"Understood. Alarm set for fifteen and five."
Avery knew the Lt. Commander could use the rest. Like the marines and most of the militiamen, she hadn't slept at all in the forty-eight hours since the aliens' attack on Gladsheim.
And Avery suspected she hadn't gotten more than a few hours of sleep a night since they'd ambushed the aliens on the freighter almost a month ago. Avery was trained to think tactically.
But he appreciated that Jilan's responsibility for strategic planning could be equally exhausting.
In the end, the plan to retake the Tiara had required both their expertise.
Of the seven grease buckets hurtling toward the Tiara, only the ones on the number two and six strands (Avery's and Jilan's, respectively) carried militia strike teams. The other five were empty—decoys rigged with claymores linked to motion-tracking sensors. On Avery's recommendation, these five buckets would arrive at the Tiara early. Once they stopped inside the orbital's coupling stations, gantries would automatically extend. Any aliens curious enough to cycle the gantries' airlocks and inspect the buckets would get a nasty surprise: a narrow cone of round metal balls, exploding outward with lethal force.
The claymores' projectiles would also shred the gantries' thin, flexible walls. But after stations one, three, four, five, and seven were cleared of hostiles, the gantries were no longer necessary. The containers full of evacuees were going to pass through the Tiara without stopping.
The previous evening, slightly more than two hundred fifty thousand people had packed into two hundred thirty-six freight containers in Utgard's seven elevator depots—secured themselves in a mix of vehicle and Welcome Wagon seats the JOTUNs had furiously fastened to the containers' floors. Already twenty-eight of the containers were on the strands in fourteen coupled pairs. Every five minutes, another seven pairs would begin to rise. And if everything went to plan, in less than ninety minutes from Loki's first mass-driver shot, all the evacuees would be off the planet's surface.
Of course, this was just the start of the evacuees' harrowing journey. Not only did the container pairs need to make it through the Tiara unmolested, but they also had to complete a much longer glide up the strands—almost halfway to the counterweight arc—in order to gain the momentum required to meet up with the propulsion pods Sif had prepositioned. Throughout all of this the Tiara would have to remain perfectly balanced, even though the stress on its strands would be well beyond their tested limits. Loki would have his hands full, and Avery hoped the AI was as capable as Jilan believed it was.
The Staff Sergeant felt his COM-pad buzz inside his assault vest, alerting him that the decoy buckets were beginning their deceleration into the Tiara. Fifteen minutes to go, Avery thought, patting and pulling at his vest's pouches to make sure his weapons' magazines were properly stowed. He had his battle rifle barrel-up between his knees, but he'd exchanged his usual M6 pistol for an M7 submachine gun from Jilan's cache. With its high rate of fire and compact size, the M7 was perfect for close-quarters combat.
The pouch that held the submachine gun's sixty-round magazines was backed with hook- and-loop material. Avery ripped it from his vest and adjusted its angle so the magazines were an easy, cross-chest pull. As he pressed the pouch firmly into position, he felt something dry and brittle crunch against his chest. Gingerly, he pulled one of Captain Ponder's Sweet William cigars from an interior pocket. He had forgotten it was there.
In a final briefing on the parliament ballroom's balcony, the Captain had given one cigar each from his dwindling supply to Avery and Byrne. "You men light them when they're safe,"
Ponder had said, nodding toward the elevator anchors and the civilians gathering in the surrounding sheds. It wasn't until now that Avery realized the Captain had purposefully not included himself in their celebratory smoke. Ponder had known he wasn't going to make it, and the truth was, his Staff Sergeants' chances weren't that much better.
Byrne and a group of twenty volunteers from the 2nd platoon squads were currently holed up at Utgard's reactor-complex, guarding Loki's data center. JOTUNs had carefully unearthed the driver's magnetic-acceleration coils while the alien warship was busy burning Gladsheim, and Loki had adjusted the driver's gimble so it was aimed at Utgard's skyline. Once the mass driver fired, the ONI PSI assumed the aliens would identify its power source and launch a retaliatory strike. It was up to Byrne to make sure they didn't succeed—to keep Loki's data center safe until the evacuation was complete.
At the five-minute mark, Avery's grease bucket jerked as its maglev pads pulled from the strand and its brake wheels engaged, slowing the bucket's progress. The transition was enough to rouse Forsell, and as the recruit blinked away his slumber, Avery motioned for him to tap Jenkins' shoulder—pass the wake-up signal around the bucket. One by one the recruits revived, retrieved their MA5s where they had fallen to the rubberized floor, and checked their ammunition.
"Loki just increased the intervals. Seven minutes between boxes," Jilan's tired voice crackled in Avery's helmet. "We'll have to hold out a little longer than we planned."
Avery did a quick calculation. By now there would be upwards of fifty containers on the strands. Their combined weight must have put too much drag on the Tiara. If it drifted too far from its geosynchronous position, Harvest's rotation would yank it from the sky, wrapping the strands around the equator like threads around a spool.
"Everyone listen up," Avery barked. "Watch your teammates. Check your corners. Tiara's got limited power. Targets will be hard to spot."
Avery had run the militiamen through the assault plan multiple times: both teams would clear their coupling stations then press out and secure the far ends of the Tiara. Once that was done, they would drive any surviving aliens back toward the center, trap them around the number-four station, and wipe them out.
"We'll meet you in the middle," Jilan said. "And Johnson?"
"Ma'am?"
"Good luck."
Avery unclipped his seat belt and rose to his feet. Through the interior windows, he could see the rate of the cable's passage slow, revealing a herringbone pattern in the strands' carbon nano-fiber construction. The bucket came to such a smooth stop—so unlike the jarring, airborne insertions Avery had experienced time and time again on other missions—that he worried his groggy recruits might not get the adrenaline surge they needed. "First platoon!" he bellowed. "Ready weapons and stand to!"
Forsell, Jenkins, and the others pulled their MA5s' charging handles and thumbed the rifles' fire-selection switches to full automatic. As they stood, these sons of Harvest met their Staff Sergeant's steely gaze with equal resolution, and Avery realized he had underestimated his recruits' preparedness. They're ready, he thought, now I want them to remember.
"Look at the man beside you," Avery said. "He is your brother. He holds your life in his hands, and you hold his. You will not give up! You will not stop moving forward!"
The bucket swayed against the cable as the gantry sealed over its hatch. The recruits stacked close together to Avery's left and right. For the first time, he looked at them and saw them for what they were: heroes in the making. As Avery's eyes came to rest on Jenkins', and he plumbed the recruit hollow stare, he realized his pep talk lacked the most important message of all: hope.
"Every one of these bastards you kill is a thousand lives saved!" Avery wrapped his left hand around the hatch's release lever and gripped his battle rifle with his right. "And we will save them. Every last one." He yanked the handle up, swung the hatch open, and charged. His squad roared behind him.
The gantry's semitransparent walls let in more light than had been in the bucket. Avery squinted as he rushed forward, scanning for targets. As the militiamen surged forward behind him, the tube began to bounce, throwing off Avery's aim. Luckily, he didn't see any contacts until he reached the end of the gantry, and the four masked creatures running past the airlock weren't in any mood to fight. Their tough, gray skin bled blue from a claymore's deadly hail.
Avery let them pass—waited to see if they had a rear guard. A moment later, a fifth alien appeared, caught sight of Avery, and raised its explosive cutlass.
Avery fired a three-round burst that caught the creature in its shoulder and spun it around.
Before its cutlass clattered to the floor, Avery was inside the Tiara proper. He drilled a second burst into the alien's chest and the creature crumpled.
Avery scanned right toward the number-one strand and didn't see any stragglers. He scanned left and fired at the closest of the four aliens just now retreating around the corner of the coupling station, clipping it in the knees. The alien fell with a muffled shriek. But just as Avery tensed for a killing burst, Jenkins' BR55 cracked beside him, and the alien's head disappeared in a bright blue spray.
"Hell yeah!" Anderson shouted as he pushed past Jenkins, out of the airlock. "Way to shoot!"
But Jenkins didn't acknowledge the compliment. Instead he looked at Avery, jaw clenched behind his shrunken cheeks. I'm going to kill them, he glared, every single one.
"Andersen, Wick, Fasoldt: clean up any wounded at the first station!" Avery pulled his battle rifle's half-spent magazine and slotted a fresh one into place. You want to kill them all?
He thought, sprinting after his retreating foes. You're going to have to be quicker than me.
Byrne had been expecting an aerial strike—one or more of the aliens' dropships and their powerful plasma turrets—and had sent his recruits into the wheat fields around the reactor to try and give them as much cover as possible. But when Loki had passed on Ponder's last-breath warning about a trio of approaching vehicles, Byrne quickly pulled his men back to the reactor tower. Against strafing aircraft, the recruits would have been sitting ducks, bunkered on and around the two-story, poly-crete structure. But the tower would provide essential high ground against a ground assault.
Either way, Byrne's role remained the same: bait.
Standing behind the LAAG turret of a Warthog parked across the reactor complex gate, Byrne got a good view of the vehicles as they sped down the access road from the highway: large front wheels that obscured the driver and tore at the pavement, engines that belched blue smoke and orange flames. He waited for the vehicles to open fire, curious to see what armament they possessed. But when they closed within five hundred meters and still hadn't opened up, Byrne realized their armored alien drivers weren't going to shoot him—they were going to ram him.
By the time he had the LAAG's rotary barrel up to speed, the lead vehicle was boosting toward him with a throaty roar. Byrne managed a few seconds of sustained fire at the blue- armored alien in the vehicle's seat, then he dove from the turret. As he rolled onto the hot and sticky asphalt, the Warthog exploded behind him—broke apart in a terrific screech of metal as the alien vehicle's bladed wheel hit it broadside between the tires.
"Open fire!" Byrne shouted in his throat mic, finishing his roll. As he sprung to his feet and dashed for a berm of sandbags protecting the reactor tower's security door, Stisen, Habel, Burdick, and sixteen other militiamen let loose with their MA5s. The lead vehicle erupted in sparks and tracer fire, and its driver might have died right then and there if the two other vehicles hadn't boosted toward the complex, swerved off the access road, and smashed right through the chain-link fence, dividing the militiamen's fire.
"Loki!" Byrne unshouldered his battle rifle. "What's your status?" He pumped three bursts into one of the trailing vehicles' engines as it followed the leader counterclockwise around the reactor and out of sight.
Byrne hadn't heard from the AI since it had fired the mass driver at the alien warship— loosed two shots like point-blank thunder that left Byrne hearing bells despite the plugs he and the militiamen had screwed deep into their ears. The Staff Sergeant knew it took significant power to charge the driver's coils and pull off two back-to-back shots. During their last briefing with Ponder, Loki had made it clear that after his initial volley, he would need to temporarily go off-line and check the reactor—or risk meltdown the next time the driver fired.
"And what happens," Byrne had asked, "If a one-two punch isn't enough to drop their ship?"
"For all our sakes, Staff Sergeant," the AI had smiled, "you had better hope it is."
Byrne swept his battle rifle right and fired on the lead vehicle as it completed its circle around the tower. He saw tan fur bristling from breaks in the driver's armor and recognized the creature as the taller of the gold-armored alien's escorts from the day they'd met in the botanical gardens.
"Watch yourselves!" Byrne shouted as the alien accomplished a quick banking turn around the halves of the ruined Warthog. Hot metal spikes rattled from two rifles mounted above and behind its wheels, forcing Byrne and the three recruits behind the berm to duck and cover. The spikes split the uppermost row of sandbags and drilled into the tower's poly-crete wall. Some of the rounds splintered against the metal security door, scattering red-hot shrapnel onto the asphalt near Byrne's boots.
"Stisen!" the Staff Sergeant shouted to his 2/A squad leader, positioned on the first floor roof, directly above the berm. "Get some fire on that bastard!"
But the ornery constable shouted back his own command: "Move, Staff Sergeant! Now!"
And Byrne did—dove sideways ahead of the vehicle's charging growl, tackling the two nearest recruits out of the way as its bladed wheels burst through the berm, filling the air with sand. The vehicle collided with the security door and smashed it from its frame. By the time Byrne rose to a knee and brought his weapon to bear, the vehicle had reversed and was revving for another go.
"Inside!" Byrne yelled, sprinting for the door. Habel and another recruit named Jepsen made it safely into the tower. But the third, an older recruit named Vallen, didn't have the speed.
The vehicle cut him down an instant before it smashed against the empty door frame. Byrne watched as the recruit disappeared beneath its slashing wheels only to appear a moment later, like wood fed through a chipper—bits of fatigues and body parts tossed skyward, back toward the complex gate.