Chains of Command (9 page)

“Target. Direct hit. Orion 34 intercept at 1733 Zulu. Orion 42 intercept in fifteen seconds.”

The broken seed ship starts tumbling on its trajectory. Huge chunks of it are still peeling off and adding to a debris tail that extends behind the ship for dozens of kilometers, then hundreds. The ship is broken, but the uncaring laws of physics keep what’s left of the Lanky along its original trajectory toward Earth.

“Orion 42 intercept in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. Miss.”

The angry firefly that is the kinetic nuclear pulse propulsion missile Orion 42 just barely misses what’s left of the Lanky seed ship and hurtles off into the space beyond at a thousand kilometers per second.

“Fuck,” Halley says over our private channel.

“It’s all right,” I reply. “He’s shot to hell already.”

“Still got a million tons of mass coming our way.”

“Initiate self-destruct on Orion 42. Three. Two. One. Execute.”

Out in the blackness of space beyond the incoming Lanky, Orion 42 and its payload disappear in another bright little pinprick of light as the AEGIS launch control crew blows up the missile. It’s a dreadful waste of scarce resources, hundreds of nuclear charges that take a lot of time and money to manufacture, but there’s no way to retrieve the missile, and it would forever be a hazard to anything it runs into out there, ten thousand tons forever coasting at a few percent of light speed.

“We have hull breach on the bogey,” AEGIS announces. “Orion 48 and 71, hold fire.”

“Hull breach, no shit,” Halley comments in private.

“All units, prepare for intercept barrage. Thirteen minutes to engagement range. Unmask all batteries and switch fire control to automatic.”

The seed ship is clearly out of control, and half its original mass is gone, but it’s still a chunk of matter at least a kilometer long, and Lanky physiques are so tough that I wouldn’t want to bet money on every last Lanky on that wreckage being dead. But with the tough outer hull cracked by sheer brute force, our rail guns and nuclear-tipped ship-to-ship ordnance can reach the softer interior of the seed ship and blow the rest of the ship apart from the inside without having to waste another Orion. The number of intercept-ready Orions is always pitifully low, and if we run out of missiles before the Lankies run out of ships, we’ll be back to throwing rocks at mountains.

The broken seed ship enters the engagement range of our fleet’s shipboard weapons a little more than ten minutes later.
Berlin
is in the second line of defense, so she doesn’t get to contribute her rail gun fire to the fireworks display about to happen, but with so many gun batteries turned on the Lanky, it hardly matters.

“Target in range,” AEGIS control sends. “Weapons free, weapons free. All units, commence barrage fire.”

The ships closest to the incoming Lanky open fire first, their rail guns pumping out a shot every three seconds in automatic mode. The ships at the front of the firing line are cruisers and destroyers with at least two rail gun batteries each. There are dozens of ships out there, and the gunfire swells to cataclysmic proportions as the Lanky gets into direct-fire range of more and more units. Dozens, then hundreds of kinetic shells streak through the space between the battle group and the Lanky hull. Many glance off the undamaged part of the hull, but plenty find their way through the gaping hole that is the front of the seed ship, bleeding their impact energies into the now-unprotected interior of the Lanky. It still tumbles end over end, bereft of any semblance of control, hurtling toward Earth on a purely ballistic trajectory.

“Cease fire on rail guns. Atomic firing mission commencing. All ships, commence nuclear fire mission.”

The ships with atomic ship-to-ship missiles in their tubes launch their ordnance. On the plot, at least a dozen v-shaped blue missile icons pop up in front of the battle group and streak toward the incoming Lanky, slower than rail gun projectiles but much faster than any Fleet unit can hope to accelerate. The launching ships timed their fire to meet the Lanky’s destroyed front instead of the still-impenetrable stern section during its out-of-control rotation. The heavy ship-to-ship missiles tear into the shattered hull of the seed ship. A moment later, the entire remaining seed ship comes apart soundlessly and almost in slow motion.

“And farewell, motherfucker,” Halley narrates from the flight deck.

“All units, watch out for incoming wreckage,” AEGIS warns. “Multiple inbound trajectories.”

The Lanky is broken up into countless pieces, but the sheer size of the seed ship means that many of the wreckage chunks still hurtling toward us at several kilometers per second outweigh most of the ships forming the defensive shield. The formation degenerates into barely controlled chaos as each ship tries to get clear of the incoming rain of debris.
Berlin
’s artificial gravity keeps us from feeling the acceleration the way we would in Earth’s atmosphere and gravity, but I can see from the optical feed that the frigate is executing a sharp starboard-and-downward turn to get clear. Below us, the familiar dirty-gray-and-blue sphere of our home world swings back into view.

“We get nailed by a chunk of seed ship . . .” I send to Halley.

“Oh, have no fear. I have my thumb on the release button for this boat,” she says.

It’s nearly pointless to try sorting out the mess on the plot as dozens of ships perform evasive maneuvers. Lanky hull pieces don’t show up on radar, but the holographic display in the CIC shows all the bits and pieces that are being tracked by optical gear, and there are too many of them to count.

“Stern section passing through grid Bravo One-Three by Foxtrot Two-Five.
Bersagliere
, expedite evasive, you’re right in the trajectory. Expedite, expedite.”

The urgent message from AEGIS comes too late, and the remaining piece of stern section, still much bigger than a supercarrier, hurtles toward the icon labeled FF-639 BERSAGLIERE. The hapless EU frigate is turning away from the incoming object at maximum burn, but the Lanky wreck is moving too fast and displaces too much space. I let out a silent curse as the icon for the EU frigate disappears from the plot. The optical feed shows the frigate, position lights blinking and the glow from her engines illuminating the rear of her hull, disappear in the blink of an eye in a cloud of fine debris, five thousand tons of warship splattered against a quarter-million-ton piece of seed ship hull like a bug against the windshield of a fast-moving hydrobus.

“Motherfucker,” I say. Halley groans a nonverbal assent. Another two hundred lives gone, faster than you can blink an eye.

“We’re going to have a whole bunch of wreckage in atmo very shortly,” Halley says. As if prompted, AEGIS chimes in on the local defense channel again.

“Bogey tail section is on trajectory for Earth impact. All pursuit units, commence drops and prosecute.”

“Bravo One-Two, TacOps. You are cleared for drop. Repeat, green light for drop. Good hunting.”

“Here we go,” Halley says. “Hang on back there.
Berlin
TacOps, I am commencing pursuit. Dropping in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Drop.”

I don’t see her thumbing the button for the clamp release, but I can feel the drop ship falling the last few meters out of the hull and leaving the arti-grav field of the
Berlin
. Halley swings the ship around until the nose is pointed at Earth. Then we are racing back toward our home world at full throttle.

The camera feed shows a spectacular light show, thousands of debris pieces entering the atmosphere and flaring long trails of superheated plasma. The largest piece of the wreckage, the tail section of the seed ship, is spinning slowly as it descends through the top layers of the atmosphere, a chunk of alien matter the size of a city block. Halley is gunning the drop ship at maximum throttle, but the wreckage has a huge speed advantage, and we are merely trying not to fall too far behind as we pursue.

“Trajectory has it coming down somewhere over Greenland,” Halley says. “Fucker’s going to make a splash when he hits.”

“Better Greenland than a PRC somewhere,” I reply.

“Tell your mudlegs twenty-three minutes until showtime. We’re taking the express elevator down.”

“Got it,” I say. Then I relay the information to the rest of the squad. The private next to me starts fidgeting with his weapon again, and this time he doesn’t even bother with an apologetic shrug when he sees that I’ve noticed.

“That ship is shot to hell,” I say. “Nothing left but Lanky corpses in there. And they’re about to hit the dirt at five k per second and make a bitch of a crater. Nothing left alive to fight, I guarantee you.”

The private smiles weakly and nods, but I can tell from his expression that he isn’t convinced. I can’t really blame him because I’m not, either.

CHAPTER 8

The high-speed descent into the atmosphere is bone-jarring as always. Halley is flogging the drop ship through the atmosphere at the absolute maximum edge of safe speed, and it’s not a comfortable ride. There are no windows in the cargo bay, so the green troops with me can’t see outside, which is a blessing right now because the superheated plasma streaming by from the direction of the heat-shielded underbelly makes it look like the ship is very much on fire.

The seed ship—what little remains of it—falls through the atmosphere in an entirely nonaerodynamic fashion, tumbling end over end and trailing a stream of fire. Smaller pieces tear off the Lanky hull and are whipped away in the slipstream, and Halley has to keep a close eye on the debris trail behind the seed ship’s stern section as she pursues the falling wreckage through the layers of Earth’s atmosphere.

On the plot, we are among the vanguard of a large gaggle of craft following the Lanky in. Most of them are drop ships, two dozen at least, but there are a few Shrikes and other attack birds in attendance. If any of the Lankies on that wreckage survive the impact, they’ll have a few companies of troops with strike spacecraft in support coming down on their heads instantly. Last year, they managed to land their seedpods in many populated areas, and it took a long night of hard fighting to pry them all off the planet. This time they won’t have the luxury of a delayed response.

Below us, the cloud cover above the northern hemisphere obscures the end point of the Lanky’s trajectory, but the data feed from the cockpit shows that Halley’s assessment was right on the money. The wreck is falling toward the expanse of Greenland in the North Atlantic, mercifully missing the Eastern Seaboard and its massive clusters of population centers by a thousand miles.

“Bogey’s still doing six klicks a second,” Halley says. “Time to impact, twenty seconds. All pursuit units, back off and stay clear of the target zone. He’s going to make the biggest impact plume you’ve ever seen.”

We’re still inbound at fifty thousand feet when the Lanky wreck screams down to the surface and smashes into Greenland’s interior under a steel-gray sky, and I’m thankful to be so far away. The impact looks like a megaton warhead went off on the surface. I see a rapidly expanding sphere of ice and dust, and then the biggest mushroom cloud I’ve ever seen rises into the sky. Half a minute later, the sound from the impact reaches the drop ship, a bone-jarring low concussion followed by dull, ominous thunder, a low-frequency rumbling that sounds almost malevolent to my ears.

“Impact. Lanky incursion at 70.446, –42.613, 0420 Zulu,” Halley sends over the local defense channel. “Heading down to the deck to check for live targets.”

The impact plume looks like something out of an apocalyptic network show. I’ve seen lots of kinetic impacts and more than a few atomic detonations, and this one is making them all look like wet firecrackers. Halley puts our ship into a wide turn to port as she approaches the impact area, to keep the ship out of the forbidding-looking cloud of debris billowing up at our starboard side. Even though it’s only early afternoon, the sky has darkened. Cascades of debris are raining down all over the impact zone. Finally, after ten minutes of gradually skirting the outside of the mess, Halley points the drop ship toward the epicenter.

“Going in,” she says. “All pursuit units in the area, follow me. Go optical and scan for movement. You find any, you shoot it until it doesn’t move anymore.”

As we cross the impact zone, it becomes increasingly clear with every kilometer that nothing is likely to be walking away from this uncontrolled crash. The tail end of the seed ship smashed into the massive glacier that covers most of Greenland at a speed that’s unsurvivable for any organism beholden to the laws of physics. Still, we can’t take any chances, so we crisscross the map grid for another twenty minutes until Halley is satisfied that nothing is going to pop out of the smoking half-kilometer crater left behind in the ice on impact.

“Ranging gear says the hole down there is two hundred meters deep,” Halley says to me.

“I’d call in the locals and have them nuke that crater,” I reply. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“Already called it in,” Halley says. “This is Euro territory. The Danes are going to have their patrol units out here before you know it.”

“Going RTB now?”

“Let me do another loop,” she replies. “We can’t afford to miss even one of those things.”

We leave the giant smoking impact crater behind and ascend through the slowly dispersing cloud of ice and dust. Halley scans the area carefully with the sensors on the nose of the drop ship. Out here, Greenland is just a sheet of ice, and any life-forms should be instantly obvious, but Lankies don’t show up on radar, and even their thermal profile is far smaller than their size would suggest.

“There’s a residual heat signature thirty kilometers to the west,” Halley announces. “Could be another piece of wreckage. I’m going to go check it out.”

“Uh-oh,” she says a few minutes later as we descend onto the spot where a low-level thermal bloom is evident on the sensors. Down on the ice, a Lanky seedpod is half buried in a large crevice, smoke and vapor still rising from the unburied end.

“They managed to eject one,” I say.

“If they got one out, there may be more,” Halley replies. She switches to the local defense channel.

“All nearby units, this is Bravo Seven-Niner off NACS
Berlin
. We have a Lanky seedpod on the ground at seventy-six degrees, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-three seconds north and negative sixty degrees, forty-seven minutes, twenty-one seconds west. Be aware there may be more seedpods in the vicinity.”

She puts the drop ship into a left-hand turn and circles the crash area. The seedpod is an alien edifice that looks out of place on the smooth blue-and-white ice. It’s almost as large as a Fleet frigate, with a tapered end and a black, glossy hull. The impact doesn’t seem to have damaged the pod much, or if it did, the damage is on the buried end of the pod. The hull piece we saw earlier slammed into the ground at unchecked velocity, but the seedpods have retardation chutes of a kind, and if there are any Lankies in that thing, they most likely survived the impact.

Halley arms the guns on the drop ship and comes to a hover a few hundred meters away and five hundred feet above the seedpod. Then she fires a burst of autocannon grenades at the hull. The heavy armor-piercing rounds would go completely through an armored Mule at this range, but the Lanky seedpod shrugs them off as if they’re a handful of thrown pebbles. Tracers glance off the hull and deflect in showers of sparks. When Halley takes her finger off the trigger again, the seedpod’s hull is flecked with the starburst patterns of impact marks, but none of the rounds have managed to penetrate the pod.

Halley circles the pod again at low level. The crack in the ice where it became firmly lodged is hundreds of meters long, and so deep that the high-powered searchlights on the nose of the drop ship can’t pierce the darkness all the way to the bottom.

“Can’t see shit,” she says. “No visuals, nothing on thermal or IR. And I can’t fit the bird into that crevice.”

“Put us down a few hundred meters to the south,” I say. “I’ll take the squad out and get a closer look. You cover us from above.”

“All right. But be careful. If that seedpod starts puking out Lankies, you don’t want to be between them and my cannons.”

The ramp of the drop ship lowers onto a forbidding and austere landscape. Greenland is one of the few places left on Earth where human settlements are sparse because the climate doesn’t support life. It’s cold and windy out here, and we all lower our face shields the moment we walk off the ship. We form a perimeter outside, and Halley raises the ramp and takes off again in a swirl of windblown ice and snow.

“Hook around to the right,” I tell Sergeant Quinones. “Don’t get too close to the seedpod. We don’t want to get into the line of fire. Advance to the crevice by fire teams.”

“Copy that,” Sergeant Quinones replies. He marks the approach on his TacLink display for the squad, and we split into two groups.

The rifle in my hands, optimized for use against Lankies as it is, seems like an insignificant and ludicrously small toy when I look at the bulk of the Lanky seedpod a few hundred meters away, sticking out of the crevice in the ice sheet at a forty-degree angle. The weight of the pod makes the ice underneath creak and groan.

“Keep a real close eye on that thing,” I send to Halley. “You know how fast those fuckers can move.”

“Don’t you worry,” she replies.

The crevice in the ice is dozens of meters wide, and the Lanky pod is wedged into it at an angle that looks a bit precarious. The nose of the pod is buried in the ice wall on the far side. I step as close to the edge of the crevice as I dare, and shine my helmet light down into it. The ice walls go from white to a cold blue and then to black at the furthest extent of my light’s reach, but I can’t see the bottom of the crevice, not even with magnification.

“That’s a deep hole,” I say. Quinones voices his agreement.

“The Scandis are on the way,” Halley sends. “I have the Sirius Patrol on the local defense channel. ETA fifteen minutes.”

“The locals will take over in a few,” I tell Quinones and the rest of the squad. “Let’s take some footage from the other side before they get here and take over.”

We start to circle around the tail end of the seedpod, and I’m glad to be moving away from the fissure, which is deep and ominous. It’s a polar spring night, and even though it’s midnight here on Greenland, the sky overhead is the color of molten lead.

There’s another crack and then a loud groan, and the Lanky seedpod’s tail end shifts upward a few degrees, then slides into the crevice another five or ten meters with a low grinding sound.

“It’s gonna fall in,” one of the troopers says.

In front of us, on the flank of the seedpod, thirty meters of hull suddenly disappear. The opening in the seedpod doesn’t come with a bang and a piece of hull dramatically blowing off like on the crashed seedpod last year in Detroit. Instead, the hull just silently and quickly folds outward, like footage of a flower opening played in fast-forward. For a moment, we all freeze, and the beams from half a dozen helmet lights dance across the sudden opening in the hull. Then there’s smooth and purposeful movement, and a few seconds later, a Lanky unfolds itself out of the opening and steps out onto the ice in a movement that seems deliberate and almost cautious.

“Contact front,” I shout into the helmet mike. “Halley, we have interlopers. Coming out of the starboard side.”

“I see it,” Halley replies tersely.

I don’t have to tell the squad to fall back. When a hostile, twenty-meter creature appears in front of you only a hundred meters away, the urge comes automatically. We retreat from the Lanky as we bring our weapons to bear. The Lanky stretches its impossibly long and spindly limbs and unfolds itself to its full height. Huge three-toed feet dig into the ice with steps that sound like huge bass drum rolls. I feel the concussions from the Lanky’s steps on the surface through the soles of my own boots.