As we make our way toward the gravity well of Mars, I use one of the CIC data consoles to go through the pictures of the Lanky seed ships we’ve encountered so far, studying them like an encyclopedia of advanced superpredators, and I realize that for all our struggles with them, all the ass-kickings we have doled out and received over the last five years, we know next to nothing about them.
“They’re all different, you know,” someone says from behind my right shoulder. I turn around and see the tactical officer looking over my shoulder. He’s sipping soy coffee from a mug with the ship’s seal on it.
“Different how?” I ask.
“You know whale pods, back on Earth?”
I nod.
“They’re all individuals, right? You can listen to them on sonar and tell them apart by voices. When they’re on the surface, you can see markings and scars and stuff.”
He points at the screen in front of me, which shows two seed ships side by side in profile.
“Those guys? Same thing. We’ve been cataloguing every one we spot. Speed, size, patrol path, optical profile. They don’t have hull numbers like we do, of course. But once you’re close enough for optical gear, you can tell them apart. A mark here, a bump there. Ripple in the skin. That sort of thing.”
He takes another sip of his coffee.
“Ours all look the same ’cause they all came out of the same fleet yard. Built to the same set of blueprints. These guys? They don’t look like they’ve been built at all.”
“They don’t look uniform enough,” I say.
“Right. Cheery thought, huh? Maybe there’s an even bigger mother ship pumping these things out somewhere. Like a whale birthing a calf.”
“Cheery thought,” I agree.
“Getting some traffic from Mars now,” the sergeant manning the signals-intelligence station in CIC says a few hours later. We are well into the second half of our parabolic trajectory that will slingshot us around Mars and toward Earth.
“Anything on fleet channels?” the XO asks.
“Uh, sort of, ma’am. All I’m getting right now is automated traffic on the fleet emergency band.”
“Crash buoys,” Colonel Campbell says darkly.
“Yes, sir.”
As we get closer to Mars and the signals burn through the interplanetary clutter, the plot on the holotable in the center of the CIC updates with the blinking pale blue icons of automatic emergency buoys. The computer assigns ship IDs to the signals as they are identified and sorted out.
“FF-478 Guadalupe Hidalgo,” the XO reads out loud. “CVA-1033 Alberta. Damn, that’s one of the Commonwealth-class carriers. CG-759 Vanguard. DD-772 Jorge P. Acosta. CG-99 Caledonia.”
“I know the skipper of Caledonia,” Colonel Campbell says. “Jana Mackay. I went to Fleet Command School with her.”
Knew, I think. Past tense, not present. Colonel Campbell knows as well as I do that the automatic emergency buoys don’t start sending until they are ejected from their host ship. No fleet skipper would have the emergency buoy jettisoned unless the ship is completely disabled and in the process of ejecting its life pods, and the computer will only release it if the ship is in the process of breaking up. If the Caledonia’s crash buoy is out there sending its distress signal, then the ship is almost certainly gone, and all her sailors with her. Then again, both the colonel and I survived the activation of the Versailles’s crash buoy some five years ago over the colony planet Willoughby, so maybe hope dies hard even in a seasoned, hard-bitten staff officer. Maybe the crew of Caledonia did manage to man life pods and make it down to the surface of Mars, and maybe they’re holed up down there waiting for a rescue, just like we were half a decade ago.
“Picking up Alliance beacons, too,” the SigInt sergeant says. “Lots of Alliance beacons.”
We watch silently as the plot fills with pale blue and red icons, all blinking their pulsing distress signals. We don’t know the identities of the SRA ships who released their own distress beacons, but there are—were—a lot of them. Ten, twenty, thirty—I try to count the mass of icons on the display but give up at thirty-five, and every few seconds the computer adds more of them to the holographic sphere hovering above the holotable. The space between our position and Mars is a sea of slowly blinking pale blue and red icons.
“What the hell is left at this point?” Colonel Campbell wonders out loud.
“Still nothing on active fleet comms,” the XO says. “We could go active, see if we can get anyone to talk back. There have got to be some surviving units in range somewhere. Ours or theirs.”
“That’s a negative,” Colonel Campbell replies. “If there’s Lankies out there in the dark, I sure as shit don’t want to broadcast a quarter-million-watt flare for everyone in this corner of space to see. Passive listening gear only, unless we know we have someone to talk to nearby.”
“Understood, sir,” the XO says. “Remain at full EMCON. Ears only for now.”
“Visual contact, Lanky seed ship,” the tactical officer calls out. “Bearing zero-nine-zero by positive zero-zero-three. Distance eighteen hundred kilometers, heading one-two-zero relative, speed two hundred meters per second. Designate new bogey Lima-8.”
“We’ll be passing a little too close for comfort. Correct our course, XO. Nudge us three degrees to port so we pass his stern with some room to spare. Son of a bitch is damn near right across our trajectory.”
“Three degrees to port, aye,” the XO says. “Helm, give me a two-second burn on the starboard-bow thrusters. On my mark. Three, two, one. Burn.”
I watch as the trajectory on the holoscreen simultaneously updates with the position and trajectory of the Lanky bogey catalogued as Lima-8 and that of Indianapolis as she fires her bow thrusters, nudging us onto a slightly different course to avoid swapping hull paint with the Lanky patrolling not too far ahead of us. The bow thrusters do their quick, controlled burn, and the line representing our trajectory bends to port very slightly. Physics being what they are, spaceships hurtling along at hundreds or thousands of meters per second can’t just turn or stop on a dime when something pops up in front of them. I’ve never paid enough attention in physics to be able to begin to make sense of conning a ship like Indy, but I know that in space, steering and braking require a lot of calculating and planning.
Colonel Campbell watches the plot correction and nods. “Steady as she goes, helm. XO, countercorrect to the original trajectory when we have this bastard at least a thousand kilometers aft of our stern.”
“Aye, sir,” Major Renner replies.
The more time I spend in fleet CICs, the more I realize that there is no real control in a starship’s control center, just an illusion of it, and that we are merely hanging on to an angry dragon by the tip of its tail. I may have even less control as a grunt on the ground, but with a rifle in my hands and a map on the display in front of me, I feel better equipped to determine my own fate than standing on a rubberized deck tile and holding on to a handrail while watching a hologram.
“Have you regretted your desire yet to switch to the navy all those years back, Mr. Grayson?” Colonel Campbell asks when he sees me studying the plot, as if he could read my thoughts.