by Marko Kloos
Blackfly Two’s end comes just a few seconds later. Halley rights her stricken ship and pulls it up in a forty-five-degree ascent to gain altitude, and the two Shrikes home in on her like sharks smelling blood in the water. She dodges the first burst from the cannons again, but the second hits her bird square amidships, blows off one of the wings, and explodes the starboard engines.
“Bailing,” she announces.
Then the icon for Blackfly Two winks out of existence, a thousand feet above Arcadia City and two kilometers from where my platoon troops are fighting for their lives, and I feel like I’ve just caught a round from an autocannon to the chest myself. My visual feed from Blackfly Two ends abruptly and with finality.
I want to charge around the corner and empty my PDW, engage the enemy until I too wink out of existence. Instead, I work the charging handle and stumble backward, toward the sanctuary of the ops center, where Philbrick and his squad have set up their fighting position. Then someone else is grabbing me by the arms from behind and pulling me backward. A human shape in battle armor appears around the corner, and I raise my PDW to bring the targeting laser up, but before I can pull the trigger, there’s a burst of weapons fire behind me, and the figure in front of me falls to the ground in a hail of fléchette impacts.
“Fall back,” Sergeant Humphrey shouts behind me. “Fall back to the next section.”
“That Mule is murdering us,” I say.
Outside, Second Platoon is fighting a fierce close-range action against the platoon that disembarked from the Mules a few minutes ago. The plaza is mostly clear—our squads have sought the shelter of the streets and alleys on the far side of the admin plaza to get out of the line of fire of the Mule’s autocannon. I scan the spot on the TacLink map where Halley’s ship got blasted out of the sky, two kilometers away, but there’s nothing. Either her emergency transponder broke, or she didn’t make it out of the ship before it blew up around her. But even if she’s on the ground, she’s too far away, and there’s a platoon of hostile troops between us and her.
“Fire in the hole!” I hear on the Company channel.
Below us, there’s a dull and powerful explosion. It’s coming from one end of the building, from the basement underneath the admin center, and it makes the dust and rubble on the floor jump.
“The fuck was that?” Corporal Giddings exclaims.
“Fallon, this is Grayson,” I send. “What the hell is happening up there? We are locking horns with the garrison company down on the ground floor.”
“Top floors are clear,” she replies. “We got a bunch of them, but some got away. There’s an elevator at the back of the building. We jacked the doors and tossed about five kilos of boom down the shaft just now.”
“Did you get the boss?”
“That’s a negative.”
Outside, one of the Shrikes makes another attack run. It comes thundering up the east–west road and rakes a street corner with its cannon. Another blue icon on the screen goes out, this one labeled 2/1-5 WILLIAMS T. Another one of Second Platoon’s troopers is gone, and three more icons in the same spot flash WOUNDED/MEDICAL. Three seconds and a hundred rounds from the Shrike’s cannon, and an entire fire team is out of action, half a squad gone. Somewhere else nearby, a Trident streaks into the sky and gives chase. The Shrike pilot banks hard right, but the submunition darts can pull much higher acceleration in a turn, and he’s too fast and low for evasive action. All three darts strike home. The Shrike cartwheels into the streets below, exploding and spewing burning fuel and wreckage for two blocks. I should be horrified at the carnage this battle is causing among the civvies down here, but I have no sympathy left for these people.
Let the bastard burn, I think. Let it all go to hell. If I could order a kinetic strike from orbit onto this city right now, I would do it with grim joy.
In front of us, at the main corridor intersection, someone tosses a grenade around the corner. It explodes with a sharp crack and fills the hallway up ahead with shrapnel and dust, but it’s too far away for the payload to reach us. Two, three, then four enemy troops dash into the hallway ahead, right on the tails of the explosion. I bring up my PDW and fire a long burst down the hallway. To my left and right, Giddings and Humphrey fire their own weapons. Giddings shoots a few short bursts from his M-66, then switches to the grenade launcher and lobs a grenade down the hallway without the customary “fire in the hole” warning. It arcs down the corridor and lands right in the middle of the enemy fire team. The explosion obscures my view of the hallway section briefly, and when the dust clears, the enemy fire team is down, splayed out on the ground.
“Hold this corridor,” I tell Giddings and Humphrey. “Hold it until Third and Fourth Squads come down from the top floors. We let them past that intersection, they can split us up and chew us up piecemeal.”
Giddings and Humphrey send their acknowledgments. I remove the empty magazine from my PDW, toss it aside, and reload the weapon with a fresh magazine from my dump pouch. Then I run back to the admin building’s ops center, twenty meters down the corridor.
“President and his entourage are in the basement shelter,” Philbrick reports. His armor is caked with concrete dust. “They closed the blast doors and sealed themselves in. We didn’t get to them in time.”
“Can we crack that door?”
“Not with what we have with us. HEAT grenades won’t cut it. Sorry, Lieutenant.”
“If they’ve closed the blast doors, you’ll need a pocket nuke to get in,” Agent Green says from his spot by the back wall of the ops center, where he is sitting on the ground in a row with the other prisoners. “That shelter is hardened against nuclear strikes. They have supplies and ammo in there to be cozy for two years.” He looks satisfied.
“That won’t make a bit of a difference to you,” I tell him.
“I’ve done my job. The president is safe. You fucked up yours, I think.”
The situation on my TacLink screen strongly supports Agent Green’s assessment. I’ve led the platoon into a bad spot, a windowless concrete coffin with only one way in and out. Without the command staff in our custody, we have no leverage. Outside, the Shrikes are mauling Second Platoon, and we are about to have our forces split and defeated in detail by the garrison force, and I have nothing left to stop it. All we can do at this point is to dig in and sell ourselves as expensively as possible. But there will be no escape for us from this city, or this moon, or the system. When Portsmouth and Berlin show up at the pickup azimuth in a few days, there won’t be anyone left to evacuate. The drop ships are down, a quarter of my troops are dead or wounded, and Halley is gone.
“Central staircase is a mess,” Sergeant Fallon reports. “We are coming down the east and west stairwells.”
“Copy. Have Third Squad link up with Second, and Fourth with First. We are holding the line in front of the ops center.”
The gunfire in the corridor outside intensifies. On my TacLink screen, there are two red icons for every blue one on the ground floor.
“There are more Mules rolling in,” Lieutenant Wolfe reports from outside. “Two from the north, two from the south. We don’t have enough HEAT rounds left to hold them off.”
This is it, I think. I am out of ideas, and there are no options left other than to hold our ground and die in place. There’s another platoon of troops rolling in, too much for our dispersed squads to handle. I made a call, and it was a bad one, and I got everyone else to go along with it.
The building lights flicker once, then go dark. A second later, the red emergency lighting comes on. I open the Company-level channel.
“They cut the mains in the admin building.”
“Not just there,” Lieutenant Wolfe replies. “Whole city just went—Jesus.”
Outside, on Lieutenant Wolfe’s video feed coming in on my TacLink screen, there’s a bright sun in the sky beyond the city, even though the planetary sunrise isn’t due for another six hours. The fireball in the eastern sky is so bright that the filters
on Lieutenant Wolfe’s optical feed kick in, and there’s only one thing that can make the visor filters go active at that range. Several seconds later, the shock wave from the detonation washes over the city, enough to make the floor shake under my boots even at that range. The noise from the blast is deep and infernally loud, like a world-ending beast clearing its throat.
“Radiological alert,” one of Second Platoon’s troopers shouts. “Nuclear detonation.”
On the TacLink screen, a symbol nobody ever wants to see pops up just five kilometers to the east—the bright orange inverted triangle signifying a nuclear warhead explosion. Outside, a roiling red mushroom cloud billows and rises above the city, ominous and terrifying to see at such close range. I’ve seen plenty of nukes deployed in battle, but always against Lankies, and never so close to an occupied human settlement. The mushroom cloud rising in the distance feels like an obscene violation.
All over the admin center, the gunfire slacks off as more and more troops on both sides become aware of what has just happened.
A new voice cuts in to the comms, on the NAC’s priority emergency channel. There’s heavy static in the background, but I recognize the speaker at once.
“Attention, renegade forces. Attention, renegade forces. This is Major Khaled Masoud of the NAC Defense Corps Special Operations Command.”
“Son of a bitch,” I say to the room in general. Our troopers are standing around, looking shell-shocked. The prisoners sitting lined up against the wall don’t have the benefit of TacLink displays or video feeds, but nobody could have missed the characteristic deep and long-lasting rumble from the nuclear detonation. Even Agent Green suddenly looks anxious and concerned.
“Put him on speaker,” I tell Gunny Philbrick, who dashes to the comms console.
“Building or floor?”
“Everything.”
“The force under my command has just detonated a kiloton-size nuclear charge right underneath terraforming plant Arcadia One, five kilometers outside of Arcadia City. The sole power source for your capital city is now a glowing radioactive cloud,” Major Masoud continues. “This is just the first strike, a demonstration of our resolve. Over the course of the last five days, my teams have placed nuclear demolition charges on every one of your active terraformers. They are very small and extremely well shielded, you have very little chance of finding them, and they are tamper-proof beyond the skill of your EOD personnel. That is a guarantee.”
There’s dead silence on all channels. All the gunfire in and around the admin center has ceased.
“This is an order to the leadership of this moon and all troops under their command. You will cease resisting the lawful and proper authority of the North American Commonwealth Defense Corps forces. You will lay down your weapons as of this moment. You will order any and all forces under your control to stand down. If you fail to do so, I will not hesitate to light off every one of the twenty-four nuclear demolition charges my teams have planted on this moon. If you choose to continue this fight, I will destroy your planetary infrastructure and your fusion power generation network irreparably. I will turn your stolen little paradise into an irradiated wasteland and leave you in it until the Lankies come for you or you all die of radiation poisoning. This is not a boast or a threat. It is a statement of fact.”
“Damn,” Philbrick murmurs next to me.
“I knew he was cold,” I say. “I had no idea just how cold.”
“The Fleet in orbit will stand down and wait for orders from the senior NAC commander in this system, to be transferred back to the Solar System. I don’t want your personnel or your leadership. All I want are those orbital assets. Surrender and turn them over to us. Fail to do it, and they will have no ground left to land on. If you are tempted to doubt my resolve, look five kilometers to the east of Arcadia City.
“You have five minutes to respond on this channel. If you do not agree to these terms, fail to reply, or continue hostilities, I will initiate the nuclear demolition of your fusion plants one by one in three-minute intervals. And I will go to my death with a smile and the knowledge that you are going to freeze and starve in the dark. You left us at the mercy of the Lankies a year ago, and paying you back in kind for that act of treason would be a true joy. Five minutes starting now. Major Masoud out.”
“Damn,” Gunny Philbrick says again, this time with a disbelieving chuckle.
Behind me, Agent Green laughs out loud. I turn around, and he grins at me from his seated position on the floor.
“Now that’s fighting dirty,” he says. Next to him, the secretary of interior security looks like he wants to throw up.
“I hope your idiot president turns him down,” I say, and mean it.
The reply comes four and a half very tense minutes later.
“Attention, NAC commander. This is General Stockett, Chief of Staff of the Arcadia Defense Corps.” The voice sounds tired and harried.
“We accept your terms. I repeat, we accept your terms. There are sixty thousand civilians living near those fusion plants. Do not set off any more nukes on this moon. All Arcadia Defense Force units, stand down. That is a direct order. Transmit to all subunits as necessary. NAC commander, we are standing by for further instructions on this channel.”
“Holy shit,” Gunny Philbrick says into the sudden upswell of whistling and cheering in the ops center and the hallway outside. “We fucking won.”
On my TacLink display, there are dozens of blinking blue icons signifying wounded or dead troopers. A third or more of the people under my command have been hurt or killed in the last fifteen minutes. It’s the most violent and merciless small-unit fight I’ve experienced in my service time. The city streets outside are chaos, panicked civilians everywhere. The mushroom cloud in the distance is still billowing into the night sky, thinning out as it rises higher and higher. Never before have I seen a nuclear weapon used against other humans in battle, right near a civilian settlement.
“We didn’t win,” I say. “Nobody did.”
CHAPTER 29
Outside, I only have one concern. I don’t care about the civilians flooding the admin plaza, or the sullen renegade troops stacking their weapons by the entrance of the admin center under the watchful eyes of Second Platoon—or what’s left of them. All I have on my mind is the coordinate two kilometers in the distance where Halley’s drop ship went down thirty minutes ago in the middle of the short and ferocious battle. There’s a quartet of Mules outside on the plaza, but there are troops and civvies all around them, and the streets are too packed for an eight-wheeled armored vehicle. Instead, I hang my PDW from its sling across my chest, and start running toward the northwest.
Pieces of Blackfly One rained down over a two-block area. I see one of the engines, still smoldering, embedded in the roof of a burning house. Shards of armor and bits of wing are scattered all over the street. The bulk of Halley’s ship crashed into what looks like a little park, small trees and neatly planted bushes destroyed by the impact of the seventy-ton drop ship and the subsequent fire.
I don’t want to see what’s in the cockpit, but I have to know. I draw in shallow, painful breaths as I walk around the shattered hull, ignoring the burning patches of fuel I’m walking through.
The nose of the ship is staved in, and all the cockpit glass shattered. But where the pilot seat used to be, there’s just a clamshell-shaped hole in the front of the ship where the rescue module used to be. I get weak-kneed with the sudden relief that floods through me, the first positive emotion I’ve had in a while. It feels utterly selfish in light of all the dead Rogue Company troopers who have been shot or blown apart by cannon rounds or burned up in the cockpits of their ships, but I am more grateful than I’ve ever been in my life that I didn’t have to find the burned and mangled remains of my wife in that cockpit.
The rescue module came down a few hundred meters away in someone’s front yard. The triple-canopy chute of the capsule is partially draped over the roof of the house like an untidy overg
arment. The clamshell halves are blown open, but there’s no Halley inside.
I call for my wife and check the alleys around the house, then the next street over, then the street next to that one. All over town, black and sooty ashes have started to fall, and I don’t need to see the radiological alert from my suit to know that this is the beginning of the radioactive fallout from the nearby nuclear explosion.
There’s a group of civilians at the end of the next streets, half a dozen men and women wearing signal-colored wet-weather ponchos. I trot up to them and shine the light from my helmet in their direction to make myself noticed. They look scared and bewildered.
“The drop ship that crashed right over there,” I say, and point with the barrel of my PDW. “Where’s the pilot that was in the rescue capsule? Did you see her?”
“We did,” one of the men says. “Pulled her out of that capsule. She was hurt pretty badly.”
“What did you do with her?” I shout.
“One of the neighbors drove her to the hospital,” the man says, eyeing my hand on the grip of my PDW. “We’re not savages here, you know.”
“Where’s the hospital?”
“Quarter kilometer that way,” he says and points south. “Two-story building, white with a red cross on the side. Can’t miss it.”
I want to say thank you, but find that the words won’t come out. Instead, I nod at the group and point over to the nearest house.
“You need to get under a solid roof. This fallout is radioactive. Get inside and do a full decon, or you’ll be puking out your bloody insides in a few days.”
The settlement hospital is probably the busiest place in town tonight. Two of the garrison’s Mules are unloading wounded troops in front of the building, and medics are helping them inside or carrying them. I push my way through the crowd at the entrance waiting in line for the decontamination lock just inside the building. Nobody argues with me when I skip to the head of the line in my battle armor.