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.