by Marko Kloos
The space between the Lanky battle lines turns into complete chaos. Each individual vehicle is maneuvering and fighting for its life separately. The Lankies simply kick the mules over or rip their weapons mounts off the tops of the vehicles. Lieutenant Stahl has engaged the polychrome camouflage again and is weaving between mules and Lankies at top speed. I decide that in some situations, the omnivision afforded by the DAS sensors is a little too much information. This is a nightmare run through a merciless close-range battle between machines and twenty-meter monsters.
“Day is turning less fun now,” Dmitry says from the gunner seat. He has fired up the weapons mount again, and he’s emptying the magazine in measured bursts, strafing Lankies as we shoot past them and pumping grenades from the automatic launcher into their midst.
We sideswipe a mule that appears next to us seemingly out of nowhere, and the impact makes the Weasel jolt and momentarily lifts the two right-side wheels off the ground. The Weasel fishtails for twenty or thirty meters and then almost runs right into the legs of an advancing Lanky. Lieutenant Stahl straightens out the fishtailing and immediately steers hard left, a turn so tight that it lifts the left-side wheels off the ground now. We bump over the tip of the Lanky’s toe with one wheel just as the thing is starting another step. The left-side wheels hit the dirt again hard.
“Look forward, durak!” Dmitry shouts at Lieutenant Stahl.
“My name is not durak!” he shouts back. “It’s Thorsten.” He yanks the wheel left, then right, and we clear another Lanky by less than a meter as it swings for us. “And this is not easy driving, you know.”
Amazingly, Dmitry laughs at this. “Is like driving car in Moscow on Saturday evening,” he says. “Maybe little less dangerous.”
“You Russians are all insane,” Lieutenant Stahl growls back.
“Just fucking drive!” I shout.
I don’t know how we make it through the gauntlet of Lankies and zigzagging mules, but a few moments later, we are out in the clear, away from the melee, and racing across the Martian plains. I swivel the optical mast backwards to see if we have Lankies in pursuit, but they’re all pushing inward and pressing in on the mules that are still trapped in the pocket between them. I hate running away from the battle, but there is nothing we can do here.
Dmitry has been working the weapons mount for the whole mad dash, and now the magazines are empty except for a few thermobaric grenades for the automatic launcher, which aren’t very effective in open spaces. We are out of ammo, down to hand weapons, and there’s a disconcerting grinding noise coming from the right side of the Weasel. The TacLink screen is a total mess, orange and blue icons layered on top of each other, and more and more blue icons winking out of existence as the transmitters in the vehicles get crushed. Two more blue icons have made it out of the cluster of orange ones and are headed away from the battle at top speed as well, taking different headings. What was a full-strength light-armored-fighting-vehicle company just five minutes ago has been reduced to a handful of damaged survivors running for their lives. Our tactics were sound, our approach by the book, our execution flawless—and we got our asses kicked up to our ears. Too many Lankies on too big a planet, and too few of us to stem that tide, even after a whole year of cranking out new troops.
Lieutenant Stahl drives the Weasel south for ten minutes before we dare to stop on a small hill to take stock of what’s left. The two surviving mules have been going roughly in the same direction, but they’re several kilometers to our west. Both have SI squads in the back, led by staff sergeants, which means I am the senior surviving NAC member.
“Head south around that mountain; then make for Olympus Spaceport,” I tell the commanders of the two mules. “Get your troops back to safety. There’s Lankies all over the rock between here and there, so keep your eyes open, and don’t take risks.”
“Copy that, sir. See you back at the base. Good luck.”
We get out of the Weasel and observe the exterior damage. The grinding sound is a piece of hull plating that is rubbing against one of the honeycomb tires. The side of the Weasel is dented and scraped all to shit from the collisions with the mule and the Lanky. The front-left wheel bearing is shot as well, but the recon car should get us back to the spaceport. Dmitry and I pull off the dangling piece of laminate armor and chuck it away.
“Which way do you want to go?” Lieutenant Stahl asks me when we’re back in the vehicle.
“I want to go back north and come around the slope of that mountain the other way,” I say. “High enough so we can use your superperiscope here and check out the plateau to the northeast of that Lanky village. I have some suspicions I want to lay to rest.”
Lieutenant Stahl plots our course on the navigation screen. “We have the range,” he says.
“Then let’s head out. I’ll try to get C2 at LZ Red along the way, once we’re on that slope.”
The news from C2 confirms my worst fears. I call in and inform command of the disastrous outcome of our mission, but it turns out that in the grand scheme of things, that’s a minor problem right now. In the background of the transmission from C2, I hear heavy-weapons fire from airborne platforms.
“We have Lankies in our rear everywhere,” Brigade Command says. “They started popping up behind the lines out of nowhere. Our perimeter around LZ Red is down to ten klicks around the base, and it’s shrinking by the hour. LZ Orange is gone, and LZ Brown is in doubt. They’re doing what they can with orbital support, but the cruisers are rapidly running out of missiles and kinetic warheads. Division is preparing for an emergency dustoff, so I suggest you double-time it back here if you want to be included.”
“What about the southern hemisphere?”
“Second Division and the SRA are pulling out of there already. We’re cutting our losses, Lieutenant. Get back to base, and Godspeed. C2 out.”
We let the news sink in for a bit. Several LZs overrun, with a brigade lost in each of them. We gave them an ass-kicking in orbit, wiped out thousands on the ground, and then they punched right back. Maybe you can’t effectively fight an enemy you haven’t even begun to understand.
“Let’s get going,” I say. “I want to get eyes on the Lanky village again on the way back to base.”
We make our way around the mountain, clinging to its side about halfway up the slope. I’m running the sensor mast, extended to its full height of twenty-five meters, and my field of view is a swath of Mars surface hundreds of kilometers wide. At one point, we get to within ten klicks of the site where the armor platoon got comprehensively folded up, and I train the mast sensors on the spot and crank them up to maximum magnification. It’s still dark out, and the image intensifiers don’t make for a very sharp picture from this far out, but I can see the wrecks of the vehicles scattered in the Mars dirt. Luckily, I am too far away to spot bodies if there are any.
A little while later, I see movement in the darkness on the plateau between the battle site and the Lanky village. We’re five hundred meters above the plateau and six kilometers away, and even with the fuzzy, green-tinted imaging of the low-light sensors, I can see that a whole bunch of Lankies are converging on a spot out there.
“Stop the ride for a moment,” I tell Lieutenant Stahl, who complies and lets the Weasel roll to a stop.
I focus on the spot out in the Martian desert. The plateau is pretty flat—I was able to see for several klicks while we were driving across it scouting for the mules earlier—but there are deep furrows and ravines from old erosion on either side of the plains, near the spots where the terrain starts to rise again. The Lankies out on the plateau, many dozens of them, are making their way into one of those ravines. I follow their movement until I find a spot where the familiar spindly silhouettes disappear in the darkness and out of sight. I had a suspicion earlier, about the way the Lankies managed to slam the trap door shut behind us so quickly even though we had just swept the plateau, and now I know how they pulled it off. I share the imagery with Dmitry and Lieutenant Stah
l.
“It’s a goddamn tunnel,” I say. “They went underground. Into the rock. Just like they did on Greenland.”
“That is why they can come up behind our lines,” Lieutenant Stahl muses. “They hide in the tunnels and come back out when we are gone.”
“We think we have a frontline, but they’ve been letting us push them on purpose. On the surface. So we’d overextend ourselves.”
“I do not think this is battle we can win, Andrew,” Dmitry contributes.
“No,” I say. “Not on the ground.”
We watch as the Lankies disappear in the tunnel mouth one by one. Unbidden, I remember the darkness in the tunnel on Greenland, my feelings of total fear and helplessness, and that same fear starts welling up again just at the thought of having to go after these things, down dark tunnels hundreds of meters below the surface. Just a dozen of them made themselves a nest and a small tunnel network on Greenland in one month. Mars has been in their hands for over a year, and there are probably tens of thousands of Lankies here. They had a lot of time to dig in and prepare. If these Lankies were half as busy and efficient as the ones on Greenland, there’s a tunnel and cave network under the surface of Mars now that a hundred thousand SI troopers wouldn’t be able to clear out in a year.
“What are they carrying?” Lieutenant Stahl asks.
“What?”
“The Lankies. It looks like they are carrying something. The ones that are going into the tunnel.”
I zoom in at maximum. The image stabilization even at two-hundred-power magnification is a thing of marvel. The Germans really know how to do optics, but right now I wish they weren’t quite as good as they are, because I can clearly see arms and legs dangling from the huge clawed hands of the Lankies. A sudden wave of nausea floods my brain.
“Bozhe moy,” Dmitry mutters when I freeze the image and share it on the Weasel’s central screens.
“Bodies,” I say. “Those are human bodies.”
CHAPTER 20
NO SUCH THING AS OVERKILL
The sun comes up an hour later while we’re still making our way around the slope of the mountain. I am busy scanning the plateau and the approaches to the Lanky village with the optical sensors. The area, which was empty when we breezed through it with our scout car and an armored company in tow, is now busy with Lanky activity again. They’re not bunching up in the massive groups we saw during the night, but it’s clear that they’ve gone back to business as usual. The village has Lankies going in and coming out of it. Some are dragging the bodies of their dead along with them. I see that even Lankies have physical limitations, because it takes two of them to move one body.
“What do they do with our dead?” Lieutenant Stahl muses. “Why do they collect the bodies? That is why there were almost no bodies in the city. They took them all.”
“Food,” Dmitry suggests. “Maybe they eat the dead.”
“I don’t know. Those things are thousands of times our body weight. There’s not enough of us around. It would be like you trying to live off cockroaches.”
Dmitry shrugs and opens his mouth, but I hold up a hand to make him hold in what he’s about to say.
“If you actually have cockroach recipes from the Russian prisons,” I say, “I am really not interested.”
He grins and shrugs. “Is protein. Everything needs protein.”
“Everything needs protein,” I repeat.
“Could be for food,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Or could be for raw material. For building. I was an engineer before I became a soldier,” he adds, almost apologetically.
“What the hell do you build with protein?” I ask.
“You do not build with it directly. But it is a component. It adds rigidity. Or flexibility, depending how you use it. Like in bones.”
I look through the eyepiece of the sensor mast array and pan over to where the Lanky village stands, twenty kilometers away but very obvious on the red Mars dirt. Now that I see one closer up and in daylight, I am reminded of the skeletal remains of a long-dead animal.
“Like in bones,” I say.
Underneath the Weasel, the ground shakes a little. Dmitry and I look at each other. Lieutenant Stahl slows the vehicle down and scans around for falling rocks or other signs of instability.
Then the ground shakes again, stronger than before. Small rocks and pebbles start bouncing down the slope in front of us.
“Volcano?” I offer.
“This part of Mars isn’t volcanically active,” Lieutenant Stahl says.
The shaking repeats, stronger still than the first two times.
“Helmets on,” I suggest. “We need to get off the hillside before we end up in a rockslide.”
A fourth tremor jolts the ground, and this one is so strong that it makes the Weasel move sideways a little. Then there’s a deep, sonorous rumbling that starts in the valley somewhere and doesn’t let up. It sounds like an earthquake, and it gets a little louder with every passing moment.
“Down there.” Dmitry points. “Look.”
A meter-wide crack has appeared in the plateau just to the south of the Lanky village. As we watch, it extends north, parting the ground like a world cut deeply with the world’s largest and sharpest knife. We hear the sudden cracking and whiplash snapping of rock layers pulling apart. The surface crack races up to the Lanky village and disappears under the structure at its southernmost point. The sound that started out as a distant, rumbling cacophony is rising sharply in volume, and the tremors that accompany it get stronger by the second.
“Earthquake,” I say. “A big-ass earthquake. Just what we needed right now.”
“Not earthquake, I think,” Dmitry says.
Over by the Lanky village, the ground has started to churn. The smaller rocks and the rubble are visibly bouncing on the ground with the vibrations of whatever is going on below the surface. The rumbling from below fills the whole valley and rolls across the plateau, a steady and energetic bass growl. It looks like two square kilometers of ground around the Lanky village have suddenly become semifluid. Then the crack bisecting the Lanky village widens. The earth on either side of it rises—five meters, ten, fifteen. The whole patch of ground around the Lanky structure heaves up, as if something huge is pushing through from below. Our vehicle, parked on a hill slope over ten kilometers away, shakes with the sonic energy of the low-frequency rumbling that increases with every second.
Then three kilometers of ground erupt upwards, and a gigantic oblong shape appears at the top of the new opening in the Martian soil. The top of it is rounded, and even though most of the object is still buried in the ground, I can tell just by looking at the curvature of the top part what it is that is bursting upwards through the rock and soil like the planet is giving birth. It’s the sleek, deadly torpedo shape of a Lanky seed ship.
“Oh, fuck me running,” I say.
Dmitry utters something at the same time in a low voice, probably the same sentiment expressed in Russian.
The Lanky village, the whole roughly dome-shaped structure, is connected to the top of the seed ship’s hull. Now that the ship is breaking through the surface, soil and rock sliding off the hull like water off a surfacing submarine, the structure starts breaking apart. It looks like the seed ship is shedding itself of the latticework edifice, as if it’s some component it no longer needs.
Maybe they aren’t shelters after all, I think. The only logical conclusion is that every last one of the Lanky “settlements” is the surface component of a buried seed ship. Feelers, or roots maybe, but not Lanky housing. We still treat them as if they think the way we do, and they constantly show us that alien means alien.
“It’s taking off,” Lieutenant Stahl says with amazement. “How is it taking off? In atmosphere? It’s enormous.”
“I have no idea,” I say. “But if that thing makes orbit, it’ll slice through the fleet like a sword through a soy block.”
I fire up my combat-controller kit and dial in the direct link to Phalan
x C2.
“Priority traffic. Phalanx C2, this is Tailpipe Red One, come in.”
“Tailpipe Red One, copy four by five. Go ahead on priority traffic.”
I send the video feed from the Weasel through the visual interface of my suit along with the next message.
“Request priority fire mission, nuclear release. There’s a Lanky seed ship taking off from the surface eighty-three klicks northwest of LZ Red.”
“Confirm your last, Tailpipe Red One. Did you say a Lanky seed ship is taking off from the surface of Mars?” The C2 officer’s tone makes it clear that he thinks I’ve lost my marbles.
“Check the visual feed. He’s halfway out of the ground right now. If he makes upper atmo and then orbit, nobody will go home today.”
The C2 officer takes a few moments to check the feed and then breaks radio protocol by transmitting a very elaborate swear.
“Repeat, request priority fire mission, nuclear release. You have got to put some nukes on top of him before he’s high enough. Do it right now. I am uploading TRP data.”
“Tailpipe Red One, stand by.”
I know that the C2 officer is making a panicked dash across CIC right now to tell the skipper, who is going to pick up the intership-comms handset in a few seconds to talk to the general in overall command of the task force. I predict that the answer won’t take long, and my prediction proves correct. Twenty seconds later, I get a reply from Phalanx.
“Nuclear strike is authorized. The closest nuke-armed unit is Kirov, and she’s repositioning right now. Shots out in seven minutes.”
“Make it faster if they can,” I reply. “Who knows how high this thing will be in four minutes.”