Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(19)
We roll through the semidarkness in silence for a while. Then the tunnel ahead comes to an end. There’s a concrete staircase leading up into a little vestibule, and a heavy security hatch set into the wall beyond. Constable Guest climbs off the ATV, and I follow suit and grab my kit bag.
He holds out his hand, and I shake it.
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,” he says.
“Where did you get that?” I ask.
“Oh, an old novel that I like. Orcs and elves and high adventure, that sort of thing.”
“Then let’s make it ‘See you in a few weeks’ instead,” I say.
“See you in a few weeks, Staff Sergeant Grayson. Thank you for sticking up for us colony roughnecks. And be safe out there.”
“You, too, Constable Guest.”
He gets back onto his ATV, nods at me, and drives back the way we came, leaving me in the dimly lit tunnel terminus. I watch as the blinking caution light on the back of his vehicle briefly paints the walls of the tunnel red in steady three-second intervals. Then I shoulder my bag again and walk up the stairs into the basement of the airfield’s main control center.
The brief lull in the weather isn’t very obvious on the surface. It’s still snowing, but at least I can see further than a few yards now, and the snow is coming almost straight down instead of whipping across the landscape horizontally. Out on the vast concrete tarmac, tracked vehicles with massive triangular plow blades are pushing snow out of the way. In the already cleared area, three Wasp drop ships, one Dragonfly, and two of the colony’s fixed-wing transport aircraft are in various stages of postflight operations, unloading their cargo bays or refueling their tanks from the airfield’s automated fuel probes.
I know the pilots of the Dragonfly assigned to the Indianapolis by sight, so I walk across the tarmac to where the hulking battle taxi is parked, mindful to stay out of the way of the ground crew and the refueling machinery. The pilots are in the cockpit, running through checklists. As I mill around near the port side of the Dragonfly, the loadmaster tromps down the lowered tail ramp. He spots me and comes walking over to where I stand.
“Sergeant Grayson?” he asks. I turn toward him so he can see my name tag, and raise the face shield of my helmet. The bitingly frigid polar air immediately makes my face numb.
“We ready to go?”
“Almost. We have to wait for some passengers from the Minsk. Their birds don’t fit into Indy’s docking clamps, so they have to switch rides down here.”
“Copy that,” I say, and lower my face shield to lock out the knife-blade winds again.
A little while later, there’s a shrill roar overhead, and two Akula-class drop ships come swooping out of the driving snow overhead. They settle side by side on a landing pad on the far end of the drop-ship tarmac in an impressive display of skillful synchronized shit-weather flying. I think of Halley, probably one of the best drop-ship pilots in the entire fleet, and wonder what her critique of that landing maneuver would be.
I can see why the SRA designers decided to call their creation the “shark.” Next to the NAC drop ships, the Sino-Russian birds look more crude, but decidedly more predatory. Their fuselages are more narrow, their cockpits smaller, and the overall shape of the airframes is more streamlined. They’re bigger than our Wasps, although not quite as large as the Dragonflies. They do, however, bristle with an almost excessive array of air-to-ground weaponry—a nose turret with two multibarreled guns, large-caliber ground-attack cannons in fixed mounts on either side of the fuselage, and more cannons still in removable pods on the wing pylons. Autocannons are simpler and cheaper than intelligent guided munitions, and the SRA engineers sure used as many of them as they could cram into the design. I’ve been on the receiving end of Akula attack runs more than once, and those things can put an awful lot of armor-piercing high explosives on target very quickly. No matter how permanent our new alliance of necessity may turn out in the end, I will never lose the feeling of dread that settles in my stomach whenever I see the insectoid, angular shape of an Akula.
I watch as the tail ramps of the SRA drop ships open. From the tail end of the closest Akula, two figures in Alliance battle armor emerge, heavy-looking kit bags slung under each arm. They walk toward us across the expanse of the landing pad. The face shields on the SRA helmets are quite a bit bigger than ours, so it’s easier to make out faces. When the two SRA troopers are twenty meters away, I recognize the taller figure on the left. I raise my own face shield again and wave.
“Dmitry,” I shout.
Dmitry walks up to me and lightly taps my armor with his gloved fist.
“Andrew,” he says. His voice sounds slightly distorted through the speaker system in his helmet. “What are you doing in cold, awful place like this one?”
“We’re going up to the Indianapolis together. I’ll be joining you for this mission.”
Dmitry shakes his head with a smile and raps my armor again. “Iz ognya da v polymya, eh?”
“What does that mean?”
“We go from flame to fire.”
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” I agree. “Looks that way.”
He gestures to the trooper next to him. The face behind the helmet’s shield is Asian and very clearly female.
“Sub-Lieutenant Lin. My superior. She is here to make sure I get on Commonwealth ship safely.”