She surprised him. His navigator took them right up to the hundred-and-twenty-kilometer ice meteor under the main engines, shedding the last of their velocity in carefully measured bursts with the main engine until they were less than ten meters away from Epsilon and finally hit zero relative to the big chunk of ice.
“I have the focal direction from Engineering,” she said softly. “It could be an easier one.”
“We didn’t have a lot of choices,” Henriksson replied. “Sorry, Commander.”
“Don’t apologize, Lieutenant,” Bazzoli told the engineering officer with a chuckle. “I know you’re not intentionally making my life harder.”
Maneuvering thrusters flashed for a second. Raven started rotating, slowly turning until her main engines were parallel to the meteor’s surface. The thrusters flared again, bringing her to a halt “upside-down” above the icy surface. It wasn’t an easy position to get into, but it was required by the awkward angle the ship was now radiating all of her heat toward.
“Ihejirika, make a hole, please,” the navigator requested in a distracted tone.
“Firing.”
This was about as far from the intended purpose of Raven’s defensive lasers as possible, but they were high-energy coherent-light weapons. They slashed chunks of ice free, explosions of vapor marking their work.
The amount of debris this was creating was the reason for the Bravo warheads and the decoys. It was impossible to hide this kind of mess—except in vast quantities of the same kind of mess.
“Clear,” Ihejirika reported as the guns fell silent. “Scanners mark sixty-seven meters to the bottom of the cave.”
“Confirmed,” Bazzoli murmured. “Don’t hold your breath, people.”
The thrusters flared again, more continuously this time, as Raven dropped into a roughly battlecruiser-shaped hole in the side of the meteor. Bazzoli kept adjusting their velocity and angle, and it took them almost a full minute to reach the bottom of the cave and settle, ever so delicately, into their hiding spot.
“We’re down. External temperature one hundred fifty Kelvin and dropping fast,” she reported. “Is this going to work?”
“It will,” Henry replied. It had to, or Raven was going to die in the forty-three hours before Scorpius appeared.
“Satine?” he continued.
“Delta shuttles are digging their way into their own hidey-holes as we speak,” she confirmed. “It’s taking them a bit longer.”
“Understood.” He hesitated. They still didn’t have visibility on the Drifters, but they needed that cover. He swallowed a sigh and nodded firmly.
“Ihejirika, detonate the Bravo warheads,” he ordered. “And then we all get very, very quiet.”
New energy signatures appeared on his screens as seventy-two five-hundred-megaton warheads went off, shredding another set of ancient ice floes into a protective screen around Raven.
“What now?” Ihejirika asked.
“Stand down to Status Two,” Henry ordered. “Get some sensor probes up on the surface to give us eyes, but send at least half our people to their beds. The Drifters will close the remaining distance over the next few hours.
“Let’s make sure at least some of our people have rested when they get here.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“We have a confirmation signal,” Thompson told Sylvia. “Transmission received by the drone and a confirmation sent back by tightbeam. If I’m reading the automatic message correctly, it skipped thirty minutes ago.”
“That was farther out than we expected,” she noted. “I’m glad our transmission caught it.”
They were speaking in English, though the same results were showing on all of the tablets scattered around the escape pod. Food wrappers crinkled as the handful of survivors dug in to the horrible-but-nutritious emergency rations the Cluster crew had supplied the emergency capsule with.
Sylvia was mostly just glad that they’d included a bathroom. That could easily have been the kind of oversight that added an extra layer of unpleasantness to a survival situation.
“Ambassador, I have lost track of Raven,” Trosh told her, the Eerdish officer stepping over to join them. “Please look at the datafeed from the sensor.”
She obeyed, but it took her a moment to process just what she was seeing.
“That is a lot of explosions for the Drifters still being two million kilometers away from Raven,” she noted. “And a lot of debris.”
“It appears Captain Wong is vaporizing large pieces of a meteor swarm to help conceal his exact position,” Trosh told her. “I am uncertain if it will work, but it is impressive.
“The Drifters have better sensors than our hastily rigged telescopes. They may be able to hold on to his signature better.”
“Even if they lose him, there are only so many meteors in a swarm like that that can hide a battlecruiser,” Sylvia said quietly. “He is buying time—and we, hopefully, have bought even more. If the drone skipped on schedule, we will have reinforcements in under twenty-four hours.
“Captain Wong will not expect them for over forty.” She shook her head. “He will do whatever it takes to buy his ship and his people time. I worry about the price.”
“Surely, he will see the reinforcements before he does anything dangerous, yes?” Trosh asked.
“I am not concerned about what Wong will do after Scorpius arrives,” she admitted. “I am concerned about what he will do when Scorpius is an hour away…and he thinks his reinforcements are twenty hours out.”
Trosh nodded his understanding as Sylvia looked over at Thompson.
“Is there anything we can do for Raven?” she asked the GroundDiv officer.
“Stay alive,” Thompson replied. “That is all we can do right now, and it is the most critical thing we can do. Right now, if Raven dies and we live, we can stand witness to the Drifters’ betrayal. If we die and Raven lives, they can stand witness.
“But one of us has to live. Right now, they are probably better hidden than we are…but the Drifters know they exist, and so far, everyone still thinks we died.”
“We need to lower our power curve,” Sylvia told Trosh, turning back to the Eerdish. “They flew right past us twice now, but we cannot rely on that happening again. They have to come back and sweep for escape pods eventually if they want this deception to hold up.”
“Everything we do creates heat the pod has to radiate,” the Cluster officer pointed out. “Breathing, eating, walking…everything.”
“We can lower the lights, turn off climate control…turn off the damn gravity,” Sylvia told him. “Everything we do creates heat, yes, so we need to create less.”
“Very few of us have any zero-gravity experience,” Trosh admitted. “I am afraid of the risks, Ambassador. That is why—”
“There are three dreadnought-level warships out there with a critical interest in making sure we never tell anyone what we saw,” Sylvia told him. “Turn off the gravity, Trosh. A few bruises and broken limbs are going to hurt us less than a plasma cannon. This pod was armored enough to survive Carpenter getting destroyed—but I doubt it can survive the full firepower of one of those Guardians.”