Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(54)

“Sir, the Murphy is separating from Independence,” the tactical officer says. “Looks like they’re departing. They’re moving off at ten meters per, and accelerating.”

“Really,” Colonel Campbell says. He reaches into the plot display and pans and zooms the scale until the icon for Independence Station is in the center of the screen segment. A pale blue icon labeled “DD-770 MURPHY” is inching away from the station slowly but steadily.

“ETA on the drop ship?”

“Nineteen minutes, sir,” the XO says. “They’ve just finished unloading.”

“Tell them to expedite, skip the window-cleaning. Tactical, keep a really close eye on Murphy.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Think they know where we are?” Major Renner asks.

“Indy? No. We haven’t gotten anything on our active warning kit. We’re a hundred thousand kilometers away, and their passive gear is shit. But maybe they saw the drop ship pop up when the pilot lit the burners. We’ll see. Let’s be ready to hit the throttle if they come our way.”

“Aye, sir,” the XO confirms.

“The passive kit on this boat is the best I’ve ever seen,” I say. “We don’t even need radar with optics like that.”

“It’s the best in the fleet,” Colonel Campbell says. “We should have built a hundred more of these things instead of those stupid big-ass hundred-thousand-ton carriers.”

“Those are what makes a deep-space navy, aren’t they?”

“They’re too big and too damn expensive, and they’re one-trick ponies. They’re good for leading planetary assaults, and that’s it. This ship weighs five percent of that and has a tenth the firepower, and we managed to get past the Lankies when nobody else did. It sucks at offensive ops, but maybe that’s not where our focus should have been all these years. Look where it got us.”



“Where the hell is he going?” the tactical officer wonders out loud a little while later. The icon for the Murphy is moving away from the space station, but her new trajectory points right toward open space.

“He’s trailing air and debris, but he’s not making for Gateway or the fleet yard,” the XO says. “Where the hell is he going with that damaged ship?”

The tactical officer extends the current trajectory of Murphy on the central plot. “Nothing there. No fleet yard, no space stations, not even a mining outpost.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s not taking a ship full of holes for a little joyride around the inner solar system for the hell of it.” Colonel Campbell taps his fingers on the edge of the holotable.

“Track him. As soon as the drop ship is secure, we follow him at a safe distance. Just for a little while. I’m curious why they wanted us on such a short leash.”

The drop ship returns to Indy fifteen minutes later. While Indy is a stealth ship, the drop ship is not, and if they’re going to pinpoint the location of the OCS, the docking sequence is our most vulnerable phase. But no active radars light us up, and there’s no contact on the tactical display suddenly changing course to come gunning for us.

“Bird’s back in the barn,” the XO says a little while later.

“Take us out and shadow that destroyer,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Mind your distance and stay on their stern. Make it ten thousand klicks.”

“There hasn’t been a lick of active radiation from them since we popped them in the snout,” Major Renner says.

“We took out their front array, which is probably why we’re still afloat. But let’s not take chances. The second it looks like they’ve spotted us, we’re turning about and going full burn. No point pushing our luck.”

We’ve been pushing our luck since we set out for Fomalhaut, I think, and look at the spot where my two missing fingers used to be. I can feel the pain throbbing underneath the chemical layer of fuzzy bliss from the painkillers, and I’m very thankful for modern chemistry right now.



Murphy leaves Earth and Luna behind, and Indy follows.

The destroyer pulls low acceleration, probably because of the damage we inflicted. The Blue-class destroyers are large ships, almost three times the size of Indy and much better armored and armed, but they are deep-space combatants and not even slightly stealthy. We are following in their wake, where the noise from their own engines make their passive sensors as good as blind.

We are under way and on Murphy’s tail for just a little under four hours when the tactical officer perks up and updates the holotable display.

“We have some active radar sweeps ahead. Two—make that three sources.”

On the holotable, three pale blue icons appear on the edge of our scanning range. They have three-dimensional lozenge-shaped zones projected around them. Our passive gear is picking up the radar transmitters, but it hasn’t pinpointed the exact locations of the sources yet, so the lozenges mark the zones where the contacts are likely to be.

“Source?” Colonel Campbell asks.

“Military, definitely Commonwealth units. ELINT is sorting out the profiles right now,” the tactical officer replies. “Stand by.”

“There’s precisely squat out here according to the charts,” Major Renner says. “This is not even a travel lane. Military or civilian.”