Fields of Fire (Frontlines Book 5)

by Marko Kloos

  Pod Country is the part of the ship where the mission pods are prepared and loaded before a launch. It’s a small section right behind the magazine control for the ship’s ordnance autoloader, which hoists munition into the launch tubes on demand. Cruisers like Phalanx have a set of dorsal launch tubes for nuclear missiles, but those are permanently loaded. The ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface launch tubes are in the center of the ship and face forward and out, and the space-warfare officer in CIC can select any of the ship’s half dozen different missile types to be loaded automatically. For this mission, the sixteen missile tubes on Phalanx will spit out a full salvo of bio-pods, each with one of us inside.

  We load our gear into the bio-pods and secure it. On a drop ship, there’s more room for kit, but on a pod launch, all I can take along is the rifle I just picked up, my combat-controller deck, and a very small kit bag with a few spare power cells for the deck. Everything else I need is already attached to my armor or integrated in it. When I am done securing my gear in the pod, the ship’s pod rigger steps up and double-checks all the fasteners and the load balancing.

  “Good to go, Lieutenant,” he says when he is done with his check. “Good luck, and Godspeed.”

  My pod is the first in line on the portside. Right behind me, Dmitry is finished loading his own gear, and the pod rigger checks his work as well, to make sure nothing is loose or likely to throw the pod off-balance on its trajectory. We are lined up with eight pods on both port and starboard sides, and all the Russians are with me in the port-side queue. Bringing up the rear on the portside are the Spaceborne Rescue sergeant and the Eurocorps liaison. The starboard row of pods is taken up entirely by the two teams of SI Force Recon.

  I walk toward the back of Pod Country and claim one of the jump seats on the bulkhead. We don’t climb into the pods until the last possible moment before the launch because we don’t want to start depleting the oxygen in the suits earlier than necessary, so we get to ride out the time until the green light back here, in rather closer proximity than back in the berthing module. One by one, my fellow podhead comrades finish their checks and come back to join me at the rear bulkhead. It occurs to me that I’ve never dropped with any of the troopers in this group except for Dmitry. I wish I had some of my old friends here—Philbrick, Humphrey, Nez, or Macfee, my fellow combat controller who is still listed as MIA since the disaster at Sirius Ad even though there’s very little doubt that everyone we left behind in that place is now dead. But the only familiar face on this drop isn’t a longtime SI or fleet friend; it’s a Russian combat controller who was my enemy not too long ago.

  “Now hear this: Orion launch in T-minus thirty,” the 1MC sounds. “Phase One begins in thirty minutes. Stand by on pods.”

  I put on my helmet and activate the data monocle. Then I turn on my suit’s tactical computer and let it do its electronic handshake with Phalanx’s neural network. As a combat controller, I have elevated access to the ship’s tactical systems, enough to at least get a view of the picture in the neighborhood around the ship. It’s not strictly against the regs to use that access while I am still on the ship, but it’s not exactly encouraged, either. But I hate being situationally blind and having nothing to look at but the autoloader hatches on the bulkhead while the battle is about to start, so I let my suit computer finish its connection and bring up the tactical plot from the holotable in CIC.

  Phalanx is at the head of a formation of six ships. In the middle of the formation is NACS Polaris, one of our few remaining supercarriers and the obvious centerpiece of our task force. Flying in close protective formation off her starboard is the SRA cruiser Kirov. On her portside, the Eurocorps frigate Westfalen is keeping pace, and trading slightly behind the carrier is the SRA destroyer Yinchuan. Bringing up the rear is a familiar hull number: AOE-1, NACS Portsmouth, the large fleet supply ship that served as our mobile base during the Leonidas mission almost two months ago. I turn on an external camera feed off Polaris’s stern and see that Portsmouth is still wearing the rough and pebbly black paint job she received in the SOCOM yard before we set out on our covert mission to reclaim Arcadia. As a strike force, this is as much combat power as I’ve seen put together since the joint-fleet evacuation of New Svalbard, and it’s almost unbelievable at this point that there are seven more task forces of roughly similar composition moving toward Mars with us.

  With nothing better to do than to wait for the green light, I watch the plot, our little cluster of blue and green icons creeping closer to Mars every minute. The tactical officer in CIC cycles through the magnification scale every few minutes to give the skipper updates on the big picture. The task group is split neatly into task forces, all waiting their turn in the battle order, spread across five hundred kilometers of space in all directions. It’s a mind-blowing display of combat power, but I remember Indy’s desperate run around Mars last year, and the amount of capital-ship wrecks that were floating in space as we zoomed by at full throttle, Lankies on our tail. For a force of this magnitude, the comms are eerily silent. I don’t hear any of the usual chatter that goes with maneuvering a task group of this size. The Lankies can sense active radiation, and the fleet has been cruising under EMCON Bravo—strictly limited transmissions—since we left the assembly point.

  “Orion launch in T-minus fifteen. Stand by for final FO targeting update.”

  FO, the forward observer, is NACS Cincinnati, on station a few tens of thousands of kilometers ahead, a black hole in space. Cincinnati has been using its powerful optical arrays to keep tabs on the Lanky seed ships near Mars. The Orions need a while to get up to Lanky-killing fractional light-speed velocity, so we need to fire them from much further out than the task force can spot the Lankies on passive arrays, but with Cincinnati feeding us updated targeting data, it will be like aiming a rifle at a target just out of arm’s reach. And for the first time ever, we are ambushing them, initiating the attack instead of reacting to theirs.

  The update from Cincinnati comes in a minute or two later, and the tactical display updates with the current position of every Lanky ship between us and Mars. My heart skips a beat when I see the orange icons representing seed ships all popping up at once on the long-range situational display. We are far out of their weapon range, but seeing the color orange on a tactical plot will give me anxiety for the rest of my life, even if we win this battle and I get to live to 110.

  The ships towing the Orion missiles are at the front of our formation, in a staggered wall that’s five abreast and five deep. One by one, the towing ships detach their missiles and launcher units and turn to reverse course. Once the Orions light their engines, they’ll start squirting nuclear charges out of their tail ends and detonating them against their ablative pusher plates at the rate of one per second, and no skipper wants to stick around when hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads are about to go off in the neighborhood. The Orions are dangerous, crude, and unwieldy, too large to fit on any ships, and a threat to anything smaller than a planetoid in their path if they miss their targets. But they are the only shot we have at pulling off that crucial first volley, to take out as many seed ships as we can in one single strike before they are aware of our presence and start dispersing.

  “Orion launch in T-minus five. All units, clear the backblast area. Level-one radiation protocol in effect.”

  On the tactical display, each Lanky seed ship in range has two target markers on it. We are about to fire two Orions at each seed ship, to account for misses and weapon malfunctions. I look at the trajectories and see that a lot of them are going to come dangerously close to Mars if they miss. I try to do the math in my head to imagine what a ten-thousand-ton block of pykrete will do on the planet’s surface if it hits at a few thousand kilometers per second, and decide that I’d rather not think about that right now. This is our one shot, and if we miss, Mars is lost to us forever anyway.

  Out in space a few hundred kilometers in front of our task group, fourteen dual Orion launchers train themselves on to their
target bearings with little bursts from their maneuvering thrusters. Each of the missiles attached to the launch modules are as long as a capital ship, heavy sledgehammers to crack open the seed ships that are impervious to any other weapon we’ve ever thrown at them.

  “Orion launch in T-minus two. Switching Orion batteries to network control. Birds free.”

  Someone in CIC has decided that the entire crew should be kept in the loop for this event, and puts the audio chatter from CIC on the general-announcement system. The skipper isn’t commenting on the launch at all, but we all know what we’re about to do. We are smacking the hornet’s nest with the biggest stick we have, and if we fail to kill the Lanky fleet in one swipe, the survivors will come swarming for us. I should be scared way more than I am right now. For some reason, knowing that we’re striking the first blow for a change makes me feel more excited and impatient than afraid.

  “Orion launch in T-minus thirty seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven . . .”

  I look over at the other members of my team. Most of them are looking at the forward bulkhead like there’s a holoscreen mounted on it that shows a championship game in progress. Dmitry sees me looking at him and gives me a fleeting grin and a thumbs-up, but I can tell that even the usually unflappable Russian is as nervous as the rest of us. If the missiles do their job, we’ll be in the pods and bound for Mars in thirty minutes. If they don’t, we’ll either die on this ship today or be witness to the end of civilization soon. Either way, once the Orions launch, it’s completely out of our hands.

  “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six . . .”

  I take a deep, shaky breath and concentrate on my tactical display again, because it’s the only thing I can do.

  “Three. Two. One. Launch.”

  On the plot, two dozen blue V-shaped icons representing antiship missiles pop into existence at the front of our battle line. I check the optical feed for a camera that’s trained on at least some of the launchers. At this distance, I can’t make out much detail, but I can clearly see the two massive Orions slowly floating away from the dual launcher. Then there’s a flare like a tiny sun that washes out the optical feed despite the automatic brightness filters.

  “Birds away, birds away,” the tactical officer says over the 1MC. “Separation and launch on Orion 82 through 86, 88 through 92, and 94 through 106. Launch failure on Orion 87 and Orion 93. Repeat, we have two misfires.”

  The Orions accelerate so quickly that the line of icons is on the plot one second, and gone the next. The nuclear charges that go off behind them every second pump most of their energy into the pusher plates and fling the missiles forward at acceleration rates that would puree a human crew even with an anti-grav system active.

  “Fifteen minutes to intercept,” CIC announces. “Battleships are moving into linebacker position.”

  The two icons representing the huge battleships, one lozenge shape blue and the other green, accelerate through the center of our formation to follow the Orions at flank speed. They’re much slower than the missiles, but they aren’t meant to catch up with them. The battleships are there to mop up any seed ships that survive the Orion volley before they can threaten the invasion fleet. I watch the two icons, labeled “AGINCOURT” and “ARKHANGELSK,” making their way past the clusters of task-force groups in a staggered formation, twenty kilometers between them. I still don’t know what the precise nature of their armament is, but I know that Aggie and Archie, as the fleet nicknamed them about ten seconds after their official commissioning, both carry immense high-energy-particle pulse cannons mounted on their centerlines. I’ve seen that weapon system at the fleet’s testing range when they used it to blow up a bunch of target hulks, and the close-range punch of those ships is absolutely devastating. But they’re very short ranged, which means that the battleships have to get close enough to the seed ships to be in their weapon range as well, and from what I saw at the target range a month and a half ago, the bugs are nowhere near ironed out.

  Next to me, Dmitry gets up and stretches his back, then his arms and shoulders. “Waiting is not thing I like,” he says. “For food, maybe. For doctor of teeth. But not for fight.”

  “I’m right there with you,” I reply.

  Dmitry reaches into the personal document pocket of his armor and pulls out a plastic pouch. Then he opens it and takes out a picture. I recognize it as the one he showed me last year on our trip back to Earth on the Indianapolis—it’s his husband, Maksim, a broad-faced, smiling guy in an SRA marine uniform, lizard-pattern camo and an undershirt with blue and white stripes. He looks at the picture for a little while and then kisses the first two fingers of his right glove and touches it gently. I feel vaguely like a voyeur watching him, but Dmitry doesn’t seem to mind. He looks over at me and holds up the picture before stowing it in his document pouch again.

  “Your wife, the pilot. Halley. She is good woman.”

  “She is,” I agree.

  “When battle is over, maybe we sit down and have drink together. You, me, Maksim, Halley. Drink much vodka, tell many war stories, maybe even some true ones.”

  “Let’s do that,” I say. “But it won’t take much for you to drink me under the table, I think.”

  “Is not competition,” he says. “Is for friendship, and remembering. Maybe forgetting, too.”

  He smiles wryly.

  I look at this Russian marine, this friendly, earnest, and competent man, and think of all the dangers we’ve shared even though we’ve only known each other briefly. I may have faced him in battle before on some colony moon somewhere. He may have killed some of my friends, and I may have killed some of his. I am once again struck by how much alike we are—how similar the grunts on both sides really are—and I know that when this battle is over, I don’t want to go on fighting him and his friends over dumb shit that could be settled at a table in one evening by half a dozen grunts from each side and a few bottles of booze between them.

  CHAPTER 12

  KICKING THE DOOR OFF THE HINGES

  The next fifteen minutes are the slowest ones of my life. The CIC’s holotable displays the tactical map at strategic scale to show both the task group and the Lanky fleet, as well as the two dozen blue V symbols that are racing from our cluster of blue and green icons to their cluster of orange ones. Far out in front of us, so close to the Lanky fleet that the icons almost touch at this scale, is the lone little blue icon that says “CINCINNATI OCS-2” next to it. Cincinnati is still in her forward-observer position, running under stealth, tracking all the Lankies optically and relaying the target data back to the task group, which in turn feeds the information to the Orions. So far, we have only fired Orion missiles at Lanky seed ships that were approaching Earth at high velocity, and those shots were much more difficult than this volley at slow-patrolling Lanky ships that are practically stationary to an Orion moving at one-twentieth of light speed.

  All those beatings we got from you bastards over the last few years, I think. Let’s see how you like getting sucker-punched back.

  On the tactical screen, the blue Vs are rushing toward the orange lozenges. The scale of the display means that the situational orb is half a million kilometers across, but the Orions are chewing up the distance between us and the Lankies like nothing I’ve ever seen moving through space, and their nuclear-propulsion charges are still accelerating them after they’re way past the halfway point. Fifteen minutes of remaining flight time turn to ten, then five, then two.

  “One minute to intercept,” CIC announces.

  With every second that passes, I expect the orange icons at the far range of our awareness bubble to scatter and rapidly change course, detecting the incoming Orions and throwing off our final targeting fixes. But however the Lankies perceive the space around their ships, sensing missiles coming toward them at fifteen thousand kilometers per second, which is what the Orions are up to in the last minute of their targeting run, doesn’t seem to be within their abilities. The Lanky seed ships continue their lei
surely patrol pattern, unaware of the kinetic energy coming their way.

  “Flight One impact in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”

  It takes all the self-control I have to stay in my seat and not jump up and pace the deck.

  “Three. Two. One. Impact.”

  The two dozen blue V icons merge with the cluster of orange lozenges in quick succession. Then the tactical display stops updating the icon positions.

  “Cincinnati has lost visual. FO is reporting multiple high-energy impacts. Stand by for poststrike assessment.”

  Several minutes pass as the sensor suites on Cincinnati and the leading ships in our battle line seek to reestablish a picture of the tactical situation. The kinetic warheads are just big blocks of pykrete, ice mixed with wood pulp, harder than concrete and much less brittle than pure ice, but they release all their energy on impact, billions of joules.

  “Getting a new fix from the FO now,” the tactical officer in CIC says.

  On the plot, the blue missile icons are gone, and so are most of the orange seed-ship icons. Three missile icons are at the very far limit of the plot, streaking toward Mars.

  “Multiple impacts,” the tactical officer announces, in a voice that sounds first amazed and then jubilant. “FO reports impacts on ten bogeys. Multiple hull breaches. Visual feed incoming.”

  I waste no time tapping into the camera feed from Cincinnati that arrives just a minute later. The space in near-Mars orbit is littered with Lanky ships that are clearly mortally wounded. Several have their entire front thirds missing and are streaming chunks of hull as they careen through space with an obvious lack of controlled propulsion. Two of the Lanky ships are torn in half, the segments drifting away from each other slowly at this magnification, with clouds of smaller hull debris between them.