Angles of Attack (33 page)

The drop ship detaches from the docking clamp, and I turn on the networked feed in my suit and tap into the outside cameras the way I like to do whenever I am along as a passenger and not doing a combat drop. We drop free from
Indy
, and the pilot takes us into a gentle descending turn to port.

“Holy hell,” I say out loud when I see the battle damage on
Indy
’s hull with my own eyes for the first time. The holes in the forward port section are each at least two meters across, and the exit hole closest to the bow section caused a lot of ancillary damage. Two of
Indy
’s missile-launch-tube covers are gone, and several square meters of hull plating around the open tubes are torn and buckled from the sudden high-velocity passage of the Lanky penetrators. Such a simple weapon, and so effective against a species that needs to ride in air-filled shells to survive out in space.

I watch
Indy
recede on my helmet display until all I can see of the stealthy OCS is a cluster of flashing navigation lights approaching the much bigger bulk of the fleet supply ship
Portsmouth
. Her streamlined little hull looks tiny against the backdrop of the gas giant behind New Svalbard and the vastness of the space beyond.

The atmospheric part of the ride is less serene than the space phase. We get bumped around a bit as the shearing winds in New Svalbard’s atmosphere buffet the drop ship left and right, up and down. After a month of smooth zero-gravity ops, it’s a little jarring to get tossed around again like a pebble in a can. I keep my helmet display active and do my usual all-aspect feed from every camera at once, which cuts down on the motion sickness.

Twenty thousand feet above New Longyearbyen and fifteen kilometers away, the cloud cover breaks and gives way to a pale blue sky. Below us, the white expanses of the snow-covered tundra belt stretch as far as I can see, all the way to the distant mountain ranges to our north and south. To our starboard, a white exhaust plume rising from a large flat building marks the location of one of the moon’s sixty-four terraforming stations, which are strung along the tundra belt like a girdle, one every hundred and fifty kilometers.

The drop-ship pilot makes a low pass over the town as we come in for a landing at the airfield. I look down at the bunker-like colony housing, each a windowless ferroconcrete dome thick enough to withstand two-hundred-kilometer winds and several meters of snow load. The streets down here are laid out in a way that minimizes alleys for the driving winter winds to funnel through, so New Longyearbyen looks a little bit like a fractal pattern from above. I see several of the colony’s tracked snow-movers out on the streets, and even a few people bundled up in hostile environment garb. I know the outside temperature is low enough to shock-freeze exposed flesh in just a few seconds, but after a month in a tiny OCS, I am looking forward to walking in a continuous straight line for a few minutes without having to step across bulkhead thresholds or change directions at gangway intersections every twenty-five meters.

The drop ship touches down on the airfield’s vertical landing pad a few minutes later. The tail ramp lowers to reveal a busy stretch of tarmac. There are several rows of drop ships parked in front of the nearby hangars, NAC Wasps and Dragonflies shoulder to shoulder with SRA Akulas. A Dragonfly and an Akula are standing nearby on the VSTOL pad, with the engines running and navigation lights blinking.

Dmitry and I walk down the ramp and onto solid ground for the first time in almost a month. I suppress the urge to kneel down and kiss the frigid concrete, which would probably cost me my lips. Dmitry shoulders his kit bag and nods at me.

“Good luck, Andrew. I do not think I will see you again.”

I hold out my good hand, and he shakes it firmly.

“Good luck, Dmitry,” I say. “See you on the battlefield some day. Hopefully on the same side.”

“Is not likely. But I will not forget what you did. You come defect to Alliance, I put in good word for you. Maybe even make you senior sergeant.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“
Do svidaniya
,” he says. Then he turns to walk toward the waiting Akula parked across the landing pad.

There’s plenty of activity on the airfield, but I don’t see any familiar faces here to meet me. I walk into the control building and down to the access tunnel that leads to the Ellipse, a kilometer and a half away, and start walking, grateful for the solitude and the opportunity to stretch my legs.

The Ellipse is as busy as it was when I left New Longyearbyen a month ago. Civilian ice miners and their families are mingling with soldiers in Homeworld Defense uniforms and the occasional Spaceborne Infantry smock. There’s music coming from some of the vendor stalls, and I can smell fried food in the air down here, a scent that makes my stomach lurch. Food vendors down here either mean that the supply situation isn’t desperate yet, or the official supply is bad enough to spur black-market demand. I know a thing or two about economics in a shortage zone from my formative years trading stolen shit in the PRC back home.

I make my way through the foot traffic, feeling vaguely out of place in my bulky hardshell battle armor, and head for the admin center, which is naturally almost at the opposite end of the Ellipse from the terminus of the airfield access tunnel.

Chief Constable Guest’s office is one of the first rooms beyond the entry vestibule of the admin center. The door is open, and when I peek inside, the constable is behind his desk. He has his humongous boots propped up on the desk, and there’s a data pad on his lap. He sees me in the doorway and does a little double take.

“How do you even get boots in that size?” I ask. “I swear, I’ve seen armored vehicles with narrower tracks.”

“Special order. Takes six months to get a pair from Earth. Well, used to, anyway.” Constable Guest puts down his data pad and swings his legs off the desktop. Then he gets out of his chair and comes over to the door.

“Good to see you back,” he says. “I knew
Indy
was entering orbit, but I figured it’d be another three or four hours before they send a drop ship down.” He looks at my bandaged hand and raises an eyebrow. “That doesn’t look too good.”

“It’s not great,” I say. “I’ll have to take my boots off in the future whenever I have to count to ten.”

“See a doc about that yet?”

“We sort of had to leave Gateway in a hurry. I’ve had the corpsman on
Indy
look at it.”

“You still need to go and have one of our docs fix you up. The clinic is down here on the ground floor, at the end of Hallway C and to the right.”

“I’ll go see ’em soon enough,” I say. “No hurry. Fingers are gone, no going back on that. Have you seen Sergeant Fallon around?” I ask, partially to change the subject.

Constable Guest scratches the top of his head. “Check the ops center. If she’s not there, she’s probably either up in the science section with Dr. Stewart, or over at On the Rocks. Also with Dr. Stewart.”

“What is Master Sergeant Fallon doing with the head of your science mission? Is she getting some schooling in astrophysics?”

Constable Guest smiles and shakes his head. “I think their mutual interests are more in the field of chemistry. Distillation, to be specific.”

I leave my armor in a corner of Constable Guest’s office next to the rack holding his well-worn M-66 carbine in its DNA-locked safety clamp. Then I walk over to the ops center and stick my head into the room, but it’s mostly empty except for three civvies and two troopers in HD uniforms I don’t know. Dr. Stewart’s office in the science section is empty as well except for an impressive amount of clutter on her desk that looks like a scientific experiment on the limits of static design. I jog down the staircase to the underground passage into the Ellipse, eager to catch up with my friend and former squad leader.

On the Rocks is noisy and a bit raucous. There are tables and chairs on the outside of the bar taking up space on the Ellipse, and people are drinking and talking out here at a volume that can be heard fifty meters beyond the nearest bend. I make my way through the little maze of tables and walk into the bar, which is packed to the last table. The people here are mostly civilian workers. A few of the tables have soldiers sitting at them, most in Homeworld Defense uniforms. The soldier and civvie tables are segregated except for one table in the corner of the room. Sergeant Fallon sits with her back to the wall, facing the door, engrossed in conversation with Dr. Stewart. I walk up to the table, and she looks up when she notices my presence.

“Andrew,” she says. Then she gets up from her chair and gives me a fierce one-armed hug that squeezes the air out of my lungs. “I am ridiculously glad that you aren’t dead.”

“That makes two of us,” I say, and she laughs. From the way she has to steady herself very slightly before letting go of me tells me that whatever distillation-related business she has been practicing with Dr. Stewart has been going on for a little while already.

“Sit, and have a goddamn drink, Staff Sergeant Grayson. That’s an order.”

She sits back down and pushes back a chair for me. Dr. Stewart watches our little glad-you’re-back exchange with wry amusement.

“Janet,” I say. “Good to see you again.”

“And you, Andrew. How was the trip to Earth?”

“I’ve had more fun,” I say. Then I sit down on the offered chair and hold up my bandaged hand. “But we got it done. In a fashion.”

“Never doubted it,” Sergeant Fallon says. “What happened to the hand?”

“Civilian security cop on Independence shot off two fingers. It’s a long story.”

“Well, we have nothing but time,” Sergeant Fallon says. She gets up from her chair again and pats my shoulder as she squeezes past me. “Talk amongst yourselves while I go and get us another round. And then you’ll tell me what went down on that mission.”

The first Shockfrost cocktail goes down smoothly and quickly, so I chase it with another. My hand is aching again, that unpleasant deep and painful throbbing that comes with deep tissue damage, and I use the last third of the second glass to wash down a pair of Corpsman Randall’s little chemical helpers. Then I run Sergeant Fallon and Dr. Stewart through the events of the mission from my perspective. By the time I am finished, the alcohol has warmed me up considerably, and the painkillers have started to deliver the goods.

“We got the big picture from the post-op briefings your skipper sent back. They’ve had a bunch of meetings about it already. My God, so much talking. And it’s all like a snake biting its own tail. Never gets anywhere.” Sergeant Fallon takes a sip from her own drink.

“What’s the story on
Midway
? When did they rejoin the party?”

Sergeant Fallon’s expression darkens. “That chickenshit fuckstick of a reservist,” she says. “We sent them messages constantly after you left. They were all the way in deep space, trying to map a sublight path back to Earth, as if they had thirty years’ worth of reactor fuel with them. Week or so ago, they came limping back with dry water tanks. And get this: The task force CO tries to claim command. Of all the Commonwealth units in the system. Because he has a golden wreath and a star on his shoulder boards, see.”