Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(42)

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “I guess since they were hauling me off to the brig anyway, I figured I ought to make it worth my while.”

“I guess in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter much. You’re just lucky they didn’t stitch you with fléchettes.”

“That major was about five pounds of trigger pull away from it,” I say. “Couldn’t help myself. Told the CSS agent that we had to go back to Fomalhaut, or thirty thousand people are going to bite it. And he just shrugs and goes, ‘Too bad.’?”

I sit up with a grunt and look at the bandage in my hand. At least my nose has stopped bleeding, but the headache is still there.

“They’re not going to let us leave,” I say.

“Oh, I know,” Colonel Campbell says. “I have been relieved of command. They’re going to replace the department heads and senior personnel, and then they’re going to attach Indy to what’s left of the fleet here around Earth.”

“That’s nuts. Indy’s damaged. She’s not going to make fuck-all of a difference when the Lankies come calling. No offense, Colonel.”

“None taken. And you’re right. She needs a month in the fleet yard and six weeks of shore leave for the crew to get back into fighting shape.”

He straightens out his uniform tunic and sits down across from me.

“None of this is right,” he says. “You don’t send civvie cops to arrest mutineers. You send military police. What business does a CSS agent have on a warship? And chucking Sergeant Chistyakov here into the brig with us? That’s a straight-up treaty violation. He should have been put on a shuttle and ferried over to Unity Station.”

“That major who was with the CSS agent wasn’t right, either,” I say. “No unit patches. No specialty badge. Just a name tag and a pair of rank sleeves.”

“I noticed that,” Colonel Campbell says. “Shit ain’t right. Hasn’t been since we made contact with that picket force. They’ve locked out all comms on Indy. Full EMCON. We can only talk with the station via hard line.”

“That explains why my PDP couldn’t connect to MilNet.” I want to throw away the blood-soaked bandage roll in my hand, but there’s no trash container here in the lockup, so I reluctantly hold on to it.

“They’re keeping a lid on us,” the colonel concludes. “Making sure we don’t talk to anyone.”

“About what? Fomalhaut? Or Mars? You think they’re trying to keep Mars a secret?”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he says. “Event of that magnitude, that close to Earth? There’s people calling their relatives on Mars every day. They probably knew about the invasion down on Earth about twelve and a half minutes after the first Lanky ship showed up in Mars orbit.”

“So why keep us isolated?”

“Beats me,” Colonel Campbell says. “But if Indy doesn’t get to leave in the next day or three and hightail it back to Fomalhaut . . .”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I know what he means. Even without the Lankies, the colonists and soldiers crammed onto the little ice moon won’t live through the coming hard winter. I was hungry a lot when I grew up, and there’s very little you won’t do for some extra calories when the hunger is gnawing at the back of your rib cage. I know that I’d rather go out fighting the Lankies than by wasting away in an underground city while the temperature outside is low enough to shock-freeze exposed skin instantly.

“You want to make breakout, perhaps?” Dmitry says sleepily from his corner. “Might be next un-good idea you have. Maybe this time you can get bullet wound.”

“I’m not fighting a bunch of armed cops hand to hand,” I say. “But it’s not me we need to get back to Indy. It’s you.”

Dmitry raises an eyebrow and tears his attention away from the Network screen. “How is this?”

“Without the access code for the Alliance node, Indy can’t go back through to Fomalhaut. They sure as hell can’t use the Commonwealth node. We gotta go back the way we came.”

“Where is your armor, Sergeant Chistyakov?” Colonel Campbell asks.

“Is in berth, on spy ship of yours. They come take me off, do not ask about armor. I decide not to tell them.”

“If they remember to ask, tell them we gave you one of our vacsuits for the trip,” Colonel Campbell says. “Just in case.”

“In case of what?” I ask. “Major Renner stealing Indy out of the dock and making the run back to Fomalhaut by herself?”

Colonel Campbell leans back with a sigh and stretches his legs.

“They’re replacing the whole command crew,” he says. “Major Renner is just running the boat until they hand it over to a new skipper and XO. Indy isn’t going anywhere right now.”

He shrugs and flashes a brief smile, which makes the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes look a little craggy in the harsh LED light from overhead.

“But you never know what kind of weird shit can happen in a hurry, Mr. Grayson.”



We don’t have to wait long for our pickup. Not thirty minutes after Colonel Campbell and Dmitry join me in the detention berth, the door opens again, and one of the cops sticks his head into the room.