barely five minutes when my comms alarm chirps a sequence announcing an incoming priority tight-beam connection from the Indianapolis.

  “Ops center, this is Indy Actual.”

  “Indy Actual, ops center. Go ahead,” I reply. The feeling of dread in my stomach clashes with the coffee I’ve guzzled since walking into the ops center. Indy Actual is Colonel Campbell, and he doesn’t make tight-beam priority calls without good cause.

  “Approaching visitor has a tailing unit,” Colonel Campbell says. “It’s a Lanky. Ring the alarm downstairs. Get ready for incoming.”

  I summon Sergeant Fallon, the HD brass, and the civilian admin crew. Not ten minutes later, everyone is in the ops center to listen to the news coming down from the Indy.

  “Are we one hundred percent positive it’s a Lanky?” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp asks. He’s the head of Sergeant Fallon’s HD battalion, the 309th AIB, which is spread out over New Longyearbyen and about a dozen of the terraforming stations.

  “Yes,” Colonel Campbell says. “They’re a very slightly reflective three-kilometer blob in space. Can’t see them on infrared, no radiation signature. If it wasn’t for the illumination from the Russian cruiser’s exhaust flare, we may have even missed them with the high-mag optics. Sons of bitches are really hard to spot at range if you don’t know exactly where to look.”

  I’ve directed the data feed from Indy’s CIC display to the holotable in the ops center again and simplified the diagram for the ground-pounder officers a little. The Russian cruiser is a red blip on a parabolic trajectory toward New Svalbard, still a little over two AUs away and creeping along at a quarter-g acceleration. The orange icon representing the Lanky seed ship is less than two billion kilometers behind the Russian. The Lanky is decelerating at two-g and closing on the Russian cruiser rapidly. You don’t need to be a space-warfare expert to see that the seed ship will overtake the SRA cruiser long before the Russians even get close to New Svalbard. They are no longer our enemies but a bunch of frightened fellow soldiers in a broken ship trying to run to the only other humans in the system for help, and they’ll never make it. Our own units are still on an intercept course, 250 million kilometers away from the Russian on a reciprocal heading, and even if they could kill the Lanky seed ship, they won’t get there in time.

  “So much for turning off the Alcubierre nodes,” Colonel Kemp says. “Backed ourselves up against a wall for nothing.”

  “Could be that they were in the system already when we shut the network down,” Colonel Campbell replies. “Could be that they came through the SRA node, and the Sino-Russians didn’t mine theirs. Could be the nukes made no difference even at transition. Doesn’t matter now, though.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Sergeant Fallon says. She’s studying the plot with her hands crossed in front of her chest and her lips pursed. “What matters is what we do about it once they get here.”

  “Like there is anything,” the civilian admin says. He looks at the orange icon representing the Lanky ship like a mouse watching the cat approach. On the whole, all the civvies in the room look like they’d rather be somewhere else right now.

  “Just because nobody’s ever kicked their asses doesn’t mean nobody can,” Sergeant Fallon says.

  “We can’t let them land,” I say. “That’s a given. There’s hundreds of those things in a seed ship. Once they land, we’re fucked. We have two battalions and whatever they stuffed into Frostbite, but we have no anti-Lanky weapons. They’re too hard to kill with the other kit. They’d eat us for lunch with numbers, even without gassing us.”

  “Then we have to figure out how to keep them from landing,” Colonel Campbell says over the tight-beam line. “I’ll do what I can with Indy, but we’re an OCS, not a heavy cruiser. We could at least do kinetic strikes on their landing sites from orbit if we can avoid the seed ship long enough.”

  “There may be another way,” I say. The colonel and the civvie admin turn around to look at me.

  “And what’s that, Sergeant?”

  I look at the holotable, where the orange icon for the seed ship creeps closer to the red symbol representing the SRA cruiser, slowly but steadily. The little orange lozenge-shaped icon represents a three-kilometer-long ship, black and shiny like a bug carapace, impossible to kill even with atomic warheads, and stuffed with hundreds of eighty-foot creatures who consider us a nuisance at best.

  “Can you call Dr. Stewart down here?” I ask the admin.

  “I don’t know if that’s the most idiotic or the most brilliant plan I’ve ever heard,” Sergeant Fallon says dryly when Dr. Stewart ends the basic rundown of the idea we tossed around the night before.

  “You want to use half of our spaceborne capability and fly it into a Lanky ship?” Colonel Campbell asks.

  “It’s not like the Gordon is doing us much good right now anyway,” I say. “She delivered her payload, and right now she’s just a target. She’s not big enough to load up all the mudlegs, even if we had a place to take them. But she has docking collars and arrestor clamps for standard-sized cargo pods.”

  “And we have plenty of those here on the moon,” Dr. Stewart continues. “We can fill them with water, shoot them into orbit, and load up the freighter with them. Increase the mass, give it extra reactor fuel. Maybe even flood the interior. Water doesn’t compress. She’d be able to pull a lot of acceleration.”

  “And the crew? Are we going to have them run the ship in vac suits? And who’s going to volunteer for that one-way trip?”

  “Nobody needs to,” I say. “She has fleet standard neural-networking gear, right? I can get together with your NN admin and the weapons officer, and we can send the Gordon off from the Indy’s CIC.”

  “You’re talking about hitting a bull’s-eye from, what, two AUs?” Colonel Campbell asks. “Even at one-g acceleration, you’re talking close to relativistic velocities. You won’t be able to correct the trajectory very well if the Lanky sees us coming.”

  “It’s stupid.” Lieutenant Colonel Decker shakes his head. “Really stupid. You can’t hit anything at that range just by throwing a freighter at it.”

  “Yes, you can,” Dr. Stewart says. “You’re
talking about a three-kilometer target that’s a few hundred meters in diameter. Even at two AUs, that’s not an impossible shot for a computer.”

  “If you’re wrong, we’ll be wasting that ship for nothing.”

  “If I’m right, we’ll be hitting that Lanky ship with a few hundred gigatons’ worth of impact energy,” Dr. Stewart replies. “I don’t care what kind of nukes you’ve shot at them before, but I guarantee you that a twenty-thousand-ton freighter moving at a tenth of light speed is going to vaporize that Lanky.”

  “A few hundred gigatons, huh?” Sergeant Fallon looks at the plot again and smiles a little. “I don’t know about you people, but I really like that number.”

  There are a few moments of heated conversation in the ops center as all the civilians and soldiers in the room share their opinions of Dr. Stewart’s idea at the same time. From the sound of it, half the personnel in the room think it’s a workable plan, and the other half concur with the admin’s assessment that it’s criminally stupid. Then the chirp of the tight-beam connection from orbit cuts in as Colonel Campbell interjects.

  “My weapons guy says it’s not even a difficult shot. Providing they stay on trajectory, of course.”

  “Doesn’t matter even if they deviate,” Dr. Stewart says. “We send that ship off with four times the acceleration of the Lanky, we’ll have the edge no matter what they do. We can always adjust, and they won’t be able to avoid us.”

  “You’re awfully sure about that stuff for a civilian,” Sergeant Fallon tells her.

  “I may not know anything about weapons, but I know mathematics and physics,” she replies.

  “If it’s such a sure thing, why hasn’t anyone ever had the same idea before?” Colonel Decker asks. He’s clearly not enamored with the idea, and his body language is somewhere between frustration and defiance.

  “Because it’s nuts,” Colonel Campbell says from orbit. “And because we usually don’t see them coming. Besides, you never put all your cash on one hand unless you’re desperate.”