On the maglev train, we just have enough time to put on our light armor kits and load our personal defense weapons, the short little submachine guns we carry in our alert bags to have something with a little more punch than a pistol. The train whisks us from Liberty Falls to Burlington in less than fifteen minutes—faster than usual because it’s a military requisition running outside the regular schedule. We check and recheck each other’s gear, even though there isn’t much to fasten and calibrate compared to regular battle armor, but it’s something for the hands and brain to do on autopilot, and it helps to fight the anxiety we both feel. Other than the first alert, there have been no further updates over MilNet, so our brains are coming up with a wide variety of possible scenarios, everything from a single Lanky ship to a full-scale assault by the Lanky fleet currently amassing around Mars. I remember my vivid dream from last night, and I hope it wasn’t a ninety-six-hour glimpse into the future. I am not physically or mentally ready for that day yet.
HDAS Burlington has its own stop on the maglev line. We file out of the train along with the few dozen other corps members who answered the emergency call in the area. The security checkpoint at the base entrance outside the station is manned by half a dozen HD troopers in full battle armor, M-66 rifles at low ready. Halley and I check in to have our IDs scanned.
“A podhead officer,” the lieutenant in charge of the checkpoint says when he sees my qualification ratings pop up on his screen. “Outstanding. We have a few platoons that need a drop-rated officer. Please report to the Bravo pad on the airfield; they’ll assign you a bird.”
“I’m going there, too,” Halley says. “In case they need a pilot. I can fly anything in the inventory.”
The officer of the guard scans her ID and hands it back to her. “Yes, ma’am. Sergeant Aponte, give these two officers a ride to Bravo pad, double-time.”
“How many seed ships do we have incoming, Lieutenant?” Halley asks.
“None, ma’am.” He looks from Halley to me and then down the line of troops checking in. “They’re already here. They overran the joint base at Thule an hour ago. On Greenland. Came out of nowhere, right out of the ice.”
CHAPTER 2
JOINT BASE THULE
Thirty thousand feet above Greenland’s western coast, our drop-ship flight draws up in combat-descent formation, and we start our dive into a swirling vortex of ice and wind.
There’s a storm above this part of the island, and from this altitude, it looks like the fury of winter made physical reality. The clouds are a steel-gray churning mass that extends from fifteen thousand feet all the way to the ground. When our drop-ship flight dips into the storm, the Hornets get instantly bounced around by the turbulent air currents. I’ve had many rough atmospheric entries in my podhead career, but as we careen toward the surface of Greenland in what feels like barely controlled flight, getting rattled like peas in a can, I can’t recall ever having been in such violent weather before. But there are thirty junior enlisted SI and HD troopers sitting in the jump seats to either side and across the aisle from me, so I keep my face shield raised and do my best to appear unconcerned.
The tactical network is strangely quiet. I see our flight of four drop ships, a full company of troops, descending toward Joint Base Thule in the corkscrew pattern of a combat descent. There are more military flights in nearby airspace—two HD ground-attack birds coming in from the south, fifty klicks away and five thousand feet below us, and a flight of Eurocorps drop ships approaching from the interior of Greenland, still a hundred kilometers out and descending in Delta formation. But there’s nothing coming from below, no tactical markers from the units that should be on and around the big joint air/space base we share with the Euros at Thule.
“Any word from the ground?” I send to the pilot.
“Negative,” the HD lieutenant in the cockpit replies. “I got nothing. No comms, no active radar. AILS is out, too. This will be a fun approach in this swirly shit.”
The outside camera views show nothing but blowing snow and ice. I have no directional or spatial references outside, and only my inner ear and the instrument feed from the cockpit provide the cues that we are still descending toward the surface at a twenty-degree nose-down pitch. Without a working AILS beam, the drop ship won’t be able to make an automated landing on the pad at Thule, and only the pilot’s skill will determine whether we make it down in one piece or become a smoking crater in the ice in a few minutes. The pilot in the cockpit isn’t Halley—they wouldn’t let her take charge of an HD bird—and I’m simultaneously very relieved and distraught that my wife is sitting this drop out on the flight pad at HDAS Burlington.
“Where the hell did they come from?” one of the platoon’s sergeants asks on the command channel over the general comms chatter.
“The pod that crashed last month,” I offer. “We chased it down and hosed the Lanky that climbed out. Pod went in the ice. There must have been a bunch more in that thing.”
“They survived in the ice for a whole frickin’ month?”
“That’s what it looks like right now, Sergeant,” I say.
I remember the drop from last month—the cataclysmic impact of the hull fragment, the seedpod we found on the ice a short while later, the Lanky that climbed out of the wreckage and into our gunfire, and the terrible noise when the ice gave way. The seedpod slid into a crevice in the ice that was too deep for the high-powered searchlights on the Wasp to illuminate all the way to the bottom. The Euro military took over shortly afterward, and they sanitized the crash site, but from the look of things, I’d say they failed to thoroughly check for surviving Lankies. Maybe there’s no way to check for life under an ice sheet that’s a kilometer thick. We’ve fought these things for half a decade now, and every time we go up against them, they still confound us and make us change our tactics.
“Outside air temperature is negative eighty-three Celsius,” the drop ship’s crew chief announces. “Negative twenty-nine on the ground, with ninety-knot winds. May want to check your heating units, or it’ll be a short deployment.”
I’ve traded the light armor kit from my alert bag for a loaner HD armor from the drop ship’s armory. Greenland’s environment is as unforgiving as they come on Earth, especially in early winter. My light armor has no heating elements in it, and stepping out of the drop ship in a winter storm with nothing but light laminate shell would have me turning into a combat-ineffective popsicle inside of five minutes. I toggle the test function for the heating system in my loaner armor, and a few moments later, I feel the heat from the built-in thermal elements radiate inward.
“Fuckin’ Greenland,” the platoon sergeant grumbles. “I thought those things didn’t like the cold.”
“They don’t,” I say. “Doesn’t mean they can’t survive in it, apparently. Check squads for readiness. And nobody better chamber a round until we’re on the ground and clear of the bird.”
“Copy that, Lieutenant. You’re the expert.”