by Marko Kloos
“We get jumped by Lankies, you take your helmet off, and you check out quickly.”
Brassey nods, but he doesn’t look happy with the reply. A few years ago, I would have taken pity and prettied up the situation assessment for the green lieutenant who has probably never been on the surface of Mars and most likely never seen a Lanky from outside of a cockpit. But I didn’t want to kindle false hope. Better a quick bullet to the brain than getting crushed by a Lanky or being dragged off to be used as organic filler in a seed ship hull.
The Lanky disappears behind a low ridge, still headed for the crash site. I scan the area ahead of us for safe spots to send a burst transmission to the Fleet. With any luck, they’ve already picked up the wailing from the drop ship’s crash beacon and dispatched a SAR ship, but I’m not willing to wait around and hope.
“That little hill over there,” I say to Brassey and point to our northeast. “Three klicks. Twenty minutes if we hustle. I’ll call for pickup from there.”
“Copy that,” Brassey replies.
I should be scared and worried as we trudge up the hill a little while later. Climbing the featureless slope makes us visible and obvious from far away, and the Lanky disappeared from sight uncomfortably close by. But I’m more irritated and pissed off than anything else. I don’t want to buy it on this irradiated rock, where no humans will settle again for a century or more. But if I do have to buy it here, I certainly don’t want it to be in a pointless crash because some wrench spinner missed tightening a bolt somewhere. The most frustrating part is that the pilot is probably right, and there’s nobody to blame for our current situation. Nothing makes me feel more like a powerless cog in a machine than almost dying just because a tired widget broke, and I don’t even have anyone to shout at for it.
“If TacOps is on the ball, they’ll see the crash beacon from the wrecked bird,” I tell Lieutenant Brassey.
“That would be nice,” he says and looks skyward, as if he’s hoping to see a SAR drop ship appear out of the low cloud ceiling overhead right this minute and save us a bunch more legwork and a risky radio call. There were only six drop ships in the air over the whole hemisphere when we went down, and seeing one-sixth of your patrol drop off the holotable display should be a solid indicator that shit has gone sideways. But now that the CIC and TacOps consoles are frequently staffed with first-deployment trainees two months out of tech school, things sometimes fall through the cracks.
Behind and below us on the rubble field, the wreckage of our Dragonfly is still burning, sending billowing black smoke into the leaden sky. I don’t see any Lankies nearby, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any around. They’ve had three years to expand the tunnel system they used for their surprise counterattack at the Second Battle of Mars, and by now they can pop out of the ground anywhere.
“All right,” I say when we reach the top of the little hill. “Take over watch. I’ll call down a taxi.”
Lieutenant Brassey nods and turns around to keep an eye on the rubble field below. He’s resting one hand on the pistol strapped to his armor’s chest plate. Two pistols and a radio—not really an ideal combat load for hiking through a Lanky-infested wasteland.
I dial into the Fleet’s TacOps channel and select burst transmission mode, three milliseconds, maximum transmitting power.
“TacOps, this is Tailpipe One. Romeo One-Five is down with one KIA. Requesting immediate combat SAR.”
The computer in my suit compresses the message into a tiny data package and sends a burst transmission up into orbit, where NACS Regulus is in orbit above the southern hemisphere.
“Tailpipe One, TacOps. Copy request for SAR mission. Stand by.”
I can picture the console jockey at the TacOps station in CIC disconnecting his headset and rushing over to the officer of the deck to check for available air assets. Thankfully, downed crew get priority billing when it comes to the allocation of those assets. It’s important for the flight crews to know that the Fleet will spare no fuel or ammo expense to get them back if they crash.
“Tailpipe One, this is the XO. SAR mission will be out of the clamps in three minutes, call sign Angel One-Niner. ETA twenty-eight minutes. Keep your heads down and lay low.”
“Copy SAR flight Angel One-Niner inbound, ETA two-eight minutes. I’ll check on TacAir when he’s overhead. Tailpipe One out,” I send in reply. Then I walk over to Brassey, who is keeping a nervous watch on the area, fingering the pistol in his chest holster.
“Twenty-eight minutes for SAR to get here,” I tell him.
“Hope they’ll get here in time,” he says.
“Don’t hope too much. Expect they won’t, and then you can’t get disappointed.”
“That’s not a very optimistic outlook,” Brassey says.
“I’m out of optimism. I traded whatever I had left for some spare rations in Detroit a year ago,” I say.
Twenty-eight minutes on the surface of Mars seem like an eternity, and there’s no spot on the planet that doesn’t remind me of the bloody mess from three years ago. We can’t settle here again, they can’t move around on the surface freely, so we have a pointless stalemate now. If I had command, I’d aim the particle cannon mount of the Arkhangelsk at the planet and hit the fire button on the main weapons console until the reactors are out of fusion mass.
Fifteen minutes into our wait, we see more Lankies in the neighborhood. Three of them appear without warning out of a ground depression half a kilometer away, moving laterally from our right to our left toward the still-burning wreck of the drop ship. At first, they’re walking in a tight group, but as soon as they are out of the depression, they spread out until there is about a hundred meters of space between them.
“Son of a bitch,” I murmur. “They’ve learned their lessons.”
“What’s that, Lieutenant Grayson?”
“Oh, they’re moving like our guys would when they’re on foot patrol. Space it out, so one strike or ambush can’t take out the whole patrol at once.”
We speak in low voices, even though the nearest Lanky is several hundred meters away. With just our pistols, we couldn’t even scratch one of those things if they discover us, much less kill all three. It’s hard to watch a group of them close enough for a MARS rocket or a few magazines from an M-95 rifle and not be able to do a thing. We watch the Lankies walk over to the burning wreckage. One of them stoops and seems to examine the site, while the other two stand nearby as if to keep a guard.
“Oh shit.” I make a fist when I see the Lanky by the wreckage reach down and pick something off the ground. I crank up the magnification on my optics to full power to see that the mangled and lifeless body of the drop ship’s pilot is now dangling from the long-fingered hand of the Lanky. The alien straightens itself out and then points its head up into the sky, looking like a dog sniffing the breeze for a familiar odor.
“Tailpipe One, this is Angel One-Niner, do you read?” I hear on the TacAir channel. The air cavalry has arrived in the neighborhood.
“Angel One-Niner, I read you five by five. We are two and a half klicks to the northeast of the crash beacon. There are three LHOs clustered around the wreckage, and they have our KIA with them. Suggest you plow the shit out of that map grid ASAP before they make it back underground with our guy. Just aim for the beacon. The hostiles are all within three hundred meters of it.”
“Copy that. Starting gun run. I’ll give you a thirty-second mark so you can turn on your own transponders.”
“Copy,” I reply. “One-Niner, you are cleared hot.”
I don’t see or hear the incoming SAR drop ship yet, but the Lankies have definitely sensed its presence, because they are now turning and striding back the way they came, and this time they are moving faster. I decide to throw caution to the wind and turn on all the gadgetry in my suit.
“Angel One-Niner, hostiles are now moving away from the crash site at fifty klicks, heading zero-two-zero from the beacon. I am painting them for you on TacLink. They’ll know we’
re up here in a second or two, so hurry up.”
“Thirty seconds to target,” Angel 19’s pilot returns. “Copy cleared hot. I’ve got you on TacLink.”
Even after doing this a thousand times, it’s still unnerving to be in the target area of an attack run in close proximity to the impact zone. The pilots know their stuff, and with our positions showing on the drop ship’s TacLink screen, the chance of accidental friendly fire is low, but there are still unforgiving physics involved, and computers can fail.
Down below us, the Lankies increase their pace. One of them swings its head over to our little hill and alters its course toward us.
“Oh shit,” I say. “One-Niner, make the easternmost LHO a priority target. He’s coming our way, and we have no ordnance.”
“Copy that,” the pilot replies. “Hang in there.”
I unlock my pistol from its holster and flick off the safety with my trigger finger. Between the magazine in the gun and the two spares, I have ninety rounds at the ready, and I intend to use eighty-nine of them on the Lanky once it gets close enough. The last one is for me, a last measure of defiance. With the other hand, I pat the pocket with my PDP in it to make sure it’s still there and in one piece. I can’t send Halley a last message from the battlefield, but every time before I go on a mission, I write her a final note and schedule it for a delayed send. If I make it back, I move it back into draft status and cancel the send. If I don’t make it back, the computer will send it as instructed. The SI grunts worked this system out years ago as a fail-safe last good-bye, and everyone else in the Fleet adopted it.
The Lanky that peeled off the little group comes directly toward us, even though we are crouching behind a low cluster of rocks. Then its steps become a little halting, and it turns its head toward the sky and then back to the two other Lankies that are now two hundred meters away from it.
“That’s right, asshole. Turn around,” I murmur. The lone Lanky is still almost two hundred meters away and at the bottom of the little hill we just climbed, but if it gets any closer before close-air support gets here, we’ll be danger close, and our body armor won’t stop tungsten-tipped autocannon shells.
One hundred and fifty meters. I take aim at the center of the Lanky’s mass, knowing full well that the spitball rounds from the pistol won’t do much more than annoy the thing at best.
The Lanky hesitates again and comes to a stop about halfway up the slope. Then it turns around and strides back down the hillside to catch up with its two companions. I let out the breath I’d been holding and flick the safety on my pistol again.
Up ahead, where the two Lankies are heading down into the ground depression from which they had appeared just a few minutes ago, dozens of explosions start peppering the ground, throwing up dirt and rocks all around the Lankies and carving a swath of destruction for a hundred meters. A few seconds later, I can hear the roar of the heavy antiarmor cannons of the SAR drop ship from the cloud cover above us. A second burst follows, and the Lankies disappear in geysers of Mars soil. I see a limb flying through the air, torn from a Lanky body by the joint forces of kinetic energy and high explosives, and I smile with grim satisfaction. The last Lanky changes its course abruptly, away from us and the impact zone of the drop ship’s cannons. It heads off to the east in as close to a run as I’ve ever seen a Lanky go, taking fast strides that are at least fifteen meters long.
“One-Niner, you are on target. Splash two. The third one is hauling ass away from us.”
“I see him on TacLink. Stand by. We’re overhead.”
The drop ship, a Dragonfly with external fuel tanks and missiles on its outer ordnance pylons, comes out of the cloud cover two hundred feet above our heads in a tight starboard turn, bleeding off speed from the attack run. Then the pilot pivots the ship and points the nose toward the fleeing Lanky, now almost two kilometers away already.
“Damn, those things can really move when they want,” Lieutenant Brassey says.
Overhead, I hear a boom and a whooshing sound. Two missiles leave the launch rails on the outer wing pylons of the Dragonfly and chase after the Lanky. They cover the two thousand meters in just a few seconds and converge on the Lanky in a brilliant orange flash. The thunderclap from the explosion reaches us six or seven seconds later.
“Splash three,” the pilot says. “Heads down. We are touching down on the flat spot one-three-zero meters to your direct north.” He marks the spot on our TacLink, and the Dragonfly descends in a hover, chin turret swiveling from left to right and back as the gunner is keeping an eye out for more targets.
I stick the pistol back into its holster and stand up.
“Let’s go,” I tell Lieutenant Brassey. “Before the wings fall off this one, too.”
The Dragonfly lands in a cloud of radioactive dust. The tail ramp comes open the moment the skids touch down, and a whole squad of SI troopers in heavy armor dash out and take up perimeter guard positions around the ship. Several of them come running toward us. We meet up halfway between the hill and the drop ship.
“You need a corpsman?” the lead trooper shouts. He’s wearing staff sergeant insignia—the new ones, three diagonal slashes over one horizontal one—and carries the short-barreled carbine version of the M-95.
“We don’t,” I say. “Neither does the pilot.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Lankies carried it off just before you creamed them from the air. He’s gone for good.”
The staff sergeant shakes his head slowly and speaks into his squad channel. I take off toward the drop ship at a trot, Lieutenant Brassey in tow.
“Don’t hang around,” I shout back at the staff sergeant. “The neighbors are kind of pissy.”
We board the drop ship with the rescue squad and strap ourselves into jump seats in the center row of the cargo bay. I give the mission control chair at the front bulkhead a wistful look—it’s equipped with an emergency eject capsule, but it’s the only seat in the cargo bay so equipped. If this bird crashes as well, there’s no escaping for me or Brassey again. But the mission control seat is already occupied by the lieutenant in charge of the rescue flight, and it would probably be a little rude to order him out of his spot at gunpoint. So I fasten the harness of my jump seat and hope for the best. In any case, being in here and lifting off in a functional drop ship beats being stranded down there amid the corpses and the irradiated dust. I’m tired and angry, and I don’t even bother to ask the pilot for permission to do my customary sensor tap so I can see the feed from the external cameras as we ascend through the cloud coverage and into Mars orbit.
We used to have a creed. We never left a man or woman behind on the battlefield, alive or dead, even if it cost us more lives to retrieve one of our own. But the war against the Lankies has turned that on its head. There’s no way to keep up that pledge without immolating ourselves, because we are fighting a war against a physically far superior species that uses our own dead as organic filler. The best we can hope for is a thoroughly destructive death, to deny the Lankies the raw materials they need. On the way up to the carrier, I pull the dog tags of the dead pilot out of the pouch where I stashed them and read the embossed inscription identifying Lieutenant Whitmer, along with his serial number, blood type, and religion. At least he got to be here, on the main battlefield in the ultimate fight for human survival, and he got to make his mark instead of spending his life sucking down shitty soy rations in an overcrowded PRC shithole on Earth. And in retrospect, it was a dumb creed. When I buy it on the battlefield, I don’t want other troops to get hurt or killed to retrieve my dead body, which is just going to end up a tiny pile of ashes inside a stainless steel burial capsule anyway.
The docking clamps pull us up into NACS Hornet’s flight deck forty minutes later. We disembark and line up for the obligatory decontamination at the decon station in the middle of the flight deck. We’ve been out of the radiation-shielded drop ship and on the surface of Mars, which means I get to spend an extra fifteen minutes getting
my armor and gear sprayed down, then stripping out of the armor and taking multiple trips through the decon shower just in case I had an undetected leak in my armor somewhere. I pick up a fresh set of CDU fatigues at the last station in the decon facility while a Fleet doc looks me over and checks the radiation dosimeter attached to my dog tag.
“Good to go, Captain,” he says. “Dosimeter’s clean. Just make sure you report to sick bay right away if you start feeling odd.”
“I’ve been feeling odd for years now, Doc,” I tell him, and he grins.
Out in the clean section of the flight deck, Lieutenant Brassey is already in a clean new flight suit and fastening the tighteners on his boots.
“You heading back to flight ops before the debrief?” I ask.
“Yeah, for a minute. They’ll want to know about what happened.”
“Grab the biggest wrench you can find, and then beat your crew chief with it.”
Brassey makes a pained face.
“Don’t be harsh, Grayson. Sometimes, shit just breaks. Material fatigue, you know?”
“Yeah,” I repeat, and let it go. Brassey nods and smiles weakly before taking off toward flight ops. He’ll have to get in line for a new bird to fly more combat patrols down there, and part of me suspects he won’t be too heartbroken if he has to do shipboard duty for a while because half our hardware is down. Metal and alloy get fatigued when they’re overused without rest periods, but so do human brains.
Our after-action debriefing is a little more involved this time because we lost an airframe and a pilot and because we had to call on precious SAR assets to haul our asses back to the carrier. I give my version of events, Brassey corroborates it with his version, and none of it serves to put the CAG or the XO in a better mood. The XO is present because we had someone killed in action. I can tell that he’s pissed off, but at least his anger is not directed at us. The CAG, the commander of the carrier’s air/space group of drop ships and strike fighters, looks like he’s already mentally writing the report he’ll have to file for a fatality and the total loss of a multi-million-dollar drop ship.