Angles of Attack

by Marko Kloos

  “Dmitry,” I shout.

  Dmitry walks up to me and lightly taps my armor with his gloved fist.

  “Andrew,” he says. His voice sounds slightly distorted through the speaker system in his helmet. “What are you doing in cold, awful place like this one?”

  “We’re going up to the Indianapolis together. I’ll be joining you for this mission.”

  Dmitry shakes his head with a smile and raps my armor again. “Iz ognya da v polymya, eh?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We go from flame to fire.”

  “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” I agree. “Looks that way.”

  He gestures to the trooper next to him. The face behind the helmet’s shield is Asian and very clearly female.

  “Sub-Lieutenant Lin. My superior. She is here to make sure I get on Commonwealth ship safely.”

  Sub-Lieutenant Lin looks at me and snaps a quick and sharp salute, her brown eyes looking into mine unflinchingly. I return the salute. She outranks me, so I should have been the one to offer a salute first, but cross-bloc courtesies are still fairly uncharted territory, and I assume she’s conceding that we’re on Commonwealth turf and that I am the NAC personnel in charge for this trip into orbit. Dmitry is a stárshiy serzhánt, a senior sergeant, which means he outranks me as well, if only by one rank and pay grade.

  I gesture over to the open tail ramp of the nearby Dragonfly.

  “Let’s get upstairs, then. Before the weather turns to shit again.”

  “Weather is already shit,” Dmitry says.

  I let Dmitry walk up the ramp first before following him into the cargo hold of the Dragonfly. At the top of the ramp, I take a deep, unfiltered breath of the cold air even though it hurts my lungs and makes my nostrils freeze. It’s a harsh and frigid place, and unfit for large-scale human habitation, but I’ll be damned if the air here isn’t the cleanest I’ve breathed in the entire settled galaxy.

  I take a seat on the left side of the Dragonfly’s cargo hold. My SRA counterpart seats himself right across the aisle from me, mirroring our arrangement in the Akula during our planetary assault a week earlier. Five years of fighting these people, and I don’t even know what language they use to communicate on joint missions, or whether they just use their comms’ automatic translators.

  I’m back on an NAC drop ship, so I get permission from the pilot in command to tie into the Dragonfly’s data bus. Then I tune out Dmitry and watch the feed from the optical sensors on the outside hull: dorsal, top bow, bottom bow, starboard wingtip, port wingtip, stern. My battle armor’s computer can stitch all the video feeds together into a seamless tapestry and project it on the inside of my visor sight. It pans with my head movements, so it almost feels like I am the drop ship as we go up through the clouds and above the horrible New Svalbard weather. Finally, at twenty thousand feet, we break through the top of the cloud cover, and the atmospheric bumps go from terrifying to merely teeth jarring.

  New Svalbard has a wild, hostile beauty from above. Much of the ice moon’s visible hemisphere is covered in thick clouds, but there are clear patches here and there, and the light from the far-off sun glints on the icy mountain ridges and vast frozen glaciers of the surface below. In another fifty or a hundred years, this will be a prime chunk of galactic real estate if the Lankies don’t come in and take it all away from us. When I first went into space after joining the fleet, I used to be awed by the majestic, overwhelming beauty of the sight of a planet from orbit, but these days it mostly reminds me of just how unfathomably vast the universe is, and how very tiny and insignificant we are.

  We transition from atmospheric to spaceflight a short time later, and the buffeting stops. You can always tell when you’re in orbit because your butt gets light in the seat despite the forty pounds of battle armor. I can see all the warships in their different orbital groups on my tactical display, but only Regulus and her escort are in visual range, thirty degrees off the port bow and a hundred kilometers away in a higher orbit than ours, position lights blinking and visible even from this range. Regulus is a massive ship, over half a kilometer from bow to stern, the largest warship class any of Earth’s nation blocs have ever put into space. Because they’re so few and so valuable, the Navigator-class carriers have not been used against the Lankies yet, so nobody knows how they would fare in battle with a seed ship, but the fact that most of the fleet got destroyed above Mars makes me think that Regulus may well be the last of her class. In any case, I am going up to Indy right now to help make sure that the carrier won’t have to go toe-to-toe with the Lankies, at least not yet.

  We dock with the Indy a few minutes later. As before, I don’t even see the stealth orbital combat ship until we’re almost on top of it, despite the fact that I can plot Indy’s position on my display through her active IFF beacon. Most of the technology in the OCS is still classified, but I know that the same polychromatic camouflage technology used for the Hostile Environment Battle Armor—our bug suits—has found its way into the outer-hull plating of the Indy. She doesn’t have overwhelming firepower, although she is well armed for a ship her size. She is, however, extremely hard to spot, track, or target. During our little insurrection a few weeks ago, Indy was able to successfully play orbital hide-and-seek with the rest of the Midway task force. According to Colonel Campbell, they didn’t even break a sweat doing it. He also claims he could have nuked Midway from stealth successfully, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.

  A light shudder goes through the Dragonfly when Indy’s docking clamps latch on to the hardpoints at the top of the drop ship’s hull. We move through the hangar hatch and into the artificial gravity field of the larger ship, and my armored weight pushes me downward into the seat again. Through the armor plating of the hull, I can hear the low warning klaxon of the automated docking system as it seals the outer hatch and pulls us into the Indy’s tiny drop-ship hangar. We come to rest with a final shudder, and the klaxon outside stops. The engines of the Dragonfly steadily decrease their racket, then fall silent altogether.

  “Welcome aboard NACS Indianapolis,” I tell Dmitry. “Hope you’re wearing battle dress uniform underneath that armor, because you need to turn your plate in until we get to the Alcubierre chute. And your admin deck, too.”

  “You are worried I spy on precious new intelligence boat, eh?”

  “I would,” I reply, and Dmitry grins.

  He starts popping open the latches of his computerized battle armor, strips off the shell segments, and stacks the pieces on the deck. The SRA commander sent him over unarmed, so I won’t have to ask for his rifle and sidearm, too. I feel a little stupid asking the man to disarm when just a week ago I fought the Lankies by his side, admin decks and loaded weapons and all, but the agreed-upon rules for this joint mission call for it. And truthfully, I don’t know Dmitry well enough yet to know that he won’t try to use the situation for all the intelligence gathering he can. Paranoia is one of the defining traits of the experienced combat soldier.

  The tail ramp opens to reveal the claustrophobic confines of the Indy’s tiny drop-ship hangar. The bulk of the Dragonfly fills it out almost entirely. I collect my bag and walk down the ramp. Before I step on the deck, I salute the North American Commonwealth flag painted on the bulkhead in front of me and address the officer of the deck, who is standing by the exit hatch. There’s an SI corporal in battle armor next to him, PDW hanging on his chest from a sling, pistol in a holster on his leg. They don’t usually bother with armed security when a surface transport arrives, but those don’t usually contain an SRA frontline combat trooper. I salute the officer of the deck.

  “I request permission to come aboard. Staff Sergeant Grayson, with SRA guest, to report to the CO as ordered.”

  The OOD returns my salute.

  “Permission granted. The skipper is waiting for you in CIC.” His gaze flicks past me to the SRA trooper as Dmitry stops on the ramp just behind me and salutes the NAC colors.

  “Craz
y-ass new world, I know,” I say to the OOD as we walk past him to the exit hatch under the watchful eyes of the armed Spaceborne Infantry corporal.

  “Crazy don’t cover it, Sarge,” he replies.

  Colonel Campbell is standing at the holotable in the combat information center when I walk through the armored hatch. Dmitry is behind me in the corridor, and there’s a pair of armed SI troopers guarding the CIC. We may not be shooting at each other anymore, but Colonel Campbell’s spirit of cooperation does not yet extend to welcoming SRA soldiers into the nerve center of his ship.

  “Good to see you, Mr. Grayson,” he says. He returns my salute and then extends his hand. “Fine work on Fomalhaut b with our new pals. I read the mission reports.”

  “Thank you, sir. I was just along for the ride, mostly. But those SRA marines did all right.”

  “Yeah, it’s amazing what we can blow up when we actually point our guns the same way.” He glances at the armored hatch behind me, where the SRA trooper is waiting just on the other side of the clear polyplast viewport.

  “And now we’re setting out on another joint mission with these folks. This one’s going to be fun. And by fun, I mean ‘white-knuckled, pants-shitting terror.’ ”

  “We’ve been there before, sir,” I say. “More than once. Versailles wasn’t exactly a slow day at the office, either.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” The shadow of a pained look shows on his face very briefly as he undoubtedly remembers his old command that burned up in the atmosphere above the colony planet Willoughby, after having lost over a third of its crew to Lanky proximity mines. That was five years ago, and it seems like forever and only just yesterday at the same time. Colonel Campbell shakes his head slightly, as if to rid himself of the memory.

  “Mr. Grayson, have you ever considered the fact that you seem to be right at the bleeding edge of the shitstorm way too often, considering your pay grade?” he asks.

  I can’t help but chuckle. “The thought has occurred to me, sir.”

  “We’re finishing up taking on extra supplies and mission personnel. There’s chow and ammo stuffed into every corner, and we have a full squad of jarheads embarked as it is, so don’t expect a lot of elbow room on this ride. We’ll be on our way just as soon as we’ve secured the extra ordnance we’re taking along. Check in with Master Sergeant Bogdan and see if he can find you some rack space somewhere.”

  “We’ll need to quarter our new friend, too,” I say, and point over my shoulder.

  “Ah, yes,” Colonel Campbell says. “I want you very close to him for as long as he’s on this ship. I’m not asking you to hot-bunk with him, but see if the master sergeant can find you adjoining quarters. If he’s out of his berth, I want you to be with him. Last thing I need is that enemy combat controller finding a quiet corner and a data jack somewhere.”

  “Understood, sir,” I say.

  “Take heart, Mr. Grayson,” the colonel says. He turns back to his holotable and examines the plot again. “You’ll be on the bleeding edge of the shitstorm once again, but at least we’ll be doing exactly what this ship was designed to do. Unless they parked a seed ship right across the Alcubierre node on the solar system side, we’ll make it through to Earth.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. I’m not quite as convinced as he is, to put it mildly, but his confident attitude helps to take the edge off my own anxiety a little. Every time I’ve worked with Colonel Campbell, I’ve bucked dreadful odds. Either I’ll get lucky again, or I’ll die a quick death in good company.

  Master Sergeant Bogdan finds us two adjoining berths in the mission-personnel module of the ship, which is occupied by the Indy’s embarked Spaceborne Infantry squad. All the grunts on this ship have been assigned to the Indy since before she last left the solar system, so they were all on the New Svalbard side of the mutiny a few weeks ago. That means I won’t have to constantly watch my back when I go to the mess hall or the head, which is a relief. There are ten berthing slots in the personnel module. All the junior enlisted SI grunts are sharing three multibunk berths, one for each of the three fire teams, and the three sergeants and the squad’s lieutenant each get their own private berths. Two of the berths are still empty, so Dmitry gets one berth and I get to claim another, continuing the record streak of private berthing spaces I’ve been able to keep going for at least a year now.

  I stash my kit in the locker and the storage drawer under the bunk. I don’t have much to tuck away other than the brand-new battle armor and HEBA kit they issued me on Regulus two weeks ago. My personal gear is still at Camp Frostbite—maybe in the locker where I placed it, possibly in the trash incinerator—and I’ve not had the desire to claim it in person. Camp Frostbite is controlled by the Spaceborne Infantry troops that obeyed the Midway commander’s order to seize the civilian assets on New Svalbard, and we killed about thirty of their number when we fought back. If I show up at Frostbite to pick up my stuff, I am likely to end up in the brig.

  When all my kit is secured, I stretch out on the bunk for a bit and watch the viewport on the door, which I have turned on to monitor the corridor outside for my new SRA pal.

  Dmitry knocks on the hatch a few minutes later. I get up to answer the knock.

  “Does advanced imperialist warship of yours have place to eat of some sort?” he asks when I open the hatch.

  “Yes, it does. You may have to make do with a sandwich and some coffee if it’s not mealtime right now, though.”

  “Coffee is kharasho,” Dmitry says. “Maybe sandwiches will be not shit.”

  “Well, let’s go,” I say. “The mess is one deck up.”

  The NCO mess is mostly empty. One of the tables is occupied by two senior sergeants with a data pad and a pile of paperwork between them. They look up when we walk in, and neither makes an effort to conceal a bit of surprise at the sight of a fleet NCO walking in with an SRA trooper. The camouflage pattern of the SRA battle dress is an irregular collection of brown, green, and black blotches that looks almost reptilian. It’s nothing like the regular digital pattern of the NAC battle dress, and the Alliance grunt sticks out on this ship like a peppercorn in a saltshaker.

  We get coffees and sandwiches and claim a table in the corner of the mess. The two fleet sergeants return to their paperwork but shoot us curious glances every once in a while.

  “Sandwiches are not shit,” Dmitry proclaims after his second one. They are standard between-meals fleet chow, bologna and soy cheese with a smidgen of mustard. They’re not entirely awful, but they’re far from not shit. I’ve had so many of them over the years that I only eat them when I have no other choice and my stomach is very empty. If Dmitry likes them, they must feed those SRA troopers some pretty awful garbage over in the Minsk’s NCO mess.

  Overhead, the 1MC announcing system comes to life, and Colonel Campbell’s voice interrupts my contemplation of relative cross-bloc culinary standards.

  “Attention all hands, this is the CO.”

  Even though the 1MC speaker strands are built into the filament of the ceiling liner and invisible, I still turn my head up out of habit. Dmitry follows suit.

  “We have completed replenishment and secured all stores. As soon as we have finished our final neural-net synchronization with the rest of the task force, we will get under way and leave New Svalbard for the coordinates the Alliance has transmitted to us. We are setting out for the SRA Alcubierre node in this system. From there we will transition back into our solar system and begin our scouting run. There is no doubt in my mind that this ship will fulfill her mission and return to New Svalbard with the intelligence needed by the rest of the task force. This is what this ship was built to do. This is what this crew was trained to do. I will not wish us luck. We won’t need luck, because we have skill. Those skinny planet-stealing sons of bitches are the ones who are going to need luck, and lots of it. We’re going home. All hands, prepare for departure.”

  Dmitry nods and turns his attention back to his half-eaten sandwich. “Good speech,” he say
s around a mouthful of food. “Ochyen kharasho.”

  I take my PDP out of the leg pocket of my battle dress and bring up a picture of Halley. It’s the one she sent me after she graduated Combat Flight School, when the world was still in balance and we were still slugging it out with the Chinese and Russians, unaware of the Lankies’ existence or the coming two-front war we’d be fighting for the next half decade. I zoom in on her face, that barely contained proud smile that’s teasing, gloating, and loving all at the same time. Then I freeze the screen and run the tip of my index finger along her jawline.

  We’re going home. I repeat the colonel’s words in my head. I’ll see you after we run the blockade. Piece of cake.

  CHAPTER 5

  Front sight, press, I remind myself. Ride the reset. Two shots, change target, two shots.

  The M109 automatic pistol in my hands bucks very slightly with every shot I fire at the troops in the hallway before me. Some are hidden behind makeshift cover, only popping out to return fire sporadically. Every time I am forced to fight with the pistol, it reaffirms my belief that the stupid thing is the most useless weapon in our arsenal, good for nothing but a display of rank.

  One of my opponents pops his head up over the storage crate he’s using as cover and aims his PDW at me. I put the front sight on his helmet and fire a quick double tap. One round glances off my enemy’s helmet, but the other drills right through his lowered face shield. He drops instantly, and his PDW clatters to the deck. I don’t have time to celebrate my brief victory—two more enemy troops come around the corridor bend twenty-five meters ahead, and the slide of my weapon is locked back on an empty magazine. I eject the disposable cartridge pack, fish a new one out of a pouch on my harness, and reload with fingers that seem too clumsy and imprecise for the task. I release the pistol’s slide and switch the fire selector to salvo fire. Then I hose down the hallway with most of the thirty-round magazine. One of the new soldiers catches a burst to his armor, but the rounds fragment against the hard laminate of his breastplate. Then they return fire together, automatic bursts from two PDWs converging on my hiding spot. The hallway in front of me goes dark.