Angles of Attack (26 page)

“Bird’s back in the barn,” the XO says a little while later.

“Take us out and shadow that destroyer,” Colonel Campbell orders. “Mind your distance and stay on their stern. Make it ten thousand klicks.”

“There hasn’t been a lick of active radiation from them since we popped them in the snout,” Major Renner says.

“We took out their front array, which is probably why we’re still afloat. But let’s not take chances. The second it looks like they’ve spotted us, we’re turning about and going full burn. No point pushing our luck.”

We’ve been pushing our luck since we set out for Fomalhaut
, I think, and look at the spot where my two missing fingers used to be. I can feel the pain throbbing underneath the chemical layer of fuzzy bliss from the painkillers, and I’m very thankful for modern chemistry right now.

Murphy
leaves Earth and Luna behind, and
Indy
follows.

The destroyer pulls low acceleration, probably because of the damage we inflicted. The Blue-class destroyers are large ships, almost three times the size of
Indy
and much better armored and armed, but they are deep-space combatants and not even slightly stealthy. We are following in their wake, where the noise from their own engines make their passive sensors as good as blind.

We are under way and on
Murphy
’s tail for just a little under four hours when the tactical officer perks up and updates the holotable display.

“We have some active radar sweeps ahead. Two—make that three sources.”

On the holotable, three pale blue icons appear on the edge of our scanning range. They have three-dimensional lozenge-shaped zones projected around them. Our passive gear is picking up the radar transmitters, but it hasn’t pinpointed the exact locations of the sources yet, so the lozenges mark the zones where the contacts are likely to be.

“Source?” Colonel Campbell asks.

“Military, definitely Commonwealth units. ELINT is sorting out the profiles right now,” the tactical officer replies. “Stand by.”

“There’s precisely squat out here according to the charts,” Major Renner says. “This is not even a travel lane. Military or civilian.”

“Let’s see what we have here,” the colonel says. “Just keep an eye on those active sources. We come even close to detection, we break off and leave them be.”

It takes the computer and the electronic-intelligence suite of
Indy
another twenty minutes to sort out the radar transmissions in front of us. One by one, the contact icons on the tactical display change from “UNKNOWN PRESUMED FRIENDLY” to actual class designations. The wedges that mark the location of the transmitting ships shrink with every second we spend in pursuit of
Murphy
.

“It’s another picket,” the XO says. “A frigate, Treaty-class. Another frigate, unknown class. And a Hammerhead cruiser.”

“All new stuff,” Colonel Campbell says. “Why are they a million klicks from Earth instead of in orbit?”

“Pretty sure
Murphy
is talking to them. I’m getting burst transmission noise,” the electronic-warfare officer says from his console.

“They’re talking on tight-beam.”

“Not tight-beam, sir. It’s encrypted ship to ship, but it’s not a fleet key. At least none we have in the computer.”

“Private conversation. Interesting.” Colonel Campbell leans over the holotable and rests his palms on the glass surface. His fingertips poke through the holographic orb of the tactical display, which re-forms itself around his hand.

“Change course to negative zero-two-zero by zero-four-five. Hold that for ten minutes and then return to the old heading, go parallel to
Murphy
again. And deploy the passive arrays, too.”

Over the next hour, the plot slowly shifts as
Murphy
approaches the picket line of unknown Commonwealth ships and we trail behind and below. The picket ships are in a patrol pattern, sweeping the space in front of them with active radar.
Indy
has to make several course corrections to avoid the invisible searchlights of the radar transmitters, and each turn takes us a little more off course from wherever
Murphy
is going.

“That’s about as far as we’ll be able to sneak in without getting lit up, I think,” Colonel Campbell says after the radar-warning-threat meter pegs from green into yellow twice in the span of a minute. “Bring her about and coast ballistic. Make your new heading positive one-two-zero by two-one-zero.”

“Hang on,” the tactical officer chimes in. “Multiple contacts on passive, bearing positive twenty degrees. Five . . . seven . . . ten . . . Sir, I have at least a dozen distinct contacts popping up on optical.”

“Go for magnification and verify,” the colonel says. Everyone in the CIC looks over at the holotable, where a cluster of pale blue icons has popped into existence on the far upper edge of our situational-awareness bubble. The picket ships are keeping us at bay, but
Murphy
is passing through the picket and heading right for that new cluster of contacts.

“Any of them squawking ID?”

“I’m getting IFF from the picket ships. The Hammerhead is the
Phalanx
. The frigates are
Lausanne
and . . .
Acheron
?” He looks over at the colonel with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “Sir, I’ve never heard of a frigate named
Acheron
in the fleet.”

“There is no
Acheron
,” Major Renner says.

On the holotable, the closest blue icons update with ship names and hull numbers: “CG-761 PHALANX,” “FF-481 LAUSANNE.” Putting lie to the XO’s statement, the letters on the third icon change from “UNKNOWN” to “FF-901 ACHERON.”

“What the hell is an
Acheron
?” our weapons officer says.

“A river,” I reply. “A river in the Greek underworld. Mythology.”

Colonel Campbell gives me a curt smile that looks slightly amused and a little approving. “Wonder if we’ll bump into
Styx
and
Lethe
out here, too,” he says.

The weapons officer’s look is blank, and the colonel sighs ever so slightly.

“Rivers,” he says. “More rivers in the Greek underworld.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s just hope that whoever named that thing just has a hard-on for the classics,” the colonel says. “That name’s a shitty omen otherwise.”

“Why is that, sir?” the weapons officer asks.

“Acheron’s the river the souls of the dead must cross to get to the underworld,” I supply.

The frigates and the cruiser are performing competent patrol patterns, with interlocking sensor coverage and tight execution.
Indy
maps out the area kilometer by kilometer, coasting on a parabolic trajectory just at the edge of the picket force’s detection range. Minute by minute, we close the distance a little, and our passive sensors yield more data bit by bit. One active sweep of
Indy
’s radar would map out our entire awareness bubble to the meter and centimeter and tell us the location of every scrap of metal bigger than a trash can in this part of space, but that would be like a thief in a dark building strapping a ten-thousand-watt flashlight to his head.

“There’s a lot of ships out here,” Major Renner says. The cluster of blue icons on the edge of our sensor range is growing bigger—every few minutes, the computer adds an icon or two to the group as we get closer and the passive arrays sniff out more radiation sources and visual contacts.

“Eight, then, twelve . . . fourteen. They have a big-ass task force assembling in the middle of nowhere.”

“Something else, too.” The tactical officer brings up a window on the holographic plot and increases the size and scan range. “Too big for a ship, too small for a station. And it’s right in the middle of all that traffic.”

Colonel Campbell studies the image from
Indy
’s optical array. The ships we’ve plotted are mere specks on the screen, all clustered around an asymmetrical white-gray structure.

“It’s an anchorage,” he says. “They have a deep-space anchorage out here. Maybe a small fleet yard. Look at that. There’s the outriggers—that’s the central part right there.” He pokes at the display with his index finger and pans the image by moving his hand clockwise.

“Whatever they’re doing out there, they’re keeping really tight EMCON,” the tactical officer says.

“Yeah, I’m sure they are. How many recon drones do we have left on the ship?”

“Fourteen, sir. We used up half our loadout in Fomalhaut.” Major Renner looks over to the ELINT officer, who confirms the statement with a nod.

“Prep them for launch. I want to make a box with them all around this anchorage.” The colonel points at the display and starts marking locations on the plot.

“They’re picketing right here, and whatever they’re assembling is on the other side of that anchorage. Put four birds on the near side—here, here, here, and here. Then four more on the far side at these coordinates.” He marks the spots by poking them with his finger. “We’ll bracket the whole area, box ’em in. I want to keep tabs on every ship that comes or goes.”

“Aye, sir. Weps, let’s get those birds into the tubes and warmed up.”

Indy
’s autonomous stealth drones are like miniature starships. They have propulsion, guidance systems, sensor packages, and a comms suite. I don’t know half the technological voodoo that goes into them because they’re superclassified secret tech, but I know from my Neural Networks days that a recon ship with the new drones tied into its sensor network is worth a whole squadron of the old ships that don’t have the drones and the new data-link infrastructure they require.

“Recon birds are ready in tubes two, four, five, and six,” the weapons officer says when the loading procedure is complete. The drones are sized to fit and launch from
Indy
’s standard ship-to-ship missile tubes—
Indy
lacks external launchers, so everything that leaves the ship has to go through the main airlock, the hangar bay, or the launcher tubes.

“Flight One ready to launch,” the XO confirms. “Float ’em out, minimal noise. Go for quarter-g acceleration once they’re at least ten kilometers away.”

“Aye, sir.” The weapons officer flips the safety covers off the hardware launch buttons on his console. Then he toggles them in sequence.

“Launching Two. Launching Four. Launching Five. Launching Six. Birds away, sir.”

“Confirm separation,” the tactical officer says. “Drones are coasting passive and ballistic.”

On the plot, the four drones we just launched appear as blue inverted V shapes. They slowly crawl away from
Indy
, fanning out very slightly as they go.

“We have good data link.”

“Prep Flight Two and launch when ready,” Major Renner says.

Almost as soon as the recon drones are away from the ship, our sensor input markedly increases in quality and resolution. The tactical plot does sort of a blip as it updates the holographic orb with new data, and ship icons shift around a bit to reflect the new data from the remote drones.

“They don’t have enough ships for a decent picket,” Colonel Campbell says after he watches the plot change for a few minutes. “Not for a chunk of space like this. They have those three right there”—he points at the picket force we just evaded—“and they’re walling off the likely approach from Earth and Luna.”