Allied Powers, page 26
Evans’ eyes narrowed, but he didn’t try to argue, even though I could tell he wanted to. Instead, he took his anger out on the company commander he’d been crouching beside, grabbing the man by the arm and yanking him upward.
“Grafton, you heard what Colonel Clanton said…get Alpha moving and pass the word down! Top!” he yelled, waving over at his first sergeant on the other side of the steps. “Get that ammo pallet loaded on the Hemet and get it on the fucking road!”
I was bouncing from one foot to the other like a three-year-old who had to pee, waiting for Quinn and the others to come out of the front entrance, the thump-thump-thump of the tank gunfire a distracting background music. So distracting I almost wet my pants when Quinn dropped out of the second-story window and hit the pavement in a superhero landing ten feet in front of me. The rest of the team followed him, the combined impacts cracking the sidewalk. Pops was last, and stumbled just a step.
“Damn leg,” he murmured.
“Where are we going, sir?” Dossie asked, working out a kink in his knee joint.
“The White House,” I told him, though I had my PA speakers turned up so they could all hear, whether or not the jamming scrambled our radios. I was interrupted by the scream of jets, the echoing rumble from the ground, drawing my eyes upward.
“Fast movers,” Pops said.
The F-35’s were riding high, at least two thousand feet up, coming in at just under supersonic, their ordnance separating like seed pods lofted on the wind. They disappeared from view behind the side of the Capitol building, but the explosions shook the ground and rattled windows even half a mile away.
The A-10’s weren’t nearly as subtle, low and slow and Godawfully loud. The F-35’s were dim silhouettes even on thermal and infrared, but the Warthogs glowed like the dying embers of a fire on a dark night. A plasma blast coming from the ground passed within a few yards of the lead plane, the wave of heat from the near miss sending the A-10 tumbling off to the side. The other birds in the formation had to bank away to avoid colliding with the lead, and one wound up flying right into a barrage of eye-searing beams of energy.
I didn’t have to look away from the explosion, my eyes guarded from the glare by the automatic polarization of my visor, but I wished I could have. I’d called those pilots in and now one of them was dead. I wanted to call them off, wanted to warn them away, but the Air Guard pilots knew their duty and knew what I couldn’t allow myself to accept, that their lives were less important than the mission. They went lower, and Hellfire missiles streaked away from the hardpoints under their wings to strike out of sight again. The chain of gut-punch blasts broke a few of the windows this time, and sent the unarmored infantry huddling lower beneath their barricades. A halo of yellow-tinged light rose above the Capitol dome, as if one of those false, fusion sunrises had made it to the ground.
“We’re going through that?” McCain asked, and even a Navy SEAL could be forgiven if his voice broke just a little.
“As close as we have to,” I confirmed. “Move out…and follow me.”
Yeah, I know, I wasn’t supposed to do this sort of shit anymore. Sue me. It was the end of the world, and I meant to go down fighting.
Why the hell am I doing this? We can’t win. Even if we kill every single one of these motherfuckers, our space cover is probably gone, and there’ll be millions more of the Bugs on their way, and they’ll keep coming until we’re all dead. It’s just what they do.
I shouldn’t have let myself think that way, not when I was leading my people into battle, but the thoughts wouldn’t go away. Maybe it was the utter carnage surrounding us. We were moving parallel to Pennsylvania Avenue, too damned close to the airstrikes but blocked off by the mass of what was left of the buildings along the road. There wasn’t much. The Paveways and Hellfires had taken the front off of half of them, the fires consuming the rest, and now they were less cover than concealment. Cars were burning in parking lots, some from their fuel tanks catching fire, some from their batteries.
There would have come a day when that wouldn’t have happened, when the Helta-tech superconductor batteries had replaced all the internal-combustion engines and older EV batteries, all of them holding enough charge to drive a thousand miles, all of them charged by fusion reactors, all of them built to order on fabricators. We would have had this whole system and others besides, would have had the stars. It would have meant the future I’d dreamed of for my kids, and their kids, and if it couldn’t have been heaven because there were humans in it, at least it would have been less like hell.
We’d been robbed of that by a computer built before humans had evolved, the product of the ultimate narcissists, people like Harrel and Vanlandingham writ large and given ultimate power to play with.
My bitter ruminations were interrupted by another swarm of Bug drones, a couple dozen of them, late to the party but called by the same hardwired instinct as their fellows, heading for the mass of others and stumbling across us purely by accident. I saw them out of the corner of my eye about the same time as the helmet’s early-warning system flashed red, telling me all about the thermal and sonic readings that it was fairly certain were a sign of enemy action. The star-bright flare of plasma ripping apart the darkness removed all doubt.
“Contact, left!” I yelled, though there was no way to tell if the transmission went through.
There was no time to give any orders even if I could have been sure they would have been heard, no time to do anything but shoot. We’d loaded up, forever ago, with plasma rounds, sintered metal accelerated by the electromagnetic coil and ignited into a bundle of ionized, burning gas by a laser near the muzzle. On full auto, the rounds were slashes of white light in the night, connecting me to the mass of Bugs like tracers from a machinegun on a night live-fire range.
The things were damned tough to kill, but the plasma rounds chopped through their thick, chitinous armor with a satisfying spray of black blood turned to steam. Well, maybe blood. The things barely had anything I could label as eyes, and they’d been genetically engineered basically from scratch by a supercomputer. Whatever it was, it splattered Jackson-Pollock patterns on the pavement.
I moved as I shot, because movement was life in a fight, sliding to the right, giving the others more of a clear firing arc. More energy beams and the temperature inside my armor soared, hot enough to burn the hairs off the back of my arms and I ducked behind the burning wreckage of a Ford pickup, shuffling from the engine compartment to the tailgate and opening up again.
And just as fast as they’d popped up, they were down, most of them ripped wide open, motionless in pieces on the ground, but a few still writhing, still trying to move until Dossie and Overfield finished them off. There was something macabre about the two Marines walking through the cluster of downed Bugs, putting the coup de grace into the back of their heads, like an H.R. Giger version of some anti-war Vietnam movie, but it was hardly the weirdest thing I’d seen and I had no moral compunction about executing alien warrior drones.
“Everyone okay?” I asked. IFF would normally have told me, but it was useless from the interference.
“Andy.” The voice was Pops, I could tell that even over the PA speakers…and I could also hear the emotion weighing down that single word.
Stomach churning with the expectation of what I’d find, I wound through the maze of dead enemy to where Pops stood, his visor up, tears glinting in his eyes by the light of the fires. At his feet was a Svalinn suit, sprawled out, motionless, half of its chest burned away by a Bug plasma weapon. I didn’t want to know, but I had to. Kneeling beside the suit, I pried open the visor.
Randy Quinn’s unseeing eyes stared back at me.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. Probably seconds, though it felt like hours, like I’d never overcome the emotional inertia, never move again. I didn’t cry. I’m not sure why, maybe because I knew we’d all be joining him soon.
“What…” It was Flagg, and she was crying. “What do we do with him?”
What could we do? There was a thermite charge implanted in the armor’s power pack, but there was no reason to use it. No one was going to steal his armor or desecrate his body. And there was no time for anything else.
“We leave him,” I told her. “We’ll…we’ll come back, after, and get him.”
And every single one of them knew what utter bullshit that was. There’d be no one left to come back.
“Pops,” I said, the words distant, as if coming from someone else, “gonna need you to…”
I couldn’t finish, but I didn’t have to. Pops nodded and shut his visor.
“I got ya’, Andy. Let’s get this over with.”
29
Men and women had seen this before, in ancient Babylon, in Hattusa at the end of the Bronze Age, in Europe when Rome fell, in Poland and Hungary when the Mongols invaded. They’d seen their cities burn, their warriors fall, and thought it was the end of everything.
They’d been wrong. Life continued, humanity went on, and though their world was over, others still existed. Not this time. It wasn’t just the fires consuming our capital city, wasn’t just the burning wreckage of two A-10 Warthogs or the husks of two platoons of tanks scattered through the next two intersections. It wasn’t the thousands, or tens of thousands of dead Bugs, or the knowledge that, even with all those casualties, the vast majority of their force was still intact, still heading for the White House. It was nothing here, not the living, nor the dead, nor the soon-to-be-dead. No, it was what was happening above that doomed us all, what was not only out of our control but beyond our knowledge.
No one spoke. We knew where we were going, what we were facing, and there was nothing left to say. The heat from the destruction lashed at me through the protection of the armor and sweat pooled at the small of my back despite the best efforts of the suit’s cooling systems. I sucked warm water out of the helmet nipple but it wasn’t much comfort, whatever cooling effect it had lost in the efforts of my biological muscles and the suit’s mechanical version, sprinting through piles of wreckage.
I couldn’t hear my footsteps, couldn’t even hear my thoughts over the clangor of the battle, which was a relief. Missiles still rained down at intervals as one squadron after another made strafing runs, but with each pass, more of the planes went down under a thousand shards of starfire slicing upward. It was an even bet whether they’d run out of missiles or planes first.
The front lines of the Bug column had reached the perimeter around the White House, less than half a mile down the road from us, and the armor had gone first, as useless as I thought it would be against the Bugs, as useless as it had been against Venezuelan guerillas armed with Russian anti-armor missiles. The defensive barriers down here were the same as back at the Capitol, concrete barricades arranged inside the fence line, though the fences were gone now, ripped apart by incoming and outgoing fire. So was much of the front façade of the White House, white turned to charred black, the whole thing nearly hidden behind drifting smoke and haze.
“Second is still holding out,” Pops said, coming up beside me as we emerged out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, close enough now that we didn’t have to worry about the airstrikes.
He was right about that, at least if the swathe of white pulses streaming out of the front barriers was any indication.
“Not for long,” I said, unable to keep the bitter cynicism from my voice. “For every Bug they kill, a hundred more take its place.” As if to demonstrate, I fired a long burst at the trailing edge of the Bug lines, where the huge swarm tailed off into ragged columns. Three of the things fell, yet the others never turned to acknowledge, focused on the goal.
The rest of the team seemed to take the action as an invitation to open up, and I didn’t try to stop them, but once we’d killed a dozen of the Bugs, our ammo drums were empty.
“Then what’s the fuckin’ point?” Pops wondered, switching out a fresh magazine in his rifle. “Why’d we bother to come down here?”
“This is where the fight is, Mark.” I tried to look eye to eye with him, though I wasn’t sure if he saw mine through my visor. “Where else would we be?”
“There’s First Battalion!” Broadwell yelled, pointing across the street, off to the side of the intersection.
The IFF still wasn’t up, but thermal readings convinced my HUD that those vague shapes in the smoke-filled street were indeed Svalinn armor. Evans was smart, which was more than I could say for myself. He hadn’t just rushed up into the rear of the Bugs, hadn’t headed straight for the defenses, either. Instead, he’d strung his people out along the other side of the road, stretched out over a half a mile, and was laying down fire perpendicular to the defensive perimeter, thinning out the enemy.
This time, though, they noticed.
There didn’t seem to be any letup of the fire directed at the White House, but there didn’t have to be, not with tens of thousands of Bugs that couldn’t even fire over their own ranks. They turned that frustrated energy on First Battalion, and Rangers died.
I sucked in a breath, about to order the team to go down there and join them, to get this over with, when static crackled in my helmet earphones. The comm panel told me it was a tight-beam message, powerful enough to cut through the EM interference. And coming from orbit.
“Andy Clanton.” It was tinny, far away, horribly accented…and yet, I recognized that rough, harsh female voice.
“Cartimandua?” I asked, voice breaking with disbelief.
“Stay clear of the enemy,” the Tevynian admiral instructed me. “We have air support incoming.”
She’d barely spoken the words when the scream of jets sounded overhead, the pitch, the tone, the power qualitatively different than the F-35’s and A-10’s. These were nuclear-pumped turbojets. Shuttles.
The delta shapes broke through the clouds, their exhaust a red halo around the engines, one squadron, then four, then six, and more till I stopped counting. Lasers speared downward, not the faint red or green of a sighting laser but high-energy bursts that ionized the atmosphere in their wake, creating their own lightning bolt to accompany the cracks of thunder. Where they struck, Bugs vaporized, and pavement exploded beneath them, turning the broad avenue into the molten road to hell.
The lasers fired so close together, so many of the damned things, that there seemed no interruption between one pass and the next, just one long, continuous roll of rumbling thunder. I almost didn’t notice the first of them land, wouldn’t have except it came down nearly on top of us, belly jets roaring, sending up billowing clouds of dust and debris.
I didn’t have to shade my eyes against it, though I blinked involuntarily as larger fragments struck my visor. More of them were touching down all around us, but I stared at this closest one as the belly ramp opened and bulky figures in what looked very much like the clunky, makeshift Chernobog powered exoskeletons clomped down it. The first of them came to what looked for all the world like the position of attention in front of me, holding his heavy machinegun at present arms in salute before one hand flipped up his visor.
“Nice to see you again, Colonel Clanton,” Major Tramplemain of the Croatoan Royal Guard snapped off, a thin smile beneath his mustache. “Where do you want us?”
The path to the White House was a maze of death and destruction, melted and fractured pavement mixed with the remains of Bug drones and American soldiers. They were all blackened, twisted flesh and metal and I couldn’t always tell where one began and the other ended. Progress through it was maddeningly slow, and I was tempted more than once to leave the others behind and hop from one island of stability to another, ten or fifteen feet at a jump, but that would have meant leaving the Croatoan troops behind…and we were going to need them.
The shuttles were still making air support passes, scraping the edges of the Bug remnants, but for warrior drones, the Bugs weren’t dumb. They knew their best chance was to push forward, work themselves too close to the Second Battalion positions for the air support to target them, and that was exactly what they’d done. I thought of ants again, of them forming bridges through the air with just their bodies to reach wasp nests. That was what they were doing a quarter-mile ahead, throwing themselves at the barricades, stacking their dead bodies in the way, to block the crew-served KE guns and the Javelin missile launchers of the conventional infantry.
The Rangers had moved forward to try to strike from behind the shield of corpses, but most of them were gone, brought down in a crossfire of plasma that had taken down as many Bugs as it had our people, but the enemy didn’t care. They weren’t individuals and if they killed their own to get to ours, that was the cost of victory.
It wasn’t working. They were down to a few thousand effectives now, a fraction of what they’d started with, and whether they knew what was happening upstairs, I wasn’t sure, but they were desperate to get into the White House, to take out what they perceived to be our national leadership, to weaken us and make it harder for us to keep fighting back. And if I’m being brutally honest, if it hadn’t been for Allie and Zack being inside that shelter, I would have let them. Instead, I was leading two hundred and change Croatoan armored troops through the broken streets in a mad dash to save the biggest traitors our country had ever known.
I hadn’t had much time to talk to Tramplemain, but the basics had been clear. The message we’d sent from the Bellerophon to the Tevynians had gone through and they’d sent a cruiser to Croatan immediately, thanks to the foresight of Cartimandua. The woman was damned smart, particularly for someone living in a culture that had been raised from the level of Bronze-Age barbarians to a star-faring civilization in living memory. If I hadn’t been hopelessly in love with Julie, I might have considered Cartimandua’s offer to hook up and have a kid or two.
