That doesn’t mean, however, that riding out a nuclear blast behind a hill just five miles from its hypocenter is a fun event.
When the nuke goes off in the valley three miles away, my suit turns all sensor input off to keep me from going blind and deaf. I can still feel the force of the blast, however. The shock wave radiates out from the explosion at the speed of sound, shaking the ground beneath our position a few seconds later. Just like at the beginning of each mission, I always expect a miscalculation at the end, some fleet tech punching in the wrong number after a decimal point, and a ten-kiloton warhead dropping directly in front of my feet instead of the proper aiming point a few klicks away. In that case, I’d die just as quickly as if my pod hit a mine on the way in. I’d simply vaporize before the pain impulse from my suddenly superheated skin reached my already gone brain to inform me of my death.
My dad would get a kick out of the fact that my job involves fleet warships firing atomic warheads at a spot in my general vicinity. He’d say that I finally found a line of work that suits my intelligence level.
We wait out the explosion in our own private armor cocoons, with no sight or sound, until our suits have decided that it’s safe to turn on the sensors again. When my vision returns, the first thing I see is the debris raining down all over the place, irradiated dust and dirt and fragments of Lanky buildings. Without my sensors, I’d be blind in this hurricane of dirt and rocks, and even with all the technology in my suit, I can only see a few hundred meters ahead.
Eventually, the fallout decreases in intensity, and we climb to the top of the hill to observe the target area. As we reach the crest, I see the mushroom cloud of the nuclear detonation rising into the sky just a few kilometers in front of us. It billows and roils like the skin of a living, breathing thing.
“I never get tired of seeing those,” Sergeant Keller says.
“What are you, some sort of adrenaline junkie?” I reply.
“Not really,” he says. “My folks got killed on Willoughby a few years back. Mom, Dad, both my sisters. I’d just joined up, or I woulda been there, too. Far as I’m concerned, every nuke dropped on these things is money well spent. Wish I could unzip this suit and piss on the ashes, too.”
The valley is wiped clean. Just as I expected, the force of the surface blast has been amplified by the steep granite walls of the canyon, and the shock wave has bounced through the valley several times. Right in the center of the mile-wide rift, there’s a new crater, a hundred feet deep. We can’t see anything through our optical sensors—the billowing debris cloud making up the base of the atomic mushroom will linger for a while longer yet—but our radar, laser, and ultrasound imagers work in concert to give us a good idea of the devastation we visited on the Lanky settlement.
“Whoo-ee,” the lieutenant chirps. “Don’t nobody pop off their helmet to scratch a nose. Radiation level is ‘extra crispy.’”
With all the electromagnetic noise in the neighborhood of a nuclear explosion, voice comms with the fleet are out of the question. I do, however, have a redundant data link with the Intrepid, and I use it to send up another encrypted burst transmission, this one with a sensor-data upload and a status code for our team: mission accomplished, no casualties, ready for pickup. I repeat the transmission a few times on several sub-channels until my screen flashes with a reply code from Fleet.
“Taxi is on the way, friends and neighbors. ETA is two-five minutes.”
“Fabulous,” Lieutenant Graff says. “Another good day at the office.”
The team sets up a perimeter while we’re waiting for the arrival of the recovery ship. The security measure is largely ceremonial at this point because any Lanky alive within ten kilometers will be moving away from the unfriendly mushroom cloud, but training is hard to overcome.
I spend a few solitary minutes on top of the hill, surveying the destruction I’ve called down upon the unsuspecting Lankies in that settlement.
I’m not religious, and I doubt I ever was, despite my mom’s efforts to get me into the embrace of the Mother Church back in Boston when I was young. I do know my Bible, however. I recall the Book of Exodus, the verses telling of the angel of death passing through Egypt at night and killing all the firstborn children, sparing only the houses with the mark of lamb’s blood on the doorposts. In a way, I am an angel of death as well, but the power I serve is even more vengeful and merciless than the god of Israel. I’m the one who marks the doorposts in the night, and we pass over none.
CHAPTER 4