Return Fire (Earth at War Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE Return Fire

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  CHAPTER TWO Back Matter

  CHAPTER ONE

  Return Fire

  Chapter One

  “…back in the USSR,” Chief Warrant Officer Mark Tremonti sang softly, under his breath. “You don’t know lucky you are…”

  I laughed.

  “Your mic is hot, Pops,” I told him, “and your lyrics are outdated. Hasn’t been any USSR in almost fifty years. Hell, we aren’t even over the Russian Republic, technically. This is the Ukraine.”

  Though you couldn’t have proven it by me. Even with the enhanced optics of the shuttle’s main viewscreen turning overcast zero-dark-thirty into high noon, I couldn’t see anything below us but rolling hills and a pincushion of conifers. Running nap-of-the-earth, it could have been anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

  “Tell that to President Popov, sir,” the weathered Delta Force operator shot back. I couldn’t see his face behind his helmet’s visor, but there was an edge to the words, a darkness to the humor. “He’s pretty much dedicated himself to pulling together as much of the old Soviet Union as he can and if he doesn’t have international Communism as a cause, good old Russian nationalism will do just fine.”

  “You know,” Julie said, craning her head back from the pilot’s seat, her smile twisted at the corner, “you’re both on hot mics and I got enough to worry about up here without debating the relative merits of Beatles songs and geopolitics. They know we’re coming and they’re not happy about it.”

  “Which they?” I asked her, shifting in my seat to get a better look at her. It wasn’t easy to turn strapped into the shuttle’s acceleration couch in Svalinn armor, but it was worth the look. Colonel Julie Nieves was the best pilot I’d ever met and smoking hot. I might have been biased, though, since I was in love with her. “The Ukrainians, the Russians or Chernobog?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Now shut up and let me fly.”

  “We got four MIGs coming in, boss,” Lt. Lopez, the ship’s gunner warned. The position was a combination of a RIO (radar intercept officer) from a Navy two-seater, the navigator from an Air Force two-seater, the copilot from larger jets and the gunner from an attack helicopter, and the last had won out because one of the gunner’s chief responsibilities was firing the shuttle’s primary armament, a coil gun. “Eleven o’clock, ten klicks out.”

  “Only four?” Julie said, sniffing. “I feel vaguely insulted.”

  “Well, it’s like three in the morning here,” I told her.

  “I said shut up, Major,” she reminded me. “Don’t make me turn this thing around and go home.”

  “They’re launching missiles,” Lopez announced. “Activating countermeasures.”

  Most of the countermeasures were electronic, but a series of hammer blows echoed from the rear of the aerospacecraft as the chaff flare launchers spat out chunks of burning magnesium and clouds of electrostatically charged metal filings. The shuttle’s jet engines took a slightly deeper tone and acceleration pushed me back into my seat, which fell out from beneath me as Julie took the ship into a dive. The hammerhead aerospacecraft was huge, over a hundred yards long and at least seventy-five from wingtip to wingtip, but she handled it as if it was an F35.

  “Yeah, that did it,” Lopez said after a few seconds. “The missiles are chasing their own tails. The MIGs are still coming after us, though.” He inclined his head forward, indicating the aircraft. “You want me to warn them off?”

  “That’d spoil the surprise. Take them down, Louis.” The words could have been light, playful, but they weren’t. She knew what she was ordering. “No point in wasting time with the main gun. Missiles should do.”

  “Targeting,” he confirmed. His fingers traced lines across the touchscreen, the computer technology courtesy of the Helta, but the software application strictly human. The Helta didn’t use missiles much. “Firing four.”

  The fuselage shuddered, one missile after another shaking loose from the internal weapons bay before their rocket engines ignited and they streaked away, glowing spears heading out into the night.

  “They’re breaking,” Lopez narrated. “Launching flares. Not gonna work,” he added dispassionately, as if he were watching a football game on TV and didn’t care who won.

  Our missiles had curved away in pursuit of the fleeing Russian jets and all I could see of them was the faint glow of their exhaust trails. Whatever happened next was distant, physically as well as emotionally. When Lopez’s pronouncement came a few moments later, it was anticlimactic.

  “They’re down. Not seeing any chutes. The screen is clear.”

  So antiseptic. It reminded me of a space battle, and of why I disliked space battles.

  “Get your people ready, Andy,” Julie told me, her voice businesslike. “We’re on the ground in three.”

  “Lt. Landry,” I said, twisting around instinctively to look back into the cargo hold even though I was speaking over my helmet radio, “we un-ass the bird in three.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The kid’s voice wavered just a little, and I couldn’t say as I blamed him. This was his first combat operation, which was why his Ranger platoon had been chosen to run support for the Delta team. If everything went well, he’d just stay back and engage any targets we missed, and if it went to shit, Pops would tell him what to do. He was green enough and in awe enough of the very concept of working with Delta Force that he’d do it without question.

  I couldn’t have picked him out of the identical, camo-colored exoskeletal armored Svalinn suits strapped into identical seats in the back of the shuttle, but he had the same, immutable human instinct as me and turned to face his platoon as he gave them orders. I couldn’t hear him, his voice trapped inside his helmet, his commands on their platoon frequency. I assumed they were the same sort of standard, redundant bullshit I’d said to my platoon when I’d been a brand-new officer fresh out of training. His platoon sergeant would make sure he didn’t fuck up too badly.

  And Quinn was in his platoon, which was another reason I’d chosen them to back us up. I didn’t know many of the Rangers, but Corporal Randolph Quinn had seemed competent from the first time I’d met him during training and I felt more comfortable with him watching my back.

  “There it is,” Pops said.

  I turned back to the forward viewscreens, something in my gut rebelling at the idea that the whole view was a projection, that the shuttle had no physical canopy. I mean, it made sense. The bird was constructed from honeycomb boron composite—shit we could only have made by the ounce before the Helta came along—heat resistant enough to take a shot from one of the lasers the Tevynians used on their fighters and tough enough to—probably—absorb the blast from an air-to-air missile. It would have been particul
arly stupid to leave a gap in the ship’s armor right over the cockpit just for the sake of tradition.

  Then again, fighter pilots were big on tradition and it had been a hell of a tussle between the pilots and the engineers. What had finally convinced them was the inarguable fact that the shuttle simply couldn’t be flown deadstick. If the power went out, so did the controls, and ejecting was the only option, which involved the whole cockpit separating from the rest of the bird

  Of course, I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

  The compound was just visible now over the rolling hills, what could have been and probably used to be an industrial park out in the middle of what Jambo would have called Bumfuck, Egypt, the only ground approach a single, gravel road. It was innocuous enough, just a cluster of sheet metal buildings with a few semis parked outside.

  Until the SAM turrets rose from one of those buildings…

  “You seeing that, Louis?” Julie asked. It constantly amazed me how she could sound so calm flying a hunk of metal twice as long as a B-52 bomber at supersonic speeds.

  “Yeah,” Lopez confirmed. “Don’t know if I have time to target each one, though. Better just take out the whole building.”

  “Controls are yours.”

  The nose of the shuttle dipped as Lt. Lopez edged it downward with the joystick, and his own targeting reticle coalesced on the main screen, hovering over the tallest of the sheet metal buildings. The reticle drifted left and so did we, but I could barely feel it, and when it was lined up with the corner of the warehouse, maybe twenty feet down from the roof, Lopez’s finger caressed the trigger.

  “Guns,” he announced.

  The shuttle was riding on the most powerful jet engines that had ever taken the air, powered by a particle bed reactor rather than aviation fuel, putting out hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust. But when the coil gun fired, it nearly stalled us out. The tungsten slug hit the building at thousands of yards per second, plumes of dust billowing from the entrance and exit wounds. For the space of a breath, I was prepared to believe the round had made a clean wound, in and out with a little bleeding but not bones or blood vessels or major damage, like the kind you always see in the movies when the hero gets hit. But this warehouse was not, apparently, an action hero. The structural support for the roof had been blown into fragments, and those fragments had taken out everything in their way. The top floor of the building collapsed inward, taking with it the surface-to-air missile turrets and then, rapidly, the rest of the structure. Tiny figures scattered from ground floor exits, racing ahead of the falling roof, disappearing in clouds of black smoke and debris.

  “I hope,” Pops commented from beside me, “that our target wasn’t taking a walk through that building just now, Lt. Lopez.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Tremonti,” Lopez said, not sounding the least bit apologetic, “but it’s my job to get you on the ground alive. The rest is up to you.”

  I grinned unabashedly, not worried about aggravating Pops since he couldn’t see it. Pops, along with the rest of the team, had gotten used to a certain level of awe being demonstrated toward Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, or Delta Force, or the Unit, or Combat Applications Group, or whatever their official designation happened to be this week. After all, he was working with Rangers and Zoomies—Space Force, anyway, which was just rebranded Zoomies. As the saying went, when it came to Delta operators, Zoomies wanted them and Rangers wanted to be them, and that was the natural order of things. But familiarity had bred, if not contempt, at least comfort. And the officers picked to work in the First Interplanetary Detachment were the best of the best in their own right.

  “Set us down just inside the fence line,” I told Julie, forcing my mind back to the mission. “North side. That should give us some cover with all the smoke from the building.”

  “Gotcha. Get off the mark quick, though. Next shuttle is about thirty seconds behind us.”

  It was a risk, bringing two of the birds out here. They were invaluable, and even though we were pretty sure the Russians didn’t have anything that could touch them, all it would take was one golden BB and irreplaceable Helta technology and engineering would be left burning in the depths of rural Ukraine.

  Which would probably make Popov laugh like a son of a bitch.

  “Thirty seconds,” Julie said. Then, after a pause, “Louis, we got some dismounts gathering in our LZ. Encourage them to move.”

  A missile streaked up from the skittering ants on the ground, a MANPAD, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, the fancy military name for a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launcher. I was opening my mouth to shout a warning, but Julie had already seen it and she jerked the shuttle into a barrel roll, leaving my stomach somewhere around a thousand feet up.

  I gritted my teeth and clenched my jaws tight to keep my last meal from redecorating the cockpit and over the scream of turbojets and the surprised squawks filling the team band in my earphones, I caught the thump-thump of the countermeasures launching again. They must have worked, because we leveled out again almost immediately. Then a stuttering white thread connected the ship’s chin turret with the ground for a full second.

  It was the same weapon, the coil gun, but Lopez had set the variable rate of fire for full-auto and reduced the muzzle velocity. The same control had switched out the ammunition from armor-piercing tungsten penetrators to sintered-metal incendiary rounds, ignited by an energy pulse at the emitter into a superheated plasma. I didn’t see the rounds impact, but I couldn’t imagine it was too pleasant for the troops on the ground. I might have felt more sympathy if they weren’t a bunch of bloodthirsty mercenaries.

  Chernobog was so outlandish it was hard to believe they were real. They’d been founded by a friend of the late and unlamented Vladimir Putin— a man named Yevgeny Lermontov who had made a name for himself as a particularly amoral GRU officer. Lermontov was, to put it mildly, a nutburger. The mercenary company was named in honor of the Slavic paganism Lermontov and the other high-ranking officers professed to believe, which was odd enough, but the man himself was a butcher who professed to admire the career of Adolph Hitler. Putin had used Lermontov’s Chernobog Company in Syria, the Ukraine and central Africa to carry out Russian policy while maintaining plausible deniability. And Popov had used him the same way, to infiltrate the shipyards in Lunar orbit, to kidnap our Tevynian prisoner and steal one of the three hyperdrive starships that were under construction. Which was why we were here.

  “Touching down!” Julie said, yelling over the banshee scream of the landing jets.

  “Everybody up!” Pops commanded, loud enough everyone could probably have heard him without the helmet radios.

  I hit the quick-release for my seat restraints and I was up before them, grabbing the back of the acceleration couch for balance and locking the magnets in my boot heels to the deck. The landing gear slammed into the packed dirt of the courtyard, sinking to the limits of the hydraulics before springing back up.

  The belly ramp was partway down and the Rangers ducked out through the gap, led by Quinn’s fire team. Lt. Landry went out right behind them, as eager to get into the action and lead from the front as any other dumbass kid who wanted nothing more than to be a Ranger. I let the Rangers go first, because age had taught me something, but I went out ahead of the Delta team because it apparently hadn’t taught me enough.

  Back in the USSR…

  Chapter Two

  The night was on fire. I could have read a book by the glare of the burning warehouse even if my helmet optics hadn’t turned everything to daylight. Bodies and pieces of bodies were scattered around the LZ, ripped apart and burned black by plasma incendiary rounds from the shuttle. I tried not to look at them. I knew too well it was a losing battle, that I’d see them again in nightmares, but there was too much to do for me to worry about it.

  “Move off the LZ!” I ordered. “Next bird touches down in thirty seconds, everyone off the LZ!”

  The ramp was swinging up and the bel
ly jets were kicking up clouds of dirt and gravel, the stones pinging off my armor in off-key notes. The impossibly huge aerospacecraft climbed back into the sky on columns of fire. The Rangers had curved into a perimeter, a half-circle facing away from the nine-foot-high wire fence, and now the semicircle shifted into a pair of arrowhead wedges, moving toward the demolished warehouse.

  The shuttle’s belly jets braided the smoke from the wrecked building as it rose, the exhaust a faint glow. The next lander was somewhere out there, maybe a couple miles away, but I didn’t look for it. I knew the dozen or so troops who’d died on the LZ weren’t a fraction of Chernobog’s full strength. We’d caught them flat-footed, but these guys, whatever I thought of them, were not amateurs. Most were former Spetsnaz, and Svalinn armor or not, underestimating them would be the last thing we did.

  “We got movement to the southwest,” Quinn said. “I can’t make anything out on thermal because of the fires.”

  “Spread out,” I told Landry. “You guys take the flanks, we’re heading straight up the middle for the command center. I held my KE rifle out ahead of me and waved for the Delta team to follow. “This way.”

  Communications protocols had been one of the first casualties of the Svalinn armor. When the radio was a connection to someone far away, to be used only when a report was due or support was needed, there was time and a need to strictly identify everyone transmitting, to carefully delineate when a transmission began and ended so that part of it didn’t get stepped on and ignored. With the helmets constantly on and the visors usually closed, every communication between infantry soldiers was a radio call, and there just wasn’t time for all that protocol when soldiers were trying to maneuver under fire.

  Luckily, the new comms system developed in concert with the Helta had rendered the ordinary protocols unnecessary. They could transmit and receive simultaneously and if one transmission stepped on another, the system recorded the missed transmission and played it right after the end of the first. And there was little need to identify yourself because the IFF—Identification, Friend or Foe—tracker in the helmet’s Heads-Up Display showed you the name and position of responsibility of the person transmitting.