Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(26)
I close my eyes and think of Halley. If I am about to end, I want her face to be the last thing on my mind before the lights go out.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Transition.”
I feel the momentary dizziness I usually experience after an Alcubierre ride ends, and the low-level discomfort that has been in every part of my body for the last few hours falls away. We’re through, and we’re not dead. Yet.
“Kill the drive now,” Colonel Campbell barks. “Get me optics on the main display.”
The thrumming noise from the ship’s fusion drive winds down quickly as the engineering officer shuts down the propulsion system. Nothing is shooting us to pieces, and we haven’t run into anything solid. Maybe they left the doorway unguarded, I think. We’re about due for some good luck for a change.
Then the optical feed comes up on the holotable display, and there’s a collective intake of breath all over the CIC. Behind me, Dmitry mutters something in Russian that can only be a swear.
Directly underneath Indianapolis, the huge glossy bulk of a Lanky seed ship stretches for what seems like miles. The optical sensors under the ship triangulate on the vessel and project a distance readout: 2,491 meters. The distance display changes as we hurtle away from the Alcubierre transition point and into the solar system. The Lanky is on a reciprocal heading, passing below and going the way we came. On the holotable, a polite alarm chirps, and a readout overlay appears on the display: “PROXIMITY ALERT.”
Indy is coasting faster than the Lanky is going, but even with our combined separation speeds, it takes Indy eight or ten seconds to clear the bulk of the Lanky ship. In that time, nobody in the CIC makes a sound, as if we could draw the Lankies’ attention just by making noise. For all I know, we might—no fleet vessel has ever been this close to a seed ship and lived to tell about it.
“Bogey at six o’clock low, moving off at fifty meters per second,” the tactical officer says in a low voice.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Colonel Campbell replies. “Too damn close. Get me a three-sixty now.”
The holotable display changes as feeds from various sensor arrays organize themselves in a semicircular pattern, stitching together a panoramic tapestry of the surrounding space. The Lanky seed ship takes up a disturbingly large section of space below and behind us, even as we are coasting away from the behemoth at hundreds of meters per second.
“There’s more of them. Visual on Bogey Two and Bogey Three.” The tactical officer reads out a bunch of Euclidean coordinates. The tactical display at the center of the holotable’s array of overlapping imagery updates with three orange icons. One of them, slow moving, is almost on top of the blue icon representing Indianapolis, only slowly inching away from us. The other two are farther away, but moving faster. One is above and to our starboard, the other below and to our port side. Colonel Campbell shifts some of the holograms around with his hands and expands them until he has a good view of Bogey Two and Three side by side.
“Bogey Three is on a perpendicular, passing to port aft,” the tactical officer says. “Bogey Two is closing laterally from our starboard. Bearing five-zero degrees, closing at two hundred meters per second.” He looks up from his display and flicks a hologram over to the main tactical readout on the holotable.
“Sir, Bogey Three is on a collision course. If our speed and heading don’t change, our paths will intersect in twenty-three seconds.”
“Bring propulsion back online,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Hold the burn until the last second. We’re too damn close as it is. I don’t want to light off a signal flare earlier than we have to. Prepare for course change, make your heading zero-five-five by positive zero-four-five. At the last second, helm.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” the helmsman says.
“Is patrol pattern,” Dmitry says behind me. “Like sharks.”
“Exactly like sharks,” Colonel Campbell says. “They’re circling the node, waiting for food. And we’re the minnow.”
I watch as the orange icons for the Lanky seed ships and the lonely blue icon representing the Indy shift around on the plot gradually. One of the orange icons inches closer to our blue one by the second. The computer, ever helpful, has drawn trajectory lines for both ships, and the orange and blue trajectories intersect at a point in space 2,500 kilometers and twelve seconds away.
“Propulsion online,” the engineering officer announces. “Standing by for burn.”
“Burn in three, two, one,” the helmsman says. I swallow hard at the sight of the Lanky ship approaching from starboard, intruding into our section of space like a careless hydrobus driver. “Burn.”
The fusion engines come back to life with a thrum, and even with the antigravity deck plating keeping us on our feet, the sense of sudden acceleration is dramatic. The tactical display on the holotable spins as the Indy reorients herself to correct her trajectory with the thrust generated by her powerful main propulsion system.
“Come to new bearing, all ahead flank. Get us the hell out of here,” Colonel Campbell shouts.
The Lanky ship on the optical sensor feed grows larger and larger on the display. Even with the cameras at minimum optical zoom, the seed ship blocks most of the view to our starboard as the distance between us decreases rapidly. I really do feel like a minnow, but the Lanky ship isn’t a shark—it’s a whale, and it’s about to swallow us without intent, purely by accident of proximity. At this distance, I can make out details on the Lanky ship I’ve never seen before—elongated bumps, irregular patterns of texture that almost look like bark or wrinkles on wet skin. I know it’s a ship—I’ve seen plenty of recon footage of them deploying seedpods by the hundreds onto colony worlds—but it’s not the first time that I find myself thinking it looks like a living, sentient thing.