by Marko Kloos
“Affirmative,” he says. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“I’m drop-qualified,” I say. “Combat controller. Shit goes down and you need to drop, I want to tag along. Got any spare armor I can borrow?”
Sergeant Quinones shrugs. “We got nothing but spare gear these days.” He points at one of his troopers. “Corporal Channing,” he says. “Go help the sergeant first class here with his gear when you’re all latched up.”
The SI loaner armor isn’t fitted to me, so it’s too snug in some places and too loose in others, but latching the hardshell sealed over my battle dress fatigues is a comforting routine nonetheless. The corporal helps me get suited up and then double-checks all my latches.
“Good to go, Sergeant,” he says. “Can’t set you up with an admin deck ’cause we ain’t got any.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “We drop, it’s Sergeant Quinones’s show. I’m just tagging along to bring an extra rifle.”
“Copy that,” Corporal Channing says.
“You ever done a Lanky drop before?”
The corporal shakes his head. “Just made corporal two months ago. I was in SOI when that shit went down last year.”
Shit, I think. School of Infantry is an SI grunt’s first assignment after boot camp. If Channing is a corporal already, we are promoting unseasoned troops to junior leadership ranks after less than a year in uniform right now.
“Well, you can’t fucking miss the sons of bitches, so there’s that, anyway. Just aim for the weak spots and unload until they drop. Nothing to it.”
“Right,” the corporal says, but his nervous smile tells me he’s not buying the notion that there’s nothing to dropping a Lanky.
I don’t like facing battle without knowing what’s happening around me. On a regular drop, I’d be tied in to the tactical network beyond the squad or platoon level, but this isn’t my unit, and I’m not wearing my own armor. When Sergeant Quinones’s short squad are all geared up and ready for action, we go down to the flight deck and file into the hold of Berlin’s Ready Five drop ship. As we tromp up the ramp, ordnance handlers are busy loading the external wing pylon hard points with heavy ordnance. The drop ship is a Wasp, the older and less capable model still in service, and this one looks about as well worn and tired as its host ship.
“Driving the bus.” Halley’s voice comes over my helmet headset on a direct channel.
“You bump their pilot out of the right seat?” I ask, relieved to hear her voice.
“Didn’t have to. He offered. I have seniority. He was one of my students in Combat Flight School just last year.”
“If he graduated last year, he’s never done a combat drop,” I say.
“Nope. And that’s why I’m driving the bus.”
“Can you give me a data downlink from Tac so I can see what’s going on? I hate being just a blind mudleg.”
“Only for you,” she says.
A few seconds later, there’s a new data stream on my helmet display, and I breathe a small sigh of relief. Then I tap into the TacNet feed and bring up the situational display. I’m only an observer and unable to do all the stuff my regular combat controller gear would let me do, but at least I can see what the CIC holotable is displaying. Berlin is accelerating toward the turnaround point, shooting back to Earth at full emergency power. Behind us, more ships are in the return chute toward Earth orbit, but Lieutenant Colonel Renner barreled out of the gallery space first and fastest, so there’s a lot of empty space between us and the next ship in line.
“Here we go again,” Halley says.
It’s been a year since my last combat, but the anxiety returns as easily as if it had merely been lurking on standby mode in the dark recesses of my mind. I watch the icon representing Berlin shooting along the trajectory to Fleet Assembly Point Golf and find myself wishing just a tiny bit for the structured boredom of my predictable job down at NACRD Orem, where they are finishing the midday chow in the mess hall right now.
Quinones is the only member of his squad with any combat experience. All his squaddies are either fresh out of SOI, or with minimal status and experience in the SI. None of them have seen anything but training and garrison duty, and none except for Quinones have ever even seen a Lanky outside of a battle simulation. I am in the back of the bus—and possibly only two hours from combat—with a short squad of green troops. I relay this knowledge to Halley in the cockpit, who just lets out an exasperated little huff.
“Do what you can with what you have,” she says.
“Best I can hope for is that their squad leader steps aside and lets me take charge, and I can keep these kids alive,” I reply. “Half a squad, and they’re all fucking boot nuggets.”
“It is what it is,” Halley replies. “Could be worse. We could have died on Mars last year, or above Earth. So quit your bitching.”
“Can’t do much else right now,” I send back, and she just sighs.
I am tracking Berlin’s progress on the plot through Halley’s courtesy data link, so there is no need for her to tell me when we get close to the turnaround point, but she does it anyway.
“Will she or won’t she?” Halley says when Berlin’s icon creeps up on the center point of the trajectory. I know what she means, of course. If Lieutenant Colonel Renner decided to stick it to the incoming Lanky by turning her frigate into a kinetic missile just like Colonel Campbell did last year, she’ll drive at maximum acceleration clear past the turnaround point and all the way back to Earth. But right on schedule, the 1MC speaker crackles, and the XO’s voice sounds overhead in the hangar bay.
“All hands, prepare for turnaround burn. All hands, prepare for turnaround in t-minus five.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.
“I guess this is not the day,” Halley says from the cockpit.
“It ain’t over yet,” I reply.
CHAPTER 7
Fleet Assembly Point Golf is lousy with warships when we finally coast into it two hours later. Most of them are smaller warships, but there’s a fair number of destroyers, cruisers, and even carriers. It’s a much more credible-looking defense force than the motley collection of small orbital combatants that assembled in Earth orbit a year ago to fight off the Lanky seed ship that rained seedpods all over North America.
As Berlin slots herself into the defensive formation, I look at the ship names and nationalities of the other units in the vicinity. There’s a squadron of European Union corvettes led by one of their frigates, the EUS Brandenburg. I know that the Icelandic Coast Guard cutter Odinn was damaged in last year’s fracas, but she’s in formation with two Norwegian fast-attack ships nearby, so they must have hammered the dents out of the hull. There are ships from the Union of South American Nations and the African Commonwealth, even from the Oceanians. I see a Japanese assault carrier, escorted by a cruiser that looks every bit as capable as the NAC’s new Hammerheads. The bulk of the defensive wall, however, consists of NAC and SRA ships, dozens of hulls with names like Ottawa, Minsk, Salt Lake City, Tianchang, Veracruz.
“Bogey is inbound from the Mars approach, bearing positive zero-one-five by one-seven- five, CBDR. All units, link fire control for barrage fire and stand by. Orion batteries engaging in t-minus forty-five.”
The plot in Berlin’s CIC shows us in a cluster of blue icons in the middle of the plot, with the combined task force between Earth and the approaching Lanky. When the orange icon for the incoming seed ship pops up on the plot, it doesn’t look quite right, and it takes me a second or two to process the information.
“He’s coming in fast,” I send to Halley. The anxiety that has squeezed the center of my stomach for two hours intensifies. This is not what the Lankies usually do, and every time they do something new and unexpected, we usually end up getting bloody noses.
“Bogey is coming in hot,” AEGIS sends. “Closing velocity is ten thousand meters per second, still CBDR.”
“Not putting on the brakes, is he?” Halley ask
s. “The fuck is he doing coming in that fast? He can’t eject pods at hypervelocity, can he?”
“Who the fuck knows,” I say. “But if the Orions miss, we are in deep shit.” At ten kilometers per second, it will take the Lanky less than ten seconds to cross the engagement range of our rail gun and missile fire and plow right through us on the way to Earth.
“They won’t miss,” Halley says.
They best not, I think. The dreadful possibility has occurred to me that the Lankies have started taking pages out of our playbook. Ten thousand meters per second isn’t nearly as fast as the Orions, which accelerate to fractional light speed within thirty minutes, but the Lanky has exponentially more mass than the ten-thousand-ton pykrete warhead on an Orion, or even a water-filled freighter hull.
The warships at the Fleet Assembly Point enter into a slow and cumbersome sort of defensive formation ballet as groups split and re-form according to their AEGIS assignments. The space control units with the heavy ordnance form a firing line to bring all weapons to bear along the likely trajectory of the incoming Lanky. The units without long-range ship-to-ship missiles fall back and form a mobile reserve to engage the seedpods and follow them down to Earth if we need to fight it out in the weeds again.
Berlin is in the group that doesn’t have anything in the missile tubes right now, so we join the Earth formation with the carriers while the heavy combatants take up the linebacker position. A little bit of my anxiety falls away as I watch our ship’s icon move back toward Earth and out of the way of the Lanky. If there are going to be ship-to-ship exchanges, at least Berlin won’t be in the thick of it.
“Orion batteries, stand by. Launch in t-minus eight.”
The Orion batteries are positioned in high orbit. There are only a handful of them, Earth’s only effective defense against the Lankies. Each is a one-time-use item armed with two of the Russian-designed Orion missiles. The missiles themselves are big, ugly things, with dirty gray pykrete warheads in front and bulging bomb magazines around their midsections. They are nuclear pulse propulsion missiles, which means they squirt out nuclear charges and then detonate them to drive the missile forward. One charge per second, ten kilotons each, one-hundred-g sustained acceleration that would turn a crew into fine puree even with artificial gravity systems. They are dangerous and dirty and incredibly brutal, sheer mass driven by atomic explosions to planetoid-shattering speeds in minutes, and they leave a lot of radiation behind, but they are the only thing we have other than the not-yet-ready battleships.
“All units, keep clear of the engagement cone. Level Three radiation protocol is in effect. Bogey still closing at 10k meters per second, bearing unchanged.”
“That ship isn’t going to slow down to let off passengers,” I say.
“Nope,” Halley confirms. “He’s going for broke.”
“To do what?”
“He’s either going to hammer down through our picket to check out what’s where, or he’s aimed right at the planet. Millions of tons at Mach 30, and adios, muchachos.”
Out in the black, the warheads of half a dozen Orion batteries train themselves onto an intercept trajectory with the uninvited guest, guided by the best ballistics computers humanity has designed. We only had a few months to cobble the system together, and it’s in a constant state of improvement, but the damn things have accounted for two seed ships already, both blown to vapor long before they could get close enough to Earth to do anything dangerous.
Someone in Berlin’s CIC brings up the optical feed trained on the approaching bogey. Lanky seed ships are very hard to spot even with excellent optical gear unless you know exactly where to look. Since last year, the world’s remaining fleets have seeded the Mars approach with enough recon satellites to track anything bigger than a mess hall tray from the outer picket line one quarter of the way to Mars all the way back to Earth. The Lanky seed ship is hauling ass downrange, a matte-black oblong cigar shape three kilometers long and millions of tons in weight. They recovered huge chunks of the Lanky hull that broke up in Earth’s atmosphere last year, and they found out that the reason for the ineffectiveness of our weaponry is that the hull of a Lanky ship is twenty meters thick, and made of some material that makes our own laminate armor look like partially frozen whipped cream.
“Orion launch window in t-minus five. All units, prepare for barrage fire. Pursuit units, ready for launch and stand by.”
“That’s us,” Halley says. “Berlin TacOps, Bravo One-Two. I am initiating prelaunch.”
“Bravo One-Two, TacOps. Copy prelaunch. Godspeed.”
A few moments later, the Wasp shudders slightly as the automated docking clamp attaches to the top of the ship. Then the launch system lifts the drop ship off the deck and slowly moves it over to the drop hatch, which is only a very short way from the parking spot on the deck. There’s another series of familiar small jolts, the docking clamp stopping the ship over the hatch, then lowering it through the open doors into the launch recess at the bottom of the hull. The upper hatch closes around the clamp to seal off the hangar bay again, and then the outer door opens, leaving nothing but inky black space beneath the hull of the Wasp.
I look around in the cargo hold, where our little three-quarter squad fills pitifully few seats, and most of the green privates are looking like they’d rather be anywhere else right now. One of them is fidgeting, touching the rifle in its holding bracket next to his seat, and looking over to his sergeant nervously. He sees me noticing and gives me a fleeting, embarrassed little grin.
“Not going to tell you it’s just like a training drop,” I say. “It sure as shit ain’t. But this waiting part is the worst. It ain’t so bad once you’re on the ground and running. Too much to do to think about it.”
“Yes, Sarge,” he says.
With all the pieces in place on our three-dimensional chessboard, all that’s left is the wait. At least I have the privilege of information, tapping into the data link that Halley provided, even if I can’t do anything to move those chess pieces around. But there’s a different quality now to the pre-battle dread I feel. Before, seeing a Lanky seed ship on the plot meant almost certain death. But we have beaten them now a few times, destroyed four seed ships in the span of a few months. It’s still a lopsided battle, but at least now it’s not an automatic death sentence. The Lankies are no longer invincible in everyone’s heads, and that’s making all the difference.
“Orion launch window in ninety seconds.”
On the plot, the Lanky is barreling down the trajectory to Earth, course unchanged, still racing along much faster than I’ve ever seen a seed ship move, ten kilometers per second. Our heavy combatants are lined up like a welcoming committee, obliquely along the projected path of the Lanky, weapons trained on the approach like a gang of robbers ambushing a traveler on a highway. We are more prepared than we were just a year ago, but my mouth is still a little dry as I follow the progress of the blaze-orange icon on the plot, hurtling toward my home planet at hypervelocity.
“Orion batteries, weapons free. Switching to autonomous control.”
The seed ship is coming in at ten kilometers per second, but the aspect is directly head-on, a down-the-throat shot that’s almost trivial for a computer to calculate. Still, the Orions are made of steel and alloy, and they are propelled by atomic charges, so there’s plenty to go wrong even if the computer pulls off perfect aim.
On the optical feed in the CIC, one of the Orion batteries releases its missile from the mount soundlessly. It drifts away laterally, and I can see tiny booster rockets firing on the missile’s body. When the missile is a few kilometers away from the mount, the main propulsion system ignites.
“Orion 34, firing.”
In space, atomic explosions look nothing like they do on Earth. Without an atmosphere to transmit a shock wave or heat, most of the detonation is radiation energy. On optical, it doesn’t look like much, just an iridescent sphere expanding outward from the ignition point. The radiation scanner, however,
comes alive with a brightly colored gamma burst that looks like a reverse-polarity shot of the sun. The Orion missile instantly leaps out of the frame, accelerated by the shaped nuclear charge aimed at the pusher plate on its tail end, pulling fifty times the acceleration a human could endure. More gamma spheres appear on the radiation scanner, stringing themselves onto the intercept trajectory for the Lanky seed ship like miniature suns. The Orion pumps out one nuke per second, and every time one goes off, the missile leaps forward at a rate no chemically or fusion-propelled object in our arsenal can hope to match.
“Orion 42, firing.”
Another Orion mount launches its payload from a different vector, from somewhere over the southern hemisphere. Another missile races toward the incoming Lanky at unbelievable acceleration. These are crude weapons, assembled in space and launched from orbit to save the Earth’s atmosphere the fallout from the hundred or so nuclear charges it would take to get an Orion up to escape velocity and out of the planet’s atmosphere. They are too large to be mounted on ships and too dangerous for a launching vehicle besides, so we can’t use them for anything other than local defense of Earth at the moment, but by God, we finally have a hammer that will crack a seed ship and make it scatter its guts, and I want to cheer every time I see an Orion launch.
“Time to intercept is t-minus twenty. Orion 48 and 71 standing by for second-tier intercept.”
Space warfare is a high-stress combination of endless waiting and sudden, overwhelming bursts of extreme force and violence. For the next twenty minutes, all I can do is to watch icons move on a plot while our drop ship hangs in its clamp with nothing but space below. The Orions rush out to meet their target, picking up speed with every second and every nuclear detonation slamming billions of joules into their pusher plates.
“Orion 34 intercept in ten seconds,” AEGIS announces when the small, blue, v-shaped icon on the plot has almost reached the much bigger orange lozenge representing the Lanky ship. I hold my breath in anticipation, and the dread I feel at the prospect of a miss squeezes my stomach like a vise. I imagine that everyone else who’s tied in to the big picture is feeling the same way.