Marko Kloos - Lines of Departure

“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.

“I don’t know if that’s the most idiotic or the most brilliant plan I’ve ever heard,” Sergeant Fallon says dryly when Dr. Stewart ends the basic rundown of the idea we tossed around the night before.

“You want to use half of our spaceborne capability and fly it into a Lanky ship?” Colonel Campbell asks.

“It’s not like the Gordon is doing us much good right now anyway,” I say. “She delivered her payload, and right now she’s just a target. She’s not big enough to load up all the mudlegs, even if we had a place to take them. But she has docking collars and arrestor clamps for standard-sized cargo pods.”

“And we have plenty of those here on the moon,” Dr. Stewart continues. “We can fill them with water, shoot them into orbit, and load up the freighter with them. Increase the mass, give it extra reactor fuel. Maybe even flood the interior. Water doesn’t compress. She’d be able to pull a lot of acceleration.”

“And the crew? Are we going to have them run the ship in vac suits? And who’s going to volunteer for that one-way trip?”

“Nobody needs to,” I say. “She has fleet standard neural-networking gear, right? I can get together with your NN admin and the weapons officer, and we can send the Gordon off from the Indy ’s CIC.”

“You’re talking about hitting a bull’s-eye from, what, two AUs?” Colonel Campbell asks. “Even at one-g acceleration, you’re talking close to relativistic velocities. You won’t be able to correct the trajectory very well if the Lanky sees us coming.”

“It’s stupid.” Lieutenant Colonel Decker shakes his head. “Really stupid. You can’t hit anything at that range just by throwing a freighter at it.”

“Yes, you can,” Dr. Stewart says. “You’re talking about a three-kilometer target that’s a few hundred meters in diameter. Even at two AUs, that’s not an impossible shot for a computer.”

“If you’re wrong, we’ll be wasting that ship for nothing.”

“If I’m right , we’ll be hitting that Lanky ship with a few hundred gigatons’ worth of impact energy,” Dr. Stewart replies. “I don’t care what kind of nukes you’ve shot at them before, but I guarantee you that a twenty-thousand-ton freighter moving at a tenth of light speed is going to vaporize that Lanky.”

“A few hundred gigatons, huh?” Sergeant Fallon looks at the plot again and smiles a little. “I don’t know about you people, but I really like that number.”

There are a few moments of heated conversation in the ops center as all the civilians and soldiers in the room share their opinions of Dr. Stewart’s idea at the same time. From the sound of it, half the personnel in the room think it’s a workable plan, and the other half concur with the admin’s assessment that it’s criminally stupid. Then the chirp of the tight-beam connection from orbit cuts in as Colonel Campbell interjects.

“My weapons guy says it’s not even a difficult shot. Providing they stay on trajectory, of course.”

“Doesn’t matter even if they deviate,” Dr. Stewart says. “We send that ship off with four times the acceleration of the Lanky, we’ll have the edge no matter what they do. We can always adjust, and they won’t be able to avoid us.”