Hammerhead Resurrection Page 19

“Captain, this is Special Warfare Commander Stacy Zack. Jeffery Holt holds her in high regard, and so do I. You can trust her. Clear?”

  “Crystal, sir.”

  “As we’ve not heard from Holloway nor Holt in two days, I have to assume they’re dead.”

  His coarseness caused Stacy’s stomach to flush with acid.

  “If something happens to me, you two are the commanding officers of this group. You,” he pointed to Donovan, “are logistics and large troop movement. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You,” he pointed to Stacy, “are guerilla tactics, which will be our main method of assault. We cannot face this threat head on.”

  Stacy asked, “How do you imagine us dealing with it, sir? As you mentioned, if something happens to you, I’d like to know your thoughts now.”

  “Our way, is your way, Zack. I have no guidance beyond that. You are the lead and the expert. Get in the forest with the singularity warheads we have left. Use them to play hell with the Sthenos.”

  Stacy felt unsure at that. “How big are these warheads?”

  Cantwell held up his hands shoulder wide. “Just under fifty pounds.”

  “I can work with that.”

  Cantwell nodded. “But first we have to get this dying heap planet side without killing everyone. Donovan, get your people coordinated. When we stop moving I want every single man and woman on this ship carrying gear. Get any vehicles we can salvage obscured before the Sthenos obtain orbit.”

  “Yes sir.” As Donovan walked away he shot Stacy a sidelong look.

  “Don’t let him bother you Zack,” Cantwell said. “He’s harsh but solid and sure.”

  “Which is why you told him to team with me.”

  Cantwell nodded. “If he gives you any trouble, you remind him of that. It’ll keep him aligned, but I expect you,” his tone became sharp as he pointed at her, “to play ball with him as well. Clear?”

  “Yes sir, but I’m sure that you’ll assist us.”

  “Laying everything on one person’s leadership is a low odds bet. We must prepare a contingency if and when our own deaths finds us. I expect you to do the same with your own team.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “People are going to die. Are you ready for it?”

  Stacy looked to Marco, X, Horace, and Jacqueline, who stood near the rear of the bridge. She imagined them in a firefight, not marking lasers but live rounds, tracers flying through smoking air. “I have no idea sir, but we’ll do the best we’re able.”

  “That,” Cantwell said, his expression flat, “is the only true answer.” He pointed to the row of jump seats along the curved, rear wall. “Get strapped in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Stacy walked away, the navigation officer said. “Thirty-five minutes to atmospheric contact, sir.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Stacy strapped herself into a jump seat with Jacqueline to her left and Marco to her right. X sat on the far side of Marco.

  Jacqueline said, “O.C. I—”

  Stacy held up her hand to silence her and pointed to Cantwell, who walked up to the row of helmsmen. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is exactly what you’ve trained for, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said, some with conviction, others with unsure quietness.

  “You will save thousands of lives today, do not think otherwise.” Then his voice boomed out, “Do I make myself clear?”

  The helmsmen all shouted back, “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Leaning down, with his hand on the team lead’s shoulder, he said something into the young man’s ear. Facing the rest of the bridge, he said, “I want every single body in this bridge strapped down now.”

  Staff began running for seats. Essential personnel drew five point harnesses from their station seats while non-essential personnel ran to the jump seats along the wall near Stacy and her team.

  Stacy said to Marko, “I wish you were at the controls of this thing right now.”

  Horace nodded. “You got that right.”

  “Me? Hell no. My skills are with small craft. These folks are experts with a monster like this. I’ve never so much as pulled one out of orbit.” He pointed to the helmsmen, “They’ll get the job done.”

  X’s eyes narrowed. “I think that’s the first humility I’ve ever seen from you Fields.”

  At the command seat, Cantwell pulled a harness over his shoulders. He touched a switched on the armrest. “All personnel, prepare for crash landing. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. Do not attempt to use escape pods. We are going to ride the Lacedaemon down to the planet. Repeat, do not use escape pods. Strap in and ride the ship down.” He paused for a moment before saying, “God speed everyone.”

  One of the navigation officers said, “Reaching degradation orbit with alignment to the Amazon basin in three… two… one… Deceleration burn cut.”

  “Engines responding nominally,” another officer said.

  Cantwell nodded.

  “Turning for reentry,” navigation said. The stars above spun and the broad Earth, sunlight glittering off the Indian Ocean came into view from the left. The rotation stopped with the planet impossibly brilliant before them, the terminator of night cutting the globe in half. The ship lifted its bow slightly.

  Marco said to himself, “Keep us belly on folks, nose up.” He lifted his chin as if willing the ship to raise its bow to the correct glide path. The growing Earth reminded Stacy she’d been here before. For the second time in her life she would ride a disabled ship out of orbit. She’d been the only survivor the first time.

  The Earth swung slightly to the right as if a great pendulum hung from the bow of the ship. As it centered, Marco said, “There you go. Now get that nose up a bit more and let’s ride it in.” As if Marco’s quiet coaching had found an ear, the bow of the ship rose.

  “Just a bit more,” Marco said, but the ship remained steady.

  “I’ve lost the vertical bow control,” a helmsman called out as he looked to his left, “Can you shove the back end down?”

  “Adjusting aft pitch,” another helmsman said.

  In a few moments, the lattice framing between the glass panels began to glow as a faint rumble grew. When the rumbling became a trembling in the deck, a panel of glass near the center of the lattice gave a sharp, crystalline crack. A line ran, spider quick, across its surface. Another cracked, and another. The lattice frame glowed bright orange now, and the stars began to fade behind a faint violet-blue. As the violet turned to pure blue, and the vibration in the seat became extreme, the first glass panel window shattered inward. The next window let go and the next.

  Wind coiled around Stacy, whipping her hair into her eyes and buffeting around her neck. Bits of glass nipped at her face. The air moved so fast past her nose and mouth it sucked the air from her lungs. She had to fight to draw breath. The bridge, bathed in the orange light of the glowing windows, vanished in acrid smoke so thick she couldn’t see her knees. The smoke tasted acidic in her throat. She coughed in spasms. The smoke coiled away from her, whatever fire had caused it seeming to have been snuffed out as quickly as it had formed. As the smoke dissipated, she drew another coughing breath. Through the eye-watering wind, she saw a low mountain to their right, draped in trees. Her eyes squinting, she could see Cantwell, the veins in his neck standing out, screaming commands to the helmsmen, who probably were unable to hear him.

  Something’s very wrong.

  They hung from their straps now, as if on a vertical wall of metal, out over the blurring valley floor. The dark-green trees of the rainforest came on fast, blurring. She smacked Marco’s knee. He leaned his head close to hers and she screamed at him, “How fast you think we’re going?”

  He watched the trees rushing by for a moment before leaning back to her. She knew he was yelling at the top of his lungs but could barely made out, “More than mach one.”

  Then we’re going to die.

  There was no way a crash
landing deceleration from that speed was survivable. That’s what had killed the others last time. She had lived only by the fortune of having her seat mounts break, easing her deceleration just enough to live. Now she was strapped to the nose of thousands of tons of metal with only a lattice frame between them and their point of impact.

  One of the helmsmen lifted her fist in victory as torrents of brilliant, yellow flame raged out from the sides of the bridge windows, the roar of rockets overrode the rush of the wind. Stacy’s shoulder straps hauled on her, and blood pressurized in her skull as her vision tinted red.

  The trees below the ship slowed more and more as the retro rockets burned. The ship lurched as a loud crack was followed by green leaves billowing into the bridge, swirling around the men and women at their stations. The green seemed unreal to Stacy. Moments before they had been in orbit and now a leaf, smacked free from a branch, slapped across her face.

  She watched the leaf arc and spin down the row of jump seats, past each man and woman. As it touched the back wall, the deck heaved. Stacy’s head snapped to the left and her vision tunneled and returned, filled with tracing stars. The ship lurched and shook, and Stacy felt at any moment her seat would rip free. The scent of broken wood and rich soil filled the bridge. With unnatural suddenness, the ship went still, her ears rang in the silence, and sunlight warmed her face.

  As the haze of dust and smoke cleared, she found herself hanging from her harness at the top of a two hundred foot vertical, metal wall. The window lattice had been crushed down, now perhaps only ten feet away from her. Halfway down the wall, where the navigation crew, the Nav-Con officer, and Cantwell had sat, tree tops lay against the decking, and the lattice had been smashed flat.

  Marco looked a bit punch drunk as he reached for his buckle. Slapping her hand over his, she said, “Watch the drop Fields.”

  Marco looked down the wall, and said in a dazed tone, “Thanks O.C.”

  “We need some way to climb or rappel down.” Stacy said.

  “We have no rapping gear,” Jacqueline said, “so climbing’s the only way.” Locking her boots to the deck, she pulled on them. They released as they were designed to do. “These won’t help us here. They’ll let go as our weight pulls away from the wall.”

  Down the rack of jump seats, near the tree tops, some had unlatched and were climbing into the branches, using the seat frames as a ladder. Here the wall of jump seats were inverted, so when Jacqueline unlatched herself her feet swung out.

  Stacy grabbed her wrist, but Jacqueline said, “Thanks O.C. I’ve got this.”

  Swinging her hips forward, she hooked her feet into the seats further down and, with her back at a forty-five degree angle to the ground, climbed down the seats. Stacy unlatched herself and followed Jacqueline, her arms burning in the short time it took to reach the vertical portion of the wall. Halfway to the tree tops, she heard a scream from above, which dopplered past. Branches cracked. Below her, tree tops tussled back to stillness as a thump rose from the forest floor. Looking up, she found Marco and X still above her.

  Putting the falling man out of her mind, she climbed down the rest of the jump seats to the tree tops. Instead of climbing down though, she moved horizontally along the crushed lattice work, through the branches until she reached Cantwell’s command seat. She had an unreasonable hope to find it empty, him already safely descended to the forest floor.

  Reaching the command seat, she shoved a heavily leafed branch aside, exposing Cantwell hanging from his shoulder straps, head slumped forward, a tree limb speared through his belly. She felt his neck. Still warm but no pulse.

  Looking at his gray head, she felt a sudden sadness for the old man. While his passing marked the loss of invaluable experience, it was something more for her. She hadn’t known him well, but he’d been a connection to Jeffrey for her. With them both gone—

  “That’s no good.”

  She turned to find X, his arms draped over a branch, his feet planted on what had once been the hand rail of the command station.

  “No,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of these guys left. We need to do a better job of protecting them.”

  “I don’t know if we have any left at all,” X said, but Stacy didn’t want to think about Jeffrey being gone. She couldn’t believe it had happened so soon in the war. He’d been the survivor of the impossible. If this engagement had taken him so readily, how could they hope to survive?

  “Come on O.C., let’s get down from here.”

  As Stacy climbed down the branches, consoles, and lattice work, she felt warm wetness on a seat’s headrest. Holding up her hand, she found it slick with blood. Down, ten feet lower, she saw blonde hair. Past the hair, where shoulders should have been, she saw only leaves and smaller branches. Lowering herself around the seat, she found the headless torso of a female navigation officer still strapped in. Looking down the row of seats she saw that all of the helmsmen had paid for their efforts with their lives.

  Another scream sounded above her and a body came crashing through the branches to her right. She saw a blur of legs. The sound of cracking branches raced to the forest floor.

  She began descending again. When she reached the place where the branches ended and fifty feet of trunk should have remained until the forest floor, she found a tall berm of soil, dug up by the energy of the crash. She dropped onto the berm and climbed down the steep, loose slope until she stood on solid forest floor. The air felt heavy, and sunlight fell in a shattered mosaic across hanging mosses and bladed leaves.

  Fighting the desire to crouch down and place her palms on the dirt, she turned to Marco and Jacqueline as X hopped down the berm. X looked up to the trees, pressed up into the lattice of the bridge. Several more had been driven forward, now hanging at steep angles over their heads. He said, “So we stand until the Great Birnam Wood rises against us.” He absently kicked a broken tree limb.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jacqueline asked.

  “MacBeth,” X said.

  “Who’s in charge here?” An exhausted but authoritative woman’s voice called out.

  Stacy turned to find Commander Holloway walking from around the side of the wreck. She had a nasty cut across her temple, which had soaked her shoulder red. A large group of pilots followed her, all covered in dirt, and grease.

  Stacy felt a wave of relief at seeing the woman who had been with Jeffrey. “Commander Holloway, I am so glad to see you. Do you have Captain Ho—”

  “I’m in charge here Commander.”

  Captain Donovan gave Stacy a withering look as he approached. He asked Holloway in a hard tone, as if being trapped in the belly of the Lacedaemon had been a shirking of duties. “Where have you been?”

  “We were trapped behind a bulkhead. When we…” she fell quiet looking at the ferns and broad leafed plants. Somewhere a frog cricked. “Where the hell are we?”

  “The Amazon,” Donovan said without emotion.

  Holloway looked slightly taken aback as she said, “We were trapped by a crushed bulkhead. When we crashed, the side of the ship ripped open, affording us an escape route.”

  Donovan nodded as though it was an acceptable excuse. “Your pilots will join the others in cargo. We must get supplies moved out as quickly as possible.”

  As Stacy scanned the pilot’s faces, she asked, “Where’s Captain Holt?”

  Holloway shrugged her shoulders. “No idea. He was one of the last into the duct work we used to evacuate the flight control center. He and two others didn’t come out the other end. We’d hoped they’d found another way out.”

  “No one’s seen him.”

  “That isn’t important right now,” Donovan said.

  Stacy’s eyes snapped to Donovan as her heart thumped at the walls of her chest. Remembering that Cantwell had told her to team with him, she checked herself from speaking her mind. She huffed her breath out her nostrils.

  “Get your people to the cargo hold,” Donovan told Holloway.

&nbs
p; “Yes, Captain Donovan, right away.” She turned to her pilots. “All right folks, let’s get around the side of the ship and start moving equipment.”

  Stacy said to her team, “We’ll search for survivors.”

  “Moving supplies is the priority right now,” Donovan said.

  Stacy glared at Donovan. Drawing a deep breath, she felt the desire to play the card Cantwell had given her, but having to use it so soon did not bode well. “I feel some members of the team should be tasked with locating survivors. My team—”

  “I am in command at this point. Commander Zack, unless your opinion is requested, you will do as you are told. Is that clear?”

  Stacy squared on Donovan. “Captain, with all due respect, Cantwell instructed us to take joint command, and I—”

  “Cantwell gave you command of guerilla warfare tactics, not large troop movements. Were you not listening?”

  She said through her teeth, “I was.”

  “Then there is no need for debate.”

  Stacy said, “I will take my team and search for survivors.”

  “Those who cannot clear the wreckage under their own power should be considered a secondary priority to keeping those still able to fight alive commander. Your team will go to the holds with Commander Holloway, or you will be considered in a state of insubordination. Do I make myself clear?”

  Glaring at him, Stacy felt anger so great that, for the first time in her career, she considered not only insubordination, but outright attacking a commanding officer. X and Marco took her by the upper arms and walked her away.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Petty Officer Third Class Braden Whitman set his case down beside the towering side of the Lacedaemon. At the base of the sun-heated metal lay a large berm of deep red soil turned up in thick blocks. As he wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, he said, “This sucks Tanner.”

  “Yeah,” Russell Tanner said as he set his case down beside Whitman’s. “It’s okay though, because it’s a wet heat.”

  With a half-hearted laugh, Whitman looked back to the narrow hole in the hull they’d made with plasma cutters to gain access to the medical supplies. The corridor to the infirmary had been smashed shut. The cases had barely fit through the blade-sharp edges of the hole.