“Well, you won’t find a crew to man it. Not for a one-way trip.”
Dr. Stewart shrugs. “Who says it needs to be manned? All we have to do is to point it the right way and open the throttle. And if your visitor—our visitor—is coming in on an unchanging trajectory, we won’t even need to nudge the stick after launch. Those Lanky ships are huge, right? It’s not hard to hit a five-hundred-meter bull’s-eye even at high speed. Not for a computer.”
“But someone needs to—”
I look at the admin deck next to me. It’s showing tactical plots right now, but I went to Neural Networks School half a lifetime ago, and I know that only security firewalls keep me from controlling all the essential systems on the Indianapolis remotely. The old freighter with her has far less complicated systems. And it’s a military freighter from the auxiliary fleet, so it has military network hardware, not civilian gear.
“Never mind,” I say. “It’s a super-long shot, but it may actually work.”
“I do science all day,” Dr. Stewart says. “Astrophysics. ‘It’s a super-long shot’ is practically the motto of our profession.”
CHAPTER 24
“Looks like somebody’s finally awake over there,” Colonel Campbell says over the tight-beam connection.
Sergeant Fallon and I are standing in front of the ops center’s modest situational display. The Networks admin has routed the feed from my tactical computer onto the holographic display. The fleet units in orbit are still rendered in friendly blue instead of enemy red, despite our current less-than-cordial relationship. The icons representing the carrier and its two escorts are rapidly climbing out of the predictable orbital racetrack they’ve been on for the last day and a half. Their new bearing points them roughly toward the incoming Russian cruiser, still almost three AUs from New Svalbard.
“Either their sensors are shit or their tactical guys have their heads up their asses,” I say. “They should have seen that boat twelve hours ago.”
“Probably a combination of both,” Colonel Campbell says. “Half of that crew is fleet reserve.”
“At least you won’t have to play hide-and-seek up there anymore,” I say. “And we only have to worry about that SI regiment they’ve crammed into Camp Frostbite.”
“I wouldn’t worry about them too much right now. I count most of the drop ships back on the Midway. They’ve got a pair of Wasps on the ground right now, that’s all.”
“It’s not exactly great flying weather out there anyway,” Sergeant Fallon says while eyeing the weather status display on the wall.
We watch the display as the carrier group leaves orbit altogether and burns to accelerate away from the moon. They pull away at one-g—not a sprint, but certainly not wasting time, either. Fifteen minutes pass, then thirty. An hour after my comms alert roused me from the smelly little cot in the storage locker, it looks like the task force is well on the way to an intercept and not just playing a ruse to get back into New Longyearbyen.
“What’s the plan?” I ask Sergeant Fallon.
She lets herself drop into one of the nearby chairs and exhales warily.
“I think we can stand down from full battle rattle a bit,” she says. “Keep a watch toward the camp, make sure those SI grunts don’t get any super-dumb ideas. But let’s cycle the Dragonflies through a standby schedule for now. One bird on alert, one on Ready Five, one off for rest. Let those pilots get some rack time.”
She looks up at me and nods over to the ops center’s main hatch.
“Same goes for you. You’ve had three hours of sleep after standing the watch in here all night. Hit the rack and don’t come back until 1800 at least. Anything major goes down before then, I’ll ring you out of bed, don’t worry.”
I know better than to argue with my old squad leader. Instead, I take my carbine, check for safe, and head toward the ops center hatch on heavy feet.
When I wake up in my bunk a good nine hours later, it’s because my body wants to, not because some alarm goes off or my comms kit intrudes with an urgent message.
I climb out of the folding cot and sniff my fatigues. I’ve been wearing the same set through the combat landing and the subsequent skirmish with the fleet, and not even the antibacterial fibers of the CDUs can mask the slightly rank smell of the body underneath. It gets hot under battle armor, and I’ve spent most of the time since leaving Frostbite in mine.