Chains of Command (40 page)

“Radiological alert,” one of Second Platoon’s troopers shouts. “Nuclear detonation.”

On the TacLink screen, a symbol nobody ever wants to see pops up just five kilometers to the east—the bright orange inverted triangle signifying a nuclear warhead explosion. Outside, a roiling red mushroom cloud billows and rises above the city, ominous and terrifying to see at such close range. I’ve seen plenty of nukes deployed in battle, but always against Lankies, and never so close to an occupied human settlement. The mushroom cloud rising in the distance feels like an obscene violation.

All over the admin center, the gunfire slacks off as more and more troops on both sides become aware of what has just happened.

A new voice cuts in to the comms, on the NAC’s priority emergency channel. There’s heavy static in the background, but I recognize the speaker at once.

“Attention, renegade forces. Attention, renegade forces. This is Major Khaled Masoud of the NAC Defense Corps Special Operations Command.”

“Son of a bitch,” I say to the room in general. Our troopers are standing around, looking shell-shocked. The prisoners sitting lined up against the wall don’t have the benefit of TacLink displays or video feeds, but nobody could have missed the characteristic deep and long-lasting rumble from the nuclear detonation. Even Agent Green suddenly looks anxious and concerned.

“Put him on speaker,” I tell Gunny Philbrick, who dashes to the comms console.

“Building or floor?”

“Everything.”

“The force under my command has just detonated a kiloton-size nuclear charge right underneath terraforming plant Arcadia One, five kilometers outside of Arcadia City. The sole power source for your capital city is now a glowing radioactive cloud,” Major Masoud continues. “This is just the first strike, a demonstration of our resolve. Over the course of the last five days, my teams have placed nuclear demolition charges on every one of your active terraformers. They are very small and extremely well shielded, you have very little chance of finding them, and they are tamper-proof beyond the skill of your EOD personnel. That is a guarantee.”

There’s dead silence on all channels. All the gunfire in and around the admin center has ceased.

“This is an order to the leadership of this moon and all troops under their command. You will cease resisting the lawful and proper authority of the North American Commonwealth Defense Corps forces. You will lay down your weapons as of this moment. You will order any and all forces under your control to stand down. If you fail to do so, I will not hesitate to light off every one of the twenty-four nuclear demolition charges my teams have planted on this moon. If you choose to continue this fight, I will destroy your planetary infrastructure and your fusion power generation network irreparably. I will turn your stolen little paradise into an irradiated wasteland and leave you in it until the Lankies come for you or you all die of radiation poisoning. This is not a boast or a threat. It is a statement of fact.”

“Damn,” Philbrick murmurs next to me.

“I knew he was cold,” I say. “I had no idea just how cold.”

“The Fleet in orbit will stand down and wait for orders from the senior NAC commander in this system, to be transferred back to the Solar System. I don’t want your personnel or your leadership. All I want are those orbital assets. Surrender and turn them over to us. Fail to do it, and they will have no ground left to land on. If you are tempted to doubt my resolve, look five kilometers to the east of Arcadia City.

“You have five minutes to respond on this channel. If you do not agree to these terms, fail to reply, or continue hostilities, I will initiate the nuclear demolition of your fusion plants one by one in three-minute intervals. And I will go to my death with a smile and the knowledge that you are going to freeze and starve in the dark. You left us at the mercy of the Lankies a year ago, and paying you back in kind for that act of treason would be a true joy. Five minutes starting now. Major Masoud out.”

“Damn,” Gunny Philbrick says again, this time with a disbelieving chuckle.

Behind me, Agent Green laughs out loud. I turn around, and he grins at me from his seated position on the floor.

“Now that’s fighting dirty,” he says. Next to him, the secretary of interior security looks like he wants to throw up.

“I hope your idiot president turns him down,” I say, and mean it.

The reply comes four and a half very tense minutes later.

“Attention, NAC commander. This is General Stockett, Chief of Staff of the Arcadia Defense Corps.” The voice sounds tired and harried.

“We accept your terms. I repeat, we accept your terms. There are sixty thousand civilians living near those fusion plants. Do not set off any more nukes on this moon. All Arcadia Defense Force units, stand down. That is a direct order. Transmit to all subunits as necessary. NAC commander, we are standing by for further instructions on this channel.”

“Holy shit,” Gunny Philbrick says into the sudden upswell of whistling and cheering in the ops center and the hallway outside. “We fucking won.”

On my TacLink display, there are dozens of blinking blue icons signifying wounded or dead troopers. A third or more of the people under my command have been hurt or killed in the last fifteen minutes. It’s the most violent and merciless small-unit fight I’ve experienced in my service time. The city streets outside are chaos, panicked civilians everywhere. The mushroom cloud in the distance is still billowing into the night sky, thinning out as it rises higher and higher. Never before have I seen a nuclear weapon used against other humans in battle, right near a civilian settlement.

“We didn’t win,” I say. “Nobody did.”

CHAPTER 29

Outside, I only have one concern. I don’t care about the civilians flooding the admin plaza, or the sullen renegade troops stacking their weapons by the entrance of the admin center under the watchful eyes of Second Platoon—or what’s left of them. All I have on my mind is the coordinate two kilometers in the distance where Halley’s drop ship went down thirty minutes ago in the middle of the short and ferocious battle. There’s a quartet of Mules outside on the plaza, but there are troops and civvies all around them, and the streets are too packed for an eight-wheeled armored vehicle. Instead, I hang my PDW from its sling across my chest, and start running toward the northwest.

Pieces of Blackfly One rained down over a two-block area. I see one of the engines, still smoldering, embedded in the roof of a burning house. Shards of armor and bits of wing are scattered all over the street. The bulk of Halley’s ship crashed into what looks like a little park, small trees and neatly planted bushes destroyed by the impact of the seventy-ton drop ship and the subsequent fire.

I don’t want to see what’s in the cockpit, but I have to know. I draw in shallow, painful breaths as I walk around the shattered hull, ignoring the burning patches of fuel I’m walking through.

The nose of the ship is staved in, and all the cockpit glass shattered. But where the pilot seat used to be, there’s just a clamshell-shaped hole in the front of the ship where the rescue module used to be. I get weak-kneed with the sudden relief that floods through me, the first positive emotion I’ve had in a while. It feels utterly selfish in light of all the dead Rogue Company troopers who have been shot or blown apart by cannon rounds or burned up in the cockpits of their ships, but I am more grateful than I’ve ever been in my life that I didn’t have to find the burned and mangled remains of my wife in that cockpit.

The rescue module came down a few hundred meters away in someone’s front yard. The triple-canopy chute of the capsule is partially draped over the roof of the house like an untidy overgarment. The clamshell halves are blown open, but there’s no Halley inside.

I call for my wife and check the alleys around the house, then the next street over, then the street next to that one. All over town, black and sooty ashes have started to fall, and I don’t need to see the radiological alert from my suit to know that this is the beginning of the radioactive fallout from the nearby nuclear explosion.

There’s a group of civilians at the end of the next streets, half a dozen men and women wearing signal-colored wet-weather ponchos. I trot up to them and shine the light from my helmet in their direction to make myself noticed. They look scared and bewildered.

“The drop ship that crashed right over there,” I say, and point with the barrel of my PDW. “Where’s the pilot that was in the rescue capsule? Did you see her?”

“We did,” one of the men says. “Pulled her out of that capsule. She was hurt pretty badly.”

“What did you do with her?” I shout.

“One of the neighbors drove her to the hospital,” the man says, eyeing my hand on the grip of my PDW. “We’re not savages here, you know.”

“Where’s the hospital?”

“Quarter kilometer that way,” he says and points south. “Two-story building, white with a red cross on the side. Can’t miss it.”

I want to say thank you, but find that the words won’t come out. Instead, I nod at the group and point over to the nearest house.

“You need to get under a solid roof. This fallout is radioactive. Get inside and do a full decon, or you’ll be puking out your bloody insides in a few days.”

The settlement hospital is probably the busiest place in town tonight. Two of the garrison’s Mules are unloading wounded troops in front of the building, and medics are helping them inside or carrying them. I push my way through the crowd at the entrance waiting in line for the decontamination lock just inside the building. Nobody argues with me when I skip to the head of the line in my battle armor.

The decon cycle takes three minutes, which are the longest three minutes of my life so far. Then the light on the decon lock goes green, and I step out of the lock and into the facility, which is in a state of controlled chaos. There are injured troops on stretchers lining the hallways and packing the first few rooms I poke my head into.

“What are you looking for, trooper? Are you injured?”

A stern-faced, harried-looking woman in a medical outfit stops me as I try to check the next room.

“I’m looking for the pilot someone brought in maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago. Female, dark hair, tall.”

“This look like a Fleet rehab facility to you? With visiting hours? We are stitching people back together right now. Wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t started a shooting war in the middle of a civilian settlement.” She puts her hand on the chest plate of my armor and tries to push me away from the door.

“Don’t,” I growl.

She gives my gun on its sling a concerned look and pulls her hand away from my armor. Then she looks around, doubtlessly for help to deal with this irate knucklehead soldier who showed up in a medical facility armed to the teeth.

“They’re stacking the arrivals wherever they can find them. If she came in half an hour ago, she’s probably in the surgery queue up in the A hallway on the second floor.”

“Thank you,” I say, and run over to the staircase without waiting for an answer.

Halley is almost as tall as I am, but she looks strangely tiny on the stretcher. The left sleeve and leg of her flight suit have been cut away, and she’s wearing bulky gel stabilizers on both limbs on her left side. The left side of her face is swollen and colored in vivid shades of purple and black, but she’s still recognizably Halley. Her hair is matted with blood and sticking to her skull. There’s an automatic med injector strapped to her right forearm, and she’s barely conscious, probably in a deep and warm painkiller haze.

“Hey,” I say, and kneel down next to her stretcher. I can’t take her hand because it’s tied down, so I just stroke her forehead. Where my hand touches her hair, it comes away with half-congealed blood. “Hey, you.”

Her eyelids flutter a little, and I can see that she’s trying to focus.

“Huh,” she says, more an exhalation than a word.

“You look like hammered shit,” I say.

“Mmmmh,” she replies, with the tiniest of smiles in the corners of her mouth. “Goddamn capsule broke my goddamn leg,” she mumbles.

“And your arm, and a bunch of other stuff.”

“Had better days,” she says.

“I haven’t,” I reply, and she smiles groggily.

“Did we win?”

I consider her question for a moment.

“We didn’t lose,” I say. “They surrendered. Masoud set off a nuclear demo charge on the main terraformer.”

“Nukes,” Halley mumbles. “Jesus. Can’t believe I slept through that.”

I look at my bruised and battered wife, one of two drop ship pilots left alive on this mission. We’ve lost so many today, and I will grieve for Lieutenant Dorian and all the dead troopers from First and Second Platoons later, when the smoke and the adrenaline have settled and I am alone with my thoughts again. But right now, I am selfishly and unapologetically happy that Halley is alive.

She grimaces and fumbles for the button that controls the med injector. I take her hand, put it back onto the stretcher, and push the button for her.

“Thanks,” she murmurs. “’s good stuff.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I reply, but she’s already drifting off.

“I’ll be back for you later,” I say, and she mumbles inarticulate assent.

The SEALs arrive in their drop ship half an hour later, while we are busy stacking captured weapons on the plaza. I’ve never hated any one group of my own podhead community as much as I loathe the Space-Air-Land commandos that come trotting down the ramp of their Blackfly, clad head to toe in HEBA suits.

“They’ve been in bug suits all along,” I say to Sergeant Fallon. “They spent the last week in stealth and sneaking around while we were busy sticking our collective dicks into the local beehives.”

“The term you are looking for is ‘cannon fodder,’” Sergeant Fallon says. “Motherfucker used us as bait. We were the diversion. So his SOCOM heroes could sneak around undetected and stick nukes everywhere while the Shrikes were busy chasing us down.”

Major Masoud brings up the rear. He’s in a bug suit as well, but he’s carrying his helmet under his arm. He stops at the top of the ramp and looks around with an unsmiling face. Then he puts the helmet on his head, and a second later, the personality projector built into the HEBA suits makes his face appear on the outside of the helmet, making it look like the bug suit dome has an actual visor. Then he trots down the ramp and steps onto the ash-covered asphalt of the admin plaza. I throw the M-66 in my hands onto a pile of identical weapons and walk over to where the SEALs are getting their bearings.

“Lieutenant,” Major Masoud says. “I’m happy that my instinct about you was correct. You almost pulled this off without the SEAL platoon.”

I have the sudden impulse to unhook my PDW from its carrying sling and put a hundred-round burst into the major’s face. But with Halley alive, my sense of self-preservation has returned, and I have no interest in getting shot on the spot by his SEALs in this irradiated shithole.