Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(73)

“I have no issue with that. Regulus has the bigger flight deck anyway, and we’re short on drop ships. You’ll have lots of elbow room.”

“What about you, Administrator?” Colonel Campbell asks. “How many civilians are you sending home with us?”

“Any that want to go. But I’ll tell you that it won’t be very many. We’re sort of set in our ways down here.”

“If the Lankies find you again, you may regret having passed up the chance.”

“If the Lankies find us again, we are going to ground and hope they’ll find the place too cold for their taste. From what info you brought back from Earth, I’d say we wouldn’t be any better off there right now.”

“That’s your decision to make, and we have no right to try to tell you otherwise. Make sure that any evacuees are ready for airlift up to the carriers by 1800 tonight at the latest,” Colonel Aguilar says.

“Understood,” the colony administrator says. “They’ll be there on time, whoever’s going.”

The commanding officers hash out details of our departure while I listen and try to ignore the throbbing pain in my temples. Apparently, the brass have started planning our return while Indy was still on her return leg to New Svalbard, but I have no idea how they’re planning to get past the seed ships on the other side of the Alliance node, and it’s not my place to ask in this particular meeting. All I know right now is that we are leaving for good within forty-eight hours, and that we are heading for unfriendly space again.



“You can stay, you know,” Sergeant Fallon says to me when we leave the conference room and walk back down to the ops center.

“Here? On New Svalbard?”

“The COs are giving the Homeworld Defense grunts the option to stay here and be a permanent part of the defense. Way we see it, the Commonwealth dumped them here for good. They have the right to decide for themselves.”

“What about you? Are you staying?”

“I thought about it,” she says. “Briefly. Very briefly.”

“But no.”

“But no,” she confirms. “None of my guys want to stay here on Ice Station Bumfuck, and I’m not going to leave my troops. Besides, I’d run out of shit to do here really fucking fast.”

“The recreational opportunities are limited,” I agree.

“It has its good sides. Clean air, lovely scenery. Peace and quiet, if you’re into that sort of thing.” Her tone makes it clear that she isn’t into that sort of thing, as if I needed the clarification.

“You’ve not been on a spaceship when the Lankies are nearby,” I say. “Down here, you get to hold a rifle and shoot at them. Run, hide, fight. Up there, you have nothing. All you can do is hold on to the nearest handrail and hope that the people in command know what the hell they’re doing. Most scared I’ve ever been in my life, and that’s no lie.”

Sergeant Fallon says nothing for a few moments. We walk up to the ops center door, and she puts one hand on the door handle.

“You’re scared because you still have something to lose,” she says. “That’s the main difference between us. And I really hope that we make it back through again. So you get to marry your sweetheart and stop sticking your idealistic neck out for the greater good. You don’t want to keep doing this soldiering shit and then find one day that you’re not scared of dying anymore.”

“You got no fear of dying, you got nothing to live for, either,” I say.

She rolls her eyes at me and shakes her head. “Spare me the motivational-calendar quotes, Andrew. Every time I think you’ve learned a thing or two, you get all un-jaded on me again. You are such a babe.” She wrenches the ops center door open. “T-minus eight,” she says. “Pack your shit and enjoy that clean white snow one last time. I’ll see you at the airfield at 1800 Zulu.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “See you there.”



I walk up to Dr. Stewart’s office to find it an even bigger mess than usual. Janet is going through the drawer of her desk and tossing things into a pair of open shipping containers in the middle of the office floor. She looks up when I step into the open doorway.

“It’s the most intoxicated soldier in the world,” she says. “From a science point of view, I am surprised you are walking around.”

“With some difficulty,” I say. “Packing for something?”

She looks around at the mess all around her. “Four years of research in this place. You’d figure I would have had some time to get some sort of organization into place. It’s not like there are a lot of distractions around here.”

“Ever heard of digital storage?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m old-fashioned. I like to mark up my pages while drinking coffee. It’s how my brain works best. Most of it is scanned and in the data banks.”

“So I’m guessing you are evacuating with us tonight.”

“Damn right I am.” She pulls a small notebook out of a stack of loose printouts and tosses it into the nearest transport bin. The stack loses its cohesion, and papers slide onto the floor. Janet pushes them aside with her foot.

“I’ve been here for forty-seven months. I’ve not seen my family in well over a year. I don’t have any kids that were born here. My family’s back on Earth, in Pennsylvania. I’m already six months past my original contract commitment. You bet your ass I’m taking the last ride out of here. I don’t think there’ll be much need of astrophysics research here in the future.”