Chains of Command by Marko Kloos

bit as capable as the NAC’s new Hammerheads. The bulk of the defensive wall, however, consists of NAC and SRA ships, dozens of hulls with names like Ottawa , Minsk , Salt Lake City , Tianchang , Veracruz .
    “Bogey is inbound from the Mars approach, bearing positive zero-one-five by one-seven- five, CBDR. All units, link fire control for barrage fire and stand by. Orion batteries engaging in t-minus forty-five.”
    The plot in Berlin ’s CIC shows us in a cluster of blue icons in the middle of the plot, with the combined task force between Earth and the approaching Lanky. When the orange icon for the incoming seed ship pops up on the plot, it doesn’t look quite right, and it takes me a second or two to process the information.
    “He’s coming in fast,” I send to Halley. The anxiety that has squeezed the center of my stomach for two hours intensifies. This is not what the Lankies usually do, and every time they do something new and unexpected, we usually end up getting bloody noses.
    “Bogey is coming in hot,” AEGIS sends. “Closing velocity is ten thousand meters per second, still CBDR.”
    “Not putting on the brakes, is he?” Halley asks. “The fuck is he doing coming in that fast? He can’t eject pods at hypervelocity, can he?”
    “Who the fuck knows,” I say. “But if the Orions miss, we are in deep shit.” At ten kilometers per second, it will take the Lanky less than ten seconds to cross the engagement range of our rail gun and missile fire and plow right through us on the way to Earth.
    “They won’t miss,” Halley says.
    They best not, I think. The dreadful possibility has occurred to me that the Lankies have started taking pages out of our playbook. Ten thousand meters per second isn’t nearly as fast as the Orions, which accelerate to fractional light speed within thirty minutes, but the Lanky has exponentially more mass than the ten-thousand-ton pykrete warhead on an Orion, or even a water-filled freighter hull.
    The warships at the Fleet Assembly Point enter into a slow and cumbersome sort of defensive formation ballet as groups split and re-form according to their AEGIS assignments. The space control units with the heavy ordnance form a firing line to bring all weapons to bear along the likely trajectory of the incoming Lanky. The units without long-range ship-to-ship missiles fall back and form a mobile reserve to engage the seedpods and follow them down to Earth if we need to fight it out in the weeds again.
    Berlin is in the group that doesn’t have anything in the missile tubes right now, so we join the Earth formation with the carriers while the heavy combatants take up the linebacker position. A little bit of my anxiety falls away as I watch our ship’s icon move back toward Earth and out of the way of the Lanky. If there are going to be ship-to-ship exchanges, at least Berlin won’t be in the thick of it.
    “Orion batteries, stand by. Launch in t-minus eight.”
    The Orion batteries are positioned in high orbit. There are only a handful of them, Earth’s only effective defense against the Lankies. Each is a one-time-use item armed with two of the Russian-designed Orion missiles. The missiles themselves are big, ugly things, with dirty gray pykrete warheads in front and bulging bomb magazines around their midsections. They are nuclear pulse propulsion missiles, which means they squirt out nuclear charges and then detonate them to drive the missile forward. One charge per second, ten kilotons each, one-hundred-g sustained acceleration that would turn a crew into fine puree even with artificial gravity systems. They are dangerous and dirty and incredibly brutal, sheer mass driven by atomic explosions to planetoid-shattering speeds in minutes, and they leave a lot of radiation behind, but they are the only thing we have other than the not-yet-ready battleships.
    “All units, keep clear of the engagement cone. Level Three radiation protocol is in effect. Bogey still closing at