by Marko Kloos
I don’t need to shout orders to re-form the line to the left and open fire. Several M-90s blast their gas-filled projectiles at the silhouette of the Lanky even before the cloud of snow from the impact settles. The Lanky takes two, three, then four rifle rounds to its torso, a target that’s almost impossible to miss at this range. It stumbles and staggers forward with an earsplitting wail. I fire my own rifle at it, pulling the trigger until the magazine is empty and the bolt locks back. The cannons on the drop ship above our heads open up with a long and noisy burst, and shell casings fall out of the sky like steel rain. The Lanky tries to right itself, and it almost makes it back to its feet despite the hail of shells peppering its body and kicking up little geysers of ice all around it. Then a MARS launcher booms behind me. The angry firefly glow of the rocket streaks toward the Lanky at the speed of sound. It hits the creature dead center in the torso and explodes with a dull, wet-sounding thump. The Lanky’s loud wail turns into a drawn-out gurgling that sounds disturbingly like a human’s death rattle as it falls forward into the snow.
“Burlington One-Five, cease fire!” I shout into the air-support circuit. “One down. Save your shells.”
“Copy that.”
The gunfire from above ceases. According to my computer’s chrono, the entire engagement took less than twenty seconds from the moment the Lanky appeared out of the snow squall, but I am out of breath and winded as if I had fought all morning.
“We’ll get stomped out here in the open,” the platoon sergeant sends. “One silver bullet left. Range that short, the rifles aren’t stopping ’em fast enough.”
“Head for the hangars over there, double-time,” I order. “We’ll use the space between the hangar as shelter and work our way out from there.”
The platoon dashes for the relative safety of the aircraft shelters, which are over a hundred meters away. As we run across the frozen concrete of the tarmac, I try to pay attention to the telltale vibrations of the ground under my boots that will announce the approach of another Lanky. I’m used to fighting them at a distance, where I can see them and take advantage of the reach of our weapons. Stumbling around in a blizzard with unseen Lankies prowling nearby makes me feel like I’m back to being very small prey. I change the magazine in my rifle at a run and release the bolt on a fresh cartridge. Overhead, the roar from the drop ship’s engines shifts as the Hornet keeps pace with us and covers us from above.
“Local defense, local defense, any units on this channel, please respond,” I send, trying not to pant into my helmet mike.
“Burlington One-Five, copy. This is Lieutenant Selbe, Homeworld Defense.”
“What’s your location, Lieutenant? I don’t have you on TacLink.”
“We’re in the shelter below the control center. They wiped out the guard platoon. Half the guys down here aren’t even in armor.”
“How the fuck did they let themselves get jumped by a bunch of twenty-meter critters?” the platoon sergeant with me wants to know over the platoon comms. We are filing into the space between two concrete hangar domes, and I hunker down next to one of the hangars, mindful to keep an eye on my surroundings.
“Would you expect Lankies out here?” I reply. “They were sitting at morning chow in the middle of a fucking winter storm. On the frozen ass end of Earth.”
On the TacLink screen, the control center looks to be another two hundred meters away from the hangars, on the other side of the airfield’s big VTOL landing pad for drop ships.
“Sit tight,” I tell the HD lieutenant. “We have a company on the ground, and more are inbound. Did you get a head count on the Lankies?”
“Negative. They showed up and started taking apart the complex right when the storm picked up. Best guess from TacLink is maybe a dozen.”
“Fucking awesome,” I murmur without transmitting. Hunting down a dozen Lankies in this mess with just infantry and without standoff air support is a near-suicidal task.
“Burlington Actual, come in,” I send to the captain in charge of the company on the top-level command channel.
“One-Five Actual, this is Burlington Actual, go ahead.”
“We’re between the hangars on the other side of the VTOL pad. One of those shits jumped us as soon as we got off the boat. We dropped him, but we already have a KIA. Suggest we hunker down for a minute and wait for the Eurocorps grunts to get here. If we attempt to link up in this shit, we’ll get stomped.”
“I have no issue with that assessment,” the captain says. According to TacLink, he’s south of the control center by the ammo bunkers. “We’re just a hundred meters from the control center, so I’ll take First Squad over there and secure the perimeter. You sit tight and link up with Second and Third Squads once the Euros get here.”
“Copy that,” I reply. Then I switch over to the squad channel.
“We’re waiting for the Euros,” I tell the squad. “Our guys are in the shelter. No point rushing to get killed.”
The platoon sergeant makes a sound that has distinctly dissatisfied undertones.
I check the TacLink screen and decrease the scale to check on the incoming drop-ship flight from the east. They are thirty kilometers out and descending toward the airfield in combat formation, five minutes out at their current speed. From the west, the direction of the North American coastline, there are now half a dozen different formations of drop ships and attack birds inbound, but as far away as they still are, they might as well be on the moon right now.
“Uh-oh,” the platoon sergeant says. Under our feet, the ground is trembling again in familiar pulse-like low-frequency tremors. The sounds are coming from the eastern end of the concrete canyon between the hangars where we’re sheltering.
“Contact east,” I send to the squad. “Get the silver bullet up, and stay away from the front of the hangars.”
“It’s like they knew to go for it in the storm,” one of the platoon’s squad leaders says. “Like they knew we weren’t going to have air support.”
“So maybe they did. They have spaceships and terraformers. Just ’cause we can’t talk to them doesn’t mean they’re dumb animals,” the platoon sergeant replies.
“They build cities,” I contribute. “They’re not just dumb animals.”
“Ants build cities. Doesn’t mean they can plan assaults.”
The computer does its best to estimate the location of the unseen Lanky stomping across the drop-ship landing pad on the other side of the hangar. The map updates with a lozenge-shaped area of contact—enough for us to know roughly where the bastard is, but not accurate enough to call down air support. One of the squads has formed a firing line across the alley between the hangars, weapons at the ready, but the Lanky doesn’t do us the favor of trying to squeeze into the tight space and make itself an easy target for our platoon’s concentrated firepower. Instead, the tremors grow more faint as it moves off into the storm.
I run up to the firing line formed by First Squad.
“Friendly passing through,” I announce. “Check those muzzles.”
“Watch yourself, sir,” the squad leader warns. “Those things can move fast.”
“Don’t I know it.”
I dash to the corner of the hangar, carbine at the ready. Behind me, there’s a whole platoon with weapons trained in my direction, and if the Lanky shows up unexpectedly at the mouth of our little alley, things will get sporty in a hurry.
Just as I reach the corner of the building, the wind slacks off noticeably. For a few moments, the snow squall in front of me lifts just enough for visibility to increase past the few dozen meters it has been since we got off the drop ship. Ahead and to my right, I can just barely see a huge silhouette in the snowstorm, its back turned to me, walking toward the main control building with long and unhurried steps.
“Burlington Actual, one’s coming your way!” I shout into the command circuit. “He’s approaching the north side of the building. One-Five, do you see him on TacLink?”
“I got him,”
the pilot sends, satisfaction in his voice. “Guns hot.”
Above us, the drop ship’s cannons thunder. A bright streak of tracers slices through the swirling white mess and races out toward the Lanky. I make a right turn and run toward the Lanky on the drop-ship pad, to make sure I keep him in sight and feed the drop ship overhead visual targeting data. I have to dodge and weave through chunks of debris lying on the concrete, and when I glance to my right, I see that the heavy laminate-steel doors of the hangar are torn to shreds. The aircraft inside, half a dozen ground-attack birds and Hornet drop ships, are twisted and mangled wrecks, smashed into scrap and scattered all over the hangar floor.
The burst of fire from the drop ship slams into the back of the Lanky and sends it tumbling forward. It crashes into the snow-covered concrete with a loud wail, limbs flailing.
“On target!” I shout to the pilot. “Keep it up.”
Our drop-ship pilot does just that. Another burst hammers into the Lanky just as it tries to get back on its feet. When it crashes to the ground again, it stops moving. Our pilot rakes the Lanky with a third burst just to be on the safe side.
“Another one down,” I send on the company channel.
“The Euros are coming in from vector one-one-zero,” the captain announces. “Twenty klicks. You want to sit tight until they have boots on the ground, your call.”
I gauge the situation and think for a few seconds.
“Sarge, move the squads around the corner and into the hangar for cover,” I send to the platoon sergeant. “Stick to the back wall.”
The platoon sergeant sends back a wordless acknowledgment. On the TacLink map on my helmet display, the icons representing my platoon’s troopers start moving and re-forming as the squads follow my order and redeploy into the hangar behind me. The hardened shelter is a big dome of reinforced concrete, apparently too tough even for the Lankies to demolish, and any threats coming at the platoon will have to come through the front doors, a predictable vector.
The storm slacks off a little more. The drop-ship landing pad is a large square of a hundred by a hundred meters, and I can see the hangars on the far side through the diminishing squall. The doors of the shelters on the other side look like they received the same treatment as the one on the hangar where my platoon is now sheltering, but there is no Lanky in evidence. I can’t even feel one walking around nearby, sense no familiar ground tremors that mean one of the twenty-meter behemoths is on the move within a quarter kilometer. I conclude they’ve either left this part of the base, or they’ve learned to walk around on tiptoes. A few years ago, I would have laughed off the second possibility, but the spindly bastards have shown an unsettling ability to adapt to our tactics and environments.
“One-Niner, this is Actual,” the company commander sends. “We are on the sublevel by the shelter. Got fire teams on the building corners, so mind your backstop if you have to open up.”
“Copy, Actual. Drop-ship pad is clear. No hostiles evident on the pad or in the hangars. If there are any left, they’ve moved off,” I respond.
“One-Five, what’s the view like from above?” the captain asks our drop ship’s pilot.
“Actual, I see precisely zip. No activity. Gonna check out the northern end of the runway and the radar facility.”
“Hook a bit east, and make a low pass over the power plant, too.”
“Copy,” the pilot replies. I already know what he’s going to find there. Wherever the Lankies attack one of our settlements, they go for the fusion plants first and smash them to rubble. I don’t know if there’s something about the emissions they don’t like—which is the common theory—or if they’ve figured out that most of our tech is powered by the fusion bottles in those buildings and that we can’t last long without heat and lights and water pumps.
“Plant’s on fire,” the pilot sends a few moments later. “What’s left of it, anyway. No contacts.”
“The hell did they run off to?” I wonder aloud.
“Maybe we got ’em all,” the pilot offers.
“Negative. HD guy said it was maybe a dozen. We only dropped two so far.”
“What do they usually do out on the colonies?”
“They wreck our shit and kill our settlers, and then they stick around,” I reply. “Hit-and-run isn’t their battle plan. They’re nearby.”
The awareness bubbles on TacLink grow and shift around over the next few minutes, the four platoons on the ground changing positions and moving carefully through the ruined base to flush out the Lankies, who have made the very best of the lousy weather. I don’t want to think of them as intelligent and wily, because that would be profoundly unfair considering the huge physical advantage they have over us already. But as our company methodically reclaims the base meter by meter without running into any Lankies, I can’t shake the unsettling feeling in the back of my head that we’ve been had. We are on our own turf, on the planet we’ve evolved on, in weather and terrain we’ve adapted to for tens of thousands of years, and we once again have to react to Lanky initiative, change our tactics to adapt to theirs. Dance to their music.
“NAC forces, this is Eurocorps. Do you copy?” I hear over the local defense channel. The voice has a strong Scandinavian accent. I fall back to my combat-controller mode and address the hail while scanning TacNet for the new arrivals. An eight-ship flight of atmospheric drop ships is descending into the airspace over Thule in a double-V formation.
“Eurocorps units, this is NAC Homeworld Defense,” I reply. “We are on the ground with a company of infantry. We have platoons on the ground at the drop-ship landing pad, in the ops center, and at the south end of the airfield. Two confirmed LHOs are down. There are more that are unaccounted for, so watch yourselves. Visibility down here is under a hundred meters. You won’t see the bastards until they’re almost on top of you.”
“NAC, understood. We will land on the drop-ship pad and at the north end of the runway. Check your weapons, and hold your fire.”
I hear the Euro ships long before I can see the first one, but the sounds have a muffled quality to them in the swirling snowstorm overhead. The new engine noises have an unfamiliar pitch. A minute or so after I hear the Euros overhead, the first Eurocorps drop ship descends out of the storm, does a 180-degree turn to face the open area to our north, and then sets down on the concrete landing pad in front of the hangar where my platoon has taken cover. In size, the Eurocorps drop ships are bigger than Wasps or Hornets, but not as large as Dragonflies. They look sleeker than our ships, less angular and utilitarian, and infinitely more elegant than the SRA’s martial-looking Akula-class drop ships. Unlike both NAC and SRA drop ships, the Eurocorps ships have a modular cargo-hold arrangement. The entire back and bottom of the hull from the wing roots back is a detachable module that can be swapped out depending on mission requirements. The ships that now descend out of the storm one by one and go skids down on the landing pad have troop-transport modules attached. Their tail ramps drop onto the concrete surface of the pad, and Eurocorps soldiers in battle armor start pouring out of the holds. They immediately deploy in quick 360-degree cover formations around their ships. I wave at the nearest of the Euros facing the hangar, and the soldier looking at me lowers his rifle and gives me a curt wave back. I leave cover and trot to the front of the hangar, my carbine at low ready.
The Euro troopers are wearing battle armor that’s almost dainty looking compared to our bulky NAC kit. Their helmets are streamlined, without a single hard angle on them, and they look like they’re about two-thirds the size of ours. The soldier I’m approaching raises his hand in a brief greeting and then flips open the visor of his helmet. The camo pattern on his armor is a blotchy mélange of black, reddish brown, and light and dark green tones that looks like someone kicked over a few buckets of earth-tone paints. The only signets on the armor that stand out are the Danish flag on one arm, and the rank insignia on his chest—two five-pointed stars, first lieutenant rank.
“Lieutenant Grayson, NAC F
leet!” I shout my introduction over the noise of the drop ships nearby.
“Lieutenant Hansen, Danish army,” he replies. “Eurocorps.”
I give the Danish lieutenant a quick rundown of the situation. Our TacLink battlefield-data network doesn’t interface with the Euros, and every time I have to lay out with my words what would take five seconds to display via helmet-visor screen, I marvel at the ability of precomputerized armies to communicate efficiently at all.
“We will expand the perimeter,” Lieutenant Hansen says when I am finished sketching the rough situational picture for him. “Cover east and west with two platoons each.”
“You’ll need a bit more than that in this weather,” I caution.
Lieutenant Hansen smiles curtly and nods at the second wave of drop ships landing on the pad behind him.
“We brought more,” he says. “Don’t worry. We know this place well.”
The modules underneath the second flight of Eurocorps ships look different from the troop haulers, less tall but slightly wider, and I have an idea what’s inside even before they have lowered their ramps. I hear the whining of powerful turbines over the din of the drop-ship engines, and an armored vehicle rolls out of the cargo module of the nearest drop ship and makes a hard left turn. It’s a six-wheeled vehicle, smaller than our mules, but no less efficient looking. The tires are big, knobby, honeycomb, run-flat units that look like they’re made for deep snow. As I watch, the vehicle’s driver turns on the exterior lights, which are blinding enough at this range to make my helmet shut its visor and turn on the eye-protection filter. A gun mount unfolds itself from its transport position on the mule’s roof and snaps into place. It’s a mean-looking three-barreled rotary cannon that’s half the length of its host vehicle. The other three drop ships discharge their own mules one by one before roaring back into the sky. The platoon of cannon-armed mules rolls up the landing pad to the north. Then two swing to the west, and the other pair to the east, cannons swiveling on their roofs as the sensor packages on the mules look for targets in the frigid storm.