According to my computer, it’s 2000 hours. I’ve slept soundly and without interruption for nine hours, and my brain is rested, but my body feels like it usually does after a hard battle, as if I had stacked heavy crates all day and run a five-thousand-meter race in full combat kit before bedtime. The hours I spent sitting in a chair in the ops center didn’t help things, either.
I straighten out my wrinkly fatigues, put on my boots, and open the door of the storage room. I leave the combat armor in the corner by my cot, but I take the rifle and sling it over my shoulder before stepping out of the room.
I’ve been in my chair in the ops center for barely five minutes when my comms alarm chirps a sequence announcing an incoming priority tight-beam connection from the Indianapolis.
“Ops center, this is Indy Actual.”
“Indy Actual, ops center. Go ahead,” I reply. The feeling of dread in my stomach clashes with the coffee I’ve guzzled since walking into the ops center. Indy Actual is Colonel Campbell, and he doesn’t make tight-beam priority calls without good cause.
“Approaching visitor has a tailing unit,” Colonel Campbell says. “It’s a Lanky. Ring the alarm downstairs. Get ready for incoming.”
I summon Sergeant Fallon, the HD brass, and the civilian admin crew. Not ten minutes later, everyone is in the ops center to listen to the news coming down from the Indy.
“Are we one hundred percent positive it’s a Lanky?” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp asks. He’s the head of Sergeant Fallon’s HD battalion, the 309th AIB, which is spread out over New Longyearbyen and about a dozen of the terraforming stations.
“Yes,” Colonel Campbell says. “They’re a very slightly reflective three-kilometer blob in space. Can’t see them on infrared, no radiation signature. If it wasn’t for the illumination from the Russian cruiser’s exhaust flare, we may have even missed them with the high-mag optics. Sons of bitches are really hard to spot at range if you don’t know exactly where to look.”
I’ve directed the data feed from Indy’s CIC display to the holotable in the ops center again and simplified the diagram for the ground-pounder officers a little. The Russian cruiser is a red blip on a parabolic trajectory toward New Svalbard, still a little over two AUs away and creeping along at a quarter-g acceleration. The orange icon representing the Lanky seed ship is less than two billion kilometers behind the Russian. The Lanky is decelerating at two-g and closing on the Russian cruiser rapidly. You don’t need to be a space-warfare expert to see that the seed ship will overtake the SRA cruiser long before the Russians even get close to New Svalbard. They are no longer our enemies but a bunch of frightened fellow soldiers in a broken ship trying to run to the only other humans in the system for help, and they’ll never make it. Our own units are still on an intercept course, 250 million kilometers away from the Russian on a reciprocal heading, and even if they could kill the Lanky seed ship, they won’t get there in time.
“So much for turning off the Alcubierre nodes,” Colonel Kemp says. “Backed ourselves up against a wall for nothing.”
“Could be that they were in the system already when we shut the network down,” Colonel Campbell replies. “Could be that they came through the SRA node, and the Sino-Russians didn’t mine theirs. Could be the nukes made no difference even at transition. Doesn’t matter now, though.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sergeant Fallon says. She’s studying the plot with her hands crossed in front of her chest and her lips pursed. “What matters is what we do about it once they get here.”
“Like there is anything,” the civilian admin says. He looks at the orange icon representing the Lanky ship like a mouse watching the cat approach. On the whole, all the civvies in the room look like they’d rather be somewhere else right now.
“Just because nobody’s ever kicked their asses doesn’t mean nobody can,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“We can’t let them land,” I say. “That’s a given. There’s hundreds of those things in a seed ship. Once they land, we’re fucked. We have two battalions and whatever they stuffed into Frostbite, but we have no anti-Lanky weapons. They’re too hard to kill with the other kit. They’d eat us for lunch with numbers, even without gassing us.”
“Then we have to figure out how to keep them from landing,” Colonel Campbell says over the tight-beam line. “I’ll do what I can with Indy, but we’re an OCS, not a heavy cruiser. We could at least do kinetic strikes on their landing sites from orbit if we can avoid the seed ship long enough.”
“There may be another way,” I say. The colonel and the civvie admin turn around to look at me.
“And what’s that, Sergeant?”
I look at the holotable, where the orange icon for the seed ship creeps closer to the red symbol representing the SRA cruiser, slowly but steadily. The little orange lozenge-shaped icon represents a three-kilometer-long ship, black and shiny like a bug carapace, impossible to kill even with atomic warheads, and stuffed with hundreds of eighty-foot creatures who consider us a nuisance at best.
“Can you call Dr. Stewart down here?” I ask the admin.