Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (49 page)

So when the pilot called ahead and informed the ground crews that he was coming in hot and heavy, they took him seriously. Runway ninety-one was a leftover from the earlier days of Spaceport Earth, when rocket- and scramjet-powered craft could be expected to take off and land without the aid of counter-mass technology. As such, it was one of the longest runways in the world.

At just under five miles long, the SE runway came second to a similarly purposed Block runway in mainland China and had the distinction of never having been overshot, even in the early days of the commercial space program. Under normal circumstances, even the largest of heavy-lift transports with CM enhancement would never require more than a mile and a half. But, of course, this was hardly a normal circumstance.

At just a hair under Mach Three and only nine hundred feet in altitude, the transport pilots almost missed the runway when it first flashed under them, a thousand feet gone by in an instant. They shifted power to the CM, then opened the airbrakes full out as the big transport began to drop. Thick wheel struts lowered out of the smooth fuselage, locking into place with two miles gone on the black ribbon they needed to land on, and from there they began bleeding speed faster than any of the manufacturer’s books would have suggested even in an emergency.

The big transport started shaking as it approached Mach One, a deep visceral shudder that had its passengers looking around nervously to see if it was about to shake itself apart. It
smoothed out as it dropped below Mach, however, and with a mile left to go the wheels screamed as they touched down.

So focused on his job that he didn’t even flinch when a nearby explosion marked the landing of an alien pod, the pilot reversed thrust. Everyone was slammed forward as the transport’s engines began to whine dangerously. The road vanished swiftly under them as he fought the controls, pushing the braking systems to their limit, and finally brought the craft to a controlled stop just half a mile from the end signs.

He slumped back, closing his eyes for a moment. “Crap. I never want to do that again.”

They were met by a small army of support crew, fire crew, and cargo movers by the time the transport shuddered to a stop on the tarmac. Eric got his people off and clear of the jet fuel and nuclear materials before he let anyone start unloading, and then headed for the tower to find out just what was going on.

He was greeted halfway there by a three-star who looked as harried as he’d ever seen a man.

“Weston?”

“Yes sir,” Eric answered, saluting. “Do you have orders for me?”

“Not yet,” the general answered. “Just real glad to see your cargo.”

Eric looked up, trails of smoke and flame still defining the skies above them as distant shock waves shattered over their position. “Might be a moot point, now. Looks like they’ve decided to drop everything they’ve got on us.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Captain. Walk with me.”

Eric nodded curtly and the general led him back to the building complex, both men ignoring the distant flashes and rolling thunder shaking the very ground upon which they walked.

“This is going down all over the world, Captain. We’re hammering them everywhere we can, but there’s more than anyone expected.”

Not more than I expected. Just later arrivals,
Eric thought grimly. “Understood. They’ve stopped targeting population centers then?”

“Looks like,” the general confirmed. “Hard to tell though. Some of them are certainly coming down in uninhabited regions, however. We can’t cover every square inch. It’s just a miracle that they’re not splashing down in the oceans.”

“I doubt they can handle the pressure differential,” Eric answered. “They’re tougher than humans, sure, but they’re still susceptible to overpressure waves. They may not be able to handle the temperature conductivity of water either.”

“Pardon?”

“You can get hypothermia off the coast of California in summer, General,” Eric answered. “These things have much higher body temperatures, and they need to maintain that heat by all accounts. Water may actually be lethal to them in very short order.”

“I thought they could operate in space?”

Eric chuckled. “It’s a bit of a misconception that space is cold, General. Space isn’t hot or cold, it just is. Objects
in
space can be hot or cold, depending on their nature and location. There’s also a difference in radiated heat loss compared to conductive heat loss.”

The general just shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it, Captain.”

“Also, I wouldn’t say that they operate in space, exactly.” Eric scowled a bit, thinking about it. “They just take longer to die than a human would.”

“Fabulous.”

Eric chuckled. “What kind of intel do we have here?”

“We’re linked into the entire DARPA net system, including the new patchwork mini-satellites they’ve been launching since the assault.”

“Good. Show me your tac-room, General, if you will.”

The general jerked his head to the left. “This way.”

He led Eric into one of the large sprawling buildings of the spaceport, in through some security sections, and finally into the mission control room that had been used during the early days of the facility. It had been revamped, updated, and generally brought into the new century at some point in the last few years.

Eric wasn’t sure why. Mission control wasn’t a priority for near-Earth travel, but he was glad to see it all the same. The holographic displays that wrapped around the room showed telemetry from every major station on the planet as far as he could see, including the main feed from the Pentagon.

“We’re tapped into every available feed,” the general said, “including some of the Block links.”

“They gave you their codes?” Eric asked, somewhat incredulous.

The general laughed. “Not a chance. No, they stopped encrypting the latest feeds in order to simplify and speed up setup times. They were getting hammered worse than we were, and setting up new encryption codes every time one of their hardware decrypts was destroyed. Near as we can tell, the aliens don’t give a damn about what we’re saying to each other, so we’ve pretty much given up on encoding.”

Eric nodded in understanding. Military-level encryption came at a cost in terms of time and equipment.

He walked over to the local area geomap, examining the tracks as they drew across the display. The sky was full of them, both coming down and going up, and that made for a right mess to decode, but he’d been doing it for years.

“You’ve brought in a lot more SAMs than should be here,” Eric said finally.

“The whole planet brought in a lot more SAMs than should be here,” the general grunted. “We’ve been pulling the things out of mothballs ever since those damned aliens showed up. There’s a mountain cache just west of here with a thousand more still being recommissioned. I never realized just how much the government overbought when it came to these things.”

Eric nodded. “Marines still have a few hundred Harriers sitting in warehouses somewhere, General. The military can be worse than a hoarder at times.”

“That explains why most of these munitions were dated forty years ago.”

“They seem to work fine,” Eric commented.

“They’re early-model HVMs, mostly scramjet-based kinetic kill vehicles.” The general shrugged. “There’s nothing on them to go bad. Just add fuel and fire.”

“No school like old school,” Eric said, satisfied.

“Just not too old,” the General said. “We’d have a hell of a time if they had chemical or nuclear warheads. Those things don’t age well.”

“We’re going to have to go out and clean up the ones that slip through,” Eric said, sighing heavily, “No option but getting our hands dirty there.”

The air force general shook his head. “May not come to that.”

Something in his tone brought Eric up short, and he looked over sharply. “What do you mean, sir?”

“We’ve been authorized to break out strategic weapons, Captain. How much do you think that will change the board?”

Eric winced, considering the question.

Strategic weapons were mostly used as simple bluff tactics rather than actually deployed in battle. Like old-fashioned nuclear weapons, strategic weapons of all kinds were best used as deterrents rather than for live combat, simply because the blasted things were incredibly destructive.

“That’s hard to say, sir. To use them properly, we’ll need to bring the enemy to a common point, and I’m not sure how we can do that,” Eric admitted.

“The President was clear, and it seems that the Block leadership is doing the same,” the general told him. “We’re to hammer every living soulless one of them, even if we have to nuke the last square inch of this planet to do it.”

PLANET RANQUIL

DENIED.