Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(69)
“Regulus, you have absolutely no idea,” Colonel Campbell sends back.
We burn to enter the orbital trajectory that will get Indy into New Svalbard orbit in just one pass, using the top layers of the moon’s atmosphere to slow the ship down to orbital maneuvering speeds. Someone in CIC put a large window with the external planetside camera feed onto the holotable next to the tactical orb, and I get to see the ice moon and the massive gas giant behind it in ultrahigh resolution at this range. New Svalbard’s cloud cover is almost complete as usual, but there are stretches of clear skies along the temperate belt around the moon’s equator. It’s a harsh world, but a beautiful one, clean and cold and unspoiled.
“Weather report for New Longyearbyen says they’re go for flight ops as long as we don’t mind a bit of chop,” Colonel Campbell says to me. “I’m pretty sure that you’re good and ready to get down to the surface. Stretch your legs after almost a month in this little barge.”
“Colonel,” I say, “I think that this ship is the finest unit in the fleet, and I would gladly go into battle with this crew again any time, against anyone. But don’t take it personally when I tell you that I’ve never wanted to get off a spaceship as much as I want to get off this one right now.”
Major Renner chuckles, and Colonel Campbell smiles curtly and shakes his head.
“God knows you’ve earned yourself a bit of fresh air,” the colonel says. He glances at my still-bandaged hand. “They’ll want you around for the debriefing, but you can join that from down there. And I wouldn’t wait too long to have that looked at by a surgeon.”
Dmitry and I are alone again for the ride in the drop ship. He sits across the aisle from me, his gear bag between his feet and strapped to the cargo eyelets that are recessed into the floor in regular intervals. The other personnel on Indy will transfer to other ships in the task force directly if needed, but Dmitry needs to switch rides on the surface because the SRA drop ships don’t fit into NAC docking clamps. If this shaky new alliance of necessity is going to continue, we will need a whole new level of standardization across both fleets—or what’s left of them at this point.
The drop ship detaches from the docking clamp, and I turn on the networked feed in my suit and tap into the outside cameras the way I like to do whenever I am along as a passenger and not doing a combat drop. We drop free from Indy, and the pilot takes us into a gentle descending turn to port.
“Holy hell,” I say out loud when I see the battle damage on Indy’s hull with my own eyes for the first time. The holes in the forward port section are each at least two meters across, and the exit hole closest to the bow section caused a lot of ancillary damage. Two of Indy’s missile-launch-tube covers are gone, and several square meters of hull plating around the open tubes are torn and buckled from the sudden high-velocity passage of the Lanky penetrators. Such a simple weapon, and so effective against a species that needs to ride in air-filled shells to survive out in space.
I watch Indy recede on my helmet display until all I can see of the stealthy OCS is a cluster of flashing navigation lights approaching the much bigger bulk of the fleet supply ship Portsmouth. Her streamlined little hull looks tiny against the backdrop of the gas giant behind New Svalbard and the vastness of the space beyond.
The atmospheric part of the ride is less serene than the space phase. We get bumped around a bit as the shearing winds in New Svalbard’s atmosphere buffet the drop ship left and right, up and down. After a month of smooth zero-gravity ops, it’s a little jarring to get tossed around again like a pebble in a can. I keep my helmet display active and do my usual all-aspect feed from every camera at once, which cuts down on the motion sickness.
Twenty thousand feet above New Longyearbyen and fifteen kilometers away, the cloud cover breaks and gives way to a pale blue sky. Below us, the white expanses of the snow-covered tundra belt stretch as far as I can see, all the way to the distant mountain ranges to our north and south. To our starboard, a white exhaust plume rising from a large flat building marks the location of one of the moon’s sixty-four terraforming stations, which are strung along the tundra belt like a girdle, one every hundred and fifty kilometers.
The drop-ship pilot makes a low pass over the town as we come in for a landing at the airfield. I look down at the bunker-like colony housing, each a windowless ferroconcrete dome thick enough to withstand two-hundred-kilometer winds and several meters of snow load. The streets down here are laid out in a way that minimizes alleys for the driving winter winds to funnel through, so New Longyearbyen looks a little bit like a fractal pattern from above. I see several of the colony’s tracked snow-movers out on the streets, and even a few people bundled up in hostile environment garb. I know the outside temperature is low enough to shock-freeze exposed flesh in just a few seconds, but after a month in a tiny OCS, I am looking forward to walking in a continuous straight line for a few minutes without having to step across bulkhead thresholds or change directions at gangway intersections every twenty-five meters.
The drop ship touches down on the airfield’s vertical landing pad a few minutes later. The tail ramp lowers to reveal a busy stretch of tarmac. There are several rows of drop ships parked in front of the nearby hangars, NAC Wasps and Dragonflies shoulder to shoulder with SRA Akulas. A Dragonfly and an Akula are standing nearby on the VSTOL pad, with the engines running and navigation lights blinking.