Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(20)

Sub-Lieutenant Lin looks at me and snaps a quick and sharp salute, her brown eyes looking into mine unflinchingly. I return the salute. She outranks me, so I should have been the one to offer a salute first, but cross-bloc courtesies are still fairly uncharted territory, and I assume she’s conceding that we’re on Commonwealth turf and that I am the NAC personnel in charge for this trip into orbit. Dmitry is a stárshiy serzhánt, a senior sergeant, which means he outranks me as well, if only by one rank and pay grade.

I gesture over to the open tail ramp of the nearby Dragonfly.

“Let’s get upstairs, then. Before the weather turns to shit again.”

“Weather is already shit,” Dmitry says.

I let Dmitry walk up the ramp first before following him into the cargo hold of the Dragonfly. At the top of the ramp, I take a deep, unfiltered breath of the cold air even though it hurts my lungs and makes my nostrils freeze. It’s a harsh and frigid place, and unfit for large-scale human habitation, but I’ll be damned if the air here isn’t the cleanest I’ve breathed in the entire settled galaxy.



I take a seat on the left side of the Dragonfly’s cargo hold. My SRA counterpart seats himself right across the aisle from me, mirroring our arrangement in the Akula during our planetary assault a week earlier. Five years of fighting these people, and I don’t even know what language they use to communicate on joint missions, or whether they just use their comms’ automatic translators.

I’m back on an NAC drop ship, so I get permission from the pilot in command to tie into the Dragonfly’s data bus. Then I tune out Dmitry and watch the feed from the optical sensors on the outside hull: dorsal, top bow, bottom bow, starboard wingtip, port wingtip, stern. My battle armor’s computer can stitch all the video feeds together into a seamless tapestry and project it on the inside of my visor sight. It pans with my head movements, so it almost feels like I am the drop ship as we go up through the clouds and above the horrible New Svalbard weather. Finally, at twenty thousand feet, we break through the top of the cloud cover, and the atmospheric bumps go from terrifying to merely teeth jarring.

New Svalbard has a wild, hostile beauty from above. Much of the ice moon’s visible hemisphere is covered in thick clouds, but there are clear patches here and there, and the light from the far-off sun glints on the icy mountain ridges and vast frozen glaciers of the surface below. In another fifty or a hundred years, this will be a prime chunk of galactic real estate if the Lankies don’t come in and take it all away from us. When I first went into space after joining the fleet, I used to be awed by the majestic, overwhelming beauty of the sight of a planet from orbit, but these days it mostly reminds me of just how unfathomably vast the universe is, and how very tiny and insignificant we are.



We transition from atmospheric to spaceflight a short time later, and the buffeting stops. You can always tell when you’re in orbit because your butt gets light in the seat despite the forty pounds of battle armor. I can see all the warships in their different orbital groups on my tactical display, but only Regulus and her escort are in visual range, thirty degrees off the port bow and a hundred kilometers away in a higher orbit than ours, position lights blinking and visible even from this range. Regulus is a massive ship, over half a kilometer from bow to stern, the largest warship class any of Earth’s nation blocs have ever put into space. Because they’re so few and so valuable, the Navigator-class carriers have not been used against the Lankies yet, so nobody knows how they would fare in battle with a seed ship, but the fact that most of the fleet got destroyed above Mars makes me think that Regulus may well be the last of her class. In any case, I am going up to Indy right now to help make sure that the carrier won’t have to go toe-to-toe with the Lankies, at least not yet.

We dock with the Indy a few minutes later. As before, I don’t even see the stealth orbital combat ship until we’re almost on top of it, despite the fact that I can plot Indy’s position on my display through her active IFF beacon. Most of the technology in the OCS is still classified, but I know that the same polychromatic camouflage technology used for the Hostile Environment Battle Armor—our bug suits—has found its way into the outer-hull plating of the Indy. She doesn’t have overwhelming firepower, although she is well armed for a ship her size. She is, however, extremely hard to spot, track, or target. During our little insurrection a few weeks ago, Indy was able to successfully play orbital hide-and-seek with the rest of the Midway task force. According to Colonel Campbell, they didn’t even break a sweat doing it. He also claims he could have nuked Midway from stealth successfully, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.

A light shudder goes through the Dragonfly when Indy’s docking clamps latch on to the hardpoints at the top of the drop ship’s hull. We move through the hangar hatch and into the artificial gravity field of the larger ship, and my armored weight pushes me downward into the seat again. Through the armor plating of the hull, I can hear the low warning klaxon of the automated docking system as it seals the outer hatch and pulls us into the Indy’s tiny drop-ship hangar. We come to rest with a final shudder, and the klaxon outside stops. The engines of the Dragonfly steadily decrease their racket, then fall silent altogether.

“Welcome aboard NACS Indianapolis,” I tell Dmitry. “Hope you’re wearing battle dress uniform underneath that armor, because you need to turn your plate in until we get to the Alcubierre chute. And your admin deck, too.”