Huron had given her a brief rundown on the tactical situation when he talked to her, and Kris wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
Seeing her struggle for a diplomatic answer, Shariati frowned. “I expected you to be frank, Ensign.”
“Yes, ma’am. Then I think that if we can’t find a way to keep the Doms off balance and confused, we’re well and truly f— . . . that is, we are . . .”
“Fucked is the word I believe you’re looking for. Am I correct?”
“Ah—I—yes, ma’am.”
“The medicos, I see, have cleared you for light duties. How would you rate your recovery? Do you feel flight-ready?”
Kris knew what Huron thought—he must’ve said it too, since Shariati had talked to him first. Had he been overruled? Or was she selling him short on his opinion of her?
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is what I believe we may be facing.” The commodore activated the display in her desktop and gave Kris a succinct account of the situation. It added more details to what Huron had told her but the real story was expressed eloquently enough by the traces.
“I think you’ll agree that this chokepoint is the heart of matter,” Shariati said conversationally. Kris certainly agreed with that—and with the as-yet-unmentioned fact that it was well beyond twice a recon fighter’s normal operating range. She assumed the commodore would get to that eventually.
“Now what I propose,” Shariati continued smoothly, “is that a single flight positioned here”—she drew a box on the display—“with each element operating independently”—adding two ellipses within said box—“can accomplish a leakproof surveillance of both approaches.”
Not quite. “What about that gap in the middle, ma’am?” Kris interjected and instantly clicked her teeth together at the realization she’d just interrupted a flag officer.
The commodore merely gave her another of those thin smiles, like a scalpel blade. “Yes. The tender can be modified to cover that—there will, of course, be a tender to get the flight there and back.”
So much for the range issue: tenders could carry up to six fighters using external clamps. They were mainly used for ferrying operations and retrieving damaged fighters and their pilots, but they could also support long-range missions that were beyond a fighter’s limited jump capabilities, allowing them to refuel and rearm. The downside was that when fully loaded, they were slow and not terribly stealthy, making them easy meat in enemy space. And what they were looking at would certainly become enemy space, unless it was a wasted trip.
“Yes, ma’am,” Kris agreed tonelessly.
“The plan is to fly a two-phase nautilus search”—naval jargon for a search pattern based on a logarithmic spiral using two craft—“with the tender making a static fence along here. That will suffice, don’t you think?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The expected arrival window”—Shariati tapped the numbers on the display—“is seven hours wide. For myself, I’ve never thought much of the Doms’ time sense. So I would suggest widening it to nine, just to be sure.” Kris nodded. “Lastly, when detection is made, it is vital that a complete order of battle be obtained. As complete as possible, I should say.” Based on the commodore’s look, as possible did not seem to encompass concerns for life and limb. “What do you think, Ensign? Is this plan feasible?”
“The tender will be acting as a comms relay, ma’am?” The question was no more than a ploy to buy time while she thought of something more intelligent to say.
“Yes. And each fighter will also carry a hyperdrone to return any data the flight collects.”
“Um—then sure—yes, ma’am. I’d say it’s feasible.”
“I was interested to note that not only is Ensign Basmartin your squadron mate, but Ensign Tanner is currently assigned to the recon wing on Concordia. So we appear to have the nucleus of a winning team here. The three of you accomplished the seemingly impossible once before, Ensign. If I offer you command of this op, what do you say to an encore?”
The tradition of the Service usually demanded unquestioning assent to such proposals, but this case was more extreme than most. Blurting out Yes, ma’am in the best gung-ho style might not be what the commodore was looking for here.
“Ah—”
“Don’t be hasty, Ensign. This mission is voluntary, and I will not disparage the severity of the challenges involved. Obtaining the data we need will likely require close contact with the enemy force. You, I’m sure, will have already worked out the odds of survival for yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She knew they weren’t going to make her do it. But . . . “Lemme talk to ’em.”
* * *
“What’dya guys think? We don’t have to do this.”
The three of them sat alone in Echo Squadron’s ready room, a generously sized compartment furnished with five retractable tables, a dumb waiter, and three coffee machines. Along the bulkheads, tactical displays (now all blank) alternated with scale models of Halith combatants and a number of more lighthearted decorations. When not serving as a briefing space, it acted as a sort of club with an atmosphere to match, but now, amidst of welter of disposable coffee cups and leftover pizza—the remains of their abbreviated dinner—Kris felt chilled.
“If it’s not us, they’ll just send someone else,” answered Baz, appearing to study the bulkhead decorations. She wondered which ones. “She asked us first, so she must think we give ’em the best shot.”
She asked us first cuz we’re expendable. But she looked at Tanner without acknowledging the thought. “What do you say?”
“Sounds like old times to me.”
“This isn’t another boggart, Tanner,” Kris cautioned. Back at the Academy, when they’d fought the boggart to a draw and had a chance to get away clean, she’d said: let’s go home winners or not at all. Why she’d said that was something Baz and Tanner couldn’t really grasp—certainly not then, and probably not now. And it had been just a war game.
Tanner grinned. “Thank gawd for that!”
No, he didn’t get it. Outwardly she asked, “What about Diego? Think he’ll go for it?” Ensign Chaz Diego was Tanner’s wingman and the logical choice to fill out the roster. Kris had never met him.
“Oh hell, yeah.” He chuckled. “You’ll never get the grin off his face. I should give him a call?”
Must already have visions of the decorations we’ll earn if we pull this off dancing in his head. Posthumous decorations?
She nudged a pizza crust to the side of her plate. “Do that.”
Tanner got on his xel, and Diego arrived ten minutes later, looking happy and expectant. As Kris explained the mission, Tanner’s prognostication proved to be correct. By the time she finished his smile was so bright you could read by it.
Kris held back a sigh as she unfurled her xel and keyed up the commodore.
“Yes, Ensign?” Shariati answered crisply.
“We’re all in, ma’am. It’s a go.”
* * *
The ops briefing broke up in an air of tension, quiet but palpable, and Commander Huron’s closing “Good hunting” did not elicit any of the usual boisterous remarks, it being just the five of them. Baz had lapsed into his usual studious preflight silence and Tanner was by now more subdued. Only Ensign Diego was still smiling.
They filed out, still with a solid hour’s work ahead of them. The mission required several software patches; those had to be verified. The tender and its new sensor suite was being seen to, and they needed to run a thorough link test. Hyperdrones were finicky critters, so the interfaces had to be wrung out one last time. With those things accomplished, they’d review any final details of the contingencies that had been prepared, then complete their TAC upload and ordnance checks.
Kris paused at the entry, then stepped back to let it close. A knot had suddenly formed behind her solar plexus. She was closer to Huron than anyone she’d ever known; that was a fact—an often uncomfortable fact. It wasn’t just that everyo
ne assumed they were lovers and had been since they met. It was the thing itself: a queer, chancy, hybrid sort of relationship, half-completed and awkward—and half the time she wished they’d end it. The rest of the time . . .
“Huron? I . . . ah”—forcing the syllables out one by one. “You got a minute?”
“Of course, Kris.”
She was still facing the entry, and looking down as she spoke. “If, um . . . there’s no homecoming from this op, when you go to get Marko’s pialla, there’s another letter in my stuff. I’d like you to take it before . . . well, y’know. I don’t care about anything else, but take that letter, okay?”
She turned toward him and from the way she momentarily met his eyes and looked away, it was clear she wasn’t talking about the sort of letter pilots often left behind in case they didn’t come back. And Kris had no one to send such a letter to—at least no one he was aware of. He nodded. The other boot was clearly dangling between them, and he waited for it to drop.
“It’s from Mariwen”—dropping it. “She . . .” Kris took a step forward, rubbing her knuckles on the palm of her other hand. “I never answered it. I don’t know how—but, I was hoping you’d tell her—just tell her that . . . I’m sorry. I know her contact info’s restricted and all, but I figured you could get it, so . . . I mean, if you can—if she’s okay—just say I’m sorry.”
“Sure. I’ll do that.” A pause. “What do you want me to do with her letter?”
“I . . . don’t know.” She looked up and tried to smile. “You figure that out, okay?”
He started to nod—to try to think of something appropriate to say—there was the space of only a short step between them—she crossed it suddenly and her hands came up against his chest, then dropped.
“Look, Rafe. There’s a lotta shit I’m no good at. And a lot more I never got a chance to learn. Keep that in mind, would’ja? Please?” And before he could respond, her arms came around his neck and she kissed him—a shocking, lingering kiss—and settled back on her heels, the color high in her face. Turning away to hide her eyes, she seemed on the cusp of saying something but shook her head—he wondered what words had been on the tip of her tongue—reached for his hand, squeezed it once, and let go.
“Bye, Rafe,”
Carefully, he swallowed to ease the catch in his throat and waited that crucial beat so his voice would at least sound calm.
“See you later, Kris.”
Z-Day +5 (AM)
Recon Flight Rogue Viper, on patrol;
Phase Plane Victor, Hydra Border Zone
Had an observer been able to lift itself far out of the galactic plane, to a god-like eminence above this volume of space that was distinguished only by its usefulness in surveilling the transit routes on either side, it would have observed four infinitesimal specks in that vast emptiness, carving the ether with mathematic precision. Two complimentary logarithmic spirals, their centers nine light-hours apart; two specks on each spiral, ten light-seconds apart, and exactly between them, a fifth speck, with which the other four communicated, although only when on the innermost leg of each expanding spiral, and then only by the briefest burst and according to the strictest protocol.
Further, if this being’s gaze could plumb dimensions normally inaccessible, it would also have beheld the deep-radar flashes from each leading speck, probing the “High Holy”(as mariners termed it) for the “shadows” made by the active keels of hypercapable ships. The trailing specks were themselves watchfully silent, listening for the flash’s echo, and any other telltale signs of approaching craft.
It might be supposed that this simple ballet would appear serene, even pleasing, to such an observer, conveying nothing of the tense, nibbling boredom being experienced by the absurdly finite inhabitants of those specks. Most especially not as it affected the inhabitant of the lead speck on the western spiral (as referenced to galactic north), who happened to be Kris. This sort of punctuated tedium was exactly how recon pilots earned their living, and it was usual to do so far from home and with little support. But not this far from home or with this little support: one slow, vulnerable, unhandy, unmanned tender. As Baz had remarked on the way out, if anything did go wrong, they were in for a very long swim home.
Nor was there often so much riding on the outcome, and never before had Kris been in actual command. In simulation, yes, of course—more times than she could recall—but this was her first encounter with the real-world version and she felt the responsibility most keenly. That feeling had been growing minute by minute and hour by hour as they followed their assigned trajectories, Baz keeping precise station behind her. Basmartin’s role had nothing to do with seniority and everything to do with his skill with sensors. He’d been the best in their class at the Academy, routinely achieving detection ranges ten or even fifteen percent better than anyone else. He was especially good with passive sensors, which was why Kris played the role of illuminator, and he had a preternatural knack for defeating ECM (or music, as it was known in the Service).
Having Baz back there was indeed a comfort, but it was a comfort sensibly diminished by her knowledge that Tanner’s skills in this regard were merely adequate (as were her own) and that she knew nothing about Diego beyond his reputation, which was for being solid, if a tad enthusiastic. She kept a hard rein on her creeping urge to ping Tanner any more than absolutely necessary. Their job was to report detection results, not chat, and in any case, her breathing down his neck wasn’t going to suddenly improve his performance.
On each inward leg, one fighter of each element flashed their results to the tender, and the tender, keeping its lonely automated vigil, duly relayed the data by hyperwave burst to Outbound. It also replied to the sender with status messages from the other element and its own news. As the spirals lengthened, so did the comms lag and interval between transmission windows. This increased the likelihood of running afoul of Halith pickets while out of comms range, so they kept their hyperdrones primed. If all went well, they’d use the drones to return their full data set once they finally made contact with the Halith fleet.
They had been at it for two hours and twenty minutes when Kris came around on the inward leg and let go a burst of data at the tender. The tender obediently replied with its own “all clear” report, but not with a status message from either Tanner or Diego. They were supposed to keep their search patterns synched but it was possible they were lagging a few minutes. She gnawed her cheek, wondering if she should slow down to allow more time for them to report in. The pattern had only a ten percent margin to keep it leakproof, and she didn’t want to start invading that yet. On the other hand . . .
She keyed up her tight-beam link. “Baz? No report from Rogue 2”—Tanner and Diego’s call sign. “Are you seeing anything?” If they’d run in trouble, one of them ought to have launched a hyperdrone. At this range, Baz might have been able to pick up a transient when it jumped out.
“Wait one.” Dead silence on the link as she felt the weight bear down on her shoulders. “Negative, Kris. I got nothing. Maybe they’re just a few minutes late.”
Maybe my ass. “I gonna ping ’em.” She decelerated to extend her comms window another six minutes. The hyperwave ping went off into vacuum. The window closed without a reply and a prickle ran across the back of her neck, the fine hairs there tickling unbearably against her flight helmet.
Goddammit. “Baz, they’re in trouble.”
“I’ll be in range in five minutes, Kris. If we stretch it some, I can—”
“No.” Those hairs felt like they were screaming and foreboding weight was pressing her down in the seat. “They ran into somethin’. They can’t be this late. We gotta go check.”
“But if we abandon this section . . .”
Kris wasn’t listening. She was rerunning their search pattern with new parameters. “We can jump the tender to here”—linking him the new pattern. “That’ll give us some cover while we see what happened.”
“That’s not leakproof.”
“It’s eighty-five percent. That’s—”
“Fifteen percent we let ’em get by.”
“Baz! What the fuck? You wanna stay here with the tender? That’s leakproof.”
“Not on the other side—”
“Exactly. What the fuck ya think went down over there? A tea party?”
“Okay, Kris. Sorry.” His voice was heavy with resignation. “What’re we gonna do?”
“Order the tender over here and then form up on me. We jump in ninety seconds.”
“Roger that, ma’am.”
* * *
The two fighters translated into the eastern half of their search volume, designated Phase Plane Juliet, with that strange sensation—as though space-time had become oddly slippery—so different from the translation of a large ship, which induced a feeling akin to euphoria in Kris.
But this shallow jump made no such impression, and as soon as her instruments came back online, she keyed up the tight-beam link to Baz. “Quarter and search. I’ll take Phase 1.”
Baz acknowledged and split off westward to cover his assigned arc. Whatever Tanner and Diego had run into, it had taken them by complete surprise, which ruled out anything as mundane as a Halith fighter squadron. Kris had to conclude they’d encountered picket ships—stealth corvettes or maybe even a frigate—and she and Baz had tuned their sensors with that in mind. It was likely the pickets were still operating in the area, probably sweeping ahead of Tanner and Diego’s last reported position.
Running a plot based on that guess, Kris took an arc extending eastward, designed to put her in the baffles of any ship cruising in that direction, and cut her drives and electronic signatures to the bare minimum. Finding nothing after coasting along for twenty minutes, she decided to add a dogleg to her pattern and turned south. Almost immediately her ESM suite picked up a faint flickering signature. Its amplitude and bearing suggested it was at extreme range and receding rapidly.
She shot Baz a coded hyperwave pulse, telling him to continue his search and rendezvous with her in fifty minutes, then boosted after the ghost, barely waiting for his acknowledging ping to come back. Whatever objections Baz might have to her haring off alone—and he’d probably have some—she didn’t have time to listen to them.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 94