Angles of Attack (4 page)

Maybe the Lankies should have showed up a few thousand years ago.

CHAPTER 2

I’ve been in the fleet for five years, hopping ships every six months after combat-controller school, and I’ve never been on a Navigator-class supercarrier until this week. The Navigators are the pride of the fleet, half again as large by tonnage as the next-biggest class of carrier and easily the most powerful warships anyone has ever put into space. But they’re too rare and valuable to shove into the kind of action I’ve mostly seen in the last few years, so I’ve never gotten to walk the decks of one until now.  

The sheer size of the
Regulus
is exaggerated by the lack of personnel on board. I know the staffing levels of a carrier and the general amount of activity on board, and if I had to guess, I’d say that the
Regulus
is running ops with half her regular crew at the most. She was in for an overhaul and resupply at the Europa fleet yards when the Lankies appeared in the solar system and took Mars, and they pressed her into action with her maintenance crew and whatever personnel they could scrounge up at Europa. The NAC Defense Corps took the worst mauling of its history in the failed defense of Mars, and there isn’t much left to scrape out of the barrel.
Regulus
wasn’t ready for combat until the Battle of Mars was already over, and all that was left to do for her was to take her escorts and run. For all I know,
Regulus
may be the last of the Navigators by now. For all I know, we humans in the Fomalhaut system may be the last of our species.

The post-mission debriefing in the
Regulus
’s SpecOps detachment’s briefing room is an agreeably low-key affair. I was the only NAC combat controller on the ground, and the other fleet SpecOps guys in the room are two Spaceborne Rescuemen and a SEAL team from the
Regulus
, and three teams of SI recon from Camp Frostbite’s Spaceborne Infantry garrison. The
Midway
left half her embarked SI regiment at Frostbite when she tucked tail and ran with the rest of the task force.

I walk into the briefing room and take a chair in the back, behind the SEAL team and on the opposite side of the room from the SI recon guys. The short and violent bloodshed during our mutiny on New Svalbard is still fresh in everyone’s memory, and some of the SI troopers have given me hostile glances or made unfriendly remarks in the mess hall on our weeklong ride here. Until we’re back in orbit above New Svalbard, I’ll be doing my best to avoid getting caught in some low-traffic corner of this ship with half a dozen pissed-off space apes between me and the exit hatch.

The SpecOps commander on the
Regulus
is a hard-faced major named Kelly. He has prematurely gray hair and the worn-out, hard-lived look common to veteran fleet SpecOps personnel. Our lifestyle is extremely taxing on our bodies and minds, and most lifers in our branch look at least ten years older than their actual age.

“That was a by-the-book ass-kicking,” he says when he starts the debriefing by firing up the holographic display on the wall. “Zero podhead casualties on this one. One hundred seventy-nine confirmed Lanky kills, and another fifty-some likelies.”

We all cheer our approval in the appropriate muted and professional fashion. That’s by far the highest nonnuclear Lanky body count any unit has ever racked up in a single drop, and we did most of it the old-fashioned way, on the ground, with rifles and rockets and automatic cannons.  

“How many SI casualties? And, uh, SRA?” one of the SEALs asks.

“Nineteen KIA, twenty-some wounded,” the major replies. “Don’t have numbers for the Russians, but they had a lot fewer boots on the ground.”

“That’s not awful for a drop that size,” the lieutenant in charge of the SEAL team says. That is of course a massive understatement. We would have taken at least three times as many SI casualties just going up against an SRA garrison battalion or two. And nobody has ever gone up against the Lankies with an overstrength regiment from orbit, but the last time they showed up while we had a force that size on the ground, they wiped it out almost completely.

“ ‘Not awful’ is right,” Major Kelly says. “We just handed those skinny bastards a major ass-kicking going toe-to-toe, on their turf. If shit had gone half as well on the colonies the last few years, we’d have them on the run by now.”

“They were acting kind of odd,” I say, and most of the heads in the room swivel into my direction. “Anyone else notice that? They were nowhere near as aggressive as they usually are. Sluggish, almost.”

“Yeah,” the SEAL lieutenant says. “Like they were drowsy or something.”

“Maybe we got ’em demoralized,” one of the SI recon guys offers, and the SEAL lieutenant snorts a brief laugh.

“They were without their mother ship,” Major Kelly says. “Which is why they got their asses kicked, of course, but maybe there’s something else to that. Maybe they were short on something that went nova with that seed ship. Supplies? Who the fuck knows.”

“They didn’t have anything set up on the surface,” I say. “I went through all the recon data before and after the drop. Not a single Lanky terraformer, or whatever the fuck they call theirs. They didn’t even manage to tear down all the SRA stations, and that’s usually their first order of business. Two-thirds of the SRA terraforming network is still up and running down there.”

“If I had to guess?” Major Kelly says. “We blew up their chow and their building supplies when we took out their ship. There weren’t enough Lankies on the ground, either. Not for a colony takeover. There’s thousands of those things in a seed ship.”

“Those were just the advance recon team or something,” someone else in the room suggests. “Ship skips by the moon, dumps the advance team, goes gunning for that SRA cruiser, gets blown to shit by the New Svalbard people.”

“Advance team gets stranded without support on the SRA moon,” Major Kelly adds. “So we basically kicked their asses because they were underfed and aimless.”

The major’s statement hangs in the room for a moment like an unwelcome after-lunch fart. Nobody wants to think that our first major military success against the Lankies—heroic rescue of colonists!—was mostly due to the fact that the Lankies may have been too weak to put up a decent fight. Then Major Kelly shrugs and shakes his head.

“Whatever. Don’t really give a shit about the why and how. Most of our guys made it back, and most of theirs are full of holes. That’s a successful mission right there. Too bad it probably won’t make a damn bit of a difference in the long run. Go and relax, people. We have a six-day ride back to New Svalbard. May be the last R and R any of us get for a long time.”

Or for good
, I think. I check my new loaner PDP for the date. It’s April 3, 2116, and I have less than three months to get back home to Earth if I don’t want to be late for my own wedding. I don’t know if Earth is still there, but I don’t even want to contemplate the possibility that Halley may not be there anymore. If this refugee United Nations strike force is going back to the solar system, I’m going, too.

The
Regulus
has state-of-the-art recreational facilities for its crew. I’ve seen a lot of fleet rec centers in my service—Halley and I usually get together at RecFacs whenever we have leave together, because we’re often too far away from Earth to make it back there before our leave time is up—and I can say that this one is the nicest I’ve seen yet. Still, I can’t get any enjoyment out of any of the offerings. It all seems so trite all of a sudden—simulators, canned Network shows bundled for fleet personnel who may be on deployment for a show’s entire Earthside run, pool and gaming holotables, and dozens of other ways for stressed-out warfighters to turn off their brains and find some diversion. All this stuff seems pointless now, with most of the fleet gone and the solar system under siege by a near-unbeatable enemy. I realize that I never liked the RecFacs anyway, and that I only ever enjoyed them because they were the only places where I got to spend some alone time with Halley in the private berths.

At least the place has sports facilities for team games and solitary workouts, so I use my downtime to sweat. There’s a running track that winds its way through the rec deck of the
Regulus
, and because it’s a big ship, it’s a long track, two kilometers of black rubberized decking with a fat white line running down the center, snaking through the many compartments. It’s quite possibly the height of vanity, considering the overall state of humanity right now, but sitting on New Svalbard, I put on a few extra pounds with the mess-hall chow at Camp Frostbite, and I want to be in the best possible shape when I see my fiancée again. There’s a better-than-even chance my once again trim body will be an expanding cloud of superheated debris in a few weeks, long before we get even within sight of Earth, but running is a good thing to do right now. It feels normal, and I can stand some of that at the moment, because everything else doesn’t.

I don’t belong on this ship. I have a loaner berth and a loaner armor set, but I don’t know a soul on the
Regulus
. The SI troopers from the
Midway
who embarked with me on this drop are quartered in the section of the ship that usually hosts the
Regulus
’s own SI regiment. I took a berth in the NCO quarters of the fleet section, well away from the
Midway
grunts, and with the
Regulus
running a skeleton crew, it’s a pretty quiet run back to New Svalbard. For the first time in weeks, I don’t have access to an all-seeing ship network or external sensor arrays, and I’m just another passenger. I sleep, I eat, I work out, and I go out of my way not to have to talk to anyone except the occasional SEAL or Spaceborne Rescue podhead in line for chow. When we arrive back in orbit over New Svalbard after six days of boring and uneventful interplanetary cruise, I’m so bored that I almost wish we had another Lanky on our tail and just a few days to find a way to kill it.

“You look like you need some of the local rotgut,” Sergeant Fallon says by way of greeting when I walk down the ramp of the
Regulus
drop ship that ferried me down to New Svalbard’s airfield. The weather has gotten a lot worse in the week I was gone. The snowdrifts by the sides of the squat hangars nearby are four or five meters high, and there’s a sixty-knot polar wind blowing across the open space and whipping the snow sideways. Sergeant Fallon is in her battle armor, which is ice-caked, and she only raises her visor briefly when she walks up to me to help me with my gear.