Fields of Fire (Frontlines Book 5)

by Marko Kloos

  “Feels good,” she says.

  “They haven’t made an incursion in a month,” I say. “I was hoping we wouldn’t see another one of those things until Mars.”

  “Let’s just hope it’s a single ship and not their whole goddamn fleet,” Halley replies. “It would suck having our shit jumped right before we pulled the trigger on our own offensive.”

  I grab my alert bag and sling it over my shoulder. Halley’s bag is on the floor on her side of the bed, and I walk over and pick hers up as well.

  “I guess we’ll see in twenty minutes,” I say. “Let’s go. We can put on the hardshell and load the PDWs on the train.”

  When we step outside, we run into my mother and Chief Kopka, who have arrived to open the restaurant for the day. Mom looks alarmed when she sees us both coming out of the door with our gear bags and serious expressions.

  “What’s going on, Andrew?”

  “Emergency alert,” I reply. “We have to report to Burlington. There’s a Lanky incursion.”

  “How many?” Chief Kopka asks.

  “No idea. We just got the alert. Heading to the base to find out. You turn on the news and sit tight. Don’t forget the lockbox in your office if things get hairy.”

  Chief Kopka nods, his expression as grim as ours. “Be careful out there, you two. And give ’em hell.”

  Mom hugs Halley, who winces a little but returns the hug. Then she hugs me, which she only accomplishes halfway because of all the extra bulk strapped to my body right now, fifty pounds of armor and gear.

  “I know this is what you do. But don’t mind if I hate it when you go off to fight.”

  “That’s your right, Mom,” I say. “Gotta go. We’ll be back. But don’t keep breakfast warm for us. We may be a while.”

  “I’ll make you two a fresh breakfast whenever you get back. Any time of the day. Just get back here, please.”

  I don’t say good-bye anymore when I leave. We walk off toward the train station without a parting ritual. It’s better to act like you’re just putting your own life on hold briefly to take care of some business, and you’ll be picking up the threads you put aside once you get back, in a little while. If I gave a heartfelt good-bye every time I left, one that matched the real danger we faced, I’d have no emotions left.

  On the maglev train, we just have enough time to put on our light armor kits and load our personal defense weapons, the short little submachine guns we carry in our alert bags to have something with a little more punch than a pistol. The train whisks us from Liberty Falls to Burlington in less than fifteen minutes—faster than usual because it’s a military requisition running outside the regular schedule. We check and recheck each other’s gear, even though there isn’t much to fasten and calibrate compared to regular battle armor, but it’s something for the hands and brain to do on autopilot, and it helps to fight the anxiety we both feel. Other than the first alert, there have been no further updates over MilNet, so our brains are coming up with a wide variety of possible scenarios, everything from a single Lanky ship to a full-scale assault by the Lanky fleet currently amassing around Mars. I remember my vivid dream from last night, and I hope it wasn’t a ninety-six-hour glimpse into the future. I am not physically or mentally ready for that day yet.

  HDAS Burlington has its own stop on the maglev line. We file out of the train along with the few dozen other corps members who answered the emergency call in the area. The security checkpoint at the base entrance outside the station is manned by half a dozen HD troopers in full battle armor, M-66 rifles at low ready. Halley and I check in to have our IDs scanned.

  “A podhead officer,” the lieutenant in charge of the checkpoint says when he sees my qualification ratings pop up on his screen. “Outstanding. We have a few platoons that need a drop-rated officer. Please report to the Bravo pad on the airfield; they’ll assign you a bird.”

  “I’m going there, too,” Halley says. “In case they need a pilot. I can fly anything in the inventory.”

  The officer of the guard scans her ID and hands it back to her. “Yes, ma’am. Sergeant Aponte, give these two officers a ride to Bravo pad, double-time.”

  “How many seed ships do we have incoming, Lieutenant?” Halley asks.

  “None, ma’am.” He looks from Halley to me and then down the line of troops checking in. “They’re already here. They overran the joint base at Thule an hour ago. On Greenland. Came out of nowhere, right out of the ice.”

  CHAPTER 2

  JOINT BASE THULE

  Thirty thousand feet above Greenland’s western coast, our drop-ship flight draws up in combat-descent formation, and we start our dive into a swirling vortex of ice and wind.

  There’s a storm above this part of the island, and from this altitude, it looks like the fury of winter made physical reality. The clouds are a steel-gray churning mass that extends from fifteen thousand feet all the way to the ground. When our drop-ship flight dips into the storm, the Hornets get instantly bounced around by the turbulent air currents. I’ve had many rough atmospheric entries in my podhead career, but as we careen toward the surface of Greenland in what feels like barely controlled flight, getting rattled like peas in a can, I can’t recall ever having been in such violent weather before. But there are thirty junior enlisted SI and HD troopers sitting in the jump seats to either side and across the aisle from me, so I keep my face shield raised and do my best to appear unconcerned.

  The tactical network is strangely quiet. I see our flight of four drop ships, a full company of troops, descending toward Joint Base Thule in the corkscrew pattern of a combat descent. There are more military flights in nearby airspace—two HD ground-attack birds coming in from the south, fifty klicks away and five thousand feet below us, and a flight of Eurocorps drop ships approaching from the interior of Greenland, still a hundred kilometers out and descending in Delta formation. But there’s nothing coming from below, no tactical markers from the units that should be on and around the big joint air/space base we share with the Euros at Thule.

  “Any word from the ground?” I send to the pilot.

  “Negative,” the HD lieutenant in the cockpit replies. “I got nothing. No comms, no active radar. AILS is out, too. This will be a fun approach in this swirly shit.”

  The outside camera views show nothing but blowing snow and ice. I have no directional or spatial references outside, and only my inner ear and the instrument feed from the cockpit provide the cues that we are still descending toward the surface at a twenty-degree nose-down pitch. Without a working AILS beam, the drop ship won’t be able to make an automated landing on the pad at Thule, and only the pilot’s skill will determine whether we make it down in one piece or become a smoking crater in the ice in a few minutes. The pilot in the cockpit isn’t Halley—they wouldn’t let her take charge of an HD bird—and I’m simultaneously very relieved and distraught that my wife is sitting this drop out on the flight pad at HDAS Burlington.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” one of the platoon’s sergeants asks on the command channel over the general comms chatter.

  “The pod that crashed last month,” I offer. “We chased it down and hosed the Lanky that climbed out. Pod went in the ice. There must have been a bunch more in that thing.”

  “They survived in the ice for a whole frickin’ month?”

  “That’s what it looks like right now, Sergeant,” I say.

  I remember the drop from last month—the cataclysmic impact of the hull fragment, the seedpod we found on the ice a short while later, the Lanky that climbed out of the wreckage and into our gunfire, and the terrible noise when the ice gave way. The seedpod slid into a crevice in the ice that was too deep for the high-powered searchlights on the Wasp to illuminate all the way to the bottom. The Euro military took over shortly afterward, and they sanitized the crash site, but from the look of things, I’d say they failed to thoroughly check for surviving Lankies. Maybe there’s no way to check for life under an ice sheet that’s a kilom
eter thick. We’ve fought these things for half a decade now, and every time we go up against them, they still confound us and make us change our tactics.

  “Outside air temperature is negative eighty-three Celsius,” the drop ship’s crew chief announces. “Negative twenty-nine on the ground, with ninety-knot winds. May want to check your heating units, or it’ll be a short deployment.”

  I’ve traded the light armor kit from my alert bag for a loaner HD armor from the drop ship’s armory. Greenland’s environment is as unforgiving as they come on Earth, especially in early winter. My light armor has no heating elements in it, and stepping out of the drop ship in a winter storm with nothing but light laminate shell would have me turning into a combat-ineffective popsicle inside of five minutes. I toggle the test function for the heating system in my loaner armor, and a few moments later, I feel the heat from the built-in thermal elements radiate inward.

  “Fuckin’ Greenland,” the platoon sergeant grumbles. “I thought those things didn’t like the cold.”

  “They don’t,” I say. “Doesn’t mean they can’t survive in it, apparently. Check squads for readiness. And nobody better chamber a round until we’re on the ground and clear of the bird.”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant. You’re the expert.”

  The ship lurches violently to the right, then pitches down, then up again, a bouncing cork in churning rapids. Without our seat harnesses, the platoon in the hold would be flying all over the place right now. The hull of the Hornet creaks under the stress, and I find myself wondering just how much atmospheric stress these old and tired birds can endure before metal fatigue and physics see us raining out of the sky over Greenland in a loose cloud of debris.

  “Visibility on the ground is going to be shit, and Lankies don’t show on thermal,” I tell the platoon sergeant and my squad leaders. “Once we’re off the tail ramp, we form an extended firing line. Fifty meters’ space between each trooper. That way we at least have TacLink share of visuals beyond our individual lines of sight. Anything comes out of the storm, you light it up without delay. This will be a short-range fight, so stay alert. And keep active transmissions to a minimum. They can sense those.”

  The squad leaders click back their acknowledgments one by one. The crew in the hold of the Hornet looks tense but determined. These aren’t the green kids who dropped into Greenland with me almost two months ago. They’re almost all HD troopers, not the battle-hardened platoon of SI space apes I’d rather have with me right now, but none of them look like they are just out of Basic, and quite a few are seasoned enlisted and NCOs who look and act like they’ve seen plenty of combat drops before. The new doctrine for Lanky incursions emphasizes a rapid response: go in with what you have and hit them as soon as you can, instead of wasting time waiting for just the right force composition. Everyone in the North American Commonwealth Defense Corps gets training on anti-Lanky weaponry now because everyone may end up facing them at any time.

  “Showtime in three,” the pilot announces. “Passing through three thousand feet. Lotta thermal signatures below.”

  My suit’s computer shows us a few kilometers outside Joint Base Thule, the sprawling military facility we operate in cooperation with the European Union’s defense force. Thule has a large drop-ship airfield and two five-thousand-meter runways that will accommodate anything with wings in the NAC arsenal. I check the sensor feeds from the drop ship’s nose and see nothing but swirling snow on the optical feed. The thermal sensors show a different story. Up ahead, there are dozens of large and small fires burning in the spot where the base is hugging the northwestern coastline of Greenland.

  “Make a low pass before you drop us,” I send to the cockpit.

  “For whatever good it’ll do,” the pilot replies. “Visibility is zero-zero out there.”

  I turn off the visual feed from the outboard cameras because they don’t do anything but give me vertigo and anxiety right now. Without any visual references out there, no sky or horizon, I can’t tell whether we’re oriented right side up or upside down, and my inner ear is trying to convince me that it’s the latter. So I focus on the world right in front of my nose again, the drop-ship cargo hold packed with thirty-six troopers under my charge.

  “Sixty seconds,” the pilot calls out. The red light above the tail ramp starts blinking. All around me, troopers are doing last-minute checks of their equipment.

  “Firing line,” I call out over the platoon channel. “Fifty-meter spacing. Weapons free as soon as your boots are on the ground. Something large moves in front of you, shoot it a lot.”

  I check the local TacLink for the other platoons in the air with us. They are descending slightly behind us on our portside, half a kilometer astern and poised to set down half a klick to our north. The Eurocorps drop ships are still fifty kilometers out, ten minutes or more of flight time. Right now, it’s us and whoever else is left on the ground at Thule base. I toggle into the local defense channel.

  “Thule base personnel on the ground, this is HD flight Burlington One-Five. We are about to go skids down at the midpoint of runway oh-eight Tango with a full platoon of infantry. Anyone down there, uplink your TacLink data and sit tight.”

  The TacLink transmitters in our suits are designed to connect to other suit computers in range and join the ad hoc network of whatever NAC units are on the ground, so there’s no time delay in sharing information in the heat of battle. As we descend toward the runway at Thule, there are worryingly few updates popping up small bubbles of awareness in the gray haze that is the tactical picture on my computer’s data overlay.

  “Got a visual on multiple fires,” the pilot says.

  I check the optical feed and see blots of orange through the swirling white mess outside—half a dozen large fires at least. My computer uses the visuals and does a quick overlay with the tactical map. The largest orange glow is coming from the refueling facilities next to the large drop-ship landing-pad cluster beyond the runway. But it looks like the Lankies didn’t limit themselves to breaking the fuel infrastructure. If my computer’s navigational bearings are correct, they’ve also wrecked the main barracks building and the fusion reactor that powers the whole facility. Of course they went for the reactor. They always do.

  “Give me a count on silver bullets,” I send to my squad leaders.

  “Three,” the reply comes back.

  That’s it? I want to say out loud but don’t. The silver bullet, the troops’ nickname for the new anti-Lanky round for the MARS launchers, is a scaled-up version of the new gas-filled rifle round, with ten times the amount of explosive gas and a much sturdier penetrator needle. They are expensive and have a very limited shelf life, and most of the production is going to the stocks of the Mars invasion fleet, so I should be glad we have any on this boat at all.

  “Put one on each flank and one in the center,” I say. “And try not to miss with those.”

  “Copy that,” the platoon sergeant replies, and I can almost hear his eye-roll. Shit-hot second louie from Fleet, thinking we HD grunts don’t know how to do our fucking jobs.

  The drop ship’s tail ramp starts opening right before the skids touch the icy runway, and an arctic blast of air cuts through the cargo hold like an invisible blade. Outside, the storm is in full swing, an environment as inhospitable as the worst, barely terraformed moons I’ve seen out in the settled part of the galaxy. I don’t know why we as a species insist on living in places where the weather can kill you almost as quickly and just as surely as a Lanky or an enemy fléchette round.

  “Off the boat!” the platoon sergeant shouts when the tail ramp touches down on the snowy runway with a muffled thump. “First Squad left. Second center. Third right. Haul ass!”

  The HD troopers file out of the ship, weapons at the ready. I’m in the back of the bus, so I have to follow the grunts out of the boat. I unbuckle my seat harness, grab my M-90 out of its holding clamp, and follow the last few troopers down the ramp at a run. At the bottom of the ramp, I wor
k the charging handle of my rifle and chamber a fifteen-millimeter anti-Lanky round.

  Outside, my line of sight is maybe thirty meters in the driving snow that is swirling all around the drop ship. My computer overlays my visor display with all the available TacLink information. The company is deploying in a widely spaced firing line as the drop ship behind us roars off into the sky again to provide for support from above. There are blue silhouettes to my left and right—troopers I can’t see with the naked eye but whose position is known to my suit’s computer, which talks to everyone else’s over our short-range tactical network.

  “Move out toward the complex,” I order, and mark the nearby building clusters on the tactical map. “And go thermal. You won’t see Lankies that way, but you’ll spot people.”

  I toggle through my own helmet’s visual overlays until I have thermal vision, warm colors of orange and red pinpointing heat sources in the featureless white mess before us.

  “One-Five Actual, I can’t see shit up here except for you guys,” the pilot sends from above, where my computer shows a three-dimensional representation of the drop ship hovering two hundred feet over our heads.

  “Movement left,” one of the troopers calls out, and a fresh surge of adrenaline floods my already-wired system.

  I can feel the Lanky through the soles of my boots before I can see it. They’re not nearly as heavy as we first thought, but they still weigh several hundred tons, and when one walks around nearby, the tremors generated by its feet hitting the ground give its presence away to anyone in a quarter-kilometer radius. These tremors are harsh and quick—a Lanky on the run.

  On our left flank, something huge and white materializes out of the snow squall. The MARS gunner on the end of our firing line swings his launcher around, but the Lanky is too close and too fast. It swings a spindly arm and sweeps it across the ground right where the MARS gunner has just brought his weapon to bear. It knocks him away, and he disappears in a spray of snow and ice, flung into the storm by something thirty times his size and a thousand times his weight. The MARS launcher and the priceless silver bullet, a third of our anti-Lanky rocket stock, disappear with the unlucky TA trooper in a blink.