Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(89)

“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.