Susan returned to her full height. “I don’t know, but I’m sure we won’t like the answer. Call for Condition Two.”
“Condition Two, aye mum,” Miguel said, then opened the 1MC. “Attention all personnel. Set Condition Two. Condition Two. This is not a drill.”
The unease in the CIC ratcheted up with the order to GQ, which was only natural. Nesbit, cleared for duty after their little … misunderstanding, would doubtlessly be along shortly. Susan was actually glad for it. He was the proper intermediary between her command and Grendel’s planetary governor, after all.
“It’s all right, everyone,” Susan cooed. “Governor Honshu just needs a few minutes to digest whatever message she received and her staff will send us an update. You know how much those pampered autocrats in their boardrooms like to play at being secret agents.”
This was met with a round of laughs from the bridge crew, but in point of fact, it was another hour before they got any sort of update for the situation on Grendel, and it wasn’t from a coms laser or high-gain radio transmission.
“Surface launches,” Mattu shouted. “Multiple signatures. Counting eleven … scratch that, seventeen. No, twenty-nine civilian boats burning for Grendel orbit.”
“What the actual fuck?” Warner cursed from the weapons station.
“Where do they think they’re going?” Nesbit asked. He’d turned up eventually, but had remained quietly in a corner up until then.
“How many boats does that leave?” Susan asked, trying to get ahead of the news.
“None, mum,” Mattu said. “That’s every registered transport on the planet. They’re evacuating.”
“In an hour?” Miguel said. “They organized a colonywide evacuation in an hour?”
“Whatever that skip drone had to say, I don’t think they took much care packing.”
“Charts,” Susan said. “I want to know their heading as soon as they settle into a course to bubble out. Extrapolate and—”
“Contacts!” Mattu shouted. “Three contacts just popped bubbles three AU out from the system primary. Confirmation by recon platform seven. Wait one. Second platform concurs. Verified three bogeys in system.”
Susan’s nostrils flared. Someone was throwing a party in her backyard and didn’t bother to invite her. “Scopes, talk to me. What are we looking at?”
“Can’t tell, mum. They’re running low emissions and their adaptive camo and jammers are hot. I have approximate mass on two of them from their bubble energy. Four hundred thousand tons and…” Mattu swallowed. “Million-and-a-half-ton range. Plus or minus a hundred thousand. Best I can do. Designating the big bastard Bogey One, the heavy-cruiser range Bogey Two, and the frigate Bogey Three.”
Susan refused to let a single muscle in her face move lest she betray her emotions to the crew. Someone had sent an entire offensive task group into her system. There was a planetary assault carrier out there. And she had no idea whose flag it was flying.
“XO. Action Stations. Right fucking now.”
“All hands. Action Stations. Action Stations,” Miguel yelled into the 1MC without bothering to remind everyone it wasn’t a drill.
“I want four dozen ship-killers on the float toward those bogeys at max EM dark burn,” Susan said unfeelingly.
“Weapons, launch four-eight ship-killers at maximum clandestine burn on a direct intercept heading for Bogeys One through Three. Target priorities to be assigned.”
Warner was already three screens deep as she echoed the order. “Launch flight of two-four kill birds for dark burn for the bogeys, aye sir!”
“Scopes,” Susan continued calmly. “The heavy cruiser, is there any chance it’s the Chusexx?”
“No, mum. Our Xre friends are in the opposite direction, but still closer than the bogeys. If they’d bubbled out to go deeper in system, we’d have seen it six minutes ago. Unless they can travel through time now.”
Of course, Susan admonished herself, feeling stupid for having asked the question in the first place. The deck swayed underfoot as two dozen seventy-ton missiles ripple fired out of their launch rails.
“Do we warn the Chusexx?” Miguel asked, surprising her. “They’re still making repairs.”
“Are you quite mad?” Nesbit said. “They’re still an enemy ship, even if they did sing you some pretty songs.”
“I have to agree with our CL,” Susan said. “Besides, warn them of what? We don’t know what this is. For all we know, they sent a hidden skip back to base and this is their task group come to finish us off.”
“That doesn’t explain the mystery Marathon drone.”
“No. I suppose it doesn’t.” Susan bit her lip. “If Thuk is at all competent, which he is, he’ll have a recon drone or two shadowing us. They’ll know as much as we do in a few minutes. And warning an enemy vessel, even a hospitable one, could be construed as treason. So I think we have to let the Xre connect their own dots on this one.”
“Agreed, mum.”
“Scopes, transfer your drone network feed to the main plot, please.”
“Done.”
In the blink of an eye, the entire star system’s tactical situation sprang to life between the deck and the ceiling, everything the Ansari’s multilayered, overlapping shells of recon drone platforms saw from one side of Grendel’s treaty line to the other, pinned with IFF icons, range, relative velocity, heading, and light-speed-delay figures highlighted next to them.
The neighborhood had gotten crowded. A cluster of two and a half dozen blue civilian icons huddled in low Grendel orbit as they sorted themselves out for a departure order. Each one would need to be at least five hundred klicks away from the rest when they bubbled. With that many ships sharing an orbit and launch window, the jockeying would take a while.
Then there was the trio of unidentified warships between Susan and the civilians she was tasked with protecting, warships whose intentions she couldn’t begin to guess.
Then there was Ansari, the only green “friendly” icon on the board. Further out still was the blazing red icon of the Chusexx, which under any other circumstances would unquestionably be the most serious threat, but thanks to the events of the last few days, actually concerned Susan the least. Strange times.
“Has the bogey task group made any moves toward
