Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 22} UNEXPECTED GUESTS

The fleet has a hard and not-very-generous weight limit for personal possessions. Shipping a kilogram of stuff over dozens of light years is insanely expensive, so each Fleet Arm member is entitled to just twenty kilos of nonissue items. We can send physical mail back home, but only a total of five hundred grams every six months, and we can only receive two hundred grams in return from Earth. The contents of the personal compartment of my locker weigh just under seven kilos, the less to haul around between deployments. I mailed my medal cases home to Mom over the years for safekeeping, and because I knew she would be pleased to have them. She never sent anything back until last year when I got a letter from her—not a MilNet e-mail, which we exchange every month or so, but an actual physical letter, written on sugarcane paper in her narrow old-fashioned cursive. It was just four pages long, and it contained nothing she couldn’t have typed into the MilNet terminal at the civil administration building back home, but it was a physical object, something that she had held in her own hands.

Right now, that letter is the only possession I have left. It’s tucked into the waterproof document pouch in my leg pocket, where it has been ever since I received it last year. All my other stuff is in a locker back at Camp Frostbite, unless the SI troops crammed into the place haven’t already dumped or looted all our gear. All I have left now are those four sheets of sugarcane paper, so thin you can almost see through them. As a welfare rat, I’ve never owned much, but I’ve never been entirely without possessions until now.

I’m peeling unit patches off my battle dress smock when there’s a knock on the door of the storage room that serves as my temporary berth.

“Come in.”

The door opens on creaky hinges, and Sergeant Fallon sticks her head into the room. She looks at the small pile of cloth patches at my feet and raises an eyebrow.

“Might as well dispense with the notion that we’re still members of an organized military,” I say. “I have half a mind to throw out all the rank sleeves as well.”

“Have the tailor make you some new ones,” she says. “Nobody says you can’t be a goddamn two-star general in this outfit.”

She steps into the room, crouches in front of me, and picks up one of the unit patches I discarded.

“Weird, isn’t it? We’ve spent so much time and sweat on these things, and in the end they’re just cheap-ass fabric squares with some sticky thread backing. Not much to show for fifteen years and half a leg, is it?”

“Don’t forget the bank account,” I say. “A million worthless Commonwealth bucks.”

“Almost three million worthless Commonwealth bucks,” she says. “Three reenlistment bonuses, a hundred and fifty monthly deposits, and jack squat to spend it all on. Just a bunch of numbers in a database somewhere, that’s all.”

She knocks on her prosthetic lower leg.

“There’s this little souvenir, of course, but I don’t think it counts. I wouldn’t have needed it if the military hadn’t sent me to the place where they blew off the original one.”

“What about the shiny medal on the blue ribbon?”

“The Medal of Honor?” She snorts a derisive little laugh. “That fucking thing. The moment they put that around my neck, I became a goddamn PR asset for the military. I had to practically blackmail them to stay in a combat billet. Although I will admit that it got me out of a court-martial or two. Doubt it’ll get me out of this mess, though.”

“They can’t put two entire battalions up against the wall,” I say.

“You haven’t been Earthside the last few years, Andrew. I honestly can’t say they wouldn’t. The more their grip on the rabble slips, the tighter they wrap the leash on their guard dogs.”

Outside in the corridor, an announcement sounds over invisible speakers. It’s a pleasant female voice, so vaguely cheerful that it can only be a computer.

“Attention, all personnel. This is a Level Two weather alert. Winds from the north at sixty to eighty kilometers per hour, light to moderate snow, temperature negative two-zero degrees Celsius. All exposed personnel, seek shelter or don appropriate protective clothing. I repeat, this is a Level Two weather alert. Monitor the MetSat channel for updated conditions. Announcement ends.”

“Minus twenty?” Sergeant Fallon says. “That’s a bit chilly.”

“And snow. Looks like winter’s starting.”

“Well, grab your armor, and let’s go take a look. I haven’t seen any clean white snow since that combat drop into Trondheim back in ’99. ’Course, that snow didn’t stay white long.”

We’ve only been inside the admin center for two hours, but when we step outside again, the place looks like it has been transplanted onto a different planet. The sky is the color of dirty concrete, and the snow is blowing so densely that I can barely make out the lights on the buildings across the little civic plaza even though they are only fifty meters away. The arctic wind, sharp as a blade, turns the skin of my face numb in just a few moments, and I lower the face shield of my helmet and take a few steps outside. The snow on the ground reaches halfway up the armored shin guards of my battle armor.

“Damn,” Sergeant Fallon says when we’re back inside, ice and snow caking our armor plates despite our merely two-minute sojourn into the weather. “That is some nasty climate out there all of a sudden.”

One of the civvie techs in the entrance vestibule, a burly fellow in smudged blue overalls and a thick thermal jacket, hears her comment and chuckles.

“That? We call that a light dusting. Typical late fall weather.”

Behind us, the announcement system comes to life again. This time it’s not the pleasant artificial female computer voice, but that of the comms tech down in the ops center.

“Sergeants Fallon and Grayson, please report to the OC. Priority tight-beam link from orbit.”

I brush the snow off my armor and stomp my boots on the concrete a few times to knock off the slush.

“Back to work, I guess,” Sergeant Fallon says. “That’s why I hate positions of authority. Everyone always bugs the shit out of you.”

“They popped up on our long-range gear a few minutes ago,” Colonel Campbell says over the voice connection from the Indianapolis. “Three AUs out. They’re right on the ecliptic, heading for us as straight as they can, as far as my sensor guys can tell.”

“Lankies?” I say, dreading the reply.

“Doubtful. Unless they’ve learned to spoof emergency transponder signals bit for bit. Our bogey is squawking an SRA distress signal in sixty-second intervals.”

Sergeant Fallon looks at me.

“I’m out of my field with this space warfare stuff,” she says. “What do we have here? Are we humped?”

“He’s coming our way and sending a distress signal from that far out, he’s not spoiling for a fight, and he isn’t a Lanky,” I say.

“Unless it’s a ruse of some kind,” Colonel Campbell says.

“Has the task force picked him up yet?”

“Doubtful. Nobody there is stirring. Our sensor gear is better than theirs by a lot, and I have snooper buoys out away from the noise. But the way he’s coming in, they’ll hear him before too long. I give it a few hours, depending on how awake their sensor guys are.”

“Any idea what he is?”

“He’s still awfully far away, but from the ELINT signature and the optical profile, I’d say he’s a large deep-space combatant. Heavy cruiser maybe, or one of their big-ass space control cans.”

“Why would one of those come our way with the radio blaring?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“Well, it’s either a ruse to make us look one way while his buddies come from a different bearing, or—”

“He’s really in trouble and looking for help,” I finish.

“If he’s running from something, it’s not one of our guys on his ass,” Colonel Campbell says. “Every fleet unit in this system is in orbit around this rock right now. And if he’s not running from one of ours…”

Nobody finishes his sentence, but it feels like the temperature in the room just dropped by twenty degrees.

“Let’s hope it’s a ruse, and there’s an SRA task force heading our way,” Colonel Campbell concludes dryly. “At least that would give us a fighting chance.”

I spend the next hour on one of the consoles in the ops center. The console is linked to the computer in my battle armor, which is tapping into the data feed from the Indianapolis’s CIC. Sergeant Fallon knows tactical diagrams, but she’s not familiar with translating them four-dimensionally to make sense of things scattered across light-hours of space, so I explain them to her as we look at the feed from Indy’s sensor suite.

“If he’s sending a distress code, and he doesn’t care if we see him coming, maybe he has a legit emergency,” Sergeant Fallon suggests. “Stranger things have happened, right?”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” I say, and point out some markers on the plot. “Indy is marking his position every time he broadcasts his signal. See here? That’s Mark One. There’s Two. Three, Four, and Five. You extend the line through these marks, and he’s headed right for us. But if you follow it back and kind of eyeball the way he came…” I finish the arc with my index finger. “That’s the moon with the only SRA colony in the system. Even now, he’s a lot closer to it than he is to us. If it’s just a shipboard emergency, why wouldn’t he go to his own base instead of the enemy base on the other side of the system?”

“I don’t like that line of thought,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“Neither do I. The only thing that makes sense to me is that someone got the jump on the Russian base, and this cruiser got away. If that’s the case, then whatever flushed him our way will follow right behind sooner or later. And with the Alcubierre network offline, our backs are against the wall.”

“Alert the grunts?”

“Not yet. That SRA cruiser is still a long way out. And if he has a Lanky seed ship on his ass, it won’t make a bit of a difference. Might as well die well rested.”

“It’s the Arkhangelsk,” Colonel Campbell says over the encrypted downlink an hour later. “Fleet intel said she was in the system when we transitioned in, and the ELINT signature of the bogey matches. She’s one of their old Kirov-class cans. A little behind on tech these days, but tough ships. Lots of firepower. If he’s playing a trick and cruising for trouble, he’s a pretty even match for the task force.”

“I’d almost wish he’s doing just that,” I say.

“Something else—he’s not moving like he’s running from anything. He’s pulling a quarter-g acceleration. That’s less than what their slowest supply tin cans can make.”

“How long until he gets here?”

“At his current acceleration, it’ll take him eight days just to get to turnaround. Make it three weeks, give or take.”

“Has the task force picked him up yet?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Won’t be long, though,” Colonel Campbell says.

“What are they going to do when they spot him?” Sergeant Fallon asks. She has been following our tactical shoptalk quietly, clearly uncomfortable to be out of her area of expertise.

“Hard to say, with that desk pilot for a task force commander,” Colonel Campbell says. “But seeing how he handled the little mutiny, I’d put some money on him storming off to meet the threat.”

“It’s not like we’re going anywhere,” I say.

“I’m not in charge of your grunts, and I don’t want to be. It would be a little silly to pull rank at this point. But I suggest you get the shop down there prepared for action. SRA ruse or Lankies on that bogey’s tail, chances are someone’s about to disturb the peace pretty soon.”

“Right.” Sergeant Fallon sighs and looks at me. “Keep us posted on the bogey, Colonel. We’ll see what we can come up with down here. In the meantime, let’s hope that the Russian cruiser just had a fusion bottle fail or something. I’m not sure I’m prepared for the other scenarios yet.”

“Will do. Indianapolis Actual out.” The speaker in the comms console chirps the descending two-tone trill of a dropped tight-beam connection.

“Let’s pretend there’s a Lanky ship behind that cruiser coming our way,” Sergeant Fallon says. “With all that combat experience against them, what would you do?”

“Tuck tail and run,” I say. “Except there’s no place to run in this system, and the transition point out of here is closed.” I shrug. “Arm everyone to the teeth, issue every last rocket launcher and tactical nuke in the magazines. Hit ’em when they land and make them pay for the place. But if they want it, it’s theirs already.”

“Such defeatism. They teach you that in the fleet?”

She raps me on the back of my armor with her fist.

“Let’s go see the science crew. I want to see if those smart people have any ideas for making the event memorable. If I’m going to die, I want to at least make it into one of those ‘Epic Last Stands in History’ books.”