by Marko Kloos
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.
“Bird’s back in the barn,” the XO says a little while later.
“T
ake us out and shadow that destroyer,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Mind your distance and stay on their stern. Make it ten thousand klicks.”
“There hasn’t been a lick of active radiation from them since we popped them in the snout,” Major Renner says.
“We took out their front array, which is probably why we’re still afloat. But let’s not take chances. The second it looks like they’ve spotted us, we’re turning about and going full burn. No point pushing our luck.”
We’ve been pushing our luck since we set out for Fomalhaut, I think, and look at the spot where my two missing fingers used to be. I can feel the pain throbbing underneath the chemical layer of fuzzy bliss from the painkillers, and I’m very thankful for modern chemistry right now.
Murphy leaves Earth and Luna behind, and Indy follows.
The destroyer pulls low acceleration, probably because of the damage we inflicted. The Blue-class destroyers are large ships, almost three times the size of Indy and much better armored and armed, but they are deep-space combatants and not even slightly stealthy. We are following in their wake, where the noise from their own engines make their passive sensors as good as blind.
We are under way and on Murphy’s tail for just a little under four hours when the tactical officer perks up and updates the holotable display.
“We have some active radar sweeps ahead. Two—make that three sources.”
On the holotable, three pale blue icons appear on the edge of our scanning range. They have three-dimensional lozenge-shaped zones projected around them. Our passive gear is picking up the radar transmitters, but it hasn’t pinpointed the exact locations of the sources yet, so the lozenges mark the zones where the contacts are likely to be.
“Source?” Colonel Campbell asks.
“Military, definitely Commonwealth units. ELINT is sorting out the profiles right now,” the tactical officer replies. “Stand by.”
“There’s precisely squat out here according to the charts,” Major Renner says. “This is not even a travel lane. Military or civilian.”
“Let’s see what we have here,” the colonel says. “Just keep an eye on those active sources. We come even close to detection, we break off and leave them be.”
It takes the computer and the electronic-intelligence suite of Indy another twenty minutes to sort out the radar transmissions in front of us. One by one, the contact icons on the tactical display change from “UNKNOWN PRESUMED FRIENDLY” to actual class designations. The wedges that mark the location of the transmitting ships shrink with every second we spend in pursuit of Murphy.
“It’s another picket,” the XO says. “A frigate, Treaty-class. Another frigate, unknown class. And a Hammerhead cruiser.”
“All new stuff,” Colonel Campbell says. “Why are they a million klicks from Earth instead of in orbit?”
“Pretty sure Murphy is talking to them. I’m getting burst transmission noise,” the electronic-warfare officer says from his console.
“They’re talking on tight-beam.”
“Not tight-beam, sir. It’s encrypted ship to ship, but it’s not a fleet key. At least none we have in the computer.”
“Private conversation. Interesting.” Colonel Campbell leans over the holotable and rests his palms on the glass surface. His fingertips poke through the holographic orb of the tactical display, which re-forms itself around his hand.
“Change course to negative zero-two-zero by zero-four-five. Hold that for ten minutes and then return to the old heading, go parallel to Murphy again. And deploy the passive arrays, too.”
Over the next hour, the plot slowly shifts as Murphy approaches the picket line of unknown Commonwealth ships and we trail behind and below. The picket ships are in a patrol pattern, sweeping the space in front of them with active radar. Indy has to make several course corrections to avoid the invisible searchlights of the radar transmitters, and each turn takes us a little more off course from wherever Murphy is going.
“That’s about as far as we’ll be able to sneak in without getting lit up, I think,” Colonel Campbell says after the radar-warning-threat meter pegs from green into yellow twice in the span of a minute. “Bring her about and coast ballistic. Make your new heading positive one-two-zero by two-one-zero.”
“Hang on,” the tactical officer chimes in. “Multiple contacts on passive, bearing positive twenty degrees. Five . . . seven . . . ten . . . Sir, I have at least a dozen distinct contacts popping up on optical.”
“Go for magnification and verify,” the colonel says. Everyone in the CIC looks over at the holotable, where a cluster of pale blue icons has popped into existence on the far upper edge of our situational-awareness bubble. The picket ships are keeping us at bay, but Murphy is passing through the picket and heading right for that new cluster of contacts.
“Any of them squawking ID?”
“I’m getting IFF from the picket ships. The Hammerhead is the Phalanx. The frigates are Lausanne and . . . Acheron?” He looks over at the colonel with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “Sir, I’ve never heard of a frigate named Acheron in the fleet.”
“There is no Acheron,” Major Renner says.
On the holotable, the closest blue icons update with ship names and hull numbers: “CG-761 PHALANX,” “FF-481 LAUSANNE.” Putting lie to the XO’s statement, the letters on the third icon change from “UNKNOWN” to “FF-901 ACHERON.”
“What the hell is an Acheron?” our weapons officer says.
“A river,” I reply. “A river in the Greek underworld. Mythology.”
Colonel Campbell gives me a curt smile that looks slightly amused and a little approving. “Wonder if we’ll bump into Styx and Lethe out here, too,” he says.
The weapons officer’s look is blank, and the colonel sighs ever so slightly.
“Rivers,” he says. “More rivers in the Greek underworld.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s just hope that whoever named that thing just has a hard-on for the classics,” the colonel says. “That name’s a shitty omen otherwise.”
“Why is that, sir?” the weapons officer asks.
“Acheron’s the river the souls of the dead must cross to get to the underworld,” I supply.
The frigates and the cruiser are performing competent patrol patterns, with interlocking sensor coverage and tight execution. Indy maps out the area kilometer by kilometer, coasting on a parabolic trajectory just at the edge of the picket force’s detection range. Minute by minute, we close the distance a little, and our passive sensors yield more data bit by bit. One active sweep of Indy’s radar would map out our entire awareness bubble to the meter and centimeter and tell us the location of every scrap of metal bigger than a trash can in this part of space, but that would be like a thief in a dark building strapping a ten-thousand-watt flashlight to his head.
“There’s a lot of ships out here,” Major Renner says. The cluster of blue icons on the edge of our sensor range is growing bigger—every few minutes, the computer adds an icon or two to the group as we get closer and the passive arrays sniff out more radiation sources and visual contacts.
“Eight, then, twelve . . . fourteen. They have a big-ass task force assembling in the middle of nowhere.”
“Something else, too.” The tactical officer brings up a window on the holographic plot and increases the size and scan range. “Too big for a ship, too small for a station. And it’s right in the middle of all that traffic.”
Colonel Campbell studies the image from Indy’s optical array. The ships we’ve plotted are mere specks on the screen, all clustered around an asymmetrical white-gray structure.
“It’s an anchorage,” he says. “They have a deep-space anchorage out here. Maybe a small fleet yard. Look at that. There’s the outriggers—that’s the central part right there.” He pokes at the display with his index finger and pans the image by moving his hand clockwise.
“Whatever they’re doing out there, they’re keeping really tight EMCON,” the t
actical officer says.
“Yeah, I’m sure they are. How many recon drones do we have left on the ship?”
“Fourteen, sir. We used up half our loadout in Fomalhaut.” Major Renner looks over to the ELINT officer, who confirms the statement with a nod.
“Prep them for launch. I want to make a box with them all around this anchorage.” The colonel points at the display and starts marking locations on the plot.
“They’re picketing right here, and whatever they’re assembling is on the other side of that anchorage. Put four birds on the near side—here, here, here, and here. Then four more on the far side at these coordinates.” He marks the spots by poking them with his finger. “We’ll bracket the whole area, box ’em in. I want to keep tabs on every ship that comes or goes.”
“Aye, sir. Weps, let’s get those birds into the tubes and warmed up.”
Indy’s autonomous stealth drones are like miniature starships. They have propulsion, guidance systems, sensor packages, and a comms suite. I don’t know half the technological voodoo that goes into them because they’re superclassified secret tech, but I know from my Neural Networks days that a recon ship with the new drones tied into its sensor network is worth a whole squadron of the old ships that don’t have the drones and the new data-link infrastructure they require.
“Recon birds are ready in tubes two, four, five, and six,” the weapons officer says when the loading procedure is complete. The drones are sized to fit and launch from Indy’s standard ship-to-ship missile tubes—Indy lacks external launchers, so everything that leaves the ship has to go through the main airlock, the hangar bay, or the launcher tubes.
“Flight One ready to launch,” the XO confirms. “Float ’em out, minimal noise. Go for quarter-g acceleration once they’re at least ten kilometers away.”
“Aye, sir.” The weapons officer flips the safety covers off the hardware launch buttons on his console. Then he toggles them in sequence.
