by Marko Kloos
“Twenty Taiwanese Synth-Pop Hits to Die To,” I say, and she laughs.
“Attention, all units in Earth orbit,” Colonel Aguilar announces over the emergency channel. “This is Colonel Fernando Aguilar, NACS Regulus. I am taking command of all military units. All units, proceed to grid two-eight-seven by one-one-five and establish a blocking position against the incoming Lanky ship. Whatever we have left, now is the time to bring it and to use it.”
“We are passing into the launch drop window in seven minutes,” Halley says. “Once we are loose, I’m flooring it for the deck, so you mudlegs back there make sure you have all your toys strapped in.”
One by one, the remaining ships of Earth’s orbital-defense patrols climb into higher orbits and come to join the blockade position. Halley has a tactical display on the center console of the Dragonfly, and I count the icons parading slowly across the hemisphere to join our cluster of defenders. A South American frigate, an African Commonwealth corvette, some patrol boats from the Oceanians. They’re not enough to blunt the hammer that’s about to descend upon us, and their crews know it, but they have decided that dying in a shield wall is better than dying on the run.
“We have visual on the bogey,” Regulus sends. “Contact, bearing three-five-zero by positive zero-zero-one, two hundred meters per second, CBDR. Distance one hundred thousand and decreasing. All units, unmask batteries and prepare for barrage fire.”
With all the task force ships networked, the information from Regulus’s CIC instantly pops up on all the tactical screens in every other ship. On the screen between me and Halley, an inverted V shape in blaze orange appears on the very edge of the scan range.
“Weapons free,” Colonel Aguilar sends. “All units, engage. Fire at will.”
We are too far for the rail guns, but most of the task force ships have held back their missile armaments, and now they’re unleashing everything they have in the magazines. Dozens of missile trails streak toward the incoming Lanky, still tens of thousands of kilometers away and increasing the range of our missiles by its own rush toward our effective weapon envelopes.
“Five minutes to launch window,” Halley says. “I’ll drop early if I have to.”
The missile barrage takes no more than two or three minutes. Then the ship-to-ship tubes of the task force ships are spent. I watch the tactical display as dozens of little inverted blue V shapes rush toward the big orange icon and then disappear one by one.
“Missile fire ineffective,” Regulus sends. “Stand by on rail gun batteries.”
“Belay that,” a new voice comes on the emergency channel. “All units, hold rail gun fire. This is Indianapolis. We are in terminal approach at T-minus sixty. You don’t want to mess up our run right now.”
I can hear the abandon-ship alert in the background of the transmission, and there’s a sudden ball of lead materializing in the center of my abdomen.
“No, no, no,” I say. Halley catches on at the same time and shouts a curse against the windshield.
“Indianapolis, abort. That is an order. You will abort your attack run immediately,” Colonel Aguilar sends.
“Negative, Regulus. Get out of the way and make the best of what comes after. It’s been an honor serving with you all. Take care to pick up the escape pods we left behind, please. Campbell out.”
There’s a blip on the display, coming in from the opposite end of the screen from the Lanky intruder, who is now fifty thousand kilometers out and driving on undeterred.
“All units, cease fire! Weapons hold! Weapons hold!”
Indy is moving at full burn, and judging by her insane speed, she must have been burning her main engines at full power for a while. The little OCS is nowhere near as heavy or as fast as the freighter we used to destroy the Lanky ship in the Fomalhaut system, however. I’m not an ace in physics, but even I can do the math involved. Our last-ditch freighter missile at Fomalhaut needed days of constant acceleration to get up to Lanky-killing speed. Indy has had only a few hours to accelerate, and there’s no way she’s going fast enough to destroy a seed ship by ramming it. Colonel Campbell is about to throw Indy against the Lanky ship for nothing, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. The orbital combat ship has turned itself into a guided kinetic missile that is hurling itself into the jaws of the shark at tens of thousands of meters per second. She crosses our sensor threshold and streaks across it in mere seconds.
I want to close my eyes. I don’t want to be witness to the death of Indy and however many of her crew that decided to forsake the escape pods and steer the ship toward its target. But I can’t tear my eyes away from the display.
Then there’s a small new sun hanging in the blackness of space fifty kilometers away.
“Indy is—Jesus, Indy has hit the Lanky. At fifty K per second.”
For just a moment, the universe freezes in place.
Then, through the white-hot bloom of the impact, the Lanky reappears.
“Goddammit,” I shout, and pound the dashboard of the Dragonfly with my bandaged hand, an action I instantly regret.
“Lanky ship now at forty-eight thousand, three-five-two by positive zero-zero-one,” Regulus’s tactical officer sends, and it sounds like he’s reading the names off a headstone.
“Aspect change, aspect change on the Lanky,” someone else says. “He’s ejecting something. Second contact, same bearing.”
Something breaks loose from the Lanky ship and gets flung aside into its own trajectory at hundreds of meters per second. Then another object follows, and then it’s a constant stream, things of irregular shapes and sizes leaving the ship and forming a trail behind the approaching ship.
“He’s damaged. Holy shit, the Lanky is damaged. Indy took a piece out of him.”
The hull of the approaching ship is no longer the smooth, organic-looking solid thing I’m used to seeing. Instead, the front end of the Lanky ship has a huge chunk missing from it, a scar that extends from the bow of the thing halfway down one side. As I train the camera on it at maximum magnification, I can see matter tearing loose from the wound and tumbling off into space. The hole in the Lanky ship has a strange, fibrous appearance.
“All units, weapons free. Aim for the hole in that hull. Whatever you have left, let the son of a bitch have it.”
A dozen ships open up with their rail guns. The barrage fire peppers the undamaged portion of the Lanky’s hull without effect, but the hole in the hull seems to absorb the cannon fire instead of deflecting it. Some of the ships have missiles left, and they add them to the shooting-range frenzy that has seized the gunnery officers on every task force vessel.
“Nuclear fire mission,” Regulus announces. “Firing tubes one through eight. All units, prepare for impact effects.”
Eight more missile trails streak toward the Lanky, now forty thousand kilometers out and closing rapidly.
“Get clear! All units, evasive action. Get out of his way!”
There’s a mad scramble as a dozen ships go in a dozen different directions to avoid colliding with the kilometers-long behemoth hurtling toward the battle group. The first of Regulus’s nukes goes wide and streaks past the Lanky. The second shatters against the undamaged front section and expends itself in a short-lived fission bloom. Then the rest arrive and seemingly hit the hull all at once. At least three of Regulus’s nukes disappear into the wound on the side of the Lanky ship.
The side of the Lanky seed ship bows out like the gills of a breathing shark. Then a much bigger section of the hull blows off the Lanky and disintegrates, and this time there is blindingly bright nuclear fire behind it. The seed ship shudders from bow to stern.
“Multiple direct hits! Multiple hits with secondaries!”
“Got you, you son of a bitch,” Halley shouts next to me.
The Lanky ship’s flight path becomes unstable. The long cigar shape from hell starts to wobble on its trajectory, like an oscillating tuning fork. The stern starts swinging out of line, and the Lanky careens sideways,
still on the same bearing but with the bow pointing forty-five degrees off course. The battle group’s rail guns and ship-to-ship missiles keep raking the massive hull. Much of the ordnance bounces off the undamaged hull the way it always has, but almost as much is pouring into the open flank of the seed ship.
Our formation is in disarray, each ship evading the Lanky and firing its weapons as fast as it can bring them to bear. It’s a brutal short-ranged exchange, and even though the seed ship is clearly mortally wounded, it’s not dead yet. From the undamaged side of the hull, penetrator rods spray into space, blindly but in large numbers. We are not in the line of fire, but two of the task force ships are less lucky. Tripoli takes a broadside that tears her up all the way from bow to stern, and she starts spinning out of control, bleeding frozen air and shrapnel. One of the smaller corvettes that joined us at the last minute simply blows apart under the hits, shattered alloy and steel hurtling in all directions. Then the Lanky is past the task force, hurtling toward Earth sideways and shedding enormous pieces of itself.
“He’s going to hit atmo,” someone sends. “My God, what if he doesn’t break up?”
“Multiple separations on the Lanky ship,” Minsk announces.
The camera feed shows smaller objects ejecting from the undamaged side of the hull. They come out in spurts, like the arterial blood of a wounded animal.
“Oh, God,” I say. “He’s tossing out his seedpods. There’s a dozen or more of those bastards in each of those.”
“All units, move in and track the debris,” Regulus orders. “Fire at will.”
Avenger still has air/space defense missiles in her magazines. She starts launching salvos of them, fast and angry fireflies that race out to intercept the seedpods before they can make it into the atmosphere and release their cargo onto Earth. But it’s too little, too late. Some of the missiles smash into the seedpods, but each of them is the size of a destroyer and seemingly just as hard-shelled as its mother ship. Most missiles fail to track or don’t catch up with the seedpods as they hurtle into the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, trailing bright plasma flares.
“Multiple incursions. Tracking twenty-plus pods in the atmosphere,” says Regulus.
I don’t need a camera to see what’s happening right outside our cockpit windows. We are in high orbit above the North American continent, and right now there are hundreds of twenty-meter-tall and hard-to-kill Lankies falling down to Earth in their resilient settlement pods.
“All drop ships, this is Regulus. Initiate drop sequence and follow the seedpods down, wherever they fall. Follow them down and kill those sons of bitches. All drop ships, initiate drop sequence,” says the Regulus tactical officer.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Halley says. She seizes her throttle lever and puts her thumb on the launch button.
“Whisky and Delta wings, follow me,” she says. “We’ll assign targets on the way down. Dropping in three, two, one. Drop.”
She punches the launch button, and the Dragonfly drops away from the Regulus. Halley opens up the throttles and brings the nose around and down with a satisfied little shout.
“Tallyho. Lock and load back there, folks. You’ll be in the dirt and killing shit in fifteen.”
CHAPTER 25
“This is going to be a mess on the ground,” Halley says.
We are streaking through the upper layer of the atmosphere, and as far as my field of view through the armored cockpit windows reaches, I can see seedpods falling toward Earth, dozens of them bleeding off speed and trailing long streams of superheated plasma. It’s almost misleading to call them “pods” like we’ve been doing all along, when all we saw of them were the husks on conquered colony worlds after Lanky landings. They’re huge and cylindrical, like blunt miniature versions of their host ship, but even in miniature they are hundreds of meters long. It’s like an entire fleet of capital ships falling out of the sky over North America.
The computer maps the descending seedpods and projects their trajectories on the navigation map.
“Everyone pick a pod to follow down,” Halley sends to the rest of the drop-ship flight. “Whoever’s in range. Tag yourselves on TacLink when you claim your target so we don’t double up by accident.”
There are three pods careening through the atmosphere more or less in front of Halley’s Delta Five. Her hand does a rapid dance on the navigation screen.
“Labrador, the Minneapolis metroplex, or Detroit,” she says. “Where do you want to party tonight?”
“Anything but Detroit,” I say.
“That one’s the easiest trajectory for me to follow,” she says. “Detroit it is. Sorry.”
She assigns her ship to the middle contact and toggles into her flight channel again.
“Everyone, pursue them right down to the deck. Their retardation mechanisms will deploy at twenty thousand, and they’ll slow down for the landing. Hit them right when they land. Don’t give them a chance to disperse.”
She flicks the display to a different screen and checks her stores. “Goddamn, do I wish we had some missiles on this thing.”
“We’re unarmed?”
“Not totally. We have the cannons. But these are training ships, Andrew. We do flight instruction and systems familiarization with them. Not much of a call for leaving rocket pods on the wing pylons.”
“Please tell me the armory is full,” I say.
“It’s always full,” she replies. “Takes too long to get them back to alert status otherwise.”
“Best news of the day,” I say.
We chase the Lanky into the atmosphere above the northern continent. The Lanky is falling ballistically, and Halley can’t follow in the same way because the drop ship would burn to ashes from the generated heat, so by the time we’re passing through the troposphere, the Lanky is several hundred kilometers ahead of us and still increasing distance. Once the worst of the buffeting stops, I unbuckle my harness and make my way into the cargo compartment.
“You got some instruction on these when they trained you for the Fomalhaut deployment,” I shout. Every pair of eyes in the cargo hold is on me as I hold up one of the M-80 Lanky zappers from the drop ship’s armory. “Don’t bother with the fléchette rifles unless that’s all you have left. Takes too long to make a dent with those. Aim for the joints at the knees and the arms, and the spot where the necks would be if those sons of bitches had any. And take every rocket for the MARS launchers we have. Shoot the armor-piercing first, then HEAT, then thermobaric. Leave the dual-purpose shit for last when you’ve run out of everything else. Point-blank, they’ll do a Lanky in just fine. Use ’em in pairs.”
“How many of those things have you killed?” one of the sergeants yells.
“Hundreds,” I say. “Thousands. With my radio. They’re plenty hard to kill, but you can kill them just fine.”
Three of the other sergeants get out of their jump seats to help out, and we start emptying the armory, handing out rocket launchers and heavy anti-Lanky rifles to the platoon. I wish we had a week to give these HD troopers some more training on these things, and I wish we had three times as much ammo in the armory as we do, but this is what we have right now, and all the time we have to prepare.
At five thousand feet, we break out of the cloud cover. The hundreds of square miles of Detroit are spread out below us, the old city ringed by neat clusters of hundred-story PRC blocks, row after row of towers. The part of Detroit I dropped into five years ago and almost got killed in was toward the old part of town, in the old first- and second-generation PRCs that still resembled a regular city somewhat. The part of Detroit we are descending into now has a whole different feel to it. The scale of these fifth-gen PRCs is overwhelming, each block a self-contained unit of four towers that reach one hundred floors into the night sky, over a thousand vertical feet.
“Try to make contact with whatever HD battalion is closest,” I say. “The 365th out of Dayton, maybe. Tell them we need everyone out here who can hold a rifle. A
nd tell them what’s coming their way, if they don’t know already.”
When the Lanky seedpod hits the ground, it’s like the finger of a grumpy god reaching out and shaking things up for the mortals. The pod slams into the dirt maybe a hundred meters from the outer perimeter of a fifth-generation housing block, four hundred-floor towers forming a square with ten-meter-tall concrete walls on the outside. We hear the concussion of the impact from several kilometers away and through the multilayered polyplast of the cockpit.
“We have footfall,” Halley sends back to Regulus. “Lanky seedpod touched down at forty-two degrees, nineteen minutes fifty-three seconds north, eighty-three degrees, zero-two minutes, forty-two seconds west, 1119 Zulu local time.”
The Lanky ship hits nose-first. It’s much squatter and shorter relative to the shape of its mother ship, so it doesn’t stay standing on end for long. The whole thing totters and then begins to lean over in what feels like slow motion. Then the end that was pointing skyward falls toward the nearby PRC towers and crashes down. The Lanky pod is longer than the distance between the outer walls of the PRC block and the impact point, and the mass of the pod bulls into the junction between the wall and the closest PRC tower. There’s a thunderclap that sounds like a fuel-air bomb just went off, and the area is obscured by an expanding cloud of concrete dust and flying debris. Halley puts the Dragonfly into a shallow dive and streaks toward the crash site.
When the dust clears a little, the front third of the seedpod is buried in the corner of the residence tower. Thirty meters of concrete wall are pulverized underneath the mass of the pod. Halley switches on the searchlights at the front of the drop ship’s nose. They cut through the dusty darkness to reveal three Lankies stalking away from the wreck, into the space between the tower blocks.
“Contact,” Halley calls out. “Three hostiles on the ground. They are in the middle of a civilian residential area. I am engaging.”
Halley pulls the drop ship into a hover maybe three hundred meters from the crashed pod and the ruined barrier wall of the PRC block. She flicks on the searchlights on the nose of the drop ship, which instantly pierce the dusty darkness with blindingly white fingers of light. The Lankies have skin the color of eggshells. Under the glare of the Dragonfly’s lights, they are as obvious as buildings.
