Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(29)
In the past few hours, we’ve detected and evaded half a dozen Lanky seed ships loitering along our pathway toward Mars. Even with the excellent optical gear on Indy, the Lankies are all but invisible until they’re almost on top of us, astronomically speaking. We are coasting on our trajectory, using the momentum from our earlier burn that set us on our way, and without radar emissions or engine-exhaust signature, Indy is a hole in space, a black cat in a dark room.
“There’s no way the rest of the fleet can make this run,” the XO says.
“No, there isn’t. Even if they make it past that welcoming committee at the transition point, they’ll get chewed up before they’re halfway to Mars,” Colonel Campbell says.
The damage-control crews are still at work patching up the ship’s wounds. The penetrator rods fired by the Lanky ships are short ranged, but whatever ends up in their path gets foot-wide holes blown through it at hypersonic speeds. Indy’s agility and small size let her avoid most of the salvo from the seed ship, but the two projectiles that hit hurt the ship badly. They blew through Indy from our bottom right flank to the top left of the hull, wrecking everything in their path. Still, most of us are alive, the ship is moving, and most of the compartments have air in them.
As we make our way toward the gravity well of Mars, I use one of the CIC data consoles to go through the pictures of the Lanky seed ships we’ve encountered so far, studying them like an encyclopedia of advanced superpredators, and I realize that for all our struggles with them, all the ass-kickings we have doled out and received over the last five years, we know next to nothing about them.
“They’re all different, you know,” someone says from behind my right shoulder. I turn around and see the tactical officer looking over my shoulder. He’s sipping soy coffee from a mug with the ship’s seal on it.
“Different how?” I ask.
“You know whale pods, back on Earth?”
I nod.
“They’re all individuals, right? You can listen to them on sonar and tell them apart by voices. When they’re on the surface, you can see markings and scars and stuff.”
He points at the screen in front of me, which shows two seed ships side by side in profile.
“Those guys? Same thing. We’ve been cataloguing every one we spot. Speed, size, patrol path, optical profile. They don’t have hull numbers like we do, of course. But once you’re close enough for optical gear, you can tell them apart. A mark here, a bump there. Ripple in the skin. That sort of thing.”
He takes another sip of his coffee.
“Ours all look the same ’cause they all came out of the same fleet yard. Built to the same set of blueprints. These guys? They don’t look like they’ve been built at all.”
“They don’t look uniform enough,” I say.
“Right. Cheery thought, huh? Maybe there’s an even bigger mother ship pumping these things out somewhere. Like a whale birthing a calf.”
“Cheery thought,” I agree.
“Getting some traffic from Mars now,” the sergeant manning the signals-intelligence station in CIC says a few hours later. We are well into the second half of our parabolic trajectory that will slingshot us around Mars and toward Earth.
“Anything on fleet channels?” the XO asks.
“Uh, sort of, ma’am. All I’m getting right now is automated traffic on the fleet emergency band.”
“Crash buoys,” Colonel Campbell says darkly.
“Yes, sir.”
As we get closer to Mars and the signals burn through the interplanetary clutter, the plot on the holotable in the center of the CIC updates with the blinking pale blue icons of automatic emergency buoys. The computer assigns ship IDs to the signals as they are identified and sorted out.
“FF-478 Guadalupe Hidalgo,” the XO reads out loud. “CVA-1033 Alberta. Damn, that’s one of the Commonwealth-class carriers. CG-759 Vanguard. DD-772 Jorge P. Acosta. CG-99 Caledonia.”
“I know the skipper of Caledonia,” Colonel Campbell says. “Jana Mackay. I went to Fleet Command School with her.”
Knew, I think. Past tense, not present. Colonel Campbell knows as well as I do that the automatic emergency buoys don’t start sending until they are ejected from their host ship. No fleet skipper would have the emergency buoy jettisoned unless the ship is completely disabled and in the process of ejecting its life pods, and the computer will only release it if the ship is in the process of breaking up. If the Caledonia’s crash buoy is out there sending its distress signal, then the ship is almost certainly gone, and all her sailors with her. Then again, both the colonel and I survived the activation of the Versailles’s crash buoy some five years ago over the colony planet Willoughby, so maybe hope dies hard even in a seasoned, hard-bitten staff officer. Maybe the crew of Caledonia did manage to man life pods and make it down to the surface of Mars, and maybe they’re holed up down there waiting for a rescue, just like we were half a decade ago.
“Picking up Alliance beacons, too,” the SigInt sergeant says. “Lots of Alliance beacons.”
We watch silently as the plot fills with pale blue and red icons, all blinking their pulsing distress signals. We don’t know the identities of the SRA ships who released their own distress beacons, but there are—were—a lot of them. Ten, twenty, thirty—I try to count the mass of icons on the display but give up at thirty-five, and every few seconds the computer adds more of them to the holographic sphere hovering above the holotable. The space between our position and Mars is a sea of slowly blinking pale blue and red icons.