Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(63)
“We are same, you and I. Both duraky. Fools. Idiots. They tell us, ‘Go here, shoot this man, call missile on this building,’ and we do. Shoot at each other for many years, kill each other’s comrades, and get little pieces of metal with colorful ribbon. We should not be here. We should be home, you and I. Back home with Maksim and . . . what is name of your fiancée?” He pronounces the new word deliberately.
“Halley,” I say. “Her first name is Diana, but she hates it, so she’s just Halley to everyone.”
“Halley,” Dmitry repeats. With his Russian accent, it sounds like “Challey.”
It almost seems like a cliché from an old war movie, I think. Enemies get together, have a drink, exchange trinkets, and show off pictures of each other’s sweethearts, and then they realize that they have so much in common that they don’t want to fight each other anymore. The futility of war, young men and women ordered from above to kill each other for stupid reasons, and all that. But I don’t feel ennobled or enlightened by any of this. Mostly, I just feel like I’ve wasted most of the last five years of my life killing people who didn’t need or want to be killed, as part of a big stupid machine that has been chewing up the very assets we needed to fight the Lankies, the real threat. A little numbered cog in the meat grinder, ready to turn on command. And now the same people who pulled the handle on that grinder over and over are probably getting ready to walk away from the mess, hands clean, to leave the rest of us to our fates.
“Duraky,” I say.
Dmitry smiles sadly and gets up from his chair. “I will go sleep now, or maybe learn more secrets of fancy imperialist spy ship. Enjoy distilled fermentation,” he says.
I watch as he walks out of the NCO mess, which is now once again empty except for me and the bottle of Russian contraband ethanol on the table.
I eat the rest of my sandwich without much enthusiasm. My hand has started hurting again, so I pull out the bottle of pain meds and open the cap. Then I pop two of the little white pills into my mouth and wash them down with a swig of my spiked coffee. If I am going to check out of reality for a while, might as well do the job all the way.
The mess hatch opens, and two of the SI troopers walk in, Corporal DeLuca and Sergeant Acosta. I quickly take Dmitry’s bottle and stick it into the leg pocket of my jeans. Every second we move along on Red Route One toward the transition point means another few thousand kilometers of vacuum between me and Halley again. I know I made the right decision, but right now every passing hour increases my resentment of myself, and I need to take the edge off a bit. I nod at the newcomers and vacate the table to head back to my berth for some more warm and fuzzy narcotics-assisted alone time.
CHAPTER 17
“Goddammit, easy on the stern thrusters. Half a degree more positive angle. Keep the bow up.”
The XO is in the middle of the CIC pit, the center of the room with the big holotable that is the brain of the ship, coordinating the docking attempt like a conductor in charge of a small orchestra. Everyone is tense, none more so than the helmsman, who is in charge of keeping Indy’s four thousand tons in perfect synchronicity with the SRA anchorage not thirty meters off our port side. This is docking attempt number four in as many hours, and what was supposed to be a two-hour affair from start to finish is turning into an all-day event.
“There we go. Now counter-burn on the bow for half a second at ten percent. A mouse fart of a burn.”
Indy has no docking arrestors anymore, having shed them like a bee losing a stinger when we fled Independence eight days ago. Even if we did still have something for the docking clamps to grab, the SRA docking system is not compatible with ours, so we have to fly in a very precise formation and perform what the fleet calls a floating link—a flexible docking collar from airlock to airlock, and nothing to keep things from coming apart except the formation-flying skills of the helmsman.
“You got it now,” Major Renner says. “But don’t slack off. We lose the collar, we won’t be replenishing squat.”
Dmitry and I are in armor again. The padding on my left hand makes the armored glove uncomfortably tight, but I luckily still fit into battle armor without having to leave off one glove and rendering the whole system compromised. We stand by as the CIC personnel do their rendezvous dance for the docking maneuver. Almost a month of seeing an Alliance sergeant in battle rattle standing in the middle of a Commonwealth warship’s CIC has completely blunted the novelty of the sight for the rest of the crew.
“Extend the docking collar,” the XO says. “Nice and easy. Half a meter per second.”
The holotable has half a dozen windows open, all showing the docking operation from as many different camera angles, with the numerical data readouts from the navigation computer overlaid on top of everything: closing rates, relative velocities, elapsed mission time, radar distances. Indy has her own flexible docking collar for ship-to-ship docking actions, and we watch as it extends out of the hull and starts to stretch across the twenty-five and a half meters to one of the auxiliary airlocks of the unmanned Sino-Russian deep-space anchorage Luzhōu-19.
“Hard lock achieved,” the chief engineer says from his station. “Divergence rate one-quarter centimeter and steady. We are go for transfer ops.”
Major Renner looks over to Dmitry and me. “Your turn, Sergeants. Go over there and open sesame.”