Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(33)
“Cut the active gear and go cold on the main engines,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Full EMCON. Let’s become a fast-moving hole in space again.”
“Aye, sir. Going full EMCON.”
Fifteen minutes pass, then thirty. The Lanky ships behind us disappear from the plot as Indy leaves them behind. Without the active sensors, the contacts marked on the holotable fade from the solid colors of “confirmed” to the progressively paler icons denoting an old contact that can’t be updated. Up ahead, the wedge of space before Indy is clear as far as the ship’s optical sensors can tell. Behind us, Mars recedes into the darkness, along with all the minefields and human wreckage floating in space around it. For a moment, I wonder if Halley was on one of the ships the Lankies destroyed, and the thought is making me almost physically nauseated, but then I dismiss it again. She’s at Combat Flight School on Luna, and her tour as instructor isn’t supposed to end until early next year. They don’t pull flight-school instructors out of the classroom and assign them to active fleet ops at the drop of a hat. But that’s a lot of destroyed hulls around Mars, and a small, nagging part of my brain doesn’t want to let go of the dreadful suspicion that Halley is out there, lifelessly drifting in a slow orbit around Mars, or still strapped into the pilot seat of a shattered Wasp somewhere on the planet’s surface.
An hour after we complete our slingshot maneuver around Mars, there’s nothing but empty space in front of us as far as the optical sensors can tell. Behind us, there’s the red planet, rotating around its axis twenty-four and a half hours a day just like it always has and always will, not caring which species has temporarily settled on its surface. It occurs to me that I may never see this sight again in person. Maybe no human will ever get close enough again to find out just how many corpses are littering the surface down there now, human and Lanky alike.
“Stand down from combat stations,” Colonel Campbell orders.
Major Renner picks up the 1MC handset and passes the order down to the entire ship. She replaces the handset and looks at the plot, where we are inching along a trajectory that has Earth’s orbit at its end point.
“One hundred forty-four hours until turnaround burn,” she says. “Fastest I’ve ever done this track.”
“We’ll be burning what’s left of our deuterium for the turnaround,” the engineering officer says. “We’ll coast into orbit with the reactors sucking recycled air.”
“As long as we get within radio range before the propulsion quits,” Colonel Campbell says. “I’m sure we’ll be able to hail a fleet tug or two to haul this boat back to Gateway. If anyone’s left back on Earth, that is.”
As I watch the images of Mars receding in our wake, I wonder what we will find when we reach Earth. I’m almost ashamed to realize that I would have a harder time accepting Halley gone and dead than Earth having suffered the same fate as Mars.
CHAPTER 8
It looks like Earth still has humans on it.
A day and a half after we make our close pass of Mars, we get comms chatter on the regular fleet and civvie channels again. We’re still coasting along with passive listening gear to avoid broadcasting our presence, but we haven’t spotted any Lanky seed ships on our path since Mars. It seems like the Lankies are content with holding the essential strip of space between Mars and our Alcubierre nodes, but that’s more than sufficient to blockade all traffic in and out of the solar system. We snuck in through a crack in the door, but we almost lost a bunch of toes doing it.
“Getting long-distance pings off the main comms relay on Luna,” the communications officer says. Without much else to do, I am back in CIC to listen in to the far-off radio chatter we’ve started picking up from the direction of Earth. It’s enormously relieving to hear other voices out in the void and know that we’re not the only humans left alive in the universe.
“Sons of bitches took out the Mars comms relay and everything beyond,” Colonel Campbell says. “That is going to take years to rebuild.”
“They must have done something else, too,” the communications officer replies. “Even with the Mars relay gone, the Luna relay has plenty of juice to reach anything clear up to the Titan fleet yards. Plenty of lag, sure, but we should have heard them the moment we popped out of Alcubierre. But we got precisely squat on our passive gear until half an hour ago. Which would mean—”
“They’re jamming us somehow.” Colonel Campbell sighs. “Five years of this shit, and I could write everything we actually know about these things on my thumbnail and have room to spare.”
Indy is hurtling toward Earth, or more precisely its turnaround point for reverse burn, at breakneck speed, far faster than I’ve ever made the Mars-to-Earth trip before. This is the most heavily used intrasystem pathway, the solar system equivalent of a traffic-clogged Main Street. Almost every ship that leaves the system or goes on to the military bases or science posts around the outer planets takes the Mars route because it’s the most energy-efficient way to travel. We should have passed dozens of ships going in either direction by now, but as we shoot toward our turnaround point, we’re the only thing out here.
“Contact,” the tactical officer says. On the holotable, a solid blue icon appears on the extreme range of our awareness bubble. We’re still running on passive sensors alone, but the new contact is scanning the space ahead of him with active radar.