Desperate Fire (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 4)

by Christopher Nuttall

His men sounded off, one by one. No one appeared to be harmed, although one of the hovertanks had been picked up by the blast and tossed over and over until it had crashed to the ground. Pat wasn’t sure precisely how that had happened, but it hardly mattered. His suit’s sensors reported a gradual increase in radiation levels. The marines were safe inside their armor, unless the levels rose to truly unbearable levels, yet the locals had no protection.

  Dear God, he thought. What did they put in those warheads?

  Just for a moment, he found himself unsure of what to do. There was clearly no point in heading onwards; their targets, the PDCs, were gone. The force shield had collapsed immediately after the blasts. But the marines had lost communications with the starships in orbit, which meant that calling for pickup was impossible . . .

  “Get a laser link to orbit,” he ordered finally. He’d never seen so much distortion, not outside training exercises. Thankfully, the tanks could use communications lasers to make contact with the starships, given time. “We’ll head back to the spaceport, then go onwards into the city.”

  He contemplated the situation as the marines turned and started to jog back the way they’d come. A nuclear weapon—a standard missile warhead—wouldn’t be radioactive, but if they’d all been groundbursts, there was a very good chance that they’d sucked up thousands of tons of soil and turned it into nuclear fallout. The sleet of radiation the marines had already detected suggested that the warhead had been deliberately designed to be as dirty as possible. Theocratic forces hadn’t just slaughtered a large chunk of the city’s population, they’d literally rendered the local area uninhabitable. They clearly didn’t have any intention of rebuilding the city in the near future.

  And how long, he asked himself, will it take for the radiation to fade away?

  “Shit,” Jack breathed. “Sir, the spaceport!”

  “It hasn’t been nuked,” Pat said sharply. “Be grateful.”

  It was a mess, he had to admit. The blast wave had clearly washed over the spaceport—a number of vehicles had been knocked over; a pair of ground-based missile launchers had been destroyed—but the complex was largely intact. And yet he knew that some of the ground crews wouldn’t have been wearing armor. He hoped, prayed, that Kat would think to send down emergency teams as fast as possible. The local radiation levels were too high.

  His radio buzzed. “Colonel,” a familiar voice said. “Report.”

  “Commodore,” Pat said. He couldn’t call Kat by her first name, not when they were both on duty. “We were nearly at the PDC when the nukes detonated. 1st Regiment is largely intact; 5th and 6th are still out of contact.”

  And 6th had been headed down to the city, he thought grimly. Marine combat battlesuits were tough, but they would have been right on top of a nuclear blast. They may all be dead.

  He pushed the thought aside. “Radiation levels at the spaceport are alarmingly high,” he added. His suit would already be forwarding its data to the orbiting ships. “We need urgent medical support, but they have to wear proper armor and bring stasis pods.”

  “Understood,” Kat said. She paused. “Colonel, Lothian wasn’t the only place to be nuked.”

  Pat blanched. “Where else?”

  “Everywhere,” Kat said. “They hit the entire planet. There were at least fifty blasts.”

  “. . . Shit.”

  Pat’s throat was suddenly very dry. He swallowed hard. Hebrides wasn’t the most heavily populated planet in the Commonwealth, but millions of people had been on the surface. The population was spread out, thankfully, yet that number of nukes would have injected so much radiation into the biosphere that the planet would likely become uninhabitable. Hebrides had been condemned to a slow and agonizing death.

  The Theocracy must be out of their minds, he thought. They must know we’ll retaliate.

  “I’m going to take a preliminary team down to Lothian,” he said softly. The question of retaliation would be decided well above his pay grade. “Major Garth will take command at the spaceport.”

  “Understood,” Kat said. She hesitated, just for a second. “Be careful.”

  Pat nodded to himself, then started issuing orders to his team. The mushroom cloud was slowly dispersing, revealing fires blazing across the remains of the city. Everything flammable within the blast radius would have been lit by the heat wave. His mind quietly catalogued the other effects as he led the way to the gates, walked through the barricades, and headed down to the city. The light of the explosion would have blinded anyone looking at it, the blast wave would have smashed hundreds of buildings, the radiation would have been overkill . . .

  Lothian had been surrounded by a forest, he knew, broken only by a motorway that encircled the entire city. Now the forest was blazing brightly, hundreds of trees crashing to the ground as flames destroyed their roots; the road was barely recognizable, covered in burning trees and cars. The intense heat would have killed him if he hadn’t been wearing the suit. Sweat seemed to trickle down his back as he trudged onwards. It had to be his imagination, he told himself firmly, but it felt real nonetheless.

  “The fleet’s launching recon drones,” Jack said quietly. “They’ll peer through the cloud.”

  Pat barely heard him as his team crossed the road and entered Lothian itself. The barricades they’d noted during their preliminary recon of the city were torn and broken, the bodies of their former defenders missing in action. He hoped that meant they’d been destroyed by the blasts, but he feared the civilians, upon liberation, had been mutilating the corpses and thus would have been caught in the open when the nukes detonated. Outside the immediate blast range, someone who took cover would have a reasonable chance of survival . . .

  Not here, he reminded himself. The radiation seemed to be growing stronger, far stronger. If the blast hadn’t gotten them, the radiation would.

  He saw something moving just inside a damaged building; he motioned for his men to stay back, then moved forward himself, weapon at the ready. But there was no threat inside the building, just a handful of dying men and women, their bodies practically melted . . .

  Pat felt his gorge rise in his throat, despite all his training, as he realized the citizens were doomed. The Commonwealth could do nothing for them, even if they were somehow teleported to a hospital on Tyre. The damage was just too great.

  I’m sorry, he thought. He hefted his rifle and shot the first man in the head, then moved on to the next and the next. He could do nothing but make the end quick. I’m sorry.

  He turned and forced himself to walk out of the building, feeling utterly wretched. He’d been trained to protect civilians, not kill them. He’d put his life on the line, time and time again, to defend the Commonwealth. And yet, all he’d been able to do for these dying men and women was kill them himself. A quick death was a mercy, but it didn’t feel like a mercy.

  Damn me, he thought.

  The damage grew worse as the troops probed the center of the city. More bodies were discovered amidst the ruined buildings, including a handful wearing cracked and broken battlesuits. His men, Pat knew; he took their ID tags and then left the corpses for later recovery. They’d be shipped home if their bodies could be decontaminated. If not, they’d have to be fired into the sun. The wind picked up, blowing dust and ash towards the marines as they reached the giant crater at the heart of Lothian. The planetary government’s offices were gone, as were the Theocrats defending it . . . and his men, caught by the blasts as they were pressing against the defenses. They had all died for nothing.

  He wanted to sit down and curse the enemy, but he had too much work to do. The radio kept crackling alarmingly, even though a flight of drones now served as communication relays. More and more shuttles were landing, bringing with them emergency supplies . . . emergency supplies that wouldn’t, that couldn’t, be remotely enough to save the entire planet. He shuddered as he led the small patrol on a long and winding path through the remains of Lothian. Even if every starship in the Commonwealth
was dedicated to evacuating the planet, it couldn’t be done in a reasonable length of time. The wind was already dispersing the fallout all over Hebrides. Millions had died . . . millions more were going to die.

  And repairing the planet might be impossible, he thought. Terraforming programs, particularly the brute-force project the United Nations had used to terraform Mars before humanity had learned how to enter and navigate hyperspace, were hugely expensive. And he didn’t think any such project had ever been carried out on a radioactive world. We might have to abandon the planet altogether.

  He shuddered as he peered into a building. It might have been a schoolhouse, or a church, or even a family house; now, the interior was so badly scorched that he had no way of determining what the structure had been. The Commonwealth had enough problems coping with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who’d fled Theocratic Space; this, the entire surviving population of a dead world, was an order of magnitude worse. And the evacuation would have to be done quickly, before the radiation slaughtered the remaining population.

  Perhaps that was the point, he told himself. They wanted to slow us down before we pressed into their territory.

  He made a note of the thought for later contemplation, then led the way back out of Lothian and up to the spaceport. If any more survivors remained within the city—and he doubted it—there was nothing he could do for them. Hundreds of shuttles flew overhead, dropping medical supplies and other pieces of equipment; thousands of stasis pods, hastily removed from the transport ships, were already in place on the landing strips. But they needed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pods.

  And we don’t have them, he thought. We never anticipated needing them on such a scale.

  Major Garth saluted as Pat approached. “Sir,” he said. “Seventeen marines from 6th Regiment have returned from Lothian.”

  Pat grimaced. 6th Regiment had been the smallest of his formations, but it had still deployed 1,500 marines. They couldn’t all be dead, could they? And yet he’d seen the blast crater. Anyone caught within the blast, battlesuit or no, wouldn’t have stood a chance. There might be other survivors, he told himself. The entire regiment wouldn’t have been committed to the final offensive. But unless his men returned to the spaceport under their own power . . .

  We will sweep the ruins, he told himself. But when?

  “Understood,” he said. “And the ground crews?”

  “A number were wounded and they all took pretty nasty doses of radiation, sir,” Garth reported shortly. “I’ve had them all put into stasis for the moment.”

  “Very good,” Pat said. It wasn’t good, but it was the best they could do. Military medicine had advanced in leaps and bounds over the last two centuries. Given time, anything that wasn’t immediately fatal could be repaired. But it might be months, years perhaps, before anyone had the time to actually give the victims proper medical care. “And the newcomers?”

  “All suited, sir,” Garth said. “The medics are already establishing a secure hospital for emergency cases. We’re bringing in additional doctors from the starships too.”

  Pat winced. “Make sure they know not to take risks,” he ordered firmly. “We’re going to need every medic we can get.”

  He gritted his teeth. Confusion was likely to cost lives. Marine combat medics knew the score, but starship doctors weren’t used to working under fire. Or, for that matter, in a poisonous environment. Radiation levels were still increasing as the wind blew fallout towards the spaceport. The marines would have to establish a long-term base somewhere safer, if there was such a place on Hebrides.

  “Yes, sir,” Garth said. “Do you want to send recon patrols to the PDCs?”

  “I don’t think there’s any point,” Pat said. Both PDCs had destroyed themselves. He doubted there were any survivors. “They were blasted to rubble too.”

  He groaned as another flight of shuttles flew overhead, landing neatly on the runway. Armored crews hastily removed another set of stasis pods, carrying them over towards the medical tents and placing them neatly by the others. It looked like he had enough pods to cope with any crisis, but he knew the massive collection was merely a drop in the ocean. Even assuming a mere tenth of the population survived and a fifth of those needed emergency attention, he didn’t have enough pods.

  “Ask the fleet to strip out their pods and send them down to the surface,” he ordered. The fleet needed a handful of colonist-carriers, which carried hundreds of thousands of pods, but the closest one he knew of was back at Tyre. And they didn’t even have a StarCom to call for help. “We’re going to need them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Garth said. “Regulations . . .”

  “To hell with regulations,” Pat snapped. The Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers on Tyre might have decreed that a starship couldn’t remove more than half of its stasis pods, but the bean counters had never had to deal with a planet-wide crisis. “There are people dying down here.”

  He forced himself to calm down. Kat would ignore the regulations and send them all down, but a few hundred more stasis pods wouldn’t make much of a difference. They needed millions of the damn things. Hell, they needed more than they had in the entire Commonwealth. The scale of the disaster was beyond comprehension. There hadn’t been anything like this since the outbreak of plague on Williamson’s World, seventy years ago.

  But this was not a disaster, he told himself sharply. It was an atrocity.

  And the Theocracy, he promised himself silently, would pay for what it had done.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Captain,” Crewwoman Shannon Foster said, “are you sure you want to land here?”

  William swallowed the angry response that came to mind. The landing zone he’d designated was over seventy kilometers from the nearest nuclear detonation, but the radiation in the air was already alarmingly high—not enough to cause him real problems, thanks to gene-splicing, medical nanotechnology, and booster injections, yet enough to be worrying. Some of the locals might survive, but their unborn children would pay a fearsome price.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “You see that croft over there? Put us down next to it.”

  “Aye, sir,” Shannon said.

  The shuttle touched down with nary a bump. William made a mental note, as he donned his long coat, to ensure that Shannon received a commendation for her flying, and then he headed for the hatch. Flying hadn’t gotten any easier in the seven days since his homeworld had been nuked, he knew; the weather had become dangerously unpredictable, great gusts of turbulence battering shuttles and knocking two of them out of the sky. The radiation and radio distortion only made matters worse.

  I shouldn’t be here, he thought as he stepped out of the shuttle and took his first breath. The atmosphere tasted odd, a faint hint of burning hanging in the air. And yet, the smell of cows and sheep also hung in the air, bringing back memories of a childhood that had been a decidedly mixed experience. I don’t belong here any longer.

  He strode towards the croft, his feet squishing through the muddy ground. He’d expected that someone would have taken the croft, since William and Scott had left their homeworld, but it was seemingly deserted. The door was open, allowing him to step into his childhood home. Much of the furniture had been taken, probably by their neighbors; the remainder, what little there was of it, rotting from disuse. His father and grandfather had crafted much of the furniture, rather than ordering pieces from an industrial production node. Making their own chairs and tables had been a simple task.

  Removing the flashlight from his belt, William switched it on, illuminating the darkened croft. His parents had slept in the living room before their untimely deaths, their double bed still fixed at one end of the room. He’d joked with his brother that whichever of them wed first would take the bed, but in the end neither of them had married. Scott’s prospective bride had been given to the pirates, while William had joined the Royal Navy. And now . . .

  He shone the light into the bedroom. The two little beds he remem
bered were gone, but the carvings his father had placed on the wall were still there. Losing the beds didn’t anger him, not after so long. Abandoned crofts were always stripped of everything their neighbors might find useful if the homestead was abandoned for more than a year and a day. He hoped that whoever had taken the beds was making good use of them.

  William felt, as he walked back into the living room, as if he’d stepped into a shell of his former home. His father’s armchair, the sole luxury in the house, was gone; the handful of books, ranging from a Bible to a pair of historical fiction novels, had vanished long ago. He wondered absently if they’d been put to good use or if the local vicar had tossed them into the fire. The Kirk had never been keen on people reading anything more than the Bible; indeed, William had often suspected they’d ban people reading the Bible too, if they could. Their objections had caused no end of problems before the pirates had arrived. Now . . .

  The Commonwealth was changing everything, he thought. Just having access to the datanet changed the world.

  He sat down on the double bed and put his head in his hands. The radiation levels were still rising, wind sweeping the fallout across the planet. The last set of projections indicated that the entire planet would be uninhabitable within a year as the radiation wiped out large chunks of the biosphere. God alone knew what would happen when the survivors were moved to refugee camps elsewhere, when they were exposed to other cultures and societies. The Kirk’s grip on their minds would be shattered.

  Not that it was that strong a grip, he told himself. We were too stubborn to let the Kirk dictate to us.

  It had been a hard life, he recalled, and yet there had been something oddly satisfying about living in the croft. He’d never known a time when he could relax and enjoy childhood; he’d been put to work, doing household and farming tasks, almost as soon as he was old enough to walk. His schooling had been very limited, long hours in the schoolhouse during winter, almost no education at all during the planting and harvesting seasons. He’d been pulling his weight on the farm before he entered his second decade, then co-running it with his brother when their parents died. No one had ever thought they couldn’t handle the work. Even the vicar had been helpful to the two young orphans as they struggled to keep their family’s farm in their hands.