“Welcome aboard, ma’am,” he says to Dr. Stewart. “You’re the first civilian on this ship since the shakedown cruise.”
“Thank you,” she replies. “Your ship is, uh, impressive.”
“Hardly,” he smiles. “We’re a glorified patrol boat. But thanks for the compliment.” He offers his hand to me as well, and I shake it.
“Mr. Grayson. Good to see you in one piece. Looks like you’ve been around since I last saw you.”
The last time I saw Colonel Campbell, he was a commander. They changed the service structure around us about a year after our first tiff with the Lankies on Capella Ac, where both the commander and I had a ringside seat to First Contact. The commander was the executive officer on my first navy assignment, and that ship ended up scattered all over Capella Ac as fine debris.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone. Combat controller for the last three years.”
Colonel Campbell nods. “I knew you’d get bored as a console jockey. First time you reported to me on Versailles, you already had a drop badge and a Bronze Star on your smock.”
The CIC is a very intimate little affair, just like everything else on this ship. It has a half dozen people in it, less than a third the staff of a carrier’s nerve center. Indy’s XO is a short and stocky sandy-haired woman who is introduced by Colonel Campbell as Major Renner. She returns my salute and shakes hands with Dr. Stewart.
“I guess we ought to get down to business,” I say. “Mind if I call home and then set up with your Neural Networks and Weapons guys?”
“She’s all yours,” Colonel Campbell says. “And I think I speak for everyone in our sorry little excuse for a fleet when I say ‘aim well.’ We have one round and no reloads.”
“Fallon, this is Grayson. I am set up on Indy and ready to kick off Doorknocker.”
Operation Doorknocker is our fancy term for the Freighter of Doom plan that is still under revision even as we are getting ready to send the Gary I. Gordon on her way. I never understood why the fleet likes to name non-martial ships like fleet tenders after ground-pounder war heroes, but I think that her namesake—a Medal of Honor winner who defended an air crew to the death in some police action in the pre-NAC days—would approve of us using his ship to try to score the first Lanky seed-ship kill in history.
“Grayson, Fallon. Understood. The ground crews are still filling the last batch of cargo pods with liquid refreshments. They should be on the way into orbit in about ninety.”
The colonial ground crews are doing their usual jobs of filling standard fleet cargo pods with water and launching them into orbit to be picked up for replenishment. The fleet uses water as reactor fuel and for the usual human uses, and New Svalbard is one of our intergalactic watering holes. Once they are in orbit, the freighter uses its orbital tugs to collect the pods and attach them to the pod clamps on the outside of the ship. The crew of the Gordon rigged a system that will allow us to remotely flood the interior spaces of the ship with the contents of one of those cargo pods, using transfer pumps and the ship’s own cargo redistribution lines in a highly irregular manner that required the overriding of every major and minor safety protocol. According to the science crew, the incompressible water will make the ship a more effective projectile and more resilient to withstand the four-g sustained acceleration needed to intercept the Lanky seed ship at its calculated turnover point.
“Bogey is now two mil kilometers from the Russian,” the tactical officer says behind me. I turn to watch the plot, where the red icon for the SRA cruiser and the orange one for the Lanky have almost merged on the holographic display.
“Uh-oh,” Colonel Campbell says. “Looks like the fleet has picked up our hard-shelled friends. Battle group is changing course and acceleration.”
On the plot, the icon cluster for the fleet task force—the Midway and her escorts—breaks away from the intercept trajectory it has been on for the last twelve hours. They’re a half AU away from New Svalbard, seventy-five million kilometers, and still two hundred million kilometers from the Russian and its Lanky pursuer.
“Are they reversing?” I ask.
Colonel Campbell shakes his head without taking his eyes off the plot. “No. They’re running.”
He magnifies the relevant section of the display and spins it to orient the tactical symbols in a plane I can see.
“They’ve accelerated. I’m guessing by the rate they’re going for maximum burn. And they’re headed ninety degrees away from our incoming party guests. Into deep space.”