“This is going to be a mess on the ground,” Halley says.
We are streaking through the upper layer of the atmosphere, and as far as my field of view through the armored cockpit windows reaches, I can see seedpods falling toward Earth, dozens of them bleeding off speed and trailing long streams of superheated plasma. It’s almost misleading to call them “pods” like we’ve been doing all along, when all we saw of them were the husks on conquered colony worlds after Lanky landings. They’re huge and cylindrical, like blunt miniature versions of their host ship, but even in miniature they are hundreds of meters long. It’s like an entire fleet of capital ships falling out of the sky over North America.
The computer maps the descending seedpods and projects their trajectories on the navigation map.
“Everyone pick a pod to follow down,” Halley sends to the rest of the drop-ship flight. “Whoever’s in range. Tag yourselves on TacLink when you claim your target so we don’t double up by accident.”
There are three pods careening through the atmosphere more or less in front of Halley’s Delta Five. Her hand does a rapid dance on the navigation screen.
“Labrador, the Minneapolis metroplex, or Detroit,” she says. “Where do you want to party tonight?”
“Anything but Detroit,” I say.
“That one’s the easiest trajectory for me to follow,” she says. “Detroit it is. Sorry.”
She assigns her ship to the middle contact and toggles into her flight channel again.
“Everyone, pursue them right down to the deck. Their retardation mechanisms will deploy at twenty thousand, and they’ll slow down for the landing. Hit them right when they land. Don’t give them a chance to disperse.”
She flicks the display to a different screen and checks her stores. “Goddamn, do I wish we had some missiles on this thing.”
“We’re unarmed?”
“Not totally. We have the cannons. But these are training ships, Andrew. We do flight instruction and systems familiarization with them. Not much of a call for leaving rocket pods on the wing pylons.”
“Please tell me the armory is full,” I say.
“It’s always full,” she replies. “Takes too long to get them back to alert status otherwise.”
“Best news of the day,” I say.
We chase the Lanky into the atmosphere above the northern continent. The Lanky is falling ballistically, and Halley can’t follow in the same way because the drop ship would burn to ashes from the generated heat, so by the time we’re passing through the troposphere, the Lanky is several hundred kilometers ahead of us and still increasing distance. Once the worst of the buffeting stops, I unbuckle my harness and make my way into the cargo compartment.
“You got some instruction on these when they trained you for the Fomalhaut deployment,” I shout. Every pair of eyes in the cargo hold is on me as I hold up one of the M-80 Lanky zappers from the drop ship’s armory. “Don’t bother with the fléchette rifles unless that’s all you have left. Takes too long to make a dent with those. Aim for the joints at the knees and the arms, and the spot where the necks would be if those sons of bitches had any. And take every rocket for the MARS launchers we have. Shoot the armor-piercing first, then HEAT, then thermobaric. Leave the dual-purpose shit for last when you’ve run out of everything else. Point-blank, they’ll do a Lanky in just fine. Use ’em in pairs.”
“How many of those things have you killed?” one of the sergeants yells.
“Hundreds,” I say. “Thousands. With my radio. They’re plenty hard to kill, but you can kill them just fine.”
Three of the other sergeants get out of their jump seats to help out, and we start emptying the armory, handing out rocket launchers and heavy anti-Lanky rifles to the platoon. I wish we had a week to give these HD troopers some more training on these things, and I wish we had three times as much ammo in the armory as we do, but this is what we have right now, and all the time we have to prepare.
At five thousand feet, we break out of the cloud cover. The hundreds of square miles of Detroit are spread out below us, the old city ringed by neat clusters of hundred-story PRC blocks, row after row of towers. The part of Detroit I dropped into five years ago and almost got killed in was toward the old part of town, in the old first-and second-generation PRCs that still resembled a regular city somewhat. The part of Detroit we are descending into now has a whole different feel to it. The scale of these fifth-gen PRCs is overwhelming, each block a self-contained unit of four towers that reach one hundred floors into the night sky, over a thousand vertical feet.
“Try to make contact with whatever HD battalion is closest,” I say. “The 365th out of Dayton, maybe. Tell them we need everyone out here who can hold a rifle. And tell them what’s coming their way, if they don’t know already.”
When the Lanky seedpod hits the ground, it’s like the finger of a grumpy god reaching out and shaking things up for the mortals. The pod slams into the dirt maybe a hundred meters from the outer perimeter of a fifth-generation housing block, four hundred-floor towers forming a square with ten-meter-tall concrete walls on the outside. We hear the concussion of the impact from several kilometers away and through the multilayered polyplast of the cockpit.
“We have footfall,” Halley sends back to Regulus. “Lanky seedpod touched down at forty-two degrees, nineteen minutes fifty-three seconds north, eighty-three degrees, zero-two minutes, forty-two seconds west, 1119 Zulu local time.”
The Lanky ship hits nose-first. It’s much squatter and shorter relative to the shape of its mother ship, so it doesn’t stay standing on end for long. The whole thing totters and then begins to lean over in what feels like slow motion. Then the end that was pointing skyward falls toward the nearby PRC towers and crashes down. The Lanky pod is longer than the distance between the outer walls of the PRC block and the impact point, and the mass of the pod bulls into the junction between the wall and the closest PRC tower. There’s a thunderclap that sounds like a fuel-air bomb just went off, and the area is obscured by an expanding cloud of concrete dust and flying debris. Halley puts the Dragonfly into a shallow dive and streaks toward the crash site.
When the dust clears a little, the front third of the seedpod is buried in the corner of the residence tower. Thirty meters of concrete wall are pulverized underneath the mass of the pod. Halley switches on the searchlights at the front of the drop ship’s nose. They cut through the dusty darkness to reveal three Lankies stalking away from the wreck, into the space between the tower blocks.