“Just as far as you can go without pegging any meters over there. If they find a recon drone, they’ll know someone’s eavesdropping, and then they’ll comb the neighborhood.”
I’ve been in the CIC since our hasty departure from Independence Station almost eight hours ago, and I am tired to the bone. Colonel Campbell looks as worn-out as I feel. The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes seem to have gotten quite a bit deeper overnight. He stifles a yawn and looks over at the time-and-date display on the back bulkhead of the CIC. The ship time is 0230 Zulu, half past two in the small hours of the morning, when human reaction times are at their worst. In a starship, that number is as arbitrary and meaningless as any other, but somehow knowing that it’s the middle of what would be the night watch on Earth just adds to the sense of fatigue I am feeling. None of us has gotten any rack time in at least fourteen hours.
The colonel catches me glancing at the clock as well and gives me a tired little smile.
“No rest for the weary, Mr. Grayson.”
He closes the recon picture windows on the holotable and pans out the scale of the plot until Indy and all the ships around the clandestine anchorage are just little blue dots right near the center. I see the blue-and-green orb representing Earth, and the smaller gray one for Luna beyond.
“Staff Sergeant Grayson, please fetch our Alliance guest and have him join us in briefing room Delta. XO, come along and bring the department heads. Tactical, you have the deck and the conn.”
“I have the deck and the conn,” the tactical officer confirms.
“We are going to figure out just what the hell we are going to do next,” the colonel says. “And then we’re going to take some rack time in shifts before this crew collapses from exhaustion.”
Dmitry is asleep in his berth when I come to fetch him, but he seems to sleep in his battle dress uniform, because he’s dressed and ready to go not sixty seconds after I rap on the hatch of his berth.
The briefing room on Delta Deck is one of the larger spaces on Indy. It’s not quite as spacious as the enlisted or NCO mess berths, but it’s bigger than the CIC pit. Most importantly, it has about twenty chairs bolted into the deck, all facing the forward bulkhead, which holds a single large holographic display that goes from the top of the bulkhead all the way to the bottom.
Dmitry and I walk into the briefing room to find half the chairs in the room full already. Most of the department heads are here, including the lieutenant in command of the embarked SI squad. He gives me a nod when he sees me stepping through the hatch, and I return it. Everyone in this room looks in need of a daylong appointment with their racks and then a month of R & R.
“Philbrick told me about the hand,” the lieutenant says when I sit down in the chair next to him. “Doc couldn’t stitch ’em back on?”
I shake my head curtly. “Those fingers are all over the deck liner on the concourse,” I say. “Nothing left to stitch back on. I’ll never talk smack about those shitty little cop buzzguns again.”
“At least it’s not your gun hand,” he says.
“Yeah, I lucked out, huh?”
The hatch opens again, and Colonel Campbell and Major Renner walk in. The XO takes one of the empty chairs while the colonel walks to the front of the room and turns on the holoscreen with a gesture. It comes to life and shows a tactical orb, a mirror image of the situational display in the CIC. The group of auxiliary fleet freighters is sitting in space, flanked by the small group of warships in attendance. Well off past our starboard stern, the picket force is doing its patrol, lighting up the tactical display with occasional flares of active radar energy as they shine a light into the black to flush out intruders. Indy is like a burglar listening in to a family meeting in the living room after having snuck past the armed guards at the neighborhood gate.
“Situation,” Colonel Campbell says. “We are in deep space a million kilometers from Earth, in optical sensor range of an uncharted installation that is very clearly military in nature. There is a sizable civilian cargo fleet nearby, and some very powerful deep-space combatants escorting them. That includes three frigates that aren’t even listed in the fleet register, and two warships under construction that are bigger than anything we have in the fleet right now.”
He turns around and marks the respective icons on the screen. The icon for Indy is coasting away from the station and the picket force again slowly, but the eight stealth drones are keeping station all around the anchorage and the assembled fleet.
“Based on our reception when we got back to the solar system unexpectedly, I am convinced that this anchorage and the ships all around it aren’t common knowledge back at Earth. They tried hard to keep a lid on our arrival, and they were perfectly willing to blow us out of space to keep us from leaving again. It’s clear that they are up to something they don’t want to become general knowledge. The question is, what do we do with this intel now?”
“Go back to Earth, send the coordinates of this little party to every ship we see, and then down to the civvie networks for good measure,” Major Renner says.
“To what end?” our tactical officer says. “That’s a bad idea, ma’am. No offense.”
“Elaborate, Captain Freeman,” the colonel says.
Captain Freeman probably only has ten years on me, but at the moment, he looks like he’s pushing fifty. He’s haggard and tired, with deep rings under his eyes. I haven’t looked in a mirror in a while, but I suspect I’m not looking all that youthful and fresh anymore myself.
“Well, that force sitting there obviously doesn’t want to be discovered,” the tactical officer says. “And they’re the only task force close to Earth right now. Anybody goes checking out the coordinates we give them, they’ll get the shit shot out of them.”
“So we’ll send the info down to the civilians,” Major Renner says. “Let the Networks run with it. Story of the century, right?”
“And then what?” I ask. “The civvies find out that the fleet is tucking tail and evacuating? You’d cause a riot from coast to coast.” Then I have a nasty, unwelcome thought. “If the authorities even let the Networks air that sort of thing. All those civvie freighters? I’m sure they don’t just hold military assets. Hell, I’d be shocked if they don’t have mostly ’burbers and government employees on them.”
“Now that’s a cheerful prospect,” Lieutenant Shirley murmurs next to me. “The rats leaving the sinking ship.”
“The well-connected rats,” I correct, and he smiles weakly.
“So what do we do?” Major Renner asks. “Run off and leave them be? They’re fixing to leave with most of the combat power on this side of the blockade. Maybe on both sides. Who knows what’s left out there?”
“That’s precisely what we should do,” Colonel Campbell replies.
“You can’t be serious, sir,” the XO says.