Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(58)
“Hard to guess without knowing what’s inside the hull,” Major Renner says. “A hundred thousand, if half the interior volume is flight deck. If it’s not a bird farm, a hundred and fifty, easy.”
The tactical officer lets out a low whistle. “That’s a huge fucking hull.”
I look at the image of the two unknown ships sitting side by side in their berths. They don’t quite look like carriers to me. They look different, denser somehow, more aggressive, like a Hammerhead cruiser flattened out and blown up to almost twice its original size. Whatever they are, I have no doubt that I’m looking at a pair of warships, meant to get close to dangerous things and take them apart.
“They’re not finished,” the chief engineer says.
“What?” Major Renner leans forward a little and peers at the image more closely.
“See that lamellar pattern on the hull?” The engineering officer leans in and does his own pan-and-zoom. “Pretty sure that’s standoff armor plating. Maybe that new reactive stuff they were trying out a year or two back at the proving grounds. See how it’s mounted in slats, like here?” He points at a section of the picture. All I see are shadows on the hull that make a sort of crosshatched pattern, but I nod anyway.
“But it doesn’t go all the way from bow to stern. It goes to right here on this ship, about one-third of the way down the hull. A little further on the other one. Look at the stern sections. Those are lateral bulkhead frame supports, open to space. Unless they meant to build those things with only their bow sections armored, they’re not finished.”
He zooms out the image a little and pans over to the berth outriggers between the ships. Then he taps the hologram with a finger.
“They’re still welding the hull together. You can see the laser arms here and here. Those ships are under construction. I’d say they’re about two-thirds done, maybe a little more.”
“But what are they for?” Colonel Campbell wonders out loud. “What the hell are they building out here, out of sight and off the books?” He flicks the image over to the edge of the tactical display and looks at the plot. “Can we get Number Five drone a little closer to that anchorage? I want to get better footage of those hulls, maybe an ELINT profile if they have any of their sensor gear installed and running already. Hull that size, you don’t wait until all the armor’s on before you put in the radios.”
“Aye, sir. I can go in another few hundred K.”
“Just as far as you can go without pegging any meters over there. If they find a recon drone, they’ll know someone’s eavesdropping, and then they’ll comb the neighborhood.”
I’ve been in the CIC since our hasty departure from Independence Station almost eight hours ago, and I am tired to the bone. Colonel Campbell looks as worn-out as I feel. The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes seem to have gotten quite a bit deeper overnight. He stifles a yawn and looks over at the time-and-date display on the back bulkhead of the CIC. The ship time is 0230 Zulu, half past two in the small hours of the morning, when human reaction times are at their worst. In a starship, that number is as arbitrary and meaningless as any other, but somehow knowing that it’s the middle of what would be the night watch on Earth just adds to the sense of fatigue I am feeling. None of us has gotten any rack time in at least fourteen hours.
The colonel catches me glancing at the clock as well and gives me a tired little smile.
“No rest for the weary, Mr. Grayson.”
He closes the recon picture windows on the holotable and pans out the scale of the plot until Indy and all the ships around the clandestine anchorage are just little blue dots right near the center. I see the blue-and-green orb representing Earth, and the smaller gray one for Luna beyond.
“Staff Sergeant Grayson, please fetch our Alliance guest and have him join us in briefing room Delta. XO, come along and bring the department heads. Tactical, you have the deck and the conn.”
“I have the deck and the conn,” the tactical officer confirms.
“We are going to figure out just what the hell we are going to do next,” the colonel says. “And then we’re going to take some rack time in shifts before this crew collapses from exhaustion.”
Dmitry is asleep in his berth when I come to fetch him, but he seems to sleep in his battle dress uniform, because he’s dressed and ready to go not sixty seconds after I rap on the hatch of his berth.
The briefing room on Delta Deck is one of the larger spaces on Indy. It’s not quite as spacious as the enlisted or NCO mess berths, but it’s bigger than the CIC pit. Most importantly, it has about twenty chairs bolted into the deck, all facing the forward bulkhead, which holds a single large holographic display that goes from the top of the bulkhead all the way to the bottom.
Dmitry and I walk into the briefing room to find half the chairs in the room full already. Most of the department heads are here, including the lieutenant in command of the embarked SI squad. He gives me a nod when he sees me stepping through the hatch, and I return it. Everyone in this room looks in need of a daylong appointment with their racks and then a month of R & R.
“Philbrick told me about the hand,” the lieutenant says when I sit down in the chair next to him. “Doc couldn’t stitch ’em back on?”
I shake my head curtly. “Those fingers are all over the deck liner on the concourse,” I say. “Nothing left to stitch back on. I’ll never talk smack about those shitty little cop buzzguns again.”