Chains of Command (27 page)

The transit to the vicinity of Leonidas c is one of the most taxing experiences I’ve had in my time in the service. No drop ship is designed to make an insertion from that far out, and I’ve never spent this much uninterrupted time in a cargo hold. The troops spend their time talking on private channels or playing the limited variety of diversionary games loaded on their PDPs. At the midpoint of our transit, twelve hours into the flight, we take on fuel from the Wasps to top off our tanks, and the squads take turns unstrapping from their jump seats and stretching their limbs. The Blackfly has a tiny galley and a toilet right next to it, but we are under combat stations and therefore in armor, and nobody is willing to risk a quick death in the event of a hull breach just for the convenience of using a proper toilet instead of the armor’s built-in waste elimination system. Long missions in armor forcing you to take a piss into your armor’s auto-cleaning underlayer aren’t something they mention in the recruiting office or in the war flicks on the Networks.

Leonidas c is an ever-growing presence off our port bow. It’s a big blue gas planet, quite beautiful to look at. The atmospheric swirls and patterns on the planet surface are mesmerizing at high magnification, and I’m glad for something other than inky black space to look at. On the tactical display, the other three drop ships are lined up behind us on our intercept trajectory, roughly ten minutes apart. If something happens to Blackfly One on the ingress, the rest of the platoon will have plenty of warning to avoid the same fate. Without radar and under full EMCON, we are limited to the optical gear, and we don’t pick up anything else in the system at all until the stretched ellipse of our intercept course brings us around Leonidas c a bit.

“There she is,” our pilot sends. “Port bow, three hundred by negative twenty-five. Popping up just over the planetary horizon by the equator.”

I check the optical feed and zoom in on the section of space Lieutenant Dorian pointed out. Leonidas cs3—Arcadia—is just barely visible as it peeks around its much bigger planet.

“Huh,” I say. “It looks like—Earth.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Arcadia is a little green-and-blue orb that looks nothing like most other colony moons I’ve seen. It very clearly has an atmosphere—even from tens of thousands of kilometers away, I can see the white patches of sporadic cloud cover.

“Anything on the radar detector?” I ask, even though I have access to that information through my data link.

“Not a thing,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “I hope we have the right neighborhood. Be a bitch to have come all this way for nothing.”

A warship or military base can be seen—or more accurately, heard—long before you cross into the range where it can detect you in return. That’s because radar and radio emissions can be picked up from very far away with passive threat detectors. But we’ve been through a good part of the Leonidas system without picking up so much as a whiff of active radiation. Unless the renegade faction has discovered a revolutionary new way to discover far-off threats, they seem to willingly accept blindness in exchange for near-invisibility.

“This is the place,” I say. “Unless they had that relay station set up with the wrong data on purpose. Throw off anyone coming after them.”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “They’re not keeping quiet ’cause they’re worried about people finding them.”

Ten minutes later, our pilot lets out a satisfied little shout.

“Contact,” he says. “Visual contact, three thirty by negative five. Three . . . five . . . six ships.”

“Battle group?” I ask.

“Big one’s a carrier. Navigator class. Too big to be anything else. Can’t make out the smaller ones yet. And there’s a structure.”

I check the optical feed and pan over the area at maximum magnification. There, in the orbit of that little blue-and-green moon, I can make out a familiar shape. I’ve seen it before, last year, when
Indianapolis
followed the damaged destroyer
Michael P. Murphy
on its run from Gateway Station.

“It’s an anchorage,” I say. “Same as the one they left behind in the Solar System. Where we found those battleships.”

The structure looks like two giant letters E joined at the spines, a central axis with six tines jutting outward. All those outriggers have ships docked at their ends, and smaller ships take up the spaces between the outriggers. One of them is definitely a Navigator, the Fleet’s premier supercarrier, which would make that ship NACS
Pollux
. The other ships are too far away and still too small in the optical feed to positively identify them without doing an electronic IFF interrogation or lighting them up with active radar, which wouldn’t be a wise course of action right now.

“Looks like we found the task force.”

“Most of it,” I concur, glad that we didn’t make a twenty-three-hour trip in a cramped drop ship for nothing.

“Look at them all tied down in anchorage. They’re not expecting trouble.”

“That’s only six. We still have four unaccounted for, plus all the auxiliary fleet freighters they took.”

“Oh, I think we’ll see them around sooner or later,” Lieutenant Dorian says.

As we coast closer to Arcadia, the image of the anchorage becomes clearer with every minute. I let the computer cross-check the visuals of the anchored ships with the list of Fleet units known to have gone with the renegade fleet a year ago. The cruiser-size hull has to be the only cruiser they took along, NACS
Phalanx
. There’s a frigate that looks small enough to be a Treaty-class ship, which would make her NACS
Lausanne
, sister unit to our
Berlin
. The task force has way more combat power in this system than we do, but I’m happy to see that most of it is tied up at the anchorage and inert at the moment.

“That would be a juicy nuke target right there. Six for the price of one,” Lieutenant Dorian says.

“Yeah,” I agree. “If we didn’t need all those ships for Mars.”

“Shame,” he says, with what sounds like sincere regret. “We could—hang on. Contact. New contact on optical, bearing zero-zero-five by positive zero-five-two. Distance one hundred thousand and change.”

A new icon pops up on the tactical display in the cockpit, marking a spotted ship in high orbit above the northern hemisphere of Arcadia. Even with the lenses at maximum zoom, I can’t make out the type or class, just a Fleet-gray hull with position lights blinking.

“Is he flashing station lights?” I ask.

“Yep,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “Full Christmas tree. Not getting any active radiation from him, either. He doesn’t want to be heard, but he sure doesn’t give a fuck about being seen.”

I look at the trajectory projection for the newcomer to see if he’s on an intercept course. He’s not headed our way, but he’s not aiming for the anchorage, either. With every passing minute, we get closer to Arcadia and our orbital insertion. I know that Lieutenant Dorian does not want to risk a corrective burn and give us away on infrared or whatever else the renegades have aimed at the approaches to Arcadia, but we also don’t want to get too close to a patrolling unit, polychromatic armor or not.

“It’s one of those new frigates,” he says after a few minutes. “Those Greek underworld ones.”

“You sure?” I consult the optical feed again to look at the hull of the patrolling ship, now a few ten thousand kilometers closer.

“It’s the right size. And the shape looks off for a Treaty.”

When the renegade fleet made their escape, they left behind the two unfinished battleships that are now
Agincourt
and
Arkhangelsk
, but they also had a trio of frigates nobody had ever seen or heard about before—
Styx
,
Acheron
, and
Lethe
, identified through their IFF transponders by the
Indianapolis
when we discovered the renegade anchorage. We know very little about these frigates and their capabilities, but if they were meant to be escorts for those battleships, they’re built to go up against Lankies. As I look at the far-off maybe-frigate on the optical feed, silently coasting along in front of the blue-and-green backdrop of Arcadia, I wonder just what kind of new surprises they kept secret over the years.

“Orbit insertion in forty-six minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Going to aerobrake and see if we can set up orbit on the other side of the moon from that station. I don’t want to have to use the burners to slow us down.”

The drop ship needs to slow down for a stable low orbit, and since we can’t fire the engines to counterburn on the way in, the only other option is aerobraking, using the friction from atmospheric entry to slow us down gradually. As stealthy as the Blackfly is, we can’t hide the superheated plasma that surrounds and flares behind us like a fiery rooster tail as we start skipping through the first dense layers of Arcadia’s atmosphere. Anyone looking our way with enough magnification will see the light show, and the ships following us in ten-minute intervals will light up the sky again in the same obvious fashion.

“Hitting atmo,” I inform the platoon, quite unnecessarily. The drop ship is buffeting and bouncing roughly as we descend at the fastest safe rate, bleeding speed and kinetic energy. Pod landings are rougher still, but in a pod, you can’t get bounced against anything, so it seems less jarring. By far the most shoot-downs and accidents occur in this phase of an orbital insert, when the ship is on a fixed trajectory and very visible. I scan the threat sensors obsessively, even though they’re almost useless while the drop ship is ensconced in superheated plasma. Finally, after what seems like an eternity but took less than thirty minutes according to my suit’s chrono, most of the buffeting stops, and we are soaring through a deep-blue sky, with the stars above us and the blue-green surface of Arcadia below. The horizon in the distance has a pronounced curve to it at our altitude, and there’s an iridescent light blue band of atmosphere shining on the far-off boundary between moon and space.

“We’ll be below the line of sight horizon to the anchorage in seven minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “We should be able to get the rest of the flight on near-field comms.”

“Copy that,” I say. “Just give the word when we’re in the clear.”

A hundred thousand feet below us, the colony moon spreads out like a surreal tapestry. It looks like one of those environmental holograms they project onto the walls in the RecFacs or medical facilities to relax people and let them pretend there’s an unspoiled world beyond. Arcadia isn’t a frozen ball of ice and rock like New Svalbard, or a craggy, brown-and-red desert like Fomalhaut’s SRA-owned moon or precolonization Mars. There’s blue water and green land, mountains and rivers, the sun glistening off hundreds—thousands—of bodies of water, lakes and streams and seas. And there isn’t a single trace of human activity anywhere—no contrails crisscrossing the skies, no lights or exhaust plumes, and no permanent smog haze over most of the land below. Instead, we are cruising above a broken cover of white clouds. I share the video feed with the platoon just so they can see what they’re about to drop into. Imaginations can run a little wild when you’re descending into hostile territory in a windowless cargo hold.

“Look at that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It’s friggin’ paradise. Never seen anything like it. No wonder most of the welfare rats want to win the colony lottery.”

“Most of ’em don’t look like that,” I say. “None of them do, actually. None that I’ve ever set foot on, anyway.”

The other three drop ships enter the moon’s atmosphere in five-minute intervals behind us, each trailing bright and obvious tails of fire on their way down. On the way into low orbit, our flight was neatly lined up, but aerobraking in the upper layers of the atmosphere isn’t a precise way to slow down. By the time Blackfly Four has made the transition into atmo, our flight is dispersed in a rough diamond formation, with more than a hundred kilometers between us.

“Threat detectors still showing zip,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “No active radar, no radio traffic, no nothing.”