Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(84)

“Who’s here?” Halley asks one of the pilots when they’ve all gathered around us.

“Everyone but Ricardelli, Carini, and Horner,” the pilot replies. “And the major is putting on a vacsuit, too.”

“God help us all,” Halley says, and several of the pilots chuckle.

“We have a dozen of the senior flight suiting up. I don’t feel good about putting them into the command seats, but we have way more birds than pilots.”

“They’ll be fine,” Halley says. “It’ll be a milk run. Okay, here’s what we’ll do.”

She points to the ships on the flight line in turn.

“The instructors take the four Dragonflies and half those Wasps. Garner, you take Whisky Nine. She’s a bit twitchy when she’s cold, so watch the lateral boosters. We don’t want to give her to a cadet. The other cadets get the Wasps starting with Whisky Thirteen. The boss can pick from whatever’s left. No shortage of ships tonight.”

“Please tell me you have pilots for every last one of those ships.” Sergeant Fallon comes trotting up, rifle bouncing against the chest plate of her armor.

“We can get twenty-four off the ground,” Halley replies. “We have thirty-six Wasps, but six are grounded for maintenance, and I’m flat out of qualified pilots for the rest.”

“I thought this was Flight School?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“I’m not putting cadets with ten solo hours behind the stick for a combat drop,” Halley says. “And you don’t want to be in the back of the bus with one, trust me.”

“First Lieutenant Halley, Master Sergeant Fallon,” I interject. “Master Sergeant Fallon, this is my fiancée.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t break her,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Pleasure, ma’am. Now let’s get these birds in the air. We have three hours and fifty minutes until we are in the middle of a planetary-level shitstorm. Excuse me.”

She walks off again, listening to whatever transmission just got her attention in her helmet’s headset. Halley looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

“My old squad leader,” I say. “Combative is her default setting.”

The HD troopers are gathering at the tail ramp of the Regulus drop ship for boarding. I look over to the ride in which I arrived, but Halley sees me and shakes her head.

“You are coming with me, mister. You think I’ll let you skip town again out of my sight, you are mistaken. Come and watch the door while I change into my vacsuit.” She points to one of the Dragonflies the ground crews are rolling into position on the flight line.

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply. “It’s the apocalypse, and you are worried about propriety? Just change on the flight deck.”

“I don’t care if it’s the apocalypse, Andrew. I’m not about to bare my ass in front of my students, even if the world ends in three hours.”





CHAPTER 24





For only the second time in my military career, I am riding in the copilot seat of a drop ship, with Halley behind the controls. There’s nobody else to claim the second seat in the cockpit, and the cargo compartment behind us is empty. We have seventy tons of spacecraft all to ourselves.

“Remember Versailles?” I ask. “You were barely out of Flight School then.”

“And you were a green network-console jock,” she says. “Yeah, I remember Versailles. The good old days.”

We’re in formation behind the Regulus’s Wasp, and there’s a chain of twenty-three more drop ships behind us, all empty except for one pilot. Ahead, the position lights of the Fomalhaut joint battle group are blinking in the distance. Earth is a mostly cloud-covered half sphere to our starboard.

All these people down there, and nobody knows what’s coming, I think. When I sent my letters off to Mom and Halley a month ago with Sergeant Williamson, I told my mother to get the hell out of the PRC and into the countryside somehow, but I suspect she didn’t need the encouragement.

“Do you regret anything?” Halley asks me. “I mean, now that we’re looking at the end of it all. Anything you wish you hadn’t done?”

I think about her question for a good while and look out at Earth and the stars beyond.

“No, I don’t,” I say. “Got off Earth. Got to see what’s out there. Got to be with you. I wish we could have spent more time together. But I wouldn’t undo anything.”

“Not even Detroit?”

“Not even Detroit,” I say. “Well, maybe I would check the color code on that fucking MARS rocket if I had to do it all again. How about you?”

“Nothing,” she says without hesitation. “I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Except maybe proposed marriage a few years earlier.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Looks like we’re not going to make the six-month waiting period.”

“One last time the military gets to fuck us over and ruin our plans,” Halley says, and we both laugh.



We dock at Regulus fifteen minutes later, two stop-ship wings hitting the clamps at the same time and getting hoisted into the flight deck simultaneously, a feat that only a Navigator-class supercarrier can pull off.

Halley turns off her engines as we pass through the airlock and get deposited on the flight deck. In front of us, Tent City is mostly gone, and two full battalions of Homeworld Defense soldiers are standing in battle order, waiting for the command to board their rides home.