None too soon to be rid of the lot, in his book.
“We have any new data on the hearings at One?” Villanueva asked him. “Anything from the JLC or the technical wing?”
“Nothing. Not a thing yet.”
Steps behind them in the hall, rapid, as they reached the briefing room. Late arrival, Graff interpreted it, turned to glance and met an out-of-breath Trev, out of FleetCom. Evans handed him a printed note.
It said: Reporters are on the shuttle. All outbound system traffic on hold. Test is imminent.
Hell, he thought. And: Why didn’t the captain warn us? FSO has to have known, FSO has to have signed the press passes…
“Reply, sir?”
“None I want in writing. Tell Com One I said so and what in hell. Those words. Stat.”
“Yessir,” Trev said, and cleared the area at max speed.
Which left Villy’s frown and lifted eyebrow.
“Reporters, on the inbound shuttle,” he told Villy. “The test’s been announced, I don’t know by whom… System traffic is stopped. We’re stuck with the shuttle, the senators, and the reporters.”
Villy’s look couldn’t be a lie. “They’ve been inbound for three damned days! This isn’t a leak, this is a damned publicity set-up! What kind of game are you guys running over at FSO?”
“That’s what I’m asking FleetCom. Bloody hell, what are they doing to us?”
“Damn mess,” Meg muttered, in the ready room, looking at the lighted plot-screen—Dek was a bundle of nerves, holding to the hand-grip beside her and memorizing that chart with the only drug-training he’d ever had, the bit that helped you focus down and retain like crazy. Ben was swearing because he hadn’t got his specific numbers out of carrier Nav yet, Sal was talking to the ordnance clerk; and
Meg muttered her own numbers to voice-comp, while suit-up techs tugged and pulled at her in intimate places. You didn’t even do that basic thing for yourself, you just memmed charts fast as you could and talked to the systems chiefs and techs who you hoped to God had done their job.
The helmet came down over her head, and other hands twisted the seal. 360° real-HUD came active, voice-link did. She evoked her entry macro, that prepped her boards long-distance, dumped her touch, her patterns, her them-marks on the plot-screen fire-path to the Hellburner systems.
Mitch’s crew and Almarshad’s were in flight control, two beats of argument between them whether it could possibly be real, whether they might actually have a realspace system entry launched at high v from far out; or whether intelligence reports foretold something about the drop in—the consensus was test, set-up, but they couldn’t take it as a test run, didn’t dare believe the ordnance that would come at them was anything but real. The sketchy fire-track was running right past Earth’s moon, not the kind of thing Sol System traffic control was going to like, and that meant a wide-open track with a shot at Earth that if they didn’t get a fast intercept on that incoming ship—the doomsday scenario: they could lose the whole motherwell in less than ten minutes, that was what shaped up on their data. Billions of people. All life on earth. The enemy wouldn’t do that. They were human beings. ..
But life in the Belt and the gossip from Fleet instructors argued there were minds out there more different than you ever wanted to meet. And you could never, ever bet on them doing the logical—
Siren went off, the board and take-hold. “Hell!” Ben cried, because they were going, there was no more time, the carrier was going to hit the mains and the next input they got was going to be off carrier ops, the carrier’s longscan / com team that was their data-supply and their situation monitor, them and the back-up teams doing her job for the sixty-minus seconds it was going to take them to board and belt.
She grabbed the dismount line behind Dek, in crew-entry order, hindmost, and hung on as the door slammed wide and the line meshed with the gears, hell of a jerk on the arm. You held on, was all, as the singing line aimed you for the mounting bars at the hatch, one, two, three, four, tech lines ringing empty, the Hellburner’s tech hatch open, but receiving no one. Carrier technical crew shouted good wishes at them as they shot past and one after the other hit the stop, pile-up of hand-grips—inertia carried them in—she hit the cushions last, heard the hatches shut when she flipped the toggle, both ports, confirm on the seal by on-panel telltales as she was snapping the only manual belt; second toggle and they went ops-corn, linked with the carrier, sending and receiving a blitz of electronic information. “We’re go,” Dek said, and instantaneously the carrier mains cut in with a solidity that shoved them harder than the pods ever had, 10+ in a brutal, backs-downward acceleration.