“Where are we going?” Stahl asks.
He looks terrified, probably because he’s never even been close to a nuclear warhead, never mind a detonation. The Euros declared themselves nuke-free seventy years ago, and to them an atomic warhead is some mystical angel of death. I’ve had enough shot into my general neighborhood to know their limitations well. They make a big bang, but the effects are predictable and avoidable if you know where to squat.
I check the topographic map and point to a spot on the other side of the hill from where we are parked right now.
“That ravine. Get us there in less than seven minutes, or our day is going to go to shit very quickly.”
“Is already shit,” Dmitry says.
As Lieutenant Stahl turns the car around and gooses it, I take one last look at the seed ship, which is now almost entirely out of the three-kilometer depression it left in the Martian soil. The latticework structure we dubbed the “village” has mostly fallen off the top of the hull, like withered roots that are no longer needed. There is something remarkably different about this seed ship—all the other ones I’ve ever seen have been obsidian black, but this one has the orange-red-ochre hue of the Mars soil that surrounds it.
“Shots out,” Phalanx reports two minutes later. “Nuclear strike inbound to your TRP, splash in three minutes, forty-five seconds.”
We are racing around the hill and down the slope at the same time, aiming for the shelter of the ravine that will be on the opposite side of the five-hundred-meter hill from the nuclear detonation. I know from experience that we will ride out the strike down there just fine unless the Russians misdial the yield selector and drop twenty-five megatons instead of two, but the German lieutenant is clearly scared shitless.
“I thought nukes don’t work against a seed ship,” he says, his eyes glued to his heads-up display again.
“They don’t work in space,” I reply. “Without an atmosphere, you don’t have a shock wave, or thermal effects. And the Lanky ships have hulls that are twenty meters thick. They block out the hard gamma rays. Nukes aren’t very effective in space. But down here in atmo, it’s a different story.”
Or so I hope anyway, I think. If our biggest stick can’t even hurt them on the ground, then we are truly fucked, because we can’t shoot Orions into planets and moons we intend to keep for ourselves.
Three minutes.
Lieutenant Stahl races the Weasel down the thirty-degree slope on the other side of the hill, as straight a line as possible without making us somersault at eighty klicks per hour. Even with the hillside between us, I can hear the humming roar of the seed ship slowly gaining altitude. I didn’t see fusion-rocket nozzles, or anything resembling the systems we use to achieve atmospheric or space flight. Our capital ships can’t even make atmo landings or takeoffs, and they have to be built in orbital fleet yards. And the Lankies seem to be growing theirs in the ground of whatever world they take over. There are dozens of recorded Lanky “settlements” on Mars, which means there are dozens of seed ships under the soil, waiting to burst forth and make orbit. I send a priority message to Ground Force Red C2 and apprise them of the situation as well, so they’re not surprised when they see the mushroom cloud from a two-megaton nuclear explosion on the horizon in a few minutes.
Two minutes.
We reach the bottom of the hill. The ravine is narrow and has very steep walls, and Stahl almost flips the Weasel when we roll down into it, but he catches it just in time. I mark the best spot for us to ride out the nuke, and he navigates through the ravine around rocks the size of mules.
“Please tell me this vehicle is equipped with full nuclear-protection capabilities,” I say to Lieutenant Stahl.
“Of course,” he says. “It has overpressure systems and filtration, and an automatic decontamination system.”
One minute.
“Stop here,” I tell the German lieutenant. “Set the brakes. Park it tail-on to ground zero. Hurry, hurry.”
Lieutenant Stahl does as he’s told and then checks the tightness of his safety harness, as if that would make a difference if we got caught in the blast wave in a ten-ton scout car.
“Ready, Dmitry?” I ask. The Russian doesn’t look a tenth as nervous as Lieutenant Stahl, but Dmitry rarely looks upset or agitated about anything.
“Is Russian artillery strike,” he says.
“Hits mostly in the right spot,” I finish for him, and he grins. We both know that if the warhead hits the wrong side of this hill, we’ll be gone in a millisecond anyway, and there will be no time for pain or regrets.
The Russian warhead hits its target on the other side of the hill as promised, only four seconds after the predicted time-on-target. Two-megaton detonations pack a wallop. I’ve only ever ridden two out that were bigger, a five and a seven, but this doesn’t seem much less powerful. We are shielded from the blast and heat waves behind millions of tons of Martian rock, but the sound is still world ending in its magnitude. There’s nothing that sounds like a nuke exploding when you’re close to ground zero. It sounds like the planet is rending itself in half. The shock wave transmits through the rock and bounces our little scout car around to the point where I’m glad for the excellent five-point harnesses on the Eurocorps vehicle. On the dash, a bunch of warning lights for the environmental system go ballistic as the vehicle’s computer detects the alarmingly rapid changes in outside temperature, air pressure, and radiation.
I am used to riding out nuclear strikes in nothing but a bug suit, and I know that Dmitry is experienced in that field as well, but the German is very unnerved. For several minutes, there’s nothing to see outside as the massive radioactive dust plume from the detonation makes debris ping off the hull of the scout car. The sound from the nuke rolls over the landscape and gets reflected back from the surrounding mountains, so it washes over us again and again.
When the effects have rolled over us, I tap Lieutenant Stahl on the shoulder. “Go back around and up to five hundred. I want to do a poststrike assessment to make sure we got the bastard.”
“Shouldn’t we wait a bit for everything to pass?”
“The worst is gone, and the radiation will be around for a while. Besides, you don’t want to miss your first atomic-mushroom close-up.”