by Marko Kloos
He turns to the Icelandic captain.
“Captain Haraldsson, I suggest you get on the line with your Eurocorps chain of command and get authorization for us to deploy nukes. I want to shift the nearest nuclear-capable NAC unit in orbit and put a five-kiloton bunker buster on top of that cave as soon as they can get a firing solution.”
The Eurocorps captain looks visibly shocked. “This is Danish territory. I do not think they will let you deploy nuclear weapons on their ground.”
The major shakes his head slowly. “Run the request by them. Tell them they can either send a few battalions of infantry to smoke these things out, or they can give us the green light for a single strike. Send the footage from Lieutenant Grayson’s armor along with your request. And do let them know that if they pick option one, it may take a few days. We just lost a platoon in the span of three seconds. Want to bet how many of your Sirius guys are going to walk out of there in the end? And if the Lankies disperse, God knows where they’ll pop out of the ice again.”
The captain looks from the major to me, then back to the major. Then he shrugs. “I will convey your request,” he finally says, reluctantly. “Stand by.”
He turns and walks out of the back of the mule. When his boots are on the ice, he falls into a brisk trot and heads over to the nearby Eurocorps command vehicles.
“Call our grunts back out of the tunnels,” the major orders. “We get the green light, we’re gonna have to un-ass the AO in a mighty hurry. Have the mules keep the perimeter. And get me regional command. They’ll shit a brick when they get the request. Might as well give them time to find a crapper and get situated.”
I laugh out loud and immediately regret it when a sharp pain lances through my side. I wince and lean forward in my seat. The major looks at me with concern.
“And get a medic over here to look at the lieutenant. He’s coughing up blood.”
The medics take me to the rear, which out on this glacier means a second echelon of armored vehicles that cover the back slope of the frozen river. They take off my armor and have me lie down on a diagnostic stretcher in the back of a medical mule. I prop up my head just enough to keep watching the scene on the glacier out of the open tail hatch of the mule.
“Two broken ribs,” the medic, a burly staff sergeant, pronounces after checking the full-body scanner. “You have a concussion, too, and a bunch of bruises and cuts. We’ll have to send you to Great Lakes to get the ribs fixed. Can’t do it in the field.”
“I’ll go to the med unit at Burlington,” I say. “It’s closer to home.”
“Up to you,” the medic replies. “Won’t take more than a day anyway. We’ll fly you out there once we get a clear Hornet.”
“Don’t bother taking up a whole bird just for one clumsy-ass lieutenant,” I say. “I’ll ride back with the rest of the company when we pack up here.”
“You sure? We may be here a while.”
“I can deal with it, Sergeant.”
“Copy that, sir.” The medical sergeant exchanges a look with his corporal assistant that tells me he thinks I’m a dumbass for not taking the ticket to Great Lakes, where the medical facilities are ten times better than the little medical unit at HDAS Burlington, which is mostly equipped to handle nosebleeds and hangnails.
I let the medics stick dermal patches to my cuts and bruises and try to keep my breaths shallow. While they are busy dressing my minor scrapes, I keep a watch toward the top of the slope, where the frontline row of mules is guarding the perimeter in front of the Lanky tunnel entrance.
Ten or fifteen minutes in, there’s a burst of activity by the tunnel, troops coming up the slope in a rush and climbing into the backs of the waiting mules. One by one, the mules close their rear hatches and head up the slope toward the glacier. From the front of our mule, I hear some garbled comms chatter. Then the intercom crackles to life.
“We are moving to meet the Hornets for exfil,” the driver says. “Hang on in the back.”
The tail ramp closes, and the driver puts the mule into motion before the ramp is closed all the way. Without any visual reference, I can’t tell where we’re going, but we’re definitely moving up the slope fast, the mule’s engine whistling its characteristic high-pitched whining noise at full throttle.
I guess they got their authorization, I think. The thought of a nuke being aimed at the spot of ground I’m currently passing in a lightly armored vehicle should alarm me more than it does. I’ve been in the same grid-square neighborhood with thermonuclear detonations dozens of times, even if those were on newly unpopulated colonies instead of Earth. I try to remember whether the combat use of nukes on the territory of a friendly alliance is a violation of the Svalbard Accords, but then I find that I really don’t give a shit. A dozen Lankies in that sort of fortified setting can take out whatever we can send into the tunnels after them, and we can’t afford to let them get away and regroup, or next time it will be a city instead of an air base, thousands of civvies dead instead of a dozen security troops. If I could launch that nuke myself, I’d do it with a cheer.
We’ve been driving over bumpy terrain for fifteen minutes when the mule comes to a halt, and the tail ramp opens again. The medics make moves to carry me outside on the mobile stretcher but relent when I wave them off and sit up with a grimace. Instead, they prop me up on each side, and we walk down the tail ramp together. Almost immediately, the cold bite of the Greenland air makes me feel like I just stepped into a walk-in freezer.
We’re on the featureless, flat ice of the glacier. Behind us, the mules have all pulled up in a row to unload troops. In front of us, there’s a line of Eurocorps and NAC drop ships, half a dozen of them, with engines running and position lights blinking. The cold air out here smells like exhaust fumes.
“Pick a bird, and grab a seat,” the order comes over the command channel and echoes across the ice from the external speakers of the mules. “Don’t worry about unit composition or nationality. We are all going to the same place.”
The medics help me up the ramp and strap me into one of the jump seats. It feels utterly strange to be sitting in a drop ship without armor or a rifle. All around me, the seats start filling up with a mix of HD, SI, and Eurocorps personnel.
“You okay sitting for a bit, Lieutenant?” the medic asks me when he checks my harness straps.
“I’ll be fine,” I reply. “Thanks for patching the leaks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The two medics take seats to either side of me.
“Buckle up, boys and girls,” the pilot says over the intercom in a British accent. “We are leaving before the unfriendly traffic arrives. Nuclear fire mission inbound in seven minutes.”
With every seat in the drop ship full of anxious-looking troops of various nationalities, the tail ramp rises and locks into place, and the bird lifts off with what feels like maximum power. They’ll only use a small tactical warhead, and we are ten kilometers or more from ground zero, but I can understand why the Eurocorps pilots want to get distance between themselves and the impending bang in a hurry. Unlike the fleet and the SI, the terrestrial forces have no experience with nukes, especially the Euros. They consider themselves more civilized for it, but the rest of the world was glad for the NAC and SRA stockpiles of fission warheads when we needed a few thousand of them to fuel the Orion missiles that have kept the Lankies away from Earth for over a year. Turns out Lankies don’t respect civilized war-fighting methods in the least.
The nuke hits seven minutes later, while we’re in formation heading out to sea, forty thousand feet above the show. The Eurocorps birds have small windows, and almost every soldier in the cargo hold tries to get a glimpse of the sun-bright fireball that blooms on the ground off to our starboard side. It’s just a five-kiloton bunker buster, one of the smallest warheads in the arsenal, but I have to admit that it makes for a spectacular display—first the hardened warhead streaking through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, trailing glowing plasma like a co
met, and then the fission detonation itself, a bright little ball of star fire that grows larger every second until it roils into the polar air and darkens with the cooling debris it sucked up from the ground. Belowground detonations are dirty as hell, and this part of Greenland will be pegging radiation alerts for a while. The mushroom from the nuke is tiny compared to some of the multi-megaton stuff I’ve seen, but it’s sufficiently awe inspiring to the Euros and the green HD troopers in the hold. Instead of following suit and gawking at the mushroom cloud, I close my eyes, but open them again quickly when I see the image of Private Cameron’s terrified face behind his helmet visor as the Lanky grabs him and flings him into the darkness like a foul-tempered toddler chucking a toy. If he was still alive somehow, he just died in a microsecond, his brain evaporated by a million-degree fireball along with the rest of his body before it could process the nerve impulses from his skin.
I fixate on the unfamiliar geometry of the Eurocorps drop ship’s interior and start counting weld lines and rivets, even though I am suddenly tired enough that I’m sure I’d fall asleep within seconds of closing my eyes.
What a thoroughly fucked-up morning.
CHAPTER 6
BANGED UP
“This is a change,” Halley says when she walks into the hospital room. “Usually I’m the banged-up one on the stretcher.”
“Next time,” I say, and sit up in my bed with a wince. “We’ll take turns.”
“You have a few to catch up on. How are you feeling?”
“All right, I guess. Better than half the platoon.”
“What the hell happened?”
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and put a hand over the bandage wrapped around my rib cage. The broken ribs are back together, but I know from experience that I’ll be sore for a week from the fusing job.
“They were waiting for us,” I tell Halley. “Built a nice ambush for us to wander into. And I led the platoon right into it, like a fucking idiot.”
Halley takes my face into both hands and kisses me gingerly. Then she sits down on the bed next to me.
“I offered to pilot one of the spare HD birds, but they wouldn’t let me. So I had to wait it out on the tarmac at Burlington. Listened to the command channel throughout the whole thing. That was torture, not being able to jump in and help out.”
“Once we scraped them off the airfield at Thule, they went into their hideout,” I say. “They dug in, right on the glacier, in the friggin’ ice. Tunneled into it like it was dirt. Couldn’t reach them with armor or airpower, so I took in a platoon to scout.”
“They should have sent remotes in there instead of risking that many grunts,” Halley says.
I shake my head. “I had the same thought. But we barely had comms down in the tunnels. And that was with guys acting as relays at every bend. We couldn’t get telemetry on the remotes. Trust me, I would have gladly sent the drones instead.”
“So what happened?” Halley asks gently.
“I think they built the trap right into their little hideout from the start. The tunnel was just wide enough for them to crawl through. By the time we were in with the whole platoon, we were two abreast and strung out. I had them space the fire teams out so we’d have room to bring our guns to bear to the front. When I figured out what was going on, we were spread out over a hundred meters of tunnel.”
I reach for the plastic water cup on my bed’s nightstand and take a long sip. Then I offer the cup to Halley. She shakes her head curtly.
“They had a second tunnel right next to the one we were in. I picked up something on the heartbeat scanner, but we didn’t have time to clear out. Motherfucker brought down the whole tunnel wall. Buried two squads in the ice. The only reason I made it out at all was because I was leading from the front.”
“Jesus,” Halley mutters. “Lankies setting fucking traps for us now.”
“That’s not even the part that scares me the most.”
I describe to Halley what happened after I dug myself out of the ice—the Lanky lair, Private Cameron alerting the nearby Lanky with his radio transmissions, my narrow escape, the orbital nuclear strike.
“I think they knew exactly how we would respond. They knew how our weapons worked. Our capabilities. Our tactics. They built that little hideout just right. Couldn’t roll armor, couldn’t call in air strikes, couldn’t even use comms without stringing out half the platoon to play mobile relays. And then—pow. Springing that trap right when we were most vulnerable.”
“Could have been coincidence. Dumb luck on their part.”
“That’s an awful lot of dumb luck, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I know.” She shrugs and shakes her head slowly. “It’s just more comforting than thinking they’re that smart. Not when we’re about to go head to head against a few thousand of those things on Mars in a few weeks.”
I think of the footage we saw on Indy’s cameras when we did the high-speed flyby of Mars a little over a year ago on the way back to Earth. I’ve never seen more Lanky settlements in one place. We saw dozens of Lanky towns down there, and that was thirteen months ago. If they’ve kept up their pace, there’ll be twice as many towns on the surface of Mars now. Our usual plan of attack would be to nuke their settlements from orbit to spare us the casualties a ground assault would cost. If the Lankies on Mars anticipate our tactics the same way those ten or twelve interlopers on Greenland did, there aren’t enough troops among all the armies of Earth to take the planet away from them again.
Behind Halley, a medical NCO enters the room. He has a PDP in one hand and a meal tray in the other.
“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?” he asks.
“Little sore, but I’ll be fine,” I reply. “Are my CDUs out of decon yet, or can you scrounge me up a loaner set?”
The medical sergeant puts the meal tray down on my nightstand. “In a hurry to leave? With two ribs repaired, we ought to keep you here twenty-four hours.”
“Call the on-duty doc and get me clearance to go, please. I’ll be fine,” I repeat. “I’m only twenty minutes away. Pretty sure the captain here can drag me back in if I start bleeding from the eyes or something.”
The sergeant looks like he wants to argue but then seems to change his mind after glancing at Halley, who is frowning. He consults his PDP and shrugs.
“I’ll see what the doc says. Your CDUs should be out of decon by now. Why don’t you eat lunch while I track them down for you?”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I say curtly. The medical sergeant nods and leaves the room.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to stay until tomorrow morning,” Halley says. “I have my final PT appointment at 0900 anyway. Doc said I’ll be put on flight status if I pass the tire-kicking tomorrow. I could come fetch you after.”
“I don’t sleep worth a shit in medical centers,” I say.
Halley inspects the meal tray on the nightstand. “You sure you want to pass on these delicacies?”
She picks up the fork on the tray and pokes the decidedly grayish-looking pile of mashed potatoes and the soymeat patty next to it.
“God, remember what the food was like when we joined? Real beef. Mash from real potatoes, with cream and garlic. Not this reconstituted powdered shit. Fresh veggies.”
“Pastries,” I add. “Doughnuts. Fresh fruit.”
“Those were the golden days,” Halley says. “Remember how we used to smuggle desserts back into the platoon bay to eat after lights-out?”
“Yeah. And the DIs knew about it all along. We ate the whole stash the night before graduation, remember?”
“Easier times,” Halley says with a smile. “At least back then we only had to worry about getting caught fooling around in the showers at night.”
I smile at the memory, which feels like it’s from an earlier life, lived by earlier versions of ourselves, cocky kids who didn’t know anything but thought they had the universe by the balls. Seven years ago, we were raw recruits, the military chow was the best food you coul
d get in the NAC, we had over a hundred colonies, and there were three million settlers on Mars. A little more than half a decade later, we choke down the same shit as everyone else, all our colonies are gone or cut off from Earth, Mars is a graveyard with lethal CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and we’re dancing on the razor’s edge of global apocalypse. Nobody in the military talks about retirement options anymore.
“I get flashbacks to Great Lakes Medical every time I stay in a med unit,” I say.
“You mean, after Detroit?”
I nod. “I think it’s the smell. Disinfectant and whatever else these places always smell like. I can’t stand it. No wonder hospital food tastes like shit.”
“Well, then.” Halley puts down the fork she has been using to prod the soymeat. “Let’s get you out of here as soon as the corporal comes back with your shit. Maybe Chief Kopka can whip up something made from ingredients that haven’t already been digested by someone else before.”
Twenty minutes later, we are walking out of Homeworld Defense Air Station Burlington and over to the maglev station. The weather outside is much sunnier than my mood. It’s a crisp and cold day, and the air here in Vermont smells even cleaner than usual. My side hurts like someone has been working it over with a meat tenderizer for a few hours, and the straps of my alert pack rub uncomfortably, but I don’t mind the discomfort. At least I am still alive to feel it. Somewhere on Greenland, there are twenty troopers who aren’t feeling anything anymore because they’ve been reduced to their component molecules by the nuclear warhead we fired at the Lanky lair.
“This feels so strange,” I say to Halley as we make our way across the station plaza, weaving through civilians on the way home from work, upper-middle-class ’burbers heading back to their safe little manufactured refuges along the Green Mountain maglev line.
“What does?” Halley asks.
“This part-time soldiering. Going to battle in the morning, and then being out in the civvie world in the afternoon. After Detroit, they didn’t even let us out of the squad bay without a psych eval. I was shooting at Lankies on Greenland a few hours ago, for fuck’s sake. Now I’m walking around in a public-transit station with an automatic weapon on my back.”