by Marko Kloos
“Duraky,” I say.
Dmitry smiles sadly and gets up from his chair. “I will go sleep now, or maybe learn more secrets of fancy imperialist spy ship. Enjoy distilled fermentation,” he says.
I watch as he walks out of the NCO mess, which is now once again empty except for me and the bottle of Russian contraband ethanol on the table.
I eat the rest of my sandwich without much enthusiasm. My hand has started hurting again, so I pull out the bottle of pain meds and open the cap. Then I pop two of the little white pills into my mouth and wash them down with a swig of my spiked coffee. If I am going to check out of reality for a while, might as well do the job all the way.
The mess hatch opens, and two of the SI troopers walk in, Corporal DeLuca and Sergeant Acosta. I quickly take Dmitry’s bottle and stick it into the leg pocket of my jeans. Every second we move along on Red Route One toward the transition point means another few thousand kilometers of vacuum between me and Halley again. I know I made the right decision, but right now every passing hour increases my resentment of myself, and I need to take the edge off a bit. I nod at the newcomers and vacate the table to head back to my berth for some more warm and fuzzy narcotics-assisted alone time.
CHAPTER 17
“Goddammit, easy on the stern thrusters. Half a degree more positive angle. Keep the bow up.”
The XO is in the middle of the CIC pit, the center of the room with the big holotable that is the brain of the ship, coordinating the docking attempt like a conductor in charge of a small orchestra. Everyone is tense, none more so than the helmsman, who is in charge of keeping Indy’s four thousand tons in perfect synchronicity with the SRA anchorage not thirty meters off our port side. This is docking attempt number four in as many hours, and what was supposed to be a two-hour affair from start to finish is turning into an all-day event.
“There we go. Now counter-burn on the bow for half a second at ten percent. A mouse fart of a burn.”
Indy has no docking arrestors anymore, having shed them like a bee losing a stinger when we fled Independence eight days ago. Even if we did still have something for the docking clamps to grab, the SRA docking system is not compatible with ours, so we have to fly in a very precise formation and perform what the fleet calls a floating link—a flexible docking collar from airlock to airlock, and nothing to keep things from coming apart except the formation-flying skills of the helmsman.
“You got it now,” Major Renner says. “But don’t slack off. We lose the collar, we won’t be replenishing squat.”
Dmitry and I are in armor again. The padding on my left hand makes the armored glove uncomfortably tight, but I luckily still fit into battle armor without having to leave off one glove and rendering the whole system compromised. We stand by as the CIC personnel do their rendezvous dance for the docking maneuver. Almost a month of seeing an Alliance sergeant in battle rattle standing in the middle of a Commonwealth warship’s CIC has completely blunted the novelty of the sight for the rest of the crew.
“Extend the docking collar,” the XO says. “Nice and easy. Half a meter per second.”
The holotable has half a dozen windows open, all showing the docking operation from as many different camera angles, with the numerical data readouts from the navigation computer overlaid on top of everything: closing rates, relative velocities, elapsed mission time, radar distances. Indy has her own flexible docking collar for ship-to-ship docking actions, and we watch as it extends out of the hull and starts to stretch across the twenty-five and a half meters to one of the auxiliary airlocks of the unmanned Sino-Russian deep-space anchorage Luzhōu-19.
“Hard lock achieved,” the chief engineer says from his station. “Divergence rate one-quarter centimeter and steady. We are go for transfer ops.”
Major Renner looks over to Dmitry and me. “Your turn, Sergeants. Go over there and open sesame.”
We go down to the main airlock, where the SI squad’s fire team Charlie are all already waiting for us in full combat gear: Sergeant Humphrey, Corporal DeLuca, and Privates Andrews and Pulaski.
“Ready for a field trip?” Sergeant Humphrey asks when we connect to the fire team’s comms circuit. She readies her M-66 carbine and bounces the targeting laser off the nearest bulkhead to make sure it works.
“Anything to get to step out for a few minutes,” I reply. There’s a PDW slung across my chest instead of my usual issue M-66. I tested my marksmanship with the carbine on Indy’s range a few days ago, and the two missing fingers on my left hand make it a little awkward to maneuver the short but heavy weapon. The PDW is a strictly short-range affair, but it weighs about half of what the rifle does and is less than half as long, much easier to handle with a hand and a half.
Dmitry is in battle armor, but unarmed. He looks at the handful of combat-ready troops in front of the airlock and shakes his head.
“Station is automated,” he says. “No personnel. Nobody to fight. You can leave weapons.”
Sergeant Humphrey grins without humor. “I don’t care how many lunches you’ve had with the skipper. I’m not going to break into an SRA installation unarmed.”
She walks over to the control screen for the main airlock and punches in the access code. The inner airlock door opens, and we file into the lock.
“Verify hard seal on the docking collar,” Sergeant Humphrey says into the shipboard comms panel.
“Hard seal verified,” the reply from CIC comes.
We all lower our helmet face shields and let the suits take over the life support.
Sergeant Humphrey seals the inner lock and cycles the outer hatch. The air rushes out of the lock—not the violent decompression of a compartment venting into vacuum, but the relatively slow release of air into a low-pressure environment. Beyond the open main hatch, there’s the twenty-five-meter stretch of flexible alloy tube connecting us to the auxiliary hatch. The outer surface of Luzhōu-19 looks like nobody has bothered to refresh the paint job or scrub the hull down since they assembled the anchorage.
“Let’s go,” Sergeant Humphrey says. “Moving out.”
We make our way across slowly and carefully, mindful of the minor up-and-down and side-to-side movements of the tube, which is the only thing connecting Indy to the station, a rather inconsequential and easily torn umbilical. It won’t be a disaster if it breaks while we’re in it because our suits are vac-sealed and we can EVA our way back to the airlock, but we are sandwiched between Indy’s four thousand tons and the larger mass of the anchorage. A slight nudge in the wrong direction on the helm controls in CIC, and we’ll be adding to the layer of grime on the outside of the SRA facility.
“Sergeant Red Star, you’re up.” Sergeant Humphrey points at the auxiliary hatch and the bulge for the wireless network receiver next to it.
Dmitry nods and turns away as he accesses his suit’s computer to ferret out the access codes. A few moments later, the auxiliary hatch unlocks with a loud thunk and a vibration that makes the skin of the flexible docking collar ripple slightly. Sergeant Humphrey brings up her M-66 and turns on the weapon light to illuminate the hatch. It slides into a recess in the hull, and lights come on in the airlock and passageway beyond.
We make our way through the docking collar and onto Luzhōu-19, with Sergeant Humphrey taking point and the rest of us close behind. The inside of the anchorage is almost as grimy as the outside. I don’t know when they put this pit stop on Red Route One, but from the worn deck lining and the myriad of scuffs and paint streaks on the passageway bulkheads, it looks like SRA starships have been filling up and resupplying here for many decades.
The anchorage is roughly cross-shaped, with a big central hub and four smaller docking spokes branching out from the central section. When Sergeant Humphrey has satisfied herself that there isn’t a platoon of SRA marines looking to jump out of dark corners and ambush us, she lets Dmitry take the lead. He guides us to the anchorage’s main control booth in the central cargo transfer area of the station, where he starts turni
ng on displays and flicking switches.
“Made ready freight lifters and fuel system,” he says. “Anchorage has fuel for twenty little imperialist spy ships.”
“Indy, Delta Six,” Sergeant Humphrey says into the comms circuit. “All clear on the inside. Our Russian friend says there’s plenty of juice.”
“Delta Six, Indy. Splendid news,” the XO replies. “We’re sending over the engineering team. In the meantime, secure the place top to bottom. And see if you can find us some variety for the galley. Maybe the Alliance has field rations that aren’t altogether awful.”
Either Dmitry has super-acute hearing good enough to have picked up the reply from Sergeant Humphrey’s helmet comms, or he has found a way to hack into our protected tactical comms circuit.
“Another not-great idea,” he says to me. “You drop Russian food on floor, it will eat hole in hull of weak Commonwealth ship.”
The replenishment takes about four times longer than the most tedious underway refueling I’ve ever witnessed. The SRA refueling probes and cowlings aren’t compatible with ours, so it takes the engineering crew several hours and half a dozen EVA trips along the outside of Indy’s hull to rig up a field-improvised adapter system.
While the techies are busy trying to get the SRA’s deuterium into our reactor fuel tanks, we grunts go through the anchorage’s storage berths to look for other useful things to claim. The station has eight large cargo holds, each big enough to hold a thousand tons or so of palleted supplies. There’s small-arms ammunition that’s incompatible with our fléchette rifles, heavy ordnance for shipboard weapons we don’t have, and spare parts for drop ships we don’t use. Finally, Private Pulaski finds the section that has the palleted chow, and we converge on it to take stock of what’s there.
“My Russian and Chinese skills are really rusty beyond ‘Put down your fucking weapons,’ ” Sergeant Humphrey says. “What is this stuff?”
Dmitry peels back the olive-green wrap on one of the pallets and looks at the stack of ration containers. Then he points at several of the boxes in turn.
“Type A is lentil stew. Type B, soy beef with tomato. Type C, goulash, also soy. Type D is barley porridge.”
“Sounds delightful,” Corporal DeLuca says. “Let’s steal some.”
Dmitry shrugs. “Is your burial.”
We manage to haul half a pallet of SRA field rations back through the docking collar and onto the ship before the engineers have hooked up the station’s refueling system to Indy. Once the deuterium-tritium pellet matrix is pouring from the SRA station’s tanks into Indy’s, we look around for other replenishment opportunities, but the pickings are sparse, at least for consumables that are used by human bodies instead of fusion reactors or weapon mounts. At least we get to top off our water tanks from Luzhōu-19’s supply as well.
“Refueling ops completing in one-zero minutes,” the XO calls out from CIC. “Finish whatever you’re doing and return to Indy for departure.”
“Aye, ma’am. Returning to the ship,” Sergeant Humphrey responds. “You heard the woman. Everyone back to the docking collar. Anyone gets left behind, it may be a long wait until the next ride off this thing.”
We detach from the SRA deep-space anchorage eight hours after our initial docking approach with full deuterium and water tanks. In regular fleet operations, even a tricky refuel while under way shouldn’t take longer than an hour and a half at the most, but considering that we tapped a supply infrastructure that was never designed to interface with our ship, it was a reasonably short stop. We’re almost half a day behind on our high-speed run back to the Alliance node, but now we have the fuel to get there as fast as Indy can go, which is plenty hasty. If we die trying to get through, we’ll die warm, clean, and reasonably well fed.
CHAPTER 18
“Combat stations, combat stations. All hands, combat stations. This is not a drill. I repeat . . .”
I’m already in vacsuit when the combat-stations alert trills overhead. I knew it was coming, but after two weeks of deeply uneventful cruising the backwater of the inner solar system, it’s still a bit of a jolt back into reality: This is a warship, and we are hurtling toward the enemy again.
I pick up my helmet and leave the berth. As I step through the hatch, I almost collide with Dmitry and Staff Sergeant Philbrick, who are squeezing through the passage outside just as I step out.
“Here we go,” Philbrick says. His combat station is outside the CIC with his fire team in case we get boarded—a very unlikely event when going up against Lankies, but shipboard protocol is what it is. Dmitry’s spot is in the CIC pit because he has to open the door for us once again, and my spot is right beside him to make sure that’s all he does while he’s patched into Indy’s silicon brain.
We rush down the passageway and up the staircase to the CIC deck with measured haste. All around us, Indy’s crew perform the well-practiced choreography of a fleet ship getting ready for battle.
“Good luck,” Philbrick says when we get to the armored CIC hatch, and he veers off to join his fire team on the outside of the vestibule.
“You, too,” I say. If things go pear-shaped, he’ll be closer to the escape pods than the CIC crew, but there won’t be any rescue out here for any of us if it comes to that.
Colonel Campbell and Major Renner are in their usual spots in the CIC pit. Dmitry and I take our positions by the handrail. The plot on the holotable isn’t very busy. It has just three icons on it, but two of them are the signal orange of positively identified Lanky contacts.
“Bogey One, bearing two-seven-zero by positive zero-one-three, moving laterally at ten meters per second, designate Lima-20. Bogey Two, bearing two-niner-zero by negative one-five-zero, moving laterally on reciprocal heading at fifteen meters per second, designate Lima-21.” The tactical officer marks the target icons with their assigned designations.
The plot shows us fifty thousand kilometers from the Alcubierre transition point. The two Lanky ships are slowly cruising through the slice of space in front of it. We are in a wide elliptical trajectory, coasting ballistic with only our passive sensors, the exact way we have been evading the Lankies since we almost traded hull plating with them when we popped out of this transition point almost a month ago.
“They’re just crawling along,” the XO says.
“They don’t have to be fast,” Colonel Campbell replies. “They just have to be in the way. But where is the third one? We had three seed ships in front of us when we transitioned in.”
“No sign of anything but Lima-20 and 21 as far as our optical gear can look, sir.”
“Sons of bitches are damn near invisible even this close. The other guy could be fifty thousand klicks further out, and we wouldn’t even see him unless we knew exactly where to look. How the hell do they manage to hide something that big so well?”
On the optical feed, the Lanky ships are slow-moving blotches against the background of deep, dark space. Their hulls don’t reflect light the way our metal alloy hulls do. They’ve always reminded me more of bug carapaces than spaceship armor. Indy is stealthy because she is small and because she is crammed to the gunwales with the very latest in stealth technology. Nobody knows yet why the Lanky ships are so damn stealthy that they don’t even show up on radar, thermal imaging, or gamma-ray scopes. It’s hard to study something that will blow you full of holes when you get close enough to spot it.
“How many drones left in the racks?” Colonel Campbell asks.
“Six, sir.”
“Get four of them into the tubes and warm ’em up. I want to have eyes on this from all angles before we try and make our dash.”
The flight of stealth recon drones launches five minutes later. At this range, less than fifty thousand kilometers away, their propulsion systems only need to burn for acceleration a few seconds. They spread out from the icon marking Indy’s location and rush toward the Lanky ships.
“They give the slightest hint that they spotted us, we’re reversing course a
nd going for full burn back the way we came,” Colonel Campbell says.
“Tickling the dragon’s tail.” Major Renner watches the little blue icons on the plot closing the distance with the larger orange ones. “All fun and games until the dragon turns and bites you in the ass.”
The drones are on their run for thirty minutes when the Lankies change course, both seemingly at the same time.
“Lima-20 turning to bear negative ten degrees relative. Fifteen degrees. Twenty.”
The icon for Lima-20 shows the Lanky making a sweeping turn, but he’s not turning toward us or the drone that is now within a thousand kilometers off his port side. He’s turning away from us. At the same time, the icon for Lima-21 changes direction as well, going in the same direction but with hundreds of kilometers of space between them. We now have stern-aspect views of both Lanky ships.
“They’re circling the transition point,” the colonel muses. “Remember when we came in? Like sharks searching for prey.”
The data from the drones bears out the colonel’s observation. We watch as the Lanky ships execute another leg in their pattern, then change course again. Their elapsed track on the plot begins to form an elliptical racetrack pattern, with both ships at opposite ends of the ellipse from each other, and the transition point in the center of the racetrack.
“Surely they’re not that dumb,” the XO says when we’re five or six turns into the pattern.
“What’s that, Major?”
“What’s the first rule of planning and executing a patrol route?” Major Renner asks nobody in particular.
“You make patrol random,” Dmitry says. “So enemy cannot predict.”
The XO and Colonel Campbell look at Dmitry with a mix of mild surprise and amusement.
“Ten points to our Russian guest,” the XO says. “That’s precisely it. But it’s not what these guys are doing. Wait for the next turn.” She points at one of the icons on the plot.
