The medics help me up the ramp and strap me into one of the jump seats. It feels utterly strange to be sitting in a drop ship without armor or a rifle. All around me, the seats start filling up with a mix of HD, SI, and Eurocorps personnel.
“You okay sitting for a bit, Lieutenant?” the medic asks me when he checks my harness straps.
“I’ll be fine,” I reply. “Thanks for patching the leaks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The two medics take seats to either side of me.
“Buckle up, boys and girls,” the pilot says over the intercom in a British accent. “We are leaving before the unfriendly traffic arrives. Nuclear fire mission inbound in seven minutes.”
With every seat in the drop ship full of anxious-looking troops of various nationalities, the tail ramp rises and locks into place, and the bird lifts off with what feels like maximum power. They’ll only use a small tactical warhead, and we are ten kilometers or more from ground zero, but I can understand why the Eurocorps pilots want to get distance between themselves and the impending bang in a hurry. Unlike the fleet and the SI, the terrestrial forces have no experience with nukes, especially the Euros. They consider themselves more civilized for it, but the rest of the world was glad for the NAC and SRA stockpiles of fission warheads when we needed a few thousand of them to fuel the Orion missiles that have kept the Lankies away from Earth for over a year. Turns out Lankies don’t respect civilized war-fighting methods in the least.
The nuke hits seven minutes later, while we’re in formation heading out to sea, forty thousand feet above the show. The Eurocorps birds have small windows, and almost every soldier in the cargo hold tries to get a glimpse of the sun-bright fireball that blooms on the ground off to our starboard side. It’s just a five-kiloton bunker buster, one of the smallest warheads in the arsenal, but I have to admit that it makes for a spectacular display—first the hardened warhead streaking through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, trailing glowing plasma like a comet, and then the fission detonation itself, a bright little ball of star fire that grows larger every second until it roils into the polar air and darkens with the cooling debris it sucked up from the ground. Belowground detonations are dirty as hell, and this part of Greenland will be pegging radiation alerts for a while. The mushroom from the nuke is tiny compared to some of the multi-megaton stuff I’ve seen, but it’s sufficiently awe inspiring to the Euros and the green HD troopers in the hold. Instead of following suit and gawking at the mushroom cloud, I close my eyes, but open them again quickly when I see the image of Private Cameron’s terrified face behind his helmet visor as the Lanky grabs him and flings him into the darkness like a foul-tempered toddler chucking a toy. If he was still alive somehow, he just died in a microsecond, his brain evaporated by a million-degree fireball along with the rest of his body before it could process the nerve impulses from his skin.
I fixate on the unfamiliar geometry of the Eurocorps drop ship’s interior and start counting weld lines and rivets, even though I am suddenly tired enough that I’m sure I’d fall asleep within seconds of closing my eyes.
What a thoroughly fucked-up morning.
CHAPTER 6
BANGED UP
“This is a change,” Halley says when she walks into the hospital room. “Usually I’m the banged-up one on the stretcher.”
“Next time,” I say, and sit up in my bed with a wince. “We’ll take turns.”
“You have a few to catch up on. How are you feeling?”
“All right, I guess. Better than half the platoon.”
“What the hell happened?”
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and put a hand over the bandage wrapped around my rib cage. The broken ribs are back together, but I know from experience that I’ll be sore for a week from the fusing job.
“They were waiting for us,” I tell Halley. “Built a nice ambush for us to wander into. And I led the platoon right into it, like a fucking idiot.”
Halley takes my face into both hands and kisses me gingerly. Then she sits down on the bed next to me.
“I offered to pilot one of the spare HD birds, but they wouldn’t let me. So I had to wait it out on the tarmac at Burlington. Listened to the command channel throughout the whole thing. That was torture, not being able to jump in and help out.”
“Once we scraped them off the airfield at Thule, they went into their hideout,” I say. “They dug in, right on the glacier, in the friggin’ ice. Tunneled into it like it was dirt. Couldn’t reach them with armor or airpower, so I took in a platoon to scout.”
“They should have sent remotes in there instead of risking that many grunts,” Halley says.
I shake my head. “I had the same thought. But we barely had comms down in the tunnels. And that was with guys acting as relays at every bend. We couldn’t get telemetry on the remotes. Trust me, I would have gladly sent the drones instead.”
“So what happened?” Halley asks gently.
“I think they built the trap right into their little hideout from the start. The tunnel was just wide enough for them to crawl through. By the time we were in with the whole platoon, we were two abreast and strung out. I had them space the fire teams out so we’d have room to bring our guns to bear to the front. When I figured out what was going on, we were spread out over a hundred meters of tunnel.”
I reach for the plastic water cup on my bed’s nightstand and take a long sip. Then I offer the cup to Halley. She shakes her head curtly.
“They had a second tunnel right next to the one we were in. I picked up something on the heartbeat scanner, but we didn’t have time to clear out. Motherfucker brought down the whole tunnel wall. Buried two squads in the ice. The only reason I made it out at all was because I was leading from the front.”
“Jesus,” Halley mutters. “Lankies setting fucking traps for us now.”
“That’s not even the part that scares me the most.”
I describe to Halley what happened after I dug myself out of the ice—the Lanky lair, Private Cameron alerting the nearby Lanky with his radio transmissions, my narrow escape, the orbital nuclear strike.
“I think they knew exactly how we would respond. They knew how our weapons worked. Our capabilities. Our tactics. They built that little hideout just right. Couldn’t roll armor, couldn’t call in air strikes, couldn’t even use comms without stringing out half the platoon to play mobile relays. And then—pow. Springing that trap right when we were most vulnerable.”
“Could have been coincidence. Dumb luck on their part.”
“That’s an awful lot of dumb luck, don’t you think?”