Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 3} NUCLEAR PEST CONTROL

I know that this drop has gone wrong even before my pod hits the ground. As I descend on my drag chute, I turn on the helmet display to get my bearings, and flinch when I see that our trajectory has carried us right into the target zone. We were supposed to drop a few dozen miles away from the big red square on the map; but our pods are about to touch down twenty-five miles inside of it. Someone else is already on the ground and looking around, because my tactical screen suddenly updates with target markers and threat vectors all around me.

My pod hits the ground with a bone-jarring impact. The lid of the pod blows off automatically, and I see the familiar lead-colored sky of a Lanky-terraformed world overhead. The Lankies like it gloomy—it’s all clouds, rain, and fog, all the time. My pod has adopted a weird nose-down attitude, and as I hit the release buckle of my harness and sit up, I see that our pods came down on a steeply sloped hillside.

“Echo Five is dirtside,” I report on the team channel. “Everything’s in one piece.”

“Fabulous,” Lieutenant Graff replies at once. “Grab your stuff and form up on me. Looks like Arty screwed the pooch on this one.”

I take my rifle out of its storage bracket, check to make sure the barrels are both loaded, and check my computer-augmented field of view for the rest of my team. As far as dispersion goes, the aim of the launch team was outstanding—we’re all within a quarter kilometer of each other. They shot a tight group from a quarter million kilometers away, but they missed the target altogether. As I trot down the hillside to join my team leader, I see a Lanky atmosphere exchanger towering above us not ten klicks away, and a cluster of the weirdly organic Lanky buildings less than two kilometers to our right. Instead of sneaking up to the settled area, we dropped right into it, and unless the locals are asleep or dead, we’ll have a welcoming committee on top of us before too long. The only bright spot so far is the fact that we’re all down and alive. I’ve been on a few missions where someone’s chutes failed to deploy, and the results of a pod impact from high orbit are usually a ten-foot impact crater and some bits and pieces of organic matter mixed in with the mangled wreckage at the bottom. Most of the time, there’s not even enough left to collect dog tags.

We all converge on the lieutenant’s position. There’s no cover nearby, and I feel very exposed on this hillside, in plain view of the nearby Lanky buildings. They’re two kilometers away, but an eighty-foot creature has a very long stride, and we’ve seen the Lankies cover a kilometer in three minutes without seeming in a particular hurry. Thankfully, the lieutenant shares my misgivings.

“We’re sticking out like glowing billboards out here,” he says as we gather around him. “Let’s get off this slope and then figure out how to unfuck this mess.”

“There’s a ravine at ten o’clock, down at the base of the hill,” Corporal Lavoie says. “We can get away from those buildings and stay out of sight.”

“Good enough. Let’s haul ass, people. Dispersed formation, hundred-meter intervals.”

We haven’t covered half a kilometer down the rocky slope when we see movement from the direction of the asymmetrical latticework spires of the Lanky buildings. A few moments later, we see the distinct shapes of three Lankies ambling toward our drop zone with slow and measured strides. Lankies never seem to be in a hurry, but once you have one coming after you, there’s no way to outrun it without a vehicle.

“Three incoming from four o’clock, bearing one-ten,” Sergeant Humphrey says in her terse and businesslike Canadian accent. We all had the symbols for “hostile troops” on our displays the moment one of us spotted the Lankies, but ingrained training dies hard. My tactical computer, ever helpful, calculates speeds and movement vectors, and informs me that we will reach the ravine just barely before the welcoming committee arrives at the hillside.

“Double-time,” the lieutenant orders, quite unnecessarily. We run down the hillside as fast as our hundred-pound loads of gear and weapons will allow.

“Turn on the camo, everyone. We hit the ditch, you spread out and lay low.”

Our suits have a brand-new polychromatic camouflage system. It’s an array of tiny electro-optical projectors, designed to blend us in with any terrain. It won’t turn us invisible, but it works well enough that you have to be pretty close to a trooper in polychrome camo to spot them. We don’t know if the Lankies see the way humans do—we don’t even know if they can “see” at all—but the few times where troopers in bug suits have turned on their PC camo to hide from nearby Lankies, nobody has gotten killed. The projector systems drain the batteries of our suits, so we’re only supposed to use them in dire emergencies. As far as I’m concerned, our current malaise qualifies for the classification.

The ravine looks like a desert wadi. It’s twenty meters wide, with a flat bottom that’s smooth and sandy from whatever seasonal torrents sweep through it a few times a year. The edges are steep and craggy, ten feet or more of almost vertical drop to the ravine bottom. We help each other down to the bottom. There are plenty of rocks and boulders of all sizes lining the sides of the ravine, but it occurs to me that the place will be a trap if the Lankies figure out our location, because there’s no quick way back out of here. Down at the bottom, my suit’s sensors no longer have an exact fix on the approaching Lankies, but by the time we have dispersed and ducked behind cover, they’re so close that I don’t need millimeter-wave radar to know they’re almost on top of us.

A hundred meters behind us, a towering gray mass appears above the ravine. I barely dare to move my head as the Lanky pauses at the edge of the ravine and then steps across it in a single stride. As always, when a Lanky is within a quarter of a kilometer, the earth quakes from the impacts of their slow steps. Nobody has ever managed to airlift an entire Lanky body back to a fleet ship for dissection, but we’ve salvaged their corpses in bits and pieces after battles, and our science people estimate that the average Lanky weighs close to a thousand metric tons.

As the Lanky disappears from sight and walks up the hill toward our discarded pods, a second one shows up at the edge of the ravine. This one is even closer than the first, maybe eighty yards, and it doesn’t follow the first one across. Instead, it pauses at the ledge and turns its head to look down into the ravine. Lankies have no visible eyes in their massive skulls, but I can almost feel the Lanky’s gaze on me as it seems to study the depression in the terrain. Then it turns to the right and starts walking along the ledge, toward the spot where we are trying to blend in with the local geology.

“Don’t anybody start shooting yet,” the lieutenant warns us over the team channel in a low voice. “He reaches into the ravine, we light him up. He walks past, we sit tight. Weapons hold.”

I watch as the Lanky ambles toward us, its huge head swinging slowly from side to side. Even after a few years of seeing them close up, they still look utterly alien and unsettling to me. Some of the SI troopers think the Lankies look like an evolved version of prehistoric Earth dinosaurs, with their toothless mouths and shield-like protrusions on the backs of their skulls.

By now, the Lanky is so close to us that his red and my blue icon are overlapping on my tactical display. The impacts of his three-toed feet on the rocky ground shake loose cascades of sand on the far side of the ravine. If he discovers us at this range and decides to stomp on us, we won’t have much time to get our weapons into play, but a preemptive burst of rifle and rocket fire would bring the other Lankies down on us in a flash. It’s a gamble, but the odds are better for us if we sit tight and play rocks until the last possible moment.

The Lanky ambles past our position and walks along the ravine for a few more moments. Then he steps across the ravine fifty meters in front of our position and continues up the hill. I can feel his progress up the hillside by the tremors underneath my feet. If there’s a good thing about opponents that are eighty feet tall, it’s that they can’t sneak up and surprise you.

“Let’s move. Down the ravine, double-time.”

We gather our stuff and start running, away from the landing spot that has become a local Lanky attraction. We were discovered, which is the worst possible start for a recon mission, but we’re still alive, which is far from the worst outcome. Every kilometer we put between us and the drop site will increase our odds of staying alive.

“You know, this shit would be a lot easier if we could take some wheels along for the drop,” Sergeant Keller pants as we trot down the ravine with all our heavy gear. Nobody argues the point.

The ravine runs out into the rocky plain three kilometers from the hillside. Our landing site is now far away, so Sergeant Humphrey chances a few sweeps with the millimeter-wave radar to check the area for Lankies. Half a dozen red icons pop up on our tactical screens, all clustered on the hillside. The nearest Lanky is roaming the area between the ravine and the drop pods, two and a half kilometers from our position. For now, we’re in the clear, but if the Lankies figure out our egress route, they can catch up with us in a hurry.

“Well, that almost went into the pants, didn’t it?” the lieutenant says. “Haven’t gotten that close to one of them in a while.”

“We’re in a bad spot, LT,” I say. “Too close to that atmo exchanger. We have no weather to hide in.”

The area around the Lanky terraforming tower is mostly featureless and devoid of vegetation. The Lankies have their own fast-growing plant life, but they never grow anything close to their own atmo exchangers. Lanky worlds are foggy and rainy, but there’s always a clear area around the mile-high terraforming towers, like the eye in a hurricane.

“Let’s get to the weather line and then head north from there,” the lieutenant orders. “North-northwest, looks like ten klicks. If we haul ass, we can be in the soup in an hour and a half.”

We move out in dispersed formation, a hundred meters between each trooper, so we can’t all get taken out as a group by a mine or a lucky Lanky. So far, we haven’t done any fighting, just a lot of running and hiding, but that’s the usual breakdown of activities on a typical recon drop—brief periods of sheer terror punctuating long stretches of running around. Any mission where we bring back our full ammo issue is a good one, because it means we didn’t get spotted.

We make it back into the weather without any contact. The Lankies milling about on the distant hillside don’t seem to be interested in looking for the passengers of those empty drop pods, which suits us fine. If the situation were reversed, and one of our SI garrisons stumbled across an empty Lanky conveyance on one of our colony planets, every trooper on that rock would be combing the place for the infiltrators, but the Lankies don’t think like we do. Whenever they take over a colony, they just drop nerve gas on the population centers, but they rarely bother individuals or small groups. It’s as if we’re insignificant to them in small numbers, much like we would smoke out an ant hive in the wrong spot but not bother hunting down stray ants one by one.

Back in the fog and rain, we take a short break, and I take the time to send a status update to the fleet via encrypted burst transmission—contact reports and targeting markers for the atmo exchanger and the nearby cluster of buildings.

“Okay, people. We are still go, unless Fleet has any objections,” Lieutenant Graff says. He outranks me by several pay grades, and he is in charge on the ground, but on the few drops I’ve done with him, he has usually sought my input on the overall tactical picture. Lieutenant Graff is unusually bright for a junior officer.

“Fleet is still go,” I say. “Be a shame to waste all that ordnance just for a walk in the dirt. Let’s go find us something to nuke.”

Mission aborts are costly business. The Linebacker cruisers still have to clear a part of the minefield, which takes a hundred or so of very expensive ballistic interceptor missiles, but the rest of the fleet won’t waste the even more expensive nuclear ordnance without precise targeting data. We would spend most of the missiles in the cruiser’s magazines just to make a hole for the pickup drop ships. We don’t abort drop-and-shop missions unless most of the team is dead and the survivors are bleeding from the eyeballs.

“Fabulous,” the lieutenant replies. “Five more minutes for rest and water, and then let’s go downtown.”

With the new bug suits, avoiding the enemy is ludicrously easy. Our tactical computers do most of the brainwork. They scan the terrain, predict enemy movement vectors, and map out the safest and stealthiest route for us. We weave our way through settlement clusters of ever-increasing size and density as we get closer to the main Lanky city on this rock. My computer keeps count of all the individual Lankies we detect and projects the presence of several thousand of them in the area of the settlement. We’re just five troopers, the only human beings on the entire planet, sneaking through what is alien suburbia like Jack tiptoeing through the giant’s castle at the top of the beanstalk. Of course, we’re not looking for treasure but for a target fix, so our warships can turn the giant’s castle into rubble with a few dozen atomic warheads.

Back before I joined the service, I wanted nothing more than a chance to go into space. I had lots of romantic notions of the frontier life out on the colonies, but after half a decade of fighting on the settled planets, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of our terraformed real estate is hardly worth the effort. Two-thirds of our colony planets are just like New Wales—barren, rocky wastelands that will take a few decades of backbreaking work to resemble even the least fertile patch of farmland back on our overtaxed Earth. To top off the futility, we’re not even here to take the place back from the Lankies, because we can’t. Instead, we’re just going to ruin the place for both species, because showing the Lankies that we’re willing to write off the planet altogether rather than letting them have it may discourage them from taking any more of our colonies. It’s a desperate, insane, typically human strategy, but it’s the only option we have right now other than rolling over. We’ve met our first competitors in the interstellar struggle for resources, and they are sweeping us out of the way without breaking a sweat.

The main Lanky settlement is fifty miles from the edge of the target zone. It’s nestled into a curved valley between steep granite cliffs. We’ve climbed a tall hill to get a good look at the place, and my computer has already selected the optimal hypocenter and warhead yield to wipe the place out most efficiently.

“They’re getting smart at this,” Lieutenant Graff says. “I mean, look at where they put this town. Granite all around, like a bomb trench.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” I say. “Gotta score a bull’s-eye right in the valley, or the blast wave’ll go over their heads altogether. Pretty smart.”

“Well, they’re a spacefaring species,” Sergeant Humphrey offers. “Dumb creatures don’t build spaceships.”

Lanky towns look a lot like underwater reefs. They don’t build individual houses in tidy rows like we do. Instead, their housing clusters kind of flow together, like vast fields of interconnected starfish. The settlement covering the valley floor below us looks like it grew there naturally. In a way, I almost feel bad for showing the fleet how to destroy it, but then I recall the mission briefing, and remind myself that we lost twelve thousand colonists and a whole reinforced company of Spaceborne Infantry troops when the Lankies came and took the place away from us.

“All the markers are set,” I tell the team. “Let’s find a good spot to ride out the blast, and then I’ll start the clock.”

We study our topographical maps and settle on the reverse slope of a hill three miles to our rear, where the concentration of peripheral Lanky infrastructure is light. According to my computer, the distance will be sufficient to ride out anything less than a fifty-kiloton nuke going off in the valley below, and with the walls of the valley amplifying and reflecting the blast wave, a tenth of that yield will be enough to turn the place into a radioactive rubble field. The nearest atmo exchanger is the one next to our landing site, and that one is more than twenty miles away, more than enough to stay clear of the fifteen kilotons the fleet usually assigns to a Lanky terraformer.

“Intrepid, Combat Control,” I send on my fleet C3 radio.

“Combat Control, Intrepid,” the response comes, weakly. The signal is traveling a quarter million kilometers to the waiting Intrepid, and there’s a lot of nasty weather between here and there.

“Flares are lit. We are heading for a safe spot now. Start the clock.”

“Affirmative, Combat. We copy final targeting data. Good luck, and keep your heads down.”

“Will do, Intrepid. Combat out.”

I cut the transmission and switch to the team channel.

“Okay, people. Clock’s ticking. Let’s get to cover and put on those sunglasses.”

The worst part of an atomic explosion is the blast. Unlike normal explosives, the pressure wave of a nuke goes back and forth, squeezing solid objects like a giant fist. There’s the fireball, of course, which will vaporize anything in its radius at the moment of detonation, but that is a mathematical constant, easily predicted from the yield of the warhead, and short-lived. The shock wave radiates out from the hypocenter of the explosion, bouncing off mountainsides and flattening everything in its way, squeezing structures into piles of rubble and then blowing them apart. It’s the most violent force we can generate at will, but it’s unpredictable, indiscriminate, and easily deflected by a few hundred feet of hillside.

That doesn’t mean, however, that riding out a nuclear blast behind a hill just five miles from its hypocenter is a fun event.

When the nuke goes off in the valley three miles away, my suit turns all sensor input off to keep me from going blind and deaf. I can still feel the force of the blast, however. The shock wave radiates out from the explosion at the speed of sound, shaking the ground beneath our position a few seconds later. Just like at the beginning of each mission, I always expect a miscalculation at the end, some fleet tech punching in the wrong number after a decimal point, and a ten-kiloton warhead dropping directly in front of my feet instead of the proper aiming point a few klicks away. In that case, I’d die just as quickly as if my pod hit a mine on the way in. I’d simply vaporize before the pain impulse from my suddenly superheated skin reached my already gone brain to inform me of my death.

My dad would get a kick out of the fact that my job involves fleet warships firing atomic warheads at a spot in my general vicinity. He’d say that I finally found a line of work that suits my intelligence level.

We wait out the explosion in our own private armor cocoons, with no sight or sound, until our suits have decided that it’s safe to turn on the sensors again. When my vision returns, the first thing I see is the debris raining down all over the place, irradiated dust and dirt and fragments of Lanky buildings. Without my sensors, I’d be blind in this hurricane of dirt and rocks, and even with all the technology in my suit, I can only see a few hundred meters ahead.

Eventually, the fallout decreases in intensity, and we climb to the top of the hill to observe the target area. As we reach the crest, I see the mushroom cloud of the nuclear detonation rising into the sky just a few kilometers in front of us. It billows and roils like the skin of a living, breathing thing.

“I never get tired of seeing those,” Sergeant Keller says.

“What are you, some sort of adrenaline junkie?” I reply.

“Not really,” he says. “My folks got killed on Willoughby a few years back. Mom, Dad, both my sisters. I’d just joined up, or I woulda been there, too. Far as I’m concerned, every nuke dropped on these things is money well spent. Wish I could unzip this suit and piss on the ashes, too.”

The valley is wiped clean. Just as I expected, the force of the surface blast has been amplified by the steep granite walls of the canyon, and the shock wave has bounced through the valley several times. Right in the center of the mile-wide rift, there’s a new crater, a hundred feet deep. We can’t see anything through our optical sensors—the billowing debris cloud making up the base of the atomic mushroom will linger for a while longer yet—but our radar, laser, and ultrasound imagers work in concert to give us a good idea of the devastation we visited on the Lanky settlement.

“Whoo-ee,” the lieutenant chirps. “Don’t nobody pop off their helmet to scratch a nose. Radiation level is ‘extra crispy.’”

With all the electromagnetic noise in the neighborhood of a nuclear explosion, voice comms with the fleet are out of the question. I do, however, have a redundant data link with the Intrepid, and I use it to send up another encrypted burst transmission, this one with a sensor-data upload and a status code for our team: mission accomplished, no casualties, ready for pickup. I repeat the transmission a few times on several sub-channels until my screen flashes with a reply code from Fleet.

“Taxi is on the way, friends and neighbors. ETA is two-five minutes.”

“Fabulous,” Lieutenant Graff says. “Another good day at the office.”

The team sets up a perimeter while we’re waiting for the arrival of the recovery ship. The security measure is largely ceremonial at this point because any Lanky alive within ten kilometers will be moving away from the unfriendly mushroom cloud, but training is hard to overcome.

I spend a few solitary minutes on top of the hill, surveying the destruction I’ve called down upon the unsuspecting Lankies in that settlement.

I’m not religious, and I doubt I ever was, despite my mom’s efforts to get me into the embrace of the Mother Church back in Boston when I was young. I do know my Bible, however. I recall the Book of Exodus, the verses telling of the angel of death passing through Egypt at night and killing all the firstborn children, sparing only the houses with the mark of lamb’s blood on the doorposts. In a way, I am an angel of death as well, but the power I serve is even more vengeful and merciless than the god of Israel. I’m the one who marks the doorposts in the night, and we pass over none.