“I got a link to our ground units back to Company level, but that’s it,” he says. “Battalion HQ dropped off.”
Some of the Chinese civvies shout in surprise, and look up into the darkening sky. I look up and follow their gaze. Up in the purplish blue of the late afternoon sky, there’s a rapidly expanding sphere of brilliant white—the signature of a nuclear explosion in high orbit. Lieutenant Benning looks up as well, just in time to see a second fireball flash up some distance from the first one. Even at this range, our helmet visors kick in the polarizing filters to protect our retinas from the blinding pinprick flares of the nuclear fireballs. I feel a sudden and overwhelming weakness in my knees.
“Oh, shit,” the lieutenant says.
I scroll through the incoming messages my tactical computer buffered before the link went down. It’s a mess of burst transmissions on the priority fleet channel, encrypted ship-to-ship comms that are illegible to my tactical computer and its limited access level.
“Try to raise Company,” I tell the lieutenant. “I’ll check in with Fleet over voice.”
I open a channel on the fleet emergency band, override the EMCON protocols of my comms suite, and crank my transmitter up to full power.
“Manitoba, this is Tailpipe Five. Do you read, over?”
For a moment, all I get in return is static. Then the reply comes down from the Manitoba, and going by the barely restrained panic in the voice of the comms operator in CIC, things have gone very wrong indeed.
“Tailpipe Five, kindly keep out of the ship-to-ship emergency comms. We are under attack. Manitoba out.”
I hear a crescendo of overlapping alarm klaxons in the background before the transmission ends.
“The fleet is under attack, sir,” I tell the lieutenant. “I have no clue what’s going on up there, but it sounds like they’re in deep shit.”
Then the fleet TacLink comes back to life, and another burst transmission scrolls across my screen, colored in the crimson red of high-priority TacLink updates.
“ALL GROUND UNITS ABORT CURRENT OBJECTIVES AND ASSUME DEFENSIVE POSTURES. TASK FORCE IS ENGAGED. ABORT RPT. ABORT ALL INBOUND TRAFFIC TO MANITOBA.”
I tap into the newly established link to our carrier and call up the CIC’s situation display. It takes much longer than usual—all the data nodes between the task force units are exchanging massive bursts of data, and there’s no bandwidth left for non-priority data traffic. Fifteen seconds after I send my request, the tactical plot on the Manitoba’s main CIC screen unfolds on my helmet display, and I feel myself getting nauseous with fear.
The task force is scattering before a new arrival in orbit, but the newcomer’s tactical icon is not the red symbol of an SRA capital ship. Instead, it’s blaze orange.
High up in the sky, more nuclear explosions are blooming, like short-lived new suns. By now, NAC troopers and Chinese civvies alike are looking up at the fireworks, none of them aware of the magnitude of the new threat.
Finally, I find my voice again.
“Lankies,” I say over the platoon channel. “It’s a fucking Lanky seed ship.”
CHAPTER 11
“Well, that’s a shitty end to this day,” the platoon sergeant says.
I can’t help but chuckle at what has to be the understatement of the decade. Everyone is cross-talking on the platoon channel, so I open a private channel to the lieutenant.
“LT, we need to call the drop ship down and get the fuck off this rock, right now.”
“Orders say to sit tight and go defensive,” the lieutenant replies. “If that’s a Lanky ship up there, we’d climb right up into the middle of a shootout.”
“Look.” I splice off the feed from the Manitoba’s CIC and send it through the private data link. Our fleet units are splitting two ways, like the small SRA task force we engaged earlier. The carrier and one of the destroyer escorts are moving out of orbit, away from the Lanky ship, and the Hammerheads and the space control cruiser are shielding the Manitoba’s retreat. The space between our ships and the advancing Lanky seed ship is a sea of missile icons—the three cruisers are emptying their magazines at the new arrival. Together, they carry a few dozen megatons of nukes, enough firepower to turn a small moon into an irradiated wasteland, but Lanky seed ships are incredibly tough, and nukes aren’t a quarter as effective in hard vacuum as they are in a planetary atmosphere.
“They’re trying to make the chute, and the cruisers are going to buy them time. If we’re still dirtside in another five minutes, they’ll be out of reach, and we’ll be breathing CO2 in another month. They won’t come back, sir. They won’t risk another task force for a lousy regiment or two. You know it.”
“They get blown out of space, we die with them, Sarge.”
“They make Alcubierre, we’re safe. Otherwise, we’re dead, one way or the other. It’ll just take a few days longer, that’s all.”