by Marko Kloos
“Two hundred and climbing,” the pilot sends. “We are in the clear.”
I look around the cargo hold and take stock with my helmet display to make sure all the SEALs made the dustoff.
“Dagger team, all accounted for,” I tell the pilot. “Mission accomplished.”
“Glad to hear it,” he responds. “That was a bit close. Sorry for the delay, but I had to keep the ship above the weather.”
“All’s well that ends well,” I say. “But I am going to have a talk with the R&D people about the meaning of the term ‘early warning.’”
In the seat in front of me, Elin looks like she has just run a marathon without preparation. Her face has the familiar expression I’ve seen on a hundred young grunts after their first brush with combat—the unfocused stare into the distance as the brain needs all available bandwidth to process what just happened, to figure out how to compartmentalize the experience and keep it well away from the sane stuff.
“You got your wish,” I tell her over helmet comms. “Live Lankies, in their natural environment. What do you think?”
She looks at me for a full ten seconds before she responds.
“I think,” she says slowly, and her voice sounds like she’s speaking from the middle of a dream. “I think I am going to check and see if they have any openings in the xenobotany division.”
CHAPTER 18
FLAMEOUT
The weather grew more ferocious while we were on the ground. The ascent back to the ship is much bumpier than the combat descent less than an hour ago. Even the seasoned SEALs are looking a little green after five minutes of rough flight, and I’m feeling more than a little queasy as well. But the adrenaline in my system is slow to ebb, and my anxiety just transferred from the danger of Lankies in close proximity to the danger of getting blotted out of the sky by a hardware failure. My crash on Mars a few years ago is still vivid in my memory, when material fatigue caused a wing to break off the garrison patrol ship I was flying in at the time. The ejection seat and the parachute both worked, but I’ve been a little more nervous on drop-ship flights ever since, especially when I am not sitting in an ejection seat.
Across the aisle from me, Elin avails herself to her suit’s built-in vomit tube for the second time since we left the ground. She looks small and exhausted.
“We’ll be all right,” I say. “These pilots know their stuff. My wife flies one of these.”
“You’re married?” Elin asks, and I nod.
“How about you?”
“No time,” she says. “I’m constantly on the go. Had a new duty station every year for the last six years. When you don’t get out much, a year’s barely enough to find out where all the good food places are.”
“We have the same problem,” I say. “But we’ve made it work for twelve years now.”
“You’ve kept a military marriage going for twelve years? Respect.”
“Married for eight. Been together for twelve. We met in boot camp, if you can believe that.”
“Really.” She smiles weakly and eyes the end of her puke tube again. “So how do you deal with it all? The time away from each other. The . . .” She gestures around the cargo hold vaguely. “The this. Going to places where things want to stomp you flat. Flying in weather that nobody should be made to fly in.”
“It’s always been our life, I guess. We’re used to it by now. We just try to make up time whenever we are together. At least we can’t ever really get sick of each other.”
“That’s one way to look at it, I suppose,” Elin says.
“It helps to know that we could quit anytime if we wanted. Resign our commissions, leave the Corps. We wouldn’t have our retirement funds. But we’d have no more this,” I say, and make the same vague gesture to encompass the cargo hold.
She narrows her eyes and smirks as she studies me with mock intensity.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” she says. “But if you had the chance to walk away and didn’t, you’re both still in because you like it.”
I give her a little shrug and a smirk of my own in reply.
“Married a drop-ship pilot—” she begins.
A mighty jolt goes through the Dragonfly, and even some of the SEALs let out shouts of anxious surprise. The lights in the cargo hold flicker and dim. A moment later, there’s a muffled bang, and the engine noise on the other side of the hull changes pitch and drops by half. I can tell by the shifting feeling in my stomach that the ship is quickly leveling out from its climb. When it’s clear that we are transitioning to a downward-facing attitude, my anxiety spikes again, and I taste fear at the back of my throat.
“Three-One, Dagger Actual,” I send to the flight deck. “What the fuck just happened?”
It takes a few tense moments before the pilot replies. When he does, I hear the warbling of cockpit alarms in the background of the transmission.
“Sit tight,” he says in a terse voice. “Lightning strike on the starboard engine. We have it under control. Stand by and keep those harnesses buckled.”
“Wonderful,” I reply, but the pilot has already cut the link.
A smell of ozone and burning plastic is wafting into the cargo hold. I look around for possible smoke from an onboard fire but fail to find any.
“Pilot says we lost the starboard engine,” I tell the SEALs. “He says they’ve got it, but I am putting SAR on notice anyway.”
“Fantastic idea,” Captain Harper says and checks the tightness of his safety harness. “What a shitty fucking end to the day that would be.”
“We have an engine out,” I tell Elin. “But we’re not crashing.”
“Yet,” she says.
I bring up my tactical screen and check the assets in the area. The close-air-support flight is still in the air a hundred klicks to our southwest, two Shrikes with twenty tons of anti-Lanky ordnance between them on their wing pylons. If we have to put this ship down, I’ll be able to vector in the Shrikes to take out nearby Lankies. But a Shrike can’t land on rough ground, and even if it could, the Fleet’s main ground-attack craft has no space or provision for passengers. For the second time today, I decide to break EMCON.
“Washington TacOps, this is Dagger Actual on Rapier Three-One,” I send.
“Dagger Actual, Washington TacOps, go ahead,” Captain Taylor’s voice responds. He’s the on-duty officer manning the TacOps station in the CIC, and just the man I want to talk to right now because he is the leader of the Spaceborne Rescue section.
“Rapier Three-One has an engine out,” I say. “We may have to put down on the surface. Get the Ready Five search-and-rescue birds warmed up and into the pits. I’ll update you as soon as I get word from the pilot.”
“Copy requested launch prep for Ready Five SAR flight,” Captain Taylor replies. “Alert is out. The birds are moving into the clamps right now. Good luck.”
The sound from the remaining engine does not build confidence. It changes in pitch every few seconds as the thrust level rises and falls seemingly at random. The storm is still tossing us around, and I have the very distinct premonition that it will be a while longer before I get to take my post-mission shower today.
“Dagger Actual, Three-One,” the flight deck finally sends. “Everything okay back there?”
“Three-One, we’re good,” I reply. “Tell me we’re not about to fall out of the sky. Because that would fuck up my dinner plans.”
“Starboard engine’s gone. We won’t be able to make orbit with the thrust from the port engine alone. I’ll have to find a place to set down and call for SAR.”
“I’ve already put them on notice. The Ready Five birds are waiting in the clamps.”
“Fantastic. Stand by for updates,” the pilot says.
I’m not going to die on this fucking planet, I think. Even if it does seem to have it in for me.
We spend the next fifteen minutes in a slow and careful descent. The usual post-mission banter among the troops has ceased entirely as everyone seems to b
e listening intently to the noises from the port engine and the pops and creaks coming from the hull. I follow our flight path with the tactical map to keep the strike fighters in our general vicinity. There’s no telling which part of the planet has Lankies on it now, and we don’t have time to get recon flights down here to scan the terrain for us ahead of our descent.
“There’s a patch of decent weather fifty klicks ahead,” the pilot says after a long period of radio silence from the flight deck. “I can see the surface. Means we won’t have to use ground radar and alert the neighborhood.”
“I’ll pass the coordinates to the SAR birds,” I say. “We’ll be back in the air in no time.”
With the search and rescue coordinated, all I can do is monitor our descent and hope that we aren’t about to put down the stricken ship right on top of a subterranean Lanky hive. When I switch off the tactical screen, I see that Elin Vandenberg is looking at me, and I can tell that she’s trying hard not to appear afraid.
“First time crash-landing?” I say to lift the mood a little, and she nods.
“How about you?”
“Not the first time,” I say. “Let’s see. Had one drop ship skewered in orbit. That was a zero-g rescue. Not nearly as much fun as you’d think it is.”
She smiles weakly.
“One on Mars,” I continue. “Technically not a crash landing because we had to bail. Parachute descent. Also not as much fun as you’d think.”
“Any other close calls?”
“That’s it as far as drop ships go,” I say. “Not a bad accident rate, I think.”
“It only ever takes one,” Elin replies. “Like I said, how are you even still alive?”
“Because I’d be in deep shit with my wife if I died,” I respond. This time, my answer gets a laugh out of her.
“Putting down in thirty,” the pilot sends back to the cargo hold over the loudspeakers ten minutes later. “We’re down to half our usual thrust, so touchdown may be a little brisk.”
“Dagger team, check your weapons,” I tell the SEALs. “Looks like our shift isn’t over yet.”
I inspect my own gear and see that I am down to three magazines for my rifle: two in the pouches and one in the gun. I haven’t been in the field with a JMB before, and it appears that the full-auto function the troops love so much has the negative side effect of prolific ammunition use under stress. If someone had briefed me ten minutes ago and asked me to guess how many rounds I fired in the engagement at Willoughby City, I would have guessed twenty. Instead, I burned through more than twice that number.
“Squad leaders, listen up,” I say. “Designate one troop per squad to hit the ship armory and grab a crate of rifle mags each before we dash off. I want us all to top off just in case,” I send.
“Copy that,” SEAL Captain Harper says, and the other squad leaders send their acknowledgments.
“Stand by for touchdown,” the flight deck announces. We feel the ship flare for the landing, pointing up the nose and arresting its downward speed in a familiar maneuver.
What follows isn’t so familiar. We hit the ground so hard that everyone takes a bounce in their seats, and something on the other side of the front bulkhead pops and squeals in structural protest. The ship clearly slides on the surface for a few meters after the skids are on the ground. Then there’s another sharp crack followed by a grinding noise, and the ship dips its front by seven or eight degrees as the front skid assembly collapses.
We all release the locks of our harnesses seemingly simultaneously. When I get up to help Elin, I see that she’s already unlocked her own as well, and she’s shrugging the padded harness straps off her shoulders.
“Grab the ammo and let’s get out of here,” Captain Harper shouts. “Before something else breaks in this thing.”
The surroundings outside look very different from the post-apocalyptic drab of Willoughby City. We’re on a plateau somewhere, with a spectacular view of a mountain chain on the horizon, and the cloud cover here isn’t nearly as heavy as over the colony city. In the distance, there are actually some breaks in the clouds, and shafts of sunlight are streaming through the cracks and painting bright patches on the landscape below.
Willoughby is much greener than I remember. Twelve years ago, it was almost entirely barren. The settlers were barely able to grow crabgrass for decoration. Now there are fields of grass and moss as far as I can see. I almost stop at the bottom of the tail ramp to look around until Sergeant Rees pushes past me with an ammo can in each hand. I clear the way for the rest of the SEALs and lead Elin away from the drop ship. We’re in a ground depression that’s a few hundred meters long, sandwiched between a rocky hill and a shallow ravine. At the bottom of the ravine, the fast-moving currents of a river are reflecting the sporadic sunlight. It’s warm, and with the lack of rain, it feels almost pleasant.
The SEALs are setting up a perimeter guard and start refilling their magazine pouches from the drop-ship armory containers. I walk over to the nearest one and do the same, then I stick a few more magazines into my dump pouch where they join the data module from the colony. I don’t expect to be here long enough to use all that ammo, but life has a weird way of confounding my expectations lately.
One of the drop-ship pilots comes jogging up to where I am standing.
“The SAR birds are on the way, sir. They’ve been tracking us for most of the descent. ETA seventeen minutes. They say to keep EMCON except for emergencies. We didn’t see any Lanky settlements nearby, but we can’t look underground.”
“All right,” I say. “Thanks for getting us on the ground without blowing up. Guess we’ll wait for the next bus together.”
Elin has walked over to a nearby rise and climbed the ten-meter slope to the top. I follow her to see what piqued her interest. A few kilometers in the distance, a squall line is moving across the plateau, the line between rain and dry air so defined that it looks like someone is dragging a transparent veil over the landscape. On the horizon, angry-looking dark clouds are swirling, slowly moving toward us in the atmospheric currents.
“It’s beautiful down here,” she says. “This part, anyway. I can see why people didn’t mind settling in this place.”
I check the map and see that we’ve put down over two hundred kilometers northeast of Willoughby City, right in the middle of the continent between two major mountain chains. When Halley and I landed here, we found shelter at a terraforming station three hundred klicks south of the city. It’s a vast, open continent that would have held tens of millions of humans in a few decades, with clean air and plenty of space for everyone.
“It’s theirs now,” I say. “Even if the Lankies all went away tomorrow, it would take us fifty years to get the atmosphere back to where it was.”
“Heck of a greenhouse, though,” Elin says. “You have to hand it to them. Whatever they’re doing with these planets they’re stealing from us, it’s really efficient.”
“You mean you xenobiologists haven’t figured out the how and why yet after all these years?”
“We know they plant terraformers of their own. We know they tip the atmosphere to ten percent carbon dioxide within a year. And we know that the plant life explodes with variety after they do. We have no idea yet why they’re growing anything, or whether it’s even intentional and not just a side effect of something. That’s part of why I am out here. It’s not exactly easy to observe all the effects on-site.”
“That’s the truth,” I say. “The new owners are super antisocial.”
Overhead, the strike fighters make their presence known. They dive out of the cloud cover and make a pass over the area, waggling their wingtips as they reach our landing spot. Then one of them splits off in a sharp left-hand turn, its wingtips carving a brilliant white condensation trail in the air. A few seconds later, the sonic boom from their flyby rolls over the hill where Elin and I are standing. Before I can wonder why they’re going supersonic and alerting the entire neighborhood, the radio screen pops up on my
heads-up display.
“Dagger Actual, this is Siren Six-Five. We have visual on a cluster of LHOs in your area. They’re fifteen klicks to your south, ten-plus individuals on the ground and moving. Doesn’t look like they’re headed for you, but you may want to wait this out on higher ground anyway.”
I watch as the tactical screen updates with the visual sighting from the Shrikes. A small cluster of orange icons pops into existence on the other side of the hills to our left. A Lanky can cover a kilometer in a minute, and the SAR flight is still fourteen minutes away. If they change direction and pick up the pace, those Lankies could give us the second close shave of the day.
“Siren Six-Five, Dagger Actual,” I reply. “Acknowledged. We’ll move away from the drop ship a little just in case they’re looking for the source of the ground impact. Keep an eye on them and stand by for CAS mission if they get too close for comfort.”
“Copy that. Your call down there. Steer us in if you need us.”
If I had my way, I’d call down the Shrikes on the Lankies right now and let them blow everything in that map grid into microscopic scraps with their ordnance. But the ground tremors from explosions seem to clue them in almost as much as unbridled EM emissions. If I have the Shrikes start fireworks on the other side of those hills, there’s no telling who will notice.
For every one of them you see on the surface, there’s twenty underground, we used to tell the new guys during our long and grinding orbital garrisoning of Mars.
“Captain Harper,” I shout. The SEAL captain comes trotting up the hill a moment later.
“Sir?”
“Move everyone up to that ridge and take up overwatch positions from between those rocks. We have hostiles passing through the neighborhood. If they come across that ship, we’re better off covering them from an elevated position.”