With the help of the Neural Networks tech on the Indianapolis, I reconnect to the ship’s TacLink and look at the sensor feed. The Indy and her charge are in their orbit by themselves, well away from the rest of the task force. I’ve never been on one of the brand-new orbital combat ships, but I’ve heard rumors about their capabilities, and now that I’m tied into the nerve center of one, I see that even the sensationalist rumor mill was short of the mark. She’s less than half the size of a fleet frigate, but her sensors and neural-networks suite are better than anything I’ve ever seen. When I check the sensor data from the networked auxiliary freighter that’s flying formation with her, I see that the Indy’s radar return is only a little bigger than that of a drop ship, even without any stealth measures enabled. Her armor is light, but her eyes and ears are fantastically acute. I do a quick check of her armament and weapons stores. She doesn’t have much in the way of ship-to-ship armament, but her air/space-defense missile system could give headaches to an entire carrier full of Shrikes, and there are four tubes of surface-attack nukes parked amidships, each missile armed with twenty-four MIRVs. For such a small ship, Indy packs quite a wallop against ground targets. Our defecting skipper has command of the smallest warship of the task force, but she’s the most modern by a huge margin—the only hull in TF 230.7 that wasn’t a scrapyard candidate from the reserve fleet.
“Incoming,” Rogue One announces. The Dragonflies are serving as a makeshift radar picket, flying overlapping figure-eight patrols above New Longyearbyen. “Four contacts, bearing three-ten, distance ninety, altitude forty thousand. Looks like a ferry drop, not a combat descent.”
I look at the contact information on my screen and gauge the flight pattern of the incoming formation.
“Indy says they’re Wasps, not Shrikes. We have eyes and ears in orbit now, by the way.”
“Looks like they’re shuttling stuff into Frostbite,” Rogue One says. “Bet you anything they picked that northerly bearing to avoid overflying the town.”
“I’d call that a fair assumption,” I say. “Sarge, we have a drop-ship flight inbound from the north. They’re coming in slow on a regular descent into Frostbite. Could be they’re trying to pull a fast one on us, though.”
“Pass the data to the grunts,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We have Delta Company playing goalkeeper on the northern approach. Tell them to warm up the MANPADs just in case.”
A drop-ship flight of four can ferry an entire battle-ready infantry company minus their heavy weapons. With our deployment pattern, we can meet them at company strength on equal terms anywhere they choose to land in the city, but the thought of two infantry companies duking it out in the middle of a populated civvie town makes me feel more than just a little queasy.
“Copy that,” I say, and pass the data on to Delta Company’s CO and platoon leaders. “Let’s hope they’re not feeling sneaky.”
“Of course, if they’re hauling troops into Frostbite, we’ll have a whole different set of problems soon,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“I don’t think they’re dumb enough to try a land assault with their light armor,” I say, but as I voice the thought, I feel some uncomfortable doubt. An hour and a half ago, I wouldn’t have thought the SI brass would try a vertical assault on the airfield with a single drop ship and a Shrike in attendance.
“Last of the birds will be in the barn in thirty minutes,” Chief Barnett says. “Not a minute too soon, either. We have some bad weather coming in from the north.”
“Bad how?” Sergeant Fallon wants to know.
“New Svalbard bad. You got here just at the tail end of what passes for summer. You have no idea how lucky we were to be able to run flight ops for a week straight. Those puddle jumpers don’t do so well when it gets cold outside, so they stay in the hangars in the winter.”
“This isn’t cold?” Sergeant Fallon eyes the temperature readout on the big status screen at the front of the operations center. It shows “–18C/25knNNE/VIS15Km.”
“That?” the chief chuckles. “That’s what we call T-shirt weather down here. Ever seen a temperature readout of triple-digit negatives? There’s a reason why we build the way we do.”
“Minus one hundred Celsius?” Sergeant Fallon says in disbelief, and Chief Barnett nods.
“And hundred-klick winds on a calm winter day. We basically go underground for three or four months.”
Sergeant Fallon looks over at me and smirks. “Andrew, forget what I said when we got here, about this place being damn near paradise.”