Vanguard

by Jack Campbell

  “I know,” Rob said. “Warships at Alfar had that capability.” But he paused, frowning again, as he brought up the menu to set the maneuvering systems on auto. Scatha knew about that capability, too. So why were the freighters moving around like they were? They must be aware that Squall could almost effortlessly match their orbital alterations.

  He looked at the options menu, feeling increasingly uneasy for reasons he couldn’t have explained, and finally tabbed the “maintain relative position automatically but request permission” selection. It would slow things down, it would put an extra burden on him, but something made him feel like that was a good choice.

  “You don’t need that approval step,” Danielle said as the change popped up on her own display. “Those systems are very reliable.”

  “I know,” Rob said.

  She gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged and turned back to her own display.

  Fifteen minutes later, the freighters shifted orbit again, this time a little lower and up toward the pole. Rob glared at the automated solution that instantly popped up for his approval, annoyed by having to review it. The orbital change was simple enough, a curve swinging over and slightly down to maintain the same position relative to the freighters. Why did he need to bother with approving it?

  But as he reached to change the option to full auto, Rob tapped the approve command instead.

  Squall swung over and down.

  Rob made a fist and softly pounded one arm of his command seat as Squall settled into her new orbit. “Why are they doing this?” he said out loud.

  “They’re messing with us,” Drake Porter said.

  “Yeah, but why? Why are they messing with us in a way that shouldn’t be bothering us? They know we can have the ship automatically maintain station on them.”

  “It is bothering you,” Drake pointed out.

  “Yeah, and why is that?” Rob looked at Danielle. “I don’t understand why they’re doing this.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe they think making us follow them around will make us do something to justify whatever they’re planning on. Or maybe they’re enjoying making us follow them around. It kind of emphasizes our inability to stop them from doing what they want.”

  Rob sat back, glowering at his display.

  Five minutes later, another alert sounded, and Rob saw the symbols for the shuttles falling away from the freighters.

  “They’ve launched,” Danielle Martel announced. “We don’t have a vector yet. I’ll get that to you as soon as . . . the freighters are shifting orbit again.”

  Rob closed his eyes, counting to five inside, determined not to let the annoying maneuvering by the freighters get to him, especially when he needed to focus his attention on the shuttles.

  When he opened his eyes, the proposed automatic maneuvering solution for Squall was displayed. Rob reached to hit approve, angry.

  And stopped himself.

  There was something about the curve of that path through space to the next orbit. What was it?

  “Lieutenant?” Danielle Martel asked.

  “Hold on.” What was bothering him? Rob stared at the proposed path through space, trying to understand. Was he simply losing his nerve? Freezing up when confronted with a difficult situation as the freighters and the shuttles both required his attention?

  Rob tapped approve, fighting against his own worries.

  He was in command, Rob thought as Squall began adjusting orbit. He couldn’t just give in to fears when all he had to do was let Squall follow—

  Danielle had said something earlier. “They’re making us follow them around.”

  He stared at the curve of Squall’s projected path. Which this time ran directly through the orbital location where the freighters had been when they launched the shuttles.

  Rob didn’t realize he had reached for and punched the main propulsion command until he had done it. Squall leaped as the main propulsion cut in at full, jarring everyone on the ship.

  “What the hell?” Danielle gasped, staring at her display, then at Rob in disbelief.

  Out in space, hitting the main propulsion like that would have altered the vector of the ship, flattening the curve of her path. But in orbit, the rules were different. Adding velocity caused Squall to rise, jumping upward into higher orbit as well as flinging her forward faster. Her projected path, which would have run through the spot where the freighters from Scatha had been, swung upward instead, passing above that orbital location.

  Still accelerating and rising in orbit, Squall leapt over her earlier path. As she tore past the orbital location the freighters had previously occupied, alarms blared.

  “Something blew up!” Danielle Martel shouted. “Combat systems estimate we are just inside the danger zone!”

  Squall rocked as fragments and a shock wave struck her shields aft and toward the bottom of the ship, then steadied out again.

  Jerking himself back into action, Rob cut off the main propulsion, breathing heavily.

  “What was that?” Drake Porter asked, sounding scared.

  Danielle Martel answered, staring at Rob. “At least one mine. The freighters must have dropped off some stealth mines at the same time as they launched the shuttles, using the same loading docks. How did you know?” she asked Rob.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I just . . . they wanted us to follow them.”

  “And you figured out why. If we’d stayed on that vector, Squall would have been badly damaged or destroyed.”

  “We were far enough out, and going away from the blast, so the shields held,” Drake said. “No damage to the ship.”

  Rob nodded, grateful that he had listened to his instincts. He only gradually became aware that everyone was staring at him with a mix of grins and wonder. And that the Scatha shuttles were still heading down toward the surface of the planet. “Back on task, people! Figure out where those shuttles are going and get us back close enough to those freighters to engage them if we get orders to!”

  “Why can’t we shoot them up?” Drake Porter demanded. “They attacked us! They tried to destroy this ship!”

  “We don’t have any proof that they did,” Rob said. “And I don’t have orders authorizing me to engage those freighters!” He touched the comm control, trying to get his breathing back to normal. “Squall was nearly lured into a minefield,” he reported to the council. “It must have been laid by the freighters from Scatha when they launched the shuttles, but we have no proof of that as of yet. All we can tell about the shuttles so far is that they are headed for a landing site somewhere in the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere.”

  He was waiting for a reply, Squall swinging cautiously onto a new vector to close once more on the freighters, when three more explosions erupted near the same location where Rob’s display showed a bright red danger marker.

  “They just destroyed the evidence,” Danielle said. “They knew we wouldn’t go back through there.”

  “What have they got as backup?” Rob asked her. “Scatha must have something as backup if the mines didn’t work.”

  “No idea,” Danielle said. “You seem to be a hell of a lot better at this than I am, Lieutenant.”

  Rob blinked, surprised to realize that he had impressed an Earth Fleet–trained officer. “Can we spot if they drop any other mines?”

  “Yes. They’ll have to open something like they did when launching the shuttles. The mines themselves are stealthy enough to fool our systems, but we should be able to spot when they could be deployed.”

  “Good.”

  “Message from the council!” Drake Porter called.

  Rob brought it up, seeing Council President Chisholm’s face this time. She was still in her office, one of those waiting in the city in the face of the possibility of an assault by Scatha. His opinion of Chisholm rose a few notches. “Lieutenant Geary, ha
ve you fired on the freighters?”

  “No.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “They’re holding orbit,” Rob said. Why weren’t the freighters making any attempt to run after their attack failed? Why weren’t they at least splitting up to make it much harder for Squall to engage them? The reason why suddenly struck him. “They want me to fire on them.”

  “Yes,” Chisholm said. “The provocative act. They still want us to start this. Scatha will commit the first aggressive act, Lieutenant Geary. We want no doubt of who began hostilities. And after Scatha does its worst, we will show them just how big a mistake they’ve made.”

  Before Rob could reply, Danielle called out. “We’ve got an estimated landing site for the shuttles!”

  Rob saw the map image appear before him and tapped it to send the same image to the members of the council. “They’re heading for the other northern continent.”

  “Get over the landing site!” Chisholm ordered. “We want the best possible overhead view to see what those shuttles drop off!”

  “We’re on our way,” Rob said.

  As Squall shifted orbit again, moving lower and away from the freighters, Ninja called.

  She glared at him. “Still alive, huh?”

  “Ninja, it’s not a good time—”

  “The shuttles and the freighters are staying silent. I still can’t hack them. But I’ve been looking at the stuff they sent to try to hack you. It’s really good.”

  Rob took his gaze from the path of Squall and the two shuttles on his display long enough to give her an alarmed look. “Are we in danger?”

  “No!” Ninja said, sounding insulted. “The walls I set up can handle stuff a lot worse than that. But standard walls wouldn’t have held, not even the stuff I saw being sold at Alfar just before we left. Scatha has spent the money to hire some decent code monkeys.”

  “So they expected their remote attack on our systems to work?” Rob asked.

  “Yes.” She narrowed her eyes at him in question. “And?”

  “You must have heard that they tried to hit us with mines, which would have torn this ship apart. I’ve been trying to think what their backup attack would be,” Rob explained. “But based on what you just said, I think the mines were the backup attack. Scatha wanted to recapture Squall, not destroy her. If that failed, they were ready to take us out the hard way.”

  “Huh. Yeah. That’s likely right.” Ninja rubbed her face with both hands. “They might have to start talking when the shuttles set down. Can you make sure I get a relay of any signals you pick up between the shuttles and the freighters?”

  “Drake?” Rob called. “Can we link Ninja into any signals we intercept?”

  “Ummm, yeah . . .” Drake Porter replied. “Give me a couple of minutes to figure this out.”

  “We’re working on it,” Rob assured Ninja. “I’ve got to get back to monitoring things.”

  The moment Ninja’s face disappeared, it was replaced by orbital imagery. “I think I’ve localized the landing site the shuttles are headed for,” Danielle announced. “Unless they make major adjustments in their paths, this is where they’re headed.”

  Rob squinted at the imagery. “An open plain where a big river meets the sea. That looks awfully familiar, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a lot like where we set up our first city,” Drake Porter said. He looked startled. “Hold on,” Drake added, pulling out his personal pad and checking something on it. “Yeah. A whole lot like it. That’s a spot marked for a future city site by the council.”

  “I’m getting a feeling that our plans have been overtaken by events,” Rob said, feeling tired. “Heavy-lift shuttles. Freighters that can carry lots of equipment and people. And a landing site very suitable for a city location. What does that look like to you?”

  “They can’t do that!” Drake protested. “It’s illegal!”

  “They are doing it,” Rob said. “Planting their own colony on our world.”

  Squall reached a good overhead location as the first shuttle landed. The images of the site were slightly hazed by the intervening atmosphere, so they weren’t clear enough for perfect detail. But it was still possible to pick out men, women, and children moving out onto the scrub grass that covered the land there. “Families,” Danielle said. “If we’d fired on the shuttles, we would have killed kids.”

  The second shuttle grounded and began disgorging building equipment much like that Glenlyon had landed, as well as more family groups.

  “We can intervene now, right?” Drake Porter demanded. “We have to—” He paused, looking worried. “What can we do? The police . . . the people down there already outnumber our police force.”

  “Lieutenant,” Danielle Martel said, “if the council hasn’t already started looking for spies, they need to start. Scatha seems to have a really good picture of what Glenlyon has in the way of defenses.”

  “It’s a pretty small picture,” Rob said, but he had to agree. Every move Scatha had made had reflected inside knowledge of Glenlyon. “Whoever is feeding them info can’t be too highly placed or too up-to-date because they didn’t know enough about Ninja’s work on our firewalls to know they wouldn’t be able to get through them. But they certainly knew that we didn’t have anything able to swoop in there and put a stop to that new colony work. They could have gotten that information from Alfar, though, just by knowing what our colony brought with it, and that would have only required combing through open-source contracts.”

  It only took another five minutes before the council called again. Council President Chisholm looked openly furious, and the shouting in the background made it clear her emotions were shared by many in the council. “Can you disable those shuttles when they lift again?” Chisholm demanded.

  Rob glanced at Danielle, who shrugged, then shook his head at Chisholm. “Maybe. Our grapeshot couldn’t be used. It’s just a tight field of ball bearings that’s not precise enough in the damage it does. Our pulse particle beam could, in theory, hit just the shuttles’ main drives. But even these heavy-lift shuttles aren’t that big compared to ships. Just about every spot on and inside them contains something important, and particle beams don’t just stop, not until they hit something so dense they can’t plow through or they lose enough energy. I can’t promise that shots aimed at a shuttle wouldn’t hit other critical components, or passengers.”

  “They won’t have any passengers on the way up, will they?” Chisholm demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Rob said. “Scatha has been really clever about this so far, and they are making no attempt at all to mask what they’re doing on the surface. That might mean—”

  “A few of the families are getting back on the shuttles,” Danielle reported.

  “That’s what I thought they’d do,” Rob said. “Yeah, they’re getting ready to lift again. Scatha is making sure that those shuttles have civilians, including children, aboard both while landing and lifting.”

  Another outburst of shouting sounded behind Chisholm, who gritted her teeth at Rob’s news. “As far as you know, would we be legally within our rights to fire on those shuttles?”

  “If we warned them, and they didn’t comply, yes,” Rob said. “But if we then asked for help, we’d be arguing points of law, and Scatha—”

  “Would be displaying the bodies of dead children,” Chisholm said. “I understand. It appears that anything we do would be worse than doing nothing.”

  Rob did not want to agree with that. Wasn’t the whole point of having a military unit like Squall to be able to act at times like this?

  But he had to admit to the truth of it. Squall and her weapons were a hammer, but the problem they were facing was nothing so simple as a nail. “At this point, I believe that is correct, Council President.”

  “Continue to monitor what Scatha is doing and wait for instructions!�
� Chisholm ordered Rob before breaking off the call.

  He sat back and looked around the bridge. “We’re to stand by for instructions. I have a feeling this is going to take a while.”

  “It’s going to be hard to stand by while we watch those Scatha shuttles taking more and more stuff down onto our planet,” Drake Porter said.

  “I know.”

  “Do we have anybody on the planet who knows how to handle stuff on the ground?”

  Rob shook his head. “Not as far as I know. When I did my search for vets to put together a team to capture Squall, no one showed up as having any ground forces experience. That mixed passenger-freighter that left just before the ships from Scatha showed up dropped off several hundred new people. Maybe someone on it knows how to do ground operations. Did that ship come from any of the Old Colonies?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Drake said. “I think it originated at Taniwha.”

  • • •

  Mele Darcy hadn’t spent long at Taniwha. It hadn’t felt right, for no reason she could have explained in any detail. She had swiftly hopped a ship heading farther down and ridden it to the end of the line.

  She had reached what seemed to be the current outer edges of the human expansion, a colony barely established, where opportunities were both boundless in the long term and limited in the short term. Unfortunately, long-term opportunities wouldn’t pay for short-term needs like food and shelter. The local police force was up to strength and not hiring, and Mele’s work skills didn’t seem to suit her for anything else available. She had sniffed around the beginnings of a naval force that the colony was putting together, but she had no experience with being part of a ship’s crew or any real desire for that line of work. There didn’t appear to be any local interest in standing up ground forces or Marines. She had actually been more interested in a job that involved exploring the surface of the new planet to augment the orbital surveys, but at the moment everyone’s attention was focused on the area around where the first city was growing. Which left her highly qualified in doing things that weren’t in demand.