The ships towing the Orion missiles are at the front of our formation, in a staggered wall that’s five abreast and five deep. One by one, the towing ships detach their missiles and launcher units and turn to reverse course. Once the Orions light their engines, they’ll start squirting nuclear charges out of their tail ends and detonating them against their ablative pusher plates at the rate of one per second, and no skipper wants to stick around when hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads are about to go off in the neighborhood. The Orions are dangerous, crude, and unwieldy, too large to fit on any ships, and a threat to anything smaller than a planetoid in their path if they miss their targets. But they are the only shot we have at pulling off that crucial first volley, to take out as many seed ships as we can in one single strike before they are aware of our presence and start dispersing.
“Orion launch in T-minus five. All units, clear the backblast area. Level-one radiation protocol in effect.”
On the tactical display, each Lanky seed ship in range has two target markers on it. We are about to fire two Orions at each seed ship, to account for misses and weapon malfunctions. I look at the trajectories and see that a lot of them are going to come dangerously close to Mars if they miss. I try to do the math in my head to imagine what a ten-thousand-ton block of pykrete will do on the planet’s surface if it hits at a few thousand kilometers per second, and decide that I’d rather not think about that right now. This is our one shot, and if we miss, Mars is lost to us forever anyway.
Out in space a few hundred kilometers in front of our task group, fourteen dual Orion launchers train themselves on to their target bearings with little bursts from their maneuvering thrusters. Each of the missiles attached to the launch modules are as long as a capital ship, heavy sledgehammers to crack open the seed ships that are impervious to any other weapon we’ve ever thrown at them.
“Orion launch in T-minus two. Switching Orion batteries to network control. Birds free.”
Someone in CIC has decided that the entire crew should be kept in the loop for this event, and puts the audio chatter from CIC on the general-announcement system. The skipper isn’t commenting on the launch at all, but we all know what we’re about to do. We are smacking the hornet’s nest with the biggest stick we have, and if we fail to kill the Lanky fleet in one swipe, the survivors will come swarming for us. I should be scared way more than I am right now. For some reason, knowing that we’re striking the first blow for a change makes me feel more excited and impatient than afraid.
“Orion launch in T-minus thirty seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven . . .”
I look over at the other members of my team. Most of them are looking at the forward bulkhead like there’s a holoscreen mounted on it that shows a championship game in progress. Dmitry sees me looking at him and gives me a fleeting grin and a thumbs-up, but I can tell that even the usually unflappable Russian is as nervous as the rest of us. If the missiles do their job, we’ll be in the pods and bound for Mars in thirty minutes. If they don’t, we’ll either die on this ship today or be witness to the end of civilization soon. Either way, once the Orions launch, it’s completely out of our hands.
“Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six . . .”
I take a deep, shaky breath and concentrate on my tactical display again, because it’s the only thing I can do.
“Three. Two. One. Launch.”
On the plot, two dozen blue V-shaped icons representing antiship missiles pop into existence at the front of our battle line. I check the optical feed for a camera that’s trained on at least some of the launchers. At this distance, I can’t make out much detail, but I can clearly see the two massive Orions slowly floating away from the dual launcher. Then there’s a flare like a tiny sun that washes out the optical feed despite the automatic brightness filters.
“Birds away, birds away,” the tactical officer says over the 1MC. “Separation and launch on Orion 82 through 86, 88 through 92, and 94 through 106. Launch failure on Orion 87 and Orion 93. Repeat, we have two misfires.”
The Orions accelerate so quickly that the line of icons is on the plot one second, and gone the next. The nuclear charges that go off behind them every second pump most of their energy into the pusher plates and fling the missiles forward at acceleration rates that would puree a human crew even with an anti-grav system active.
“Fifteen minutes to intercept,” CIC announces. “Battleships are moving into linebacker position.”
The two icons representing the huge battleships, one lozenge shape blue and the other green, accelerate through the center of our formation to follow the Orions at flank speed. They’re much slower than the missiles, but they aren’t meant to catch up with them. The battleships are there to mop up any seed ships that survive the Orion volley before they can threaten the invasion fleet. I watch the two icons, labeled “AGINCOURT” and “ARKHANGELSK,” making their way past the clusters of task-force groups in a staggered formation, twenty kilometers between them. I still don’t know what the precise nature of their armament is, but I know that Aggie and Archie, as the fleet nicknamed them about ten seconds after their official commissioning, both carry immense high-energy-particle pulse cannons mounted on their centerlines. I’ve seen that weapon system at the fleet’s testing range when they used it to blow up a bunch of target hulks, and the close-range punch of those ships is absolutely devastating. But they’re very short ranged, which means that the battleships have to get close enough to the seed ships to be in their weapon range as well, and from what I saw at the target range a month and a half ago, the bugs are nowhere near ironed out.
Next to me, Dmitry gets up and stretches his back, then his arms and shoulders. “Waiting is not thing I like,” he says. “For food, maybe. For doctor of teeth. But not for fight.”
“I’m right there with you,” I reply.
Dmitry reaches into the personal document pocket of his armor and pulls out a plastic pouch. Then he opens it and takes out a picture. I recognize it as the one he showed me last year on our trip back to Earth on the Indianapolis—it’s his husband, Maksim, a broad-faced, smiling guy in an SRA marine uniform, lizard-pattern camo and an undershirt with blue and white stripes. He looks at the picture for a little while and then kisses the first two fingers of his right glove and touches it gently. I feel vaguely like a voyeur watching him, but Dmitry doesn’t seem to mind. He looks over at me and holds up the picture before stowing it in his document pouch again.
“Your wife, the pilot. Halley. She is good woman.”
“She is,” I agree.
“When battle is over, maybe we sit down and have drink together. You, me, Maksim, Halley. Drink much vodka, tell many war stories, maybe even some true ones.”
“Let’s do that,” I say. “But it won’t take much for you to drink me under the table, I think.”
“Is not competition,” he says. “Is for friendship, and remembering. Maybe forgetting, too.”
He smiles wryly.
I look at this Russian marine, this friendly, earnest, and competent man, and think of all the dangers we’ve shared even though we’ve only known each other briefly. I may have faced him in battle before on some colony moon somewhere. He may have killed some of my friends, and I may have killed some of his. I am once again struck by how much alike we are—how similar the grunts on both sides really are—and I know that when this battle is over, I don’t want to go on fighting him and his friends over dumb shit that could be settled at a table in one evening by half a dozen grunts from each side and a few bottles of booze between them.
CHAPTER 12