Angles of Attack (46 page)

“MARS rockets,” Sergeant Fallon bellows.

I know we brought maybe two rockets per launcher, and we used up most of our supply on a single Lanky already, but there’s nothing else left to do other than run away and let the Lankies wreak havoc down here.

I shoulder my M-80, which seems ludicrously inadequate for this scenario. Then I grab a new pair of shells and stuff them into the barrels. Next to me, our four MARS gunners take a knee and aim at the closest Lanky, fifty meters away. The noise and chaos all around us are apocalyptic.

“On my mark. Three, two, one,
fire
!” Sergeant Fallon shouts. Four launchers disgorge their payloads, and the closest Lanky is blown off its three-toed feet by the impacts. It goes down in a flailing tangle of limbs.

I hear the thundering staccato of a heavy machine gun. Tracers streak across the plaza and over the heads of the crowd. They lay into the Lankies and deflect off their tough hides in puffs and sparks. I look for the source of the fire and see a machine gun mount on a tripod, set up on the low roof of one of the administrative buildings in the center of the plaza. The people manning the gun are wearing the same olive-drab fatigues as the militia soldiers I met in the atrium of the tower.
Lazarus Brigade
. I have a brief flashback to a hot summer night five years ago, when a gun mount just like that hosed one of our drop ships out of the sky and killed half my squad when we went out to rescue the pilot.

Everyone is firing at the Lankies now—HD troopers, armed civilians, and the uniformed militiamen with the canister-fed automatic cannon. I load and fire, load and fire, again and again, until the ammo loops on my armor are empty. The Lankies are backing away from the volume of fire that’s getting thrown their way. They cluster in front of the barrier wall, safety in numbers and proximity. Then they start climbing the retaining wall, which is only half as tall as they are.

“Coming in hot,” Halley shouts over the platoon channel.

“I thought you have no cannon shells left,” I shout back.

“I don’t,” she says. “But I have seventy tons at five hundred knots.”

I almost drop my rifle in shock. “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t do this.”

The distant wailing of the Dragonfly engines increases in pitch and volume. It’s coming from the east, a drop ship at full throttle and well above the speed of sound. Then it appears in the sky between the two eastern towers, engines aglow. Halley banks the ship smoothly and elegantly and shoots right through the space between the towers. Then there’s the muffled sound of a low explosion, and Dragonfly Delta Five streaks across the plaza like a huge missile and plows into the barrier dam the Lankies are climbing onto.

The fireball that blooms into the sky and outward from the barrier dam illuminates the whole plaza in a furious shade of orange. The Lankies disappear in the inferno, crushed and flung aside by the impact force of millions of joules, far more punch than all the MARS rockets we are carrying on our backs combined.

I can’t even find the strength to shout, or cry, or do anything but stare at the fireball and the enormous gash the drop ship has torn into the top of the barrier wall. The heat wave from the explosion washes across the plaza and over me, and I don’t even flinch when my helmet lowers the face shield automatically to protect my eyes.

“Good chute,” I hear Sergeant Fallon over the squad channel. “Good chute. Hot damn, that was some warrior shit.”

I look up and see the white triple canopy of a fleet emergency parachute in the sky beyond the damaged tower. From the chute’s suspension lines dangles the cockpit-escape module of a drop ship.

The sudden relief I feel makes my knees buckle, and I sit down on the ground, hard. Sergeant Fallon walks up to me, rifle still at the ready and pointed downrange. Then she takes one hand off the gun and pats me on the shoulder.

“Relax, Romeo. She’s fine.”

“Can we just please stop killing shit tonight by flying into it?” I shout, and Sergeant Fallon laughs as she walks off.

The capsule goes down in the no-man’s-land between the PRCs, where the old Detroit was never fully razed and the new Detroit just went up around it in fortified islands. We find the chute and the escape module five hundred yards past the barrier dam between the towers. When we reach the capsule, Halley has already popped the explosive bolts that separate the halves of the module. She’s sitting in the rubble in front of the capsule on a section of the parachute that saved her life.

“This is the lousiest honeymoon ever,” she says when I come running up to her.

“I want to fucking punch you for that,” I say.

She looks at me with a tired smile. “ ‘Don’t do this,’ ” she says, repeating my last statement to her on the radio in a gently mocking tone. “I know how and when to work an ejection-seat handle, Andrew. I am not a moron.”

I hold out my hand to help her up, and she takes it.

“I guess we’re even now,” I say.

When we get back to the plaza, there are armored vehicles in front of the administration building, and at least a hundred of the militia troopers in OD green fatigues are securing the site and managing the flow of civilians. The other squads of Sergeant Fallon’s platoon are nowhere to be seen. Some of the green-clad militia spot us as we walk up the access ramp to the plaza, and two armored vehicles with heavy-machine-gun mounts on them come toward us.

“Oh, sure,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Now they show up. After we’ve done all the work.”

The armored vehicles stop in front of us, and their remote-controlled gun turrets swivel to cover us with their muzzles. We raise our hands slightly and keep them away from our weapons.

The tail hatches of the armored mules open, and more militia troopers file out and form a semicircle around us. Then the passenger hatch on the lead mule creaks open, and a tall black female trooper sticks her upper body out of the hatch to address us.

“Put your weapons and helmets on the ground, please,” she says.

Halley pops the retention strap on her leg holster, pulls out her pistol, and chucks it onto the ground in front of us. Then she looks at me and shrugs.

“Their turf,” she says.

“Homeworld Defense don’t just give up their guns,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I have no interest in getting hog-tied and shot like a dog in a dirty basement somewhere.”

The female militia trooper nods at Halley. “Guess it’s true what they say about selection,” she says. “All the smart ones go fleet.”

Something about her face rings a bell in the back of my head. It’s still dark, and she’s thirty meters away, but I can see tattoos on her face. An unusual tribal pattern. I’ve seen it once before, almost five years ago.

“Corporal Jackson?” I say. She startles.

I remove my helmet and drop it at my feet.

“Grayson,” I say. “We were in the 365th together.”

The woman I knew five years ago climbs out of her vehicle and comes trotting over to us. She is wearing the same fatigues all the other militia troops are wearing. Her collars bear the gold-leaf insignia of a major.

“Yes, we were,” she says to me, and smiles a very sparing little smile. “Yes, we were. Seems this night is full of surprises.”

“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Sergeant Fallon removes her own helmet and flashes a grin. “Kameelah fucking Jackson. Still got that big stupid knife you were hauling everywhere?”

Jackson laughs out loud. The teeth she flashes are still perfectly straight and white. “I do, Master Sergeant. It’s in the truck.” Then her smile fades a little. “I’m still going to have to collect your weapons and your comms gear, please.”

“Are we POWs now?” Halley asks. “We just saved your bacon down here, you know. Should count for something, shouldn’t it?”

“You’re not POWs,” Jackson says. “You are making a donation to our cause. And no,” she addresses Sergeant Fallon. “We’re not going to hog-tie you and shoot you like a dog in a basement somewhere. So unsling your goddamn weapons already, and we can have our little reunion sitting down.”

The militia troops lead us to the back of one of the armored vehicles. They’re courteous and surprisingly professional about the whole thing. We surrender all our comms gear and weapons, and Corporal Jackson—I have a hard time thinking of my old squad mate as a major despite the rank insignia on her collars—gathers everything and deactivates the electronic stuff expertly.

“How on Earth did you end up falling in with this lot?” Sergeant Fallon asks her as we file into the armored troop transport.

“Long story,” Jackson says. “After Detroit a few years back, I went looking for the people who sprung that ambush on us. And I found them.”

She waits until we’ve all taken our seats and then straps herself into the jump seat closest to the door and its control panel.

“Funny thing, too. I was going to find them and kill the whole lot of them. For Stratton and Paterson, you know?”

I nod when she looks at me. Stratton and Paterson died the night Sergeant Fallon lost her leg and I got wounded. That was my last drop with the Territorial Army before I got to join the fleet, and hardly a week goes by where I don’t revisit the battle in my dreams, and sometimes my waking hours.

“But you didn’t,” I say.

“No,” she replies, and smiles that enigmatic smile of hers I remember well. “I didn’t. Was going to, for sure. But then I got captured and met the general. He was a colonel back then.”

“And he talked you into joining? You, Kameelah Jackson, the baddest corporal in the 365th?” Sergeant Fallon chuckles. “The man sure can talk, I’ll give him that.”

“Turns out we’ve been shooting at the wrong people all those years,” Jackson says. “Ain’t ashamed to admit I was wrong. About a bunch of things.”

“So you’re the general’s right hand now?” I ask. She looks at me and flashes a quick grin.

“Among other things,” she says. “Among other things.”

The armored troop transport rumbles along for the better part of an hour. Deprived of all our technology, we are blind in the windowless back—not that I would know my way around Detroit even if I had a view. When the transport finally comes to a stop, Sergeant Fallon is asleep, or pretending to be. I am bone-tired after the last few days of constant fear of death and combat, and I want to fall asleep, but my anxious brain won’t let me. The last time I was down here, among the same people, I didn’t get to leave under my own power. I was airlifted out, with two fléchettes in my left side.