by Marko Kloos
Both of us have our tactical screens up on the visors of our helmets, and we can see all the information from the respective TacLink feeds of our allies. Sergeant Dragomirova races the electric car through the city streets at breakneck speed. She’s able to avoid streets and intersections with Lankies in them because the spotted ones show up on our map overlay complete with movement vectors. We make it to the perimeter fence of the base, which is torn down in many spots. Sergeant Dragomirova slows down for a hard left turn and steers our ride through one of the gaps in the fence. Then she floors it again, and we’re headed for the VTOL pad of the base, driving up to the dragons to tickle their tails and run away.
We’re a hundred meters from the VTOL pad when I spot the first Lankies. They’re much taller than the surrounding buildings and almost as tall as the hardened concrete domes of the big spacecraft shelters nearby. I turn my suit’s transmitter up to full power, which is enough radio energy to send messages to the waiting ships in orbit. If the Lankies are really sensitive to radiation, I just turned on a superbright flashlight in a dark basement.
“Come on, you bastards!” I shout. “Over here.”
Behind me, Sergeant Dragomirova turns on the little car’s entertainment system, which starts blaring a K-pop tune. She turns the volume all the way up, and the music is so loud in the confines of the car that my helmet reduces the incoming volume by three-quarters to preserve my hearing. I don’t speak Korean, so I don’t understand the lyrics, but the tune is pretty catchy, with lots of bass beat.
Our combined efforts to get the Lankies’ attention has the desired effect almost at once. I don’t know whether it’s the radio energy from my suit or the K-pop or both, but the nearest Lankies turn and start walking our way. Even when they’re not in a hurry, they can outrun a human easily with their five-meter strides, and when they are agitated, they can move much more quickly than their size would suggest. The first Lanky comes off the VTOL pad in a brisk walk that turns into a trot. Sergeant Dragomirova whips the electric car around and floors the accelerator. We race away from the VTOL pad and over to the open space of the triple runways. The tarmac is strewn with debris and destroyed vehicles, and the SRA sergeant has to do a slalom to avoid wreckage and concrete chunks.
The car is fast, but the Lanky isn’t much slower, and it doesn’t slow down for obstacles. Instead, it steps right over them. Behind the first one, four more have decided to give chase to our loud little car. I let my suit update the target data for the rest of the squad. Then I bring my rifle to bear and switch the fire-control system to computer control. With my finger on the trigger, the suit’s ballistic computer takes over. I center my helmet reticle on the closest Lanky, now eighty meters away and closing the distance, and point the muzzle of the gun in the same direction. The computer waits until the barrel of the gun lines up with the intended target, and then the gun adds its thundering report to the noise of the pop tune blasting from the car’s speakers. For a human, an eighty-meter hit on a moving target from a weaving and dodging platform would be a one-in-a-hundred shot, but for the computer, it’s a trivial matter. The round hits the Lanky in the upper chest, and the explosive gas payload blows a head-sized hole out of its thick hide. The Lanky collapses midstride and crashes into the wreckage of a fuel bowser, and the impact is so loud that it drowns out the pop music from the car momentarily. The Lankies behind the first one keep following, undeterred, but I notice that they’re loosening up their formation a little, fanning out past the fallen body of the one I just dropped.
“You have five behind you,” Lieutenant Perkins says over the squad channel. “Whatever you do, don’t fucking stop. They’re too far for us to engage.”
“Four more coming,” Dmitry announces. “From between hangars, trying to cut you off. Turn right and go faster.”
I turn to my right and see the four Lankies Dmitry announced, emerging at a fast clip from the space between the nearby hangars. I yell to Sergeant Dragomirova and point over to the newcomers, and she kills the entertainment system and silences the K-pop tunes warbling from the speakers at a hundred decibels. Then she steers to the right, away from both Lanky groups. We race across the runways on a diagonal course. With fewer wrecks and bits of debris out here in the open, Sergeant Dragomirova can go full throttle, and we’re up to a hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating by the time we’re across the third runway. I shoot the rest of the magazine at the Lankies trying to catch up to us to keep them pissed off.
“Now would be a great time to shoot some arty at these things,” I send to Dmitry.
“I sent request. Go over this point in twenty-five seconds; then go straight another ten seconds and make turn to three hundred degrees,” he says, and marks a spot on the map a kilometer ahead. Then he gives instructions in Russian to Sergeant Dragomirova, and she sends back a terse acknowledgment.
Somewhere out in high orbit past the Lanky minefield, a Russian cruiser is aiming its ventral rail gun battery at Dmitry’s target reference point right now and letting fly with whatever their gunnery department deemed appropriate for a squad-sized group of Lankies out in the open. It’s not a comforting thought at all, even though I know that Dmitry knows what he’s doing. But kinetic projectiles don’t distinguish between friend and foe, and an aiming error of a tenth of a degree can make a shot miss by hundreds of meters at this range. We race ahead of the group of Lankies, who are now keenly interested in the little electric car kicking up a rooster tail of red Mars dirt by the side of the runway. I eject the empty magazine from my rifle and insert a full one from one of the ammo pouches on my armor. The anti-Lanky rounds are so large that the magazines are way too cumbersome for something that only holds five measly rounds. Two quick engagements, and I’ve already gone through a quarter of my ammunition. And if we don’t clear this space for the main landing force soon, there won’t be any resupply.
Sergeant Dragomirova has to kill a few seconds to reach the spot marked by Dmitry at exactly the right time, so she slows the car down and whips it around in a circle before looping back to our old heading. That maneuver reduces our distance to the nearest Lanky from over two hundred meters to less than a hundred. The two groups of Lankies are converging on our position, and I have a good idea why Dmitry directed us the way he did.
“Mark,” Dmitry says. “Now ten seconds ahead, full speed. Next mark, turn to three hundred degrees. Chetrie, tri, dva, odin, mark.”
Sergeant Dragomirova turns the wheel and whips the nose of the car to the left. The electric engine is running at full output, and I don’t want to check how much battery life is left in this thing. If it dies on us in the middle of this wide-open stretch of dirt, the Lankies will only be a brief worry before the air strike gets here. I’ve called lots of ordnance down into my neighborhood, but I’ve never had any called down practically right on top of my head.
“Seven seconds,” Dmitry says, and now there’s urgency in his voice. “Go faster.”
I shout at Sergeant Dragomirova, who is yelling at Dmitry into her helmet’s headset, and the leading Lanky outside, now two hundred meters away again, lets out a screeching wail that sounds pissed off and frustrated at the same time.
Not having any fun, eh? Join the fucking club, I think.
This time, I can hear the whistling sound from the kinetic rounds overhead. It’s a sharp, shrill sound, like a knife blade hacking through sheet metal.
The kinetic warheads from the Russian cruiser smack into the dirt by the side of the runway where the Lankies are following us in an untidy gaggle. They hit the ground in half-second intervals, each pounding like giant sledgehammers. For just a second, I am convinced that the Russians have elected to use tactical nukes. Sergeant Dragomirova is aiming the car at a gap between two hangars, and we’ve almost reached it when the impacts bounce us off the ground and fling the car into the air like we’re a ration can that someone kicked down an alley. I hear a low explosion in the car, and then I see only white and dirty red in front of my eyes. The car rolls o
ver, then again, and again. We were close enough to the hangars that I expect the world to end any second now, that we’ll get crushed against the concrete wall of a spacecraft shelter. But then the car rolls one last time and comes to a stop. The dashboard display still works, but it’s blinking a red “LOW BATTERY” warning among a host of error messages, and the whining from the electrical drivetrain ceases. The little stolen car has driven its last meter. I move my arms and legs, but it feels like I’m moving through syrup instead of air. The whole inside of the vehicle is filled with foam from the crash safety dispensers installed in the civilian car. It’s meant to keep the occupants of a vehicle from suffering impact injuries, and I very much appreciate that safety feature right now, but it makes it a lot harder to get out of the car quickly to get to cover. I guess the designers never had “getting chased by Lankies” or “narrowly getting missed by an orbital strike” on their list of possible safety hazards. I can’t see Sergeant Dragomirova, but I know she’s still alive as well, because she’s cursing up a storm in Russian as she, too, is trying to free herself from the embrace of the rapidly solidifying safety foam.
When I’ve finally freed myself from the wreck of the electric car, I can’t see anything outside but red dust. I cycle through my helmet’s sensor modes until I reach the microwave mode that warned me of the presence of the Lankies in the tunnels on Greenland. All around us, rocks and dirt are raining down. I can barely see my hands in front of my face, microwave mode or not, and I sure as hell wouldn’t notice a Lanky in this mess even if it walked right up to me.
Behind me, Sergeant Dragomirova struggles free from the overturned car and gives the wreck a last kick. We’re both covered in dust and the residue from the safety foam that probably saved our lives just now, because the car looks like it went three rounds with a battlecruiser in a head-on collision contest. My rifle is gone, but the sergeant still has hers. She checks the action of her rifle, points toward our west, and yells something my way in Russian.
“That way is cover,” my computer translates for me. I give her a thumbs-up, look around on the ground for my rifle, and then decide to write it off as a loss. If that M-95 is the only thing I’ll lose today, I’ll come out well ahead. I turn toward Sergeant Dragomirova again, who is already trotting off to the west, toward the row of spacecraft shelters we were trying to reach right before the kinetic rounds hit. I can’t see them in this mess, but my computer’s map says they’re seventy meters away, so I trust the silicon and follow my SRA companion.
It’s good to see that even the Lankies have limits to their physical strength. The spacecraft shelters are all still standing, domed structures made out of reinforced concrete several meters thick. But the heavy roll-away doors that sealed off their fronts are gone, torn off their tracks and scattered all over the tarmac in front of the shelters just like at Joint Base Thule back on Earth. Sergeant Dragomirova and I make our way into the nearest hangar for cover and gape at the destruction inside. This particular hangar had half a dozen civilian interplanetary passenger ships in it, and they’re all thoroughly wrecked, smashed into each other and reduced to component parts by the Lankies. The whole hangar floor is littered with twisted and mangled bits of steel and alloy. There are scorch marks and charred wreckage bits from long-extinguished fires, and the presence of several fuel trucks tells me that they were in the middle of fueling the birds in the hangars for a rapid evac when the Lankies landed. But just like in the streets of Olympus City, I see almost no human remains here. If they got jumped while trying to get the ships ready for takeoff, there should be dozens or hundreds of dead crew and service personnel out here among the wrecks, but I can’t see a single body out in the open.
“That was too fucking close, Dmitry,” I send over the squad channel to let him know we’re still drawing breath, in case he’s not watching our icons on the tactical screen.
“Was not too close,” he says. “If too close, you would be dead both.”
I bite back a cranky reply—can’t argue with the Russian’s logic, after all—and look back at the open end of the hangar, where the red Mars dirt is still raining down everywhere.
“Got eyes on the bad guys?”
“No more bad guys,” Dmitry says. “Not on landing pad. And cannot see too good out by runway, but no movement so far.”
“I concur,” Lieutenant Perkins sends from the south. “That strike wiped out half the map grid. Gotta hand it to the Russians: that was dead-on. Couldn’t have done it better with a guided shell and a laser to ride it in. We are advancing toward your position.”
I check my tactical map. “Copy that. You guys take up station at the south end and secure the VTOL pad and the refueling stations. We are moving north to get eyes past the northern end of the runway. Let’s secure this bitch so we can call down the grunts.”
“Let’s,” Lieutenant Perkins concurs.
By the time the dust from the kinetic strike settles, Sergeant Dragomirova and I are already half a kilometer north of the impact points. I don’t have to turn around and lay eyes on the area where the Lankies got caught out in the open by three kinetic rounds from Kirov to know the result of the strike. The airfield has three main runways, each five kilometers long to accommodate even the heaviest interplanetary shuttles and freighters, and one of them is now out of commission because one of the Russian kinetic rounds tore a twenty-meter crater into it. But we still have two runways undamaged, and the refueling stations are all intact as well. Lieutenant Perkins’s two fire teams take up perimeter guard around the VTOL pad and its subterranean fuel tanks to guard them from the Lankies that are still milling around in the city streets.
The main air/space-traffic-control tower for the Olympus City spaceport sits on a little hill on the north end of the base. The radar installation and fusion reactor a hundred meters away are little more than rubble, but the control tower is only slightly damaged. Sergeant Dragomirova and I break open a door and make our way up the emergency staircase of the tower.
The main control room at the top of the tower is empty, and other than the fact that half the windows in the place are shattered, things here look mostly intact, like someone could just turn the power back on and start directing inbound traffic again if the base radar down the hill wasn’t all wrecked to shit. We’re fifty meters above ground level, higher up than even Dmitry and his squad on their rooftop to the south of the base. The view from up here is excellent, and I can see far to the north, where the Martian plains extend underneath a gray and cloudy sky. And what I see in the distance makes me wish for a hole to crawl into.
“We have incoming from the south,” Lieutenant Perkins sends. Five orange icons pop up on my tactical map beyond the south end of the base, close to where Dmitry’s squad is providing overwatch for the SI guys.
“Uh-huh,” I say, preoccupied with the view from the north-facing windows of the control tower. “We’ve got incoming from the north, too.”
“How many?” Lieutenant Perkins asks.
In the distance, eight kilometers away according to my computer, the biggest group of Lankies I’ve ever seen together in one place is coming across the plains toward Olympus City and the spaceport. The only thing I can think of is Gateway Station on a busy day, when there are so many people moving on the central concourse that the crowd moves like a stream.
“Every last fucking one of them, I think.”
CHAPTER 15
RODS FROM THE GODS
I don’t even bother mourning the loss of my rifle, or the fact that only two of us are up here on the north end of the field instead of the entire team. What’s coming down from the plains is beyond our ability to stop with hand weapons. Depending on how they’re positioned in orbit relative to our location, it may even be beyond the fleet’s ability to handle.
“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. Priority fire mission. Sending TRP data uplink now.”
It takes a few seconds for the signal to travel up to Phalanx, and then a few seconds more for the tactical
officer in CIC to process what he’s seeing on his display. The plain to the north of Olympus City is a sea of orange icons, hundreds of Lankies in motion, flowing in our general direction at twenty kilometers per hour.
“I read your uplink,” the tactical officer says, and I admire the professionalism that keeps the incredulity in his voice to a very slight note. “Call the ordnance, Tailpipe Red One. You are in the clear for a nuclear strike.”
I think about it for a moment. That many Lankies out in the open are a tempting target for a hundred-kiloton warhead. The whole group would be gone in a flash, but then the follow-up troops would have to deal with the fallout and the radiation. And I know that Phalanx has a pitifully low number of nuclear warheads on board. The battle has just begun, and we have no clue what else they may throw at us once the first wave is on the ground. If I have them start using nukes right now, we may all regret it later.
“Negative on nukes,” I say. “They’re bunched up enough for kinetics. But we’ll need a lot of them.”
God, I wish we had some close-air support already, I think. The Shrike pilots would have a party with that many Lankies out in the open and with no orbital support of their own.
“Give us a time-on-target strike,” I continue. “All the rail gun barrels you can bring to bear. Make it a hundred rounds. Saturate grid Romeo Alpha Nine-Seven as they pass through it, in”— I check my TacLink screen and do a quick calculation—“eight minutes, thirty seconds. I will call in follow-ups as needed.”
Rail gun projectiles are cheap, and the task force carries plenty of them, but a hundred rounds will make a big dent in our supply. The tactical officer on the other end of the link does not argue the need. He can read a plot, and he knows just as well as I do that if a few hundred Lankies overrun the spaceport and the city, Red Beach is going to be a no-go for landing troops.