Marko Kloos - Lines of Departure

Dr. Stewart taps around on the screen of her data pad and furrows a brow.

“If the fleet would be a little more forthcoming with data on the Lankies instead of treating every little thing as a state secret, maybe we would have found a solution already. But I guess they don’t want to upset the civilians.”

She looks up at me with a frown.

“Anyone ever hit one of their ships with something really big?”

“Some cruiser skipper rammed one with his ship once. Didn’t work. Our biggest ships are a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand tons. Those seed ships are a few kilometers long. They probably weigh a few million tons. You drive a twenty-K cruiser against a seed ship, it won’t even slow ’em down.”

“That would depend on how fast you drive it,” Dr. Stewart says. “Their hulls may be so tough you can’t crack them with shipboard weapons, but those creatures are living, organic beings. They can’t be immune to physics. I guarantee that if we hit one of those seed ships hard enough, it’ll kill every living thing inside.”

“We haven’t made a dent with a few hundred megatons of nukes. You’d have to go pretty fast to hit them a lot harder than that.”

Dr. Stewart smiles and slurps more of her cold coffee.

“See, I may have a hard time thinking like a soldier, but you think too much like one. Forget gigatons . Start thinking like a scientist. Think exajoules. Petajoules . We don’t want a battle, we want to cause an astronomical event you’ll be able to see on Earth with a telescope in twenty-five years.”

I can’t help but smile at the idea of turning a Lanky seed ship into a new star in the Fomalhaut system.

“I’m all on board with that,” I say. “But how do we get there from here? All we have is that ancient unarmed freighter and a patrol ship. Like I said, not exactly a fearsome task force.”

“Think physics, not guns. A fist-sized rock isn’t so fearsome, right? But throw it at something at one-tenth the speed of light, and the impact energy would be enough to make life really interesting on this moon for a short time.”

She picks up her data pad again and starts scribbling on the screen with her finger.

“Say, how much does that freighter weigh?”

“Five, six thousand tons maybe,” I say. “Fully loaded, three or four times that. But you can’t just ram the thing into a Lanky ship.”

“Why not?”

“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.”

“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.

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 .