Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(88)

“He’s going to hit atmo,” someone sends. “My God, what if he doesn’t break up?”

“Multiple separations on the Lanky ship,” Minsk announces.

The camera feed shows smaller objects ejecting from the undamaged side of the hull. They come out in spurts, like the arterial blood of a wounded animal.

“Oh, God,” I say. “He’s tossing out his seedpods. There’s a dozen or more of those bastards in each of those.”

“All units, move in and track the debris,” Regulus orders. “Fire at will.”

Avenger still has air/space defense missiles in her magazines. She starts launching salvos of them, fast and angry fireflies that race out to intercept the seedpods before they can make it into the atmosphere and release their cargo onto Earth. But it’s too little, too late. Some of the missiles smash into the seedpods, but each of them is the size of a destroyer and seemingly just as hard-shelled as its mother ship. Most missiles fail to track or don’t catch up with the seedpods as they hurtle into the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, trailing bright plasma flares.

“Multiple incursions. Tracking twenty-plus pods in the atmosphere,” says Regulus.

I don’t need a camera to see what’s happening right outside our cockpit windows. We are in high orbit above the North American continent, and right now there are hundreds of twenty-meter-tall and hard-to-kill Lankies falling down to Earth in their resilient settlement pods.

“All drop ships, this is Regulus. Initiate drop sequence and follow the seedpods down, wherever they fall. Follow them down and kill those sons of bitches. All drop ships, initiate drop sequence,” says the Regulus tactical officer.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Halley says. She seizes her throttle lever and puts her thumb on the launch button.

“Whisky and Delta wings, follow me,” she says. “We’ll assign targets on the way down. Dropping in three, two, one. Drop.”

She punches the launch button, and the Dragonfly drops away from the Regulus. Halley opens up the throttles and brings the nose around and down with a satisfied little shout.

“Tallyho. Lock and load back there, folks. You’ll be in the dirt and killing shit in fifteen.”





CHAPTER 25





“This is going to be a mess on the ground,” Halley says.

We are streaking through the upper layer of the atmosphere, and as far as my field of view through the armored cockpit windows reaches, I can see seedpods falling toward Earth, dozens of them bleeding off speed and trailing long streams of superheated plasma. It’s almost misleading to call them “pods” like we’ve been doing all along, when all we saw of them were the husks on conquered colony worlds after Lanky landings. They’re huge and cylindrical, like blunt miniature versions of their host ship, but even in miniature they are hundreds of meters long. It’s like an entire fleet of capital ships falling out of the sky over North America.

The computer maps the descending seedpods and projects their trajectories on the navigation map.

“Everyone pick a pod to follow down,” Halley sends to the rest of the drop-ship flight. “Whoever’s in range. Tag yourselves on TacLink when you claim your target so we don’t double up by accident.”

There are three pods careening through the atmosphere more or less in front of Halley’s Delta Five. Her hand does a rapid dance on the navigation screen.

“Labrador, the Minneapolis metroplex, or Detroit,” she says. “Where do you want to party tonight?”

“Anything but Detroit,” I say.

“That one’s the easiest trajectory for me to follow,” she says. “Detroit it is. Sorry.”

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.”