“Not lately,” I say. “Indy is bugging out for a while, which means you’ll be without spaceborne cover.”
“Guess I’ll be sounding the alarm early after all. Where are you going?”
“We need to stay out of their range until we’ve hammered that Lanky, or everything is fucked to hell. Once that’s done, we’ll come back around and see what we can dent.”
The hull of the Indianapolis vibrates ever so slightly as the nose of the ship swings around and the engines go to maximum acceleration. Even with the artificial gravity compensating for the sudden three gravities of acceleration, I still have to hang on to the side of the comms console for a moment.
“They’ll find this place a tough nut to crack,” Sergeant Fallon says. “At least our guys have weapons for the job.”
“You don’t have any air support except for three Dragonflies,” I reply. “You may just want to negotiate terms with them.”
“That doesn’t sound like you at all, Andrew,” she says flatly. “POW orange doesn’t go well with my complexion.”
“Hold out one way or another. Until we’re back. Last stands, and all that.”
“We’ll be here,” she says. “One way or another. Just kill that alien son of a bitch.” She cuts the comms link.
We speed away from New Svalbard at flank speed, which is pretty swift for a warship of Indy’s small size. The guilt I feel when I watch the dirty white globe of the ice moon recede behind us is almost debilitating. I should be on the ground right now with Sergeant Fallon and the rest of the troops, and dig in for the inevitable battle with the SRA landing force. I try to recall how many troops a Chinese or Russian carrier has on board. They like to stack their marine regiments troop-heavy, so if they come equipped for a spaceborne assault, they probably have four thousand troops getting into combat armor right about now. And that’s if they didn’t bring along a second carrier, which is very likely considering the size of their task force. We have four thousand troops on the moon, but they’re split up into two factions, and ours is split up over several dozen terraforming stations. We are in a horrible tactical position, but we will fight if we are attacked, and I should be with them. Instead, I am running away from the impending battle. I know that the Indy’s mission is vital to our survival, but I still feel like I made a terribly wrong call by coming up here.
The tactical display is a conga line of icons—the Gordon in the lead, with the Indianapolis behind, and finally the cluster of SRA fleet units bringing up the rear. We’re all headed right for the Lanky, who has been on the same stubborn course and acceleration since we first spotted him against the exhaust flare from the now-dead Russian cruiser. I take turns standing watch at the neural-networks station with the Indy’s administrator. The display in the middle of the CIC changes its resolution and scanning range automatically to keep the units in sensor range in their proper spatial relationships on the tactical orb, and the kilometer scale next to the sphere shrinks with every passing hour. The Indy is running, but the SRA task force is slowly gaining because of their acceleration advantage. The shot clock on the CIC bulkhead is ticking down, but it seems like the minutes and seconds take much longer to pass than usual.
In the middle of the third watch cycle, something changes. The SRA task force is a 150 million kilometers from New Svalbard, and their acceleration numbers are steady, but all of a sudden we’re gaining range again and pulling away.
“They’ve gone for turnover,” the XO says. “They’re not chasing us. They’re just going for the colony.”
Their turnover point means they’ll spend the second half of their approach to New Svalbard accelerating in the opposite direction, which means they’re definitely planning to coast into orbit instead of letting us lead them on a wild goose chase.
“Small consolation,” I say. “That’s too much combat power for our troops to take on. They want the place, it’s theirs already.” I have no doubt that Sergeant Fallon and her HD troops will extract a hefty toll for the SRA victory, but I know orbital assault tactics, and if the Chinese or Russian in charge of that battle group has been awake for just half his lectures in war college, they will take New Svalbard away from us.
“Two hours, sixteen minutes to impact,” the weapons officer says.
“Let’s see if all of this is even going to matter in the end,” the colonel says darkly.
CHAPTER 27
“Gordon is doing forty-eight hundred kilometers per second,” the tactical officer says. “Time to impact: three minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Do they not see us coming?” Dr. Stewart asks.