At the appointed instant, armed with as good a read on the ghost as long range allowed, she made the rendezvous to find Baz waiting for her. Closing to tight-beam range, she opened the lowest-power spread-spectrum channel. “Anything?”
“Found a statis bottle back there in a debris cloud,” came the tinny reply, “and Tanner’s bird—what’s left of it anyway. He’s not in it.” The cloud had to be what was left of Diego’s fighter then. And probably of Diego. Fucked-up start to my first command—losing two right outta the chute.
That thought needed to be pushed aside, and the acid bite in her stomach needed to be ignored. With an effort, she managed both. “Tanner ejected?”
“Looks like. I haven’t been able to detect a suit beacon yet—hope he’s just lying low. But he didn’t launch his hyperdrone.” That was not comforting: he should’ve popped it off at the first sign of trouble. But it was impossible to say what might have happened, and if Tanner thought the bad guys were still in the area, it made sense he wouldn’t activated his beacon immediately. His suit environmentals were good for about twenty-four hours if he wanted to stay conscious—maybe as long as twenty-six or even twenty-eight in a pinch—although it was ill-advised to push it much past sixteen. At that point, you were better off going into hyper-sleep, which would keep you alive for another ten days or so. The catch there was that the suit couldn’t revive you: a medical team had to do that. But he knew Kris and Baz would start searching ASAP, so surely he’d activate his beacon before too long—if he could. If not, they’d have to do a fine-comb search for him, which meant—
She yanked that train of thought to a halt. Don’t try to do everything—let Baz handle it. It was the ghost that needed her attention right now.
“Alright, Baz. Take a look at this.” She linked him the signature data. “What’dya think?”
“Looks like a stealth corvette to me,” he answered after a minute, concurring with her initial guess. “Got whacked some too—he’s bleeding erratically—and hauling ass for home.” Tanner and Diego must have gotten some licks in then. Good job there, guys. She never would’ve detected it otherwise.
“That’s what I thought.” Following the corvette’s course would lead her straight to the Doms but, assuming they were somewhere along the Callindra Lane, her fighter didn’t have the reaction mass to get there and get back. Confirming their location, to say nothing of getting close enough to ID the individual ships, meant a one-way trip.
A one-way trip for her fighter certainly. It might be just possible she could make it back. The idea sounded insane at first, but the more she’d thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. Fundamentally, it depended only on that most reliable of forces—simple gravity—and out here, far from any perturbing bodies, the mechanics were perfectly straightforward. She’d worked out a simple algorithm while returning to meet Baz, and although it needed to be refined, the results were promising.
“Baz, keep searching for Tanner. How long do you think that’ll take?”
“Based on where his fighter is, maybe a couple of hours. If he lights up, a lot less of course.”
“Good. Bring the tender over here, fuel up, find Tanner and get ’im back to the station ASAP. Send a drone off with my data and anything else you find out as soon as you locate him—”
“Kris—”
“Don’t interrupt. Once you’re tanked up, I need you to set the tender’s autopilot to fly this trajectory”—sending him a plot. “Exactly this trajectory, Baz. Can you do that?”
“Kris, what the hell are you thinking?”
“I’m going after the ghost. We still gotta a job to do.”
“That’s way outta range—”
“That’s why I need you to send the tender down this line.”
Something brief and unintelligible on the other end. “Yeah, okay.”
“This is gonna work, Baz.”
“Sure.”
She ignored his tone. “Just one more thing.”
“What?”
“What’s the specific impulse of a round from a standard-issue sidearm?”
“What?”
“Come on, Baz—specific impulse. How much delta-V do you get from firing a sidearm in null-G?”
“Well . . . shit. About two meters per second maybe. For a hundred kilo rest mass.”
“About? I don’t need about, Baz. You used to keep all this shit on your xel! What’s the fuckin’ number?”
“Kris . . .” She heard him exhale over the link. “How many decimals you want?”
“How many you got?”
“I dunno—I can’t say what the exact tolerances are on the goddamned things! Maybe . . . call it four significant digits?”
“Fine. Gimme four significant digits then.”
He did. She plugged them into her algorithm.
“Look, Kris—”
“Thanks, Baz. You better get going.”
“Kris—”
“And I’m sorry I snapped at you. Don’t hate me, okay?”
“Kris! When I said we might be in for a long swim home, you knew I was kidding, right?”
“Get home safe, Baz. Don’t fuck around out there—that’s an order. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
Kris understood Basmartin’s feelings; had the roles been reversed, she wouldn’t have been happy with it either. But somebody had to find Tanner (there was too little hope for Diego to be worth thinking about right now) and report back with what they’d found. The data they had on the fleeing corvette wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. It meant the mission wasn’t a total zero.
And Baz had family, friends—a life. A real one beyond the Service. He deserved a shot at living it.
He was probably being pessimistic anyway—he always worried too much. Sorta like Huron, that way. They both worried about her—thinking she did crazy shit cuz she just didn’t care. It wasn’t true. She liked breathing as much as anyone. But sometimes shit just had to get done.
Like now.
Her plan was a good one. She’d follow the corvette’s course, burning hard at first and then cooling it down as she got closer. That committed her to a long stern chase, but that was what she wanted: it would bring her in behind the fleet’s pickets. It was highly unlikely the Doms would be looking for a lone fighter approaching from the rear, especially not with the corvette reporting it had found and flamed two snoopers.
If the Doms did decide to get nosy and intercept her bird, that was okay with her—she wouldn’t be in it. That was why she’d had Baz dispatch the tender on that specific trajectory. First, if she failed to detect the fleet by the point of no return, she’d have the option of breaking off and going home—a failure. But she didn’t see how it was possible to miss a footprint that big. At the ops briefing, Huron had told them to expect shunting that would distort and confuse the gravitic signatures, but that would be directed ahead and she’d be coming up from behind.
Once she had the Doms localized, she’d set her bird on an intercept course and shut down all but the passive sensors. The sensor suite could be programed with a decision tree to regulate when reports would be flashed to the tender, which would be skirting the edge of the fleet’s detection envelope. She’d figured in a nice safety margin there. Once the algorithm was satisfied it had resolved all the major targets, it would launch the drone—sooner, if it detected any craft approaching. That might give the game away, but no matter; they’d have accomplished their mission. Her part in all this was just to set everything up and make sure it was working. Then she’d do the simplest thing of all: step out.
It would be a long drift: twenty hours before she rendezvoused with the tender, twenty-two at the outside. That was pushing it, but not too hard. There would be errors in her estimates, of course, and they’d accumulate over time. Chances were good that when she arrived, she wouldn’t be able to close the tender using just suit thrusters. That’s why she’d asked Baz about the specific impul
se generated by her sidearm. As a maneuvering device, it was crude, but her calculations showed that it would allow her to make the necessary course corrections during the endgame. Until then, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do, and she could use a nice long nap.
* * *
Two hundred and ninety-four minutes into chasing down the long vanished corvette’s trail, Kris was alerted to cloud of phase wakes, just above threshold. Locking onto them and running a swirling filter, she extracted a range and a mass estimate; pretty vague but, for her purposes, good enough. She sent a burst off to the tender, waited for confirmation it was received, and started her algorithms. The point of no return was far behind her, and now she was looking at a twenty-four drift, the not the twenty-two hour maximum she’d counted on.
Dammit.
There was nothing for it, however—things would only get worse from here. Checking her figures one last time, she uploaded all the data to her xel and mated it to her suit avionics. Reverifying the upload and that her xel was accessible through her visor display, she engaged the autopilot.
The autopilot beeped and flashed up a message to acknowledge the handover. One by one, the bird’s systems took themselves offline. Unmating the suit umbilicals as the cockpit HUD blanked, she sat for a minute, breathing deliberately and watching the countdown timer in the upper-right corner of her visor. When it reached one minute, she cracked the canopy with the manual release.
At forty-five seconds, she levered open the canopy and swung out on the wing spar. Grasping the rim of the cockpit, she checked the countdown timer again. The digits reeled off as she watched with the greatest concentration. In the instant before the timer beeped over her helmet speakers and the sound actually registered in her mind, she let go.
Z-Day +5 (PM)
LSS Trafalgar, Outbound Station
Gamma Hydras, Hydra Border Zone
Commodore Shariati faced her intent officers assembled in Trafalgar’s CIC. Now that they knew what they were up against, on which axis, adrenaline was running high. The hyperdrone from Kris’s fighter had arrived in the beginning of the afternoon watch, bearing a detailed breakdown of the Dom battle group that was better than anything the commodore, despite her seemingly cavalier manner, had dared hope for. It tallied two fleet carriers, two light carriers, a dozen cruisers (four heavy and eight light) and eighteen destroyers, behind a screen of three frigates and seven stealth corvettes. That was twice their strength in ships, but more critically, if the Doms’ strike groups were at their full complement, they’d bring four hundred twenty fighters into battle, against the one hundred thirty-four in her force. Their best estimate was that those four hundred twenty fighters would be in strike range at 0415 the day cycle after tomorrow.
So much for what the data told them. What it did not reveal was the fate of the four young pilots she’d sent out to collect it. None had yet returned. Nominally, they should have followed the drone by no more than seven hours, and it was well past that. But the data did show it had been collected at close range: so close that a fighter probably could not have made it back to the tender, even if the pilot managed to escape. And that was all the answer they were likely to ever get.
She clearly recalled the look in Huron’s eyes as they discussed the mission—a look whose basis was better than she’d thought at the time—and she promised herself that if they lived through this, she'd spend a day reflecting on those four pilots, and most especially on a certain young female ensign who’d made it all possible. But right now what mattered was not wasting the gift she’d given them.
“Sonovia,” the commodore spoke in her clear, cutting voice, “please get me the maximum sustainable sortie rates assuming an op window of twenty-four hours. Deploy our recon assets as far forward as possible, in a two-tier search. I’m posting BATCRURON 9 to here.” She highlighted an outlying position, off the flank of the approaching Halith forces. BATCRURON 9 included Artemisia, Shariati’s own battlecruiser, the heavy cruisers Formidable and Reliant, the light cruisers Osiris, Ares, Laconia and Agamemnon, and their destroyer screen.
“Detach Osiris and Minotaur to here”—selecting a point on the Anju-Ri axis—“as if we had been reinforced and were planning a breakout on that line. Tell Captain Lazaroff she may be somewhat conspicuous in her actions, but she is on no account to risk either ship.” That left them only the light cruisers Gryphon and Nemesis, and the remaining destroyers, to support Trafalgar and Concordia.
Commander Harmon held back a frown as she felt her stomach tighten. “Ma’am, that gives us only the bare minimum for picket duty and recovery ops. We won’t be able to maintain an effective area-defense net.”
“I’m quite aware of that, Commander.”
“Are we planning a breakout on the Anju-Ri axis, ma’am?” Commander DeCano asked cautiously.
“As of now, no,” Shariati answered with equal care, “but you will plan for that eventuality.”
“Are we to deploy all our recon assets, ma’am?” Harmon asked.
“All except Commander Huron’s flight, Sonovia. And the commander himself is to remain on board—I wish that to be particularly well understood.”
“What contingencies are we to consider, ma’am?” asked Captain Bajorat.
“Sauvé qui peut, Dirk. Sauvé qui peut.”
“Very good, ma’am.” The captain, who was used to his CO’s eccentric sense of humor, still did not find that an especially comforting thought, whatever his cool, calm and collected tone implied.
“There you have it, people. Our work is cut out for us. Report back by midnight. Dirk, please notify the other commands and inform Captain RyKirt he may set Condition 2 Easy throughout the ship.”
Condition 2 Easy meant that action stations were manned but ship is not fully secured, allowing personnel to move between spaces for head calls, to get coffee, or visit the gunrooms for a snack. The galley was still able to serve hot food, which was not a trivial consideration for people with a hard night ahead of them, and the promise of a much harder day tomorrow.
“Shall I tell them anything else, ma’am?” her chief of staff asked, his manner unchanged.
“You may tell them: Iacta alea est, Captain. That is all.”
* * *
In all the diminished task force, there were probably only a few dozen people who were conversant in Latin to any degree, and a bare handful that knew a word of French. Armorer’s Mate Second Class Luis Castillo was certainly not among them. So the commodore’s mild jest of having The die is cast announced over the all-hands broadcast system in the original Latin was not responsible for Castillo’s look of discomposure as he exited the H-deck ladder well, having skidded down five lift ladders from C-deck, where he’d been standing watch. His post had given him every opportunity to observe the officers coming and going from CIC and eavesdrop on snatches of their conversation, and despite his monoglotism, everything he’d heard during his watch left him with no doubt as to the true nature of what Shariati had said about contingencies, no matter which dead language she chose to express it in.
He was still breathing hard as he ducked through the hatch that led to the gunroom just outside the forward berthing area. As expected, it was busy with petty officers gathering up what they could for themselves and their teams to see them through the remainder of the watch. At a table near the back, he saw his crew-second, Senior Chief Petty Officer Gabrielle Wooten, sharing coffee and a sandwich with Machinist Katie Flowers. Wooten looked up as he squeezed through the crowd, noted the high color in the young mariner’s face and retrieved another sandwich from the dumbwaiter.
“Here, Castillo. Eat something—you look pale.”
Castillo took the sandwich automatically. “She’s gone and done it,” he said, low and hoarse, conscious of dozens of attentive ears. “Hoisted the goddamn black flag, I tell ya. Fucking jolly roger, all the way.”
“Now watch your mouth, sailor.” Wooten, who knew the commodore of old and knew well that almost no power of heaven or eart
h would keep her from going straight for the enemy’s jugular once her blood was up, poured the last of the coffee into Flower’s cup. “We got mixed company here. Now grab a box of donuts and get on down to your action station.”
Z-Day +6 (AM)
Deep space,
Hydra Border Zone
Being alone. Drifting through an infinitude with hard vacuum stretching away on every hand as far as time itself. There probably wasn’t so much as single organic molecule for a thousand klicks in any direction. What the fuck had she been thinking . . .
Once Trench had taken her onto the observation deck of Harlot’s Ruse. They were in null-gee, as usual, and he activated the omni-displays and suppressed the overhead, bulkheads and deck. It was an old slaver trick, intended to make new girls feel helpless and isolated by introducing them to the never-ending abyss, and maybe giving them a hint of what might be in store if they misbehaved. Generally it worked, provoking anything from profound unease to outright hysteria.
It made Kris laugh.
Whether Trench enjoyed the experience or could merely tolerate it for a few minutes while his property freaked out, Kris never knew. He never repeated it—their subsequent visits to O-deck where strictly conventional—so it seemed pretty likely he actually didn’t enjoy it much. But she did. At odd times, say if she could get away in the middle of grave watch, she’d go there and just float, communing with eternity and tenuous promise of freedom it seemed to hold.
Eternity met with on view screens was one thing. Staring it in the eye out here was another. When she let go of her fighter, her appointed rendezvous with the tender had been a mere number: 5,135,169 ±32 kilometers distant on this trajectory (two-sigma confidence), based on her estimate of how good her inputs were. She now knew they weren’t as good as she had thought. An error as small as not accounting for her offset from the fighter’s centerline when she let go mattered. Just how much, she’d learn very soon.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 95