Angles of Attack (43 page)

She assigns her ship to the middle contact and toggles into her flight channel again.

“Everyone, pursue them right down to the deck. Their retardation mechanisms will deploy at twenty thousand, and they’ll slow down for the landing. Hit them right when they land. Don’t give them a chance to disperse.”

She flicks the display to a different screen and checks her stores. “Goddamn, do I wish we had some missiles on this thing.”

“We’re unarmed?”

“Not totally. We have the cannons. But these are training ships, Andrew. We do flight instruction and systems familiarization with them. Not much of a call for leaving rocket pods on the wing pylons.”

“Please tell me the armory is full,” I say.

“It’s always full,” she replies. “Takes too long to get them back to alert status otherwise.”

“Best news of the day,” I say.

We chase the Lanky into the atmosphere above the northern continent. The Lanky is falling ballistically, and Halley can’t follow in the same way because the drop ship would burn to ashes from the generated heat, so by the time we’re passing through the troposphere, the Lanky is several hundred kilometers ahead of us and still increasing distance. Once the worst of the buffeting stops, I unbuckle my harness and make my way into the cargo compartment.

“You got some instruction on these when they trained you for the Fomalhaut deployment,” I shout. Every pair of eyes in the cargo hold is on me as I hold up one of the M-80 Lanky zappers from the drop ship’s armory. “Don’t bother with the fléchette rifles unless that’s all you have left. Takes too long to make a dent with those. Aim for the joints at the knees and the arms, and the spot where the necks would be if those sons of bitches had any. And take every rocket for the MARS launchers we have. Shoot the armor-piercing first, then HEAT, then thermobaric. Leave the dual-purpose shit for last when you’ve run out of everything else. Point-blank, they’ll do a Lanky in just fine. Use ’em in pairs.”

“How many of those things have you killed?” one of the sergeants yells.

“Hundreds,” I say. “Thousands. With my radio. They’re plenty hard to kill, but you can kill them just fine.”

Three of the other sergeants get out of their jump seats to help out, and we start emptying the armory, handing out rocket launchers and heavy anti-Lanky rifles to the platoon. I wish we had a week to give these HD troopers some more training on these things, and I wish we had three times as much ammo in the armory as we do, but this is what we have right now, and all the time we have to prepare.

At five thousand feet, we break out of the cloud cover. The hundreds of square miles of Detroit are spread out below us, the old city ringed by neat clusters of hundred-story PRC blocks, row after row of towers. The part of Detroit I dropped into five years ago and almost got killed in was toward the old part of town, in the old first- and second-generation PRCs that still resembled a regular city somewhat. The part of Detroit we are descending into now has a whole different feel to it. The scale of these fifth-gen PRCs is overwhelming, each block a self-contained unit of four towers that reach one hundred floors into the night sky, over a thousand vertical feet.

“Try to make contact with whatever HD battalion is closest,” I say. “The 365th out of Dayton, maybe. Tell them we need everyone out here who can hold a rifle. And tell them what’s coming their way, if they don’t know already.”

When the Lanky seedpod hits the ground, it’s like the finger of a grumpy god reaching out and shaking things up for the mortals. The pod slams into the dirt maybe a hundred meters from the outer perimeter of a fifth-generation housing block, four hundred-floor towers forming a square with ten-meter-tall concrete walls on the outside. We hear the concussion of the impact from several kilometers away and through the multilayered polyplast of the cockpit.

“We have footfall,” Halley sends back to
Regulus
. “Lanky seedpod touched down at forty-two degrees, nineteen minutes fifty-three seconds north, eighty-three degrees, zero-two minutes, forty-two seconds west, 1119 Zulu local time.”

The Lanky ship hits nose-first. It’s much squatter and shorter relative to the shape of its mother ship, so it doesn’t stay standing on end for long. The whole thing totters and then begins to lean over in what feels like slow motion. Then the end that was pointing skyward falls toward the nearby PRC towers and crashes down. The Lanky pod is longer than the distance between the outer walls of the PRC block and the impact point, and the mass of the pod bulls into the junction between the wall and the closest PRC tower. There’s a thunderclap that sounds like a fuel-air bomb just went off, and the area is obscured by an expanding cloud of concrete dust and flying debris. Halley puts the Dragonfly into a shallow dive and streaks toward the crash site.

When the dust clears a little, the front third of the seedpod is buried in the corner of the residence tower. Thirty meters of concrete wall are pulverized underneath the mass of the pod. Halley switches on the searchlights at the front of the drop ship’s nose. They cut through the dusty darkness to reveal three Lankies stalking away from the wreck, into the space between the tower blocks.

“Contact,” Halley calls out. “Three hostiles on the ground. They are in the middle of a civilian residential area. I am engaging.”

Halley pulls the drop ship into a hover maybe three hundred meters from the crashed pod and the ruined barrier wall of the PRC block. She flicks on the searchlights on the nose of the drop ship, which instantly pierce the dusty darkness with blindingly white fingers of light. The Lankies have skin the color of eggshells. Under the glare of the Dragonfly’s lights, they are as obvious as buildings.

“Motherfuckers are
big
,” Halley says. All I can do is grunt my agreement.

I’ve seen many Lankies, and while these appear no different from those I’ve seen in the past, the human habitat surrounding them gives them a whole new terrifying sense of scale. Two of them are walking away from the wreckage of their pod with brisk, long strides, and the tops of their cranial shields are six stories off the ground.

“Hold on to something back there,” Halley shouts over the intercom to the grunts in the back of the Dragonfly. Then she guns the engines and accelerates at full throttle. She swings the nose of the ship to the left, past the nearest undamaged residence tower, and loops back around into the plaza between the buildings. She flips a few overhead switches, and when she starts talking again, her voice is booming out of the speakers for the external public-address system of the drop ship, amplified a few thousand times.

“Seek shelter. Get indoors and away from the windows. Go to the upper floors. Get out of the plaza!”

The scene below is utter pandemonium. The plaza between the four towers is a big square of maybe two hundred meters on each side, and it’s packed with people who are retreating from the sight of the Lankies like a swift ebb pulling away from a shoreline. I see the muzzle flashes of gunfire, the sounds too distant and the cockpit glass too thick for me to hear them, as some of the people in the crowd open fire with whatever weapons they have on hand.

Halley pulls the Dragonfly into a hover again between the two nearest residence towers, each reaching three hundred meters into the night sky, a hundred floors of tiny apartments stacked on top of each other. We are close enough that I can see people in the windows staring at us wide-eyed, the position strobes of the drop ship illuminating the scene in regular sharp flashes of red and orange.

Halley pops the safety cover off the launch button on her flight stick.

“Let’s rock,” she says.

The heavy antiarmor cannons on the underside of the Dragonfly rap out a thundering staccato: boom-boom-boom. The reports echo in the artificial canyon between the buildings and reverberate off the concrete surfaces all around us until it sounds like an entire wing of drop ships just opened fire. Tracers shoot across the plaza and smack into the nearest Lanky in a shower of sparks and flying shrapnel. I realize that Halley made her loop around the towers to get a clear shot at the Lankies, to minimize the risk of these heavy cannon shells hitting the buildings instead. She works her trigger like a musician timing a beat.

The Lanky shrieks that unearthly wail that has chased me through many dreams in the last few years. In this place, it sounds utterly foreign. The sound is so earsplittingly loud that it almost drowns out the thunder from the Dragonfly’s weapons. It flails its long, spindly limbs and ducks from the hail of gunfire pouring from Halley’s autocannons. Halley doesn’t give it any reprieve. She keeps up a methodic staccato of bursts that rake the Lanky’s head and torso. Several cannon shells ricochet off the cranial shield that makes the Lankies look a little like old Earth dinosaurs. The tracers careen into the darkness and explode against unseen obstacles in brilliant little bursts of white-hot sparks.

The Lanky turns around and strides away from the cannon fire in long, halting steps. Halley shifts her fire and sends a stream of tracer shells into its lower body. The Lanky stumbles, and its own momentum carries it forward. It flails wildly as it crashes to the concrete of the plaza. Its head hits the wall of the nearby residence tower and tears a three-meter gash into the concrete facade. When the Lanky hits the ground, a cloud of concrete dust billows up around it.

The two other Lankies are crossing the plaza in long, thundering strides, away from the drop ship and its lethal cannon fire. Halley fires another burst into the Lanky on the ground and then swings the nose of the Dragonfly around. The spindly bastards can move amazingly fast for something that large. Not twenty seconds have passed since Halley first opened fire, and one of the remaining pair of Lankies is already all the way across the plaza and disappearing behind another one of the residence towers. The other is right in the middle of the plaza, stalking after its companion in the biggest hurry I’ve ever seen one move. Halley puts the thumb down on her flight stick button, and the cannons spit out their hail of red-hot fire and death again.

The shells pepper the Lanky’s torso and the backs of its legs. Its stride falters, and the huge alien stumbles and falls to the ground with a dull and resonant concussion. Halley keeps up her fire—short, deadly accurate bursts of two or three shells at a time, using the entire ship to aim the guns. There’s a cluster of small one-story buildings where the Lanky fell—food-distribution booths or vendor stalls maybe—and the Lanky’s enormous mass flattens them as if they were empty ration boxes. It tries to scramble to its feet in the rubble, but Halley rakes its legs with another burst, and it crashes back down to the ground, wailing its shaky and warbling cry at deafening volume. The unearthly sound reverberates from the concrete canyons nearby. I’ve always wondered what that noise would sound like in the middle of a major city, and now I don’t have to wonder anymore. It sounds like something from an old monster feature on the Networks.

“Goddammit,” Halley shouts. “Will you just fucking
die
already?”

But the Lanky doesn’t do us the favor. Instead, it rights itself once more and scoops up what looks like half a ton of random debris with a long and spindly arm. Then it flings the load of shattered bits of concrete wall and corrugated roofing at us from maybe fifty meters away.