Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 25} OPERATION DOORKNOCKER

Outside, the weather has improved a little over the zero-visibility blizzard that kept us inside yesterday. The snow has slacked off, but the cold winds that are whipping through the spaces between the reinforced concrete domes of the airfield buildings are still bitingly cold.

I walk out of the airfield’s control building and immediately have to suppress the urge to lower the visor of my helmet. Dr. Stewart, who is following me onto the tarmac, is wearing a borrowed military vacsuit that looks about five sizes too big for her.

Out on the landing pad in front of the main hangar, one of our hijacked Dragonflies is standing with the tail ramp open and the engines running. Even though the fleet units are out on an intercept trajectory several hours out from New Svalbard, using a third of our offensive air power to shuttle two people up to the Indianapolis seems exceedingly wasteful and unwise, but the Indy’s stealth birds don’t have passenger capability and can’t pick us up.

“When’s the last time you’ve been up in space?” I ask Dr. Stewart as we walk up the Dragonfly’s ramp. She is eyeing the interior of the cargo bay, which is lined with the usual complement of sling seats for fully armored combat grunts.

“Not since I arrived here,” she replies. “Three years, nine months. I’ve never hitched a ride in one of these, though.”

“Dragonfly-class drop ship. It’s a mean little beast. Holds a full platoon of Spaceborne Infantry in armor and does the fire support once the troops are on the ground.”

“It looks mean,” she concurs.

There’s no loadmaster, just the two pilots up front. I walk over to the loadmaster console and tap into the cockpit comms.

“Passengers loaded. Give us thirty seconds to strap in, and then let’s get her upstairs. Are you sure you’re qualified to do orbital docking maneuvers?”

“Yeah, no sweat,” the pilot replies in the lazy drawl they seem to teach in Combat Flight School. “I’ve read the manual. Can’t be all that hard if the fleet jocks can do it.”

Dr. Stewart is struggling with the harness of one of the passenger seats, and I walk over and help her with the straps.

“Thanks,” she says. She looks about as nervous as I felt when I took my first drop-ship ride in a Territorial Army Wasp, five years and half a lifetime ago on Earth. I check her helmet seal and plug her suit and helmet into the ship’s oxygen and comms circuits.

“If we get decompression, your helmet shield will lower automatically. That won’t happen, though. There’s nothing around that can shoot at us. So just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

I take the seat next to hers and strap myself in. The pitch of the engines changes, and I can feel the Dragonfly lifting off the deck. Then we’re in forward motion, and a few moments later the pilot goes full throttle and points the ship into the sky. I tap into the optical systems of the Dragonfly and watch the feed from the multitude of external sensors on the hull.

“You want to see your little moon from above?” I ask Dr. Stewart over the intercom link.

“Can I?” She looks around. “This thing doesn’t have any windows.”

I reach over and lower the visor on her helmet. Then I share the camera feed with her and cycle it through the multitude of views from the optical array. The sky over the settlement is the color of dirty snow. The cloud cover stretches from horizon to horizon now, and as we ascend through the low clouds hanging over New Longyearbyen, the seventy-ton drop ship gets buffeted by the winds.

“We really weren’t meant to live in places like this,” I say.

“Why not?” she asks.

“So much effort just to stay alive,” I say. “Ten years of terraforming, and if I step out of the admin building without heated armor, I’ll be dead from exposure within fifteen minutes.”

“That’s what we do,” Dr. Stewart says. “As a species, I mean. Earth is no cozy womb, either. Never has been. This is no worse than Antarctica, and we’ve had cities there for half a century now. You’ve been around the colonies, haven’t you?”

“You could say that.”

“Then you know how much we can adapt. We have to. Earth is getting too small for all of us.”

I think of the place where I lived until I joined the service—humans stuffed into concrete shoeboxes and stacked a hundred high, then crammed next to each other for dozens of square miles. Weekly food allowances, occasional treats through vouchers for better food, and a small hope for a shot at a better life, the colony lottery. I know damn well that Earth is already too small for us, but I also know how small the colonies are, how long it takes to make a planet or moon even minimally habitable, and how quickly the population grows back home even with mandatory birth control in the food for welfare rats. We were running out of time long before the Lankies started to take everything away from us again. As a species, they seem much better at the adaptation game.

The cloud cover on New Svalbard seems to extend forever. When we finally break out of the zero-visibility layer of white that covers this part of the moon like a shroud, the altimeter readout from the computer shows twenty thousand feet. The sky is the color of cobalt, with the far-off sun a small but bright sphere near the cloud horizon, and the much closer blue orb of Fomalhaut c taking up a quarter of the sky behind us. Fomalhaut c is the gas planet around which New Svalbard orbits, twice as far away from its parent sun than Neptune is distant from the sun in our home system. It’s a pretty sight, but it reminds me of the mind-boggling vastness of the universe, and how far away from other members of our species we are right now.

The pilot takes a conservative ascent into orbit to save fuel, so we have thirty minutes to gaze at the scenery before we approach the Indianapolis in orbit. The orbital combat ship is built for stealth, and I don’t even see it until the pilot calls in docking clearance, and the Indy lights up her positional illumination. Twenty degrees off our port bow, a sleek ship appears out of nowhere, a vague indication of shape only illuminated by blinking station lights. As we draw nearer, I get my first look at the exterior of a Constitution-class OCS. It looks a little like a Lanky ship in miniature, all curves and streamlined surfaces, almost organic in appearance. The drop ship draws closer and positions itself underneath the Indy for the automated docking procedure, but even from just a hundred meters away, I can’t make out any exposed antennas or exhausts, just a series of openings near the tail end that look more like gills than thrust nozzles.

A few minutes later, the hull shudders slightly as the docking clamps attach to the Dragonfly and pull the drop ship up into the hangar of the Indianapolis. The status light on the loadmaster’s panel across the aisle turns from red to green, and the deployment light above the tail ramp follows suit. I shut off the sensor feed from the sensors and raise my visor.

“You can unbuckle,” I tell Dr. Stewart.

“Is there a procedure for stepping on a navy ship? Like, do I have to wipe my feet or something?”

“I’ll handle that,” I say, and return Dr. Stewart’s wry smile.

I get out of my seat and walk over to the loadmaster console to unlock the tail ramp. It comes open with the familiar soft hydraulic whining and reveals the small craft hangar of the Indianapolis beyond.

The Indy’s hangar is claustrophobically tiny. As we walk down the laminate steel ramp of the Dragonfly, I look around and see that the drop ship fills out most of the available space. I see a refuel probe, an automated ordnance loader, and very little else aside from two deckhands stepping up to the ship to check for ordnance to secure. There’s a corporal in fleet fatigues with a PDW slung across his chest standing by the bulkhead in front of us. I stop at the end of the tail ramp and salute the NAC colors painted on the bulkhead above the corporal’s head.

“Permission to come aboard to report to the CO,” I say.

The corporal returns my salute. “Permission granted,” he says.

I step off the ramp and onto the deck, and Dr. Stewart follows me. “That is one small hangar,” I say to the corporal as we step up to the hatch. “Smallest one of any boat I’ve ever been on.”

“We don’t have an air/space complement except for the two stealth birds,” the corporal says. “And those have their own berths in the hull. Hangar’s just for ferry flights and visitors.”

“I see.” I look back over my shoulder and see that the wingtips of the Dragonfly are barely far enough away from the walls to let an ordnance cart squeeze past.

“Well, it’s not a carrier,” he says. The hatch in front of him opens silently. “But everything’s new and shiny. Best galley in the fleet, I guarantee it.”

Colonel Campbell stands at the tactical display with his arms folded when I enter the CIC with Dr. Stewart in tow. He turns around and briefly returns my salute before offering his hand.

“Welcome aboard, ma’am,” he says to Dr. Stewart. “You’re the first civilian on this ship since the shakedown cruise.”

“Thank you,” she replies. “Your ship is, uh, impressive.”

“Hardly,” he smiles. “We’re a glorified patrol boat. But thanks for the compliment.” He offers his hand to me as well, and I shake it.

“Mr. Grayson. Good to see you in one piece. Looks like you’ve been around since I last saw you.”

The last time I saw Colonel Campbell, he was a commander. They changed the service structure around us about a year after our first tiff with the Lankies on Capella Ac, where both the commander and I had a ringside seat to First Contact. The commander was the executive officer on my first navy assignment, and that ship ended up scattered all over Capella Ac as fine debris.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone. Combat controller for the last three years.”

Colonel Campbell nods. “I knew you’d get bored as a console jockey. First time you reported to me on Versailles, you already had a drop badge and a Bronze Star on your smock.”

The CIC is a very intimate little affair, just like everything else on this ship. It has a half dozen people in it, less than a third the staff of a carrier’s nerve center. Indy’s XO is a short and stocky sandy-haired woman who is introduced by Colonel Campbell as Major Renner. She returns my salute and shakes hands with Dr. Stewart.

“I guess we ought to get down to business,” I say. “Mind if I call home and then set up with your Neural Networks and Weapons guys?”

“She’s all yours,” Colonel Campbell says. “And I think I speak for everyone in our sorry little excuse for a fleet when I say ‘aim well.’ We have one round and no reloads.”

“Fallon, this is Grayson. I am set up on Indy and ready to kick off Doorknocker.”

Operation Doorknocker is our fancy term for the Freighter of Doom plan that is still under revision even as we are getting ready to send the Gary I. Gordon on her way. I never understood why the fleet likes to name non-martial ships like fleet tenders after ground-pounder war heroes, but I think that her namesake—a Medal of Honor winner who defended an air crew to the death in some police action in the pre-NAC days—would approve of us using his ship to try to score the first Lanky seed-ship kill in history.

“Grayson, Fallon. Understood. The ground crews are still filling the last batch of cargo pods with liquid refreshments. They should be on the way into orbit in about ninety.”

The colonial ground crews are doing their usual jobs of filling standard fleet cargo pods with water and launching them into orbit to be picked up for replenishment. The fleet uses water as reactor fuel and for the usual human uses, and New Svalbard is one of our intergalactic watering holes. Once they are in orbit, the freighter uses its orbital tugs to collect the pods and attach them to the pod clamps on the outside of the ship. The crew of the Gordon rigged a system that will allow us to remotely flood the interior spaces of the ship with the contents of one of those cargo pods, using transfer pumps and the ship’s own cargo redistribution lines in a highly irregular manner that required the overriding of every major and minor safety protocol. According to the science crew, the incompressible water will make the ship a more effective projectile and more resilient to withstand the four-g sustained acceleration needed to intercept the Lanky seed ship at its calculated turnover point.

“Bogey is now two mil kilometers from the Russian,” the tactical officer says behind me. I turn to watch the plot, where the red icon for the SRA cruiser and the orange one for the Lanky have almost merged on the holographic display.

“Uh-oh,” Colonel Campbell says. “Looks like the fleet has picked up our hard-shelled friends. Battle group is changing course and acceleration.”

On the plot, the icon cluster for the fleet task force—the Midway and her escorts—breaks away from the intercept trajectory it has been on for the last twelve hours. They’re a half AU away from New Svalbard, seventy-five million kilometers, and still two hundred million kilometers from the Russian and its Lanky pursuer.

“Are they reversing?” I ask.

Colonel Campbell shakes his head without taking his eyes off the plot. “No. They’re running.”

He magnifies the relevant section of the display and spins it to orient the tactical symbols in a plane I can see.

“They’ve accelerated. I’m guessing by the rate they’re going for maximum burn. And they’re headed ninety degrees away from our incoming party guests. Into deep space.”

“They’re running,” I repeat. I want to get angry at the fact that the task force commander has chosen to make discretion the better part of valor instead of returning to us to defend the only NAC settlement in the system from almost certain annihilation, but part of me can’t fault him. Part of me would rather be on the Midway right now. They may just be the last humans alive in the Fomalhaut system once we’ve all played our hands.

“Smart,” Colonel Campbell echoes my thoughts. “Not brave, but sensible.”

“Bogey will intercept the cruiser in fifteen minutes,” the tactical officer announces. I notice that he doesn’t refer to the SRA ship as a bogey as well. I watch the red icon on its futile, limping run away from the monster that’s chasing it. A week or a month ago I would have cheered the prospect of blotting a Russian space control cruiser from the plot, but now my stomach clenches at the thought of the poor bastards who have fifteen minutes of existence left before the Lanky overtakes them and shotguns their ship from bow to stern with yard-thick spikes that will crack open every pressurized compartment they have left.

We keep watching the plot as the minutes tick down on the CIC’s clock. It’s like watching a condemned prisoner squirming on the gurney as the executioner approaches. The distance between the icons decreases until they look like they’re on top of each other even at maximum display magnification.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” the tactical officer calls out. “Two hundred…one-fifty…one hundred…”

He brings up the video feed from the central optical array and superimposes it on the tactical plot. The Russian cruiser is a little gray dot in the middle of the segment. I don’t see the Lanky at all.

“Fifty. Twenty-five. They should be overtaking them right…about…now.”

I still don’t see the Lanky ship on the screen, but suddenly there’s a bright flash of light, searing and white-hot even at this distance and magnification. Then the Russian cruiser is an expanding ball of fire that rapidly scatters and disperses into the blackness of space.

“What the hell was that?” the tactical officer asks.

“Nuclear detonation,” I say. That wasn’t a fusion bottle letting go after battle damage, but a high-yield atomic warhead going off in hard vacuum.

“Son of a bitch,” Colonel Campbell says, with something akin to respect in his voice. “They launched their nukes at contact range.”

“Did they kill the Lanky?” Dr. Stewart asks. She looks nauseated.

“Not likely,” Colonel Campbell says even before the tactical officer checks the optical feed to answer her question. “That wasn’t their goal anyway, just a possible fringe benefit.”

“They went out on their own terms,” I say. “Launched the nukes to kill themselves and possibly the Lanky, too.”

“That is insane,” Dr. Stewart says.

“You’ve never seen a ship that was hit by a Lanky broadside,” I reply. “People getting sheared in half by a Lanky penetrator. Running out of air. Those are some shitty ways to die. Nuclear fireball? Instant oblivion.”

“And a last ‘fuck you’ to the other team,” Colonel Campbell says.

“I have the Lanky back on optics,” the tactical officer says. “He’s backlit from the nuke right now. Same speed and heading. Didn’t even slow down for the intercept.”

“Or from getting twenty megatons right in the kisser,” Colonel Campbell says. “Keep tracking him until you lose him, and then have the computer track his trajectory with the optical array, same speed. He’ll turn invisible on us again sooner or later. Let’s make sure we can find him again.”

“Well, there we have it,” I say to the CIC in general. Then I send a transmission down to New Longyearbyen.

“Fallon, Grayson. The Lanky has overtaken the Russian. He’s coming our way now, same trajectory.” I don’t have to mention that the SRA cruiser is now a cloud of debris vapor still traveling at one-quarter-g acceleration.

“Copy that,” Sergeant Fallon sends back. “It’s all on you now. Doorknocker commences in sixty minutes. Keep me posted. Fallon out.”

There are no windows in the CIC—the combat information center is always deep in the center of a warship, where it’s most protected—but I can tap into the numerous optical sensors on the outside of the hull. Below us, New Svalbard is a cold, white ball of frozen ground and ice, barely more hospitable than the rest of this system. Fomalhaut c looks ethereal in its almost translucent presence, blue storm swirls the size of entire Earth continents rippling on its surface. Somewhere in the black void beyond, toward the Fomalhaut star that is twinkling brightly in the distance, there’s a Lanky seed ship coming for us, and all the plans we’re making right now feel a little bit like the battle strategies of cockroaches who see the boot coming down on them.

Still, we gear up to throw our rocks and give them the finger because that’s what we do. The Russian cruiser captain, or whoever had survived to remain in command over there, did exactly that when the boot came down on him, and if our water-laden kinetic missile fails to hit the target, I hope to go out in a similar way. Not that anybody would ever know.

We spend the last hour before the launch double- and triple-checking all the numbers, and then starting over and checking them again from scratch. Dr. Stewart has gotten the same response from the computer every time, and she still verifies everything by hand and with her data pad. The Neural Networks guy on the Indy is a sergeant who looks to be about my age. He graduated Neural Networks School the same year I did, two classes before me, and it occurs to me that he is exactly where I would be at this point in my career if I hadn’t opted to go for the combat-controller track because I got bored watching progress bars all day long. In an alternate universe, I may be the one sitting in the Networks Center of the Indianapolis right now, with some other combat controller looking over my shoulder. Maybe in yet another alternate universe, we’re still in the task force that’s running away, or we’re part of the debris cloud that’s now dispersed behind the approaching Lanky.

I watch as the Indy’s Networks administrator systematically disables all the fail-safes and security protocols on the Gordon’s shipboard network. I went to Networks School and had his job for over a year in the fleet, so I know that some of the things he’s doing are supposed to be impossible to do, and very definitely in violation of fleet regulations. It’s also how I know that he is good at his job and not just one of the bottom 10 percent of his tech school class.

“I’m probably the first Neural guy in the fleet who has ever gotten to do this in real life,” he says as he digs his way through yet another subsystem of the Gordon’s central computer. “Pissing on every safety reg in the book.”

“They’ll bust you back to private and drum you out without your end-of-service bonus,” I say, and he grins.

“Please,” he says.

Without the crew on board and with all her hollow spaces filled with water, the Gordon will be able to pull much more sustained acceleration, and the reactor won’t need to spend any of its energy budget keeping the artificial-gravity deck plates energized. What we’re about to do has never been done, not even with a target ship, and it’s only even possible because the Gordon has military-grade propulsion and computer systems, to keep up and interface with the fleet units she was built to support. Still, nobody has ever thought of pushing a military freighter to four gravities of sustained acceleration and keeping her there for thirty-five hours. We are truly on the cutting edge of desperate measures.

“That was the last one,” the Networks admin says. “The reactor output fail-safe and automatic shutdown. Unhackable, they said in tech school.”

“There’s no such thing,” I say.

“There’s only the fear of a court-martial.” He taps his screen and initiates the reactor warm-up. “Fifteen minutes to one hundred and ten percent. This baby will go out of the starting blocks like a fighter.”

I watch through the external feed as the automated tugs wrestle the two remaining cargo pods into position and lock them into place. The freighter itself is a long, knobby hull with a command section at the front and an engine section aft, connected by a long spine. The external cargo pods all connect to the spine of the ship and form the bulk of the Gordon’s hull. Each cargo pod can be jettisoned separately for orbital drop—an easier and cheaper method than ferrying everything down to the surface with atmospheric craft.

The Networks admin lets out a low whistle.

“Gross weight is forty-three thousand metric tons,” he says. “I think that’s a class record. The water in the main hull added damn near eight thousand tons.”

Dr. Stewart taps around a bit on her data pad and lets out a whistle of her own.

“If this thing hits—when it hits—we’re going to need some heavy-duty eye protection back here. Because the impact energy will be two hundred gigatons. Give or take a few depending on how much water she burns along the way.”

There are general sounds of amazement and appreciation in the CIC. The nukes in the tubes of all the task force ships put together probably total less than a thousandth of that yield.

“If we miss that shot, it will be the biggest waste of ordnance in the history of space warfare,” the tactical officer says.

“Then let’s not miss.” Colonel Campbell looks up at the time readout on the CIC bulkhead. “Is the Lanky still where we want him to be?”

“He’s skipping in and out. Sensors keep losing him, but the computer is tracking his projected path with the optics. Every once in a while, we get a reflection, and he pops back into the visible spectrum. He’s right on track. One-gravity acceleration. Thirty-six hours, eleven minutes, and three seconds to turnaround. Unless the Lankies have a way to negate physics and stop their ships on a dime without having to counter-burn,” the weapons officer adds.

“Well, let’s hope they don’t. XO, reset the shot clock. Prep for send-off. Weps and Networks, whenever you’re ready.”

At minus thirty-six hours and three minutes, the Networks administrator opens the throttles on the Gordon’s fusion rocket engines and increases the reactor output to 110 percent, emergency military power. The Gary I. Gordon leaps out of her orbital parking spot like a MARS missile popping out of the launcher tube, faster than I have ever seen a warship accelerate from a dead start, let alone a fifty-year-old freighter. We had debated using the gravity well of Fomalhaut c by slingshotting the freighter around it, but with all the reactor power being available for the engines, we concluded that the risk of losing telemetry and having an unfortunate freighter/planet interface wasn’t worth the extra acceleration out of the starting block. We’ve slaved the navigation system and thrust controls of the Gordon to the neural network on the Indianapolis, and now the freighter is a giant guided missile, unmanned, with the remote control sitting in front of me in the CIC.

“Send a courtesy message to the Midway and her entourage,” Colonel Campbell says. “Tell them to stay clear of that neighborhood. Not that they’ll need the encouragement.”

The comms officer does as instructed, and I take the opportunity to contact the ops center down in New Longyearbyen’s admin center.

“Fallon, this is Grayson. Operation Doorknocker is in progress. Time to target is thirty-six hours.”

“Rolled the dice and bet the house on one throw,” Sergeant Fallon replies. “Are you staying up there, Andrew?”

“Affirmative. Thirty-six hours to go, I’ll be backing up their Networks guy so we don’t have to pop a bunch of go-pills.”

“Makes sense. I’ll inform the troops down here.” There’s a brief pause. “If we miss, how long until our party crashers arrive?”

“They’re going a steady one-g, so once they flip and accelerate the other way, seventy hours.”

“One hundred and six hours, then. Guess I don’t have to have everyone lock and load just yet. Good luck, Andrew. If we miss, get your butt back down here so we can do our epic last stand together.”

“That’s affirmative, Sarge,” I say. “Grayson out.”

I turn around and watch the tactical display. The Gordon is out of sight of the low-power optics already, but on the plot, she has barely moved toward the Lanky. Blue icon accelerating toward orange icon, irresistible force hurling itself against immovable object.

Don’t you fucking miss, I think. I’ll be in deep shit if I don’t make it back for my own wedding.