The flight of Dragonflies homes in on our dead Wasp, and the ten minutes of orbital maneuvering feel like ten hours to us. The Dragonfly drop ships have EVA airlocks for special ops, so we have a way into the ships without forcing their passengers to de-atmo the hulls. Still, without proper EVA suits, and with the last zero-gravity training session a few months behind me, changing ships in high orbit is a thrill I could do without. Under normal circumstances, the scene outside would be a breathtaking sight—the streamlined and lethal Dragonfly attack drop ship, position lights blinking, matching trajectories with our wreckage with the red and brown expanse of Sirius Ad below us as a backdrop. I mostly have eyes for the EVA hatch on the Dragonfly, a small target twenty yards beyond the destroyed tail ramp of our Wasp. When I push off, I miscalculate my trajectory and tumble toward the hatch too high, but the Dragonfly’s pilot fires his thrusters for a fraction of a second and expertly catches me with the hatch like a catcher plucking a ball out of the air with his mitt. A few moments later, the EVA hatch closes again, and I hear the rush of ingressing air as the crew pressurizes the hatch compartment again. The drop ships don’t have artificial-gravity gear like the big starships, so I have to hold on to the webbing that covers the inside of the hatch compartment to keep from careening around in the interior like a pea in a can.
“Hang on for about twenty seconds, trooper,” someone says over the intercom. “I’ll open the troop hatch as soon as the pressure is back to normal.”
“You got it,” I reply. “No rush.”
In the weightlessness of high orbit, I can’t feel the acceleration of the ship directly, but when the pilot revs the engines again, the increased vibrations transmit from the hull right into the webbing I am grasping. On my tactical screen, I can see our four-ship diamond formation detaching from the symbol that marks the dead Banshee Two-Five, and then heading away from Sirius Ad at maximum acceleration. With nothing left between us and the distant Nassau but a four-hour flight and a Lanky seed ship to avoid along the way, I shut down my tactical screen. If we make our escape, I’ll owe my life to a drop-ship pilot for what seems like the fiftieth time, and if the Lankies intercept us, I don’t want to have a countdown to my impending death again.
When we dock with the Nassau a few hours later, I expect to see a security detachment on the flight deck to escort us straight to the brig, but the Nassau’s captain seems to have decided to save the court-martial business for later. When we file out of the troop bay, our only welcoming committee is the chief of the deck, who waves us on impatiently. The Nassau’s little hangar is made to hold two combat-ready drop ships and two standby spares, and with four of the huge new Dragonflies cluttering up the deck, the ships are now parked wingtip to wingtip.
“All hands, prepare for Alcubierre transition. I repeat, all hands prepare for Alcubierre transition. Countdown one-five minutes.”
With almost a hundred new arrivals on the tiny frigate, the ship is now overstuffed with people and gear, and there are no seats for us to strap into. We sit down wherever we can claim a few square feet out of the way. I find a corner in a storage room, peel off my helmet, and sit down on the oil-stained floor to await our transition into the Alcubierre chute.
When we transition for the trip back to our own solar system, we leave behind a carrier, a destroyer, and three cruisers, lost with all hands. On Sirius Ad, we abandon the better part of two full Spaceborne Infantry regiments, thousands of fellow troopers who aren’t geared to fight the Lankies that are about to descend upon them. Even if they evade the Lankies on the ground, every human being on that planet will succumb to the newly unbreathable atmosphere in another two months at the most. We pulled off a textbook planetary assault, won all our battles on the ground, and suffered the worst military defeat of NAC forces in half a decade—ten thousand dead in thirty minutes, another five thousand about to die, and the Lankies in possession of a system that is just seven light years and a single transition away from our homeworld.