Points of Impact

by Marko Kloos

  The clamp lowers us into the launch bay, which closes above us. Then the doors of the launch bay open, and there’s nothing but space underneath the Dragonfly.

  “Three. Two. One. Drop,” the pilot counts down. On drop, the clamp overhead releases the ship, and the Dragonfly goes into brief free fall. The grunts in the hold do their customary whooping, as if we’re cresting the biggest hill of a roller coaster track. I close my eyes until the drop ship has left Ottawa’s artificial gravity field and my stomach stops trying to slide up my throat.

  Clear of the ship, the pilot swings the nose around and takes formation lead for the flight down to the surface. New Svalbard looks just the way it did when I saw it last five years ago—glacial plains of thick ice, mountains capped with snow, and swirling white-gray cloud fields. It’s easily the least hospitable place I’ve ever been to, and yet I’ve always liked the harsh and austere beauty of it.

  “Check out the event at two seventy, four hundred klicks off,” the pilot says. I tap into the portside array and look in the direction he indicated. A huge dark cloud is rising a few hundred kilometers in the distance. I’ve seen many high-energy kinetic impacts over the years, and it’s remarkable how similar they look to mushroom clouds from atomic detonations. The wreckage of the Lanky seed ship hit the continent with enough force to throw up a few hundred thousand cubic meters of superheated ice and rock, and all of it is going to come raining down on the moon again over the next day or so.

  “Garcia, Grayson,” I send to the TacOps station.

  “Go ahead,” Garcia says.

  “Advise the skipper that we need to sanitize the crash site ASAP. I’d love to say that nothing could have survived that impact, but after Greenland I wouldn’t bet money on it.”

  “Already on it, Captain,” Garcia replies. “I just tasked two flights of Shrikes to burn it out with nukes.”

  For a moment, I am taken aback at the notion of nuclear bombardment of the crash site. New Svalbard is an ice moon, and potable water is its main reason for being. Before the Lankies, it was one of the NAC’s main water stops. Setting off nukes on this moon will make much of the ice useless and deny us this resource for the next fifty years or more. But then I remember Greenland again, and the unexpected hardiness of the Lankies even under fifty meters of ice. If any of the seed ship’s passengers survived the crash, they’ll be entrenched under the surface in a few weeks, and they’ll have another seed ship rising from the ice in a year.

  “We got a little break with the weather,” the pilot sends back. “Broken clouds over the target area and light winds below five thousand. It’ll be a little bumpy in the higher altitudes, though, so tell the grunts to buckle in and hang on.”

  I relay the message to the troops in the cargo hold and make sure my own harness is on as tight as possible. When a drop ship pilot tells you that the flight is going to be a little bumpy, strap in firmly and prepare to lose a filling or two.

  I thought I remembered the shitty weather above New Svalbard, but five minutes into the atmospheric part of the descent, I am still surprised by the pounding the drop ship is taking. The temperate belt around the moon’s equator usually has slightly warmer air above it than the mountain air to the north and south—a result of the terraforming process—and the cold winds from those regions are often fierce. The bouncing and the jolts go from awful to worrisome the lower we are in the atmosphere. When the Dragonfly leaves the cloud coverage at five thousand feet above the deck, the pounding subsides, and I say a quick thank-you prayer to the weather gods for not scattering the ship all over the glacier below.

  I’m not mentally prepared for the suddenness of being low above a battlefield lousy with Lankies again. We come out of the clouds, and there are dozens, maybe hundreds of Lankies spread out over the glacier below as far as I can see. They walk singly or in small formations, with wide gaps between the individuals. All of them are heading in the same direction as the drop ship, toward the town of New Longyearbyen, sitting on the glacial plain thirty klicks to our west. My fingers run on autopilot as I bring up my TacLink screen and designate target reference points as fast as I can place them on the screen.

  “TacOps, Tailpipe One,” I send to Sergeant Garcia, this time using proper radio protocol. “We have what you can call a target-rich environment down here on the glacier thirty klicks east of the town. I am updating TacLink.”

  The pilot of our drop ship doesn’t bother slowing down to engage. There are plenty more Lankies in front of us, and the Dragonfly bobs and weaves as the pilot fires his cannons or launches missiles at targets of opportunity. Behind us, the other drop ships of our flight come out of the clouds one by one, and their pilots start picking off Lankies as well. But the free-for-all doesn’t last very long. Thirty seconds after we come out of the clouds, our drop ship flight heads into another weather front, and this one looks like it’s a wall of windblown snow from twenty thousand feet all the way to the ground. The shaking and bouncing resumes as the Dragonflies get tossed around again like corks in a swift current.

  “Zero-zero visibility up front,” the pilot sends. “I’m flying by radar altimeter. We have eighty-knot crosswinds. If this shit goes all the way to the airfield, prepare for an interesting landing.”

  As soon as we’re in the soup again, the Lanky contacts on my TacLink screen fade from bright to light orange, signifying contacts that are no longer actively observed. Lankies don’t show up on infrared or radar, so they’re practically invisible in weather like this until they’re right on top of someone. Behind the drop ship flight, several Shrikes rush toward the target reference points I marked earlier to drop cluster munitions blindly. But the Lanky formation was widely dispersed, and they can walk at fifty klicks an hour when they want to. Without a chance to thin them out from the air, they’ll hit the defensive perimeter at New Svalbard unobserved and with minimal engagement time for the defenders.

  “TacOps, Tailpipe One. Advise the ground commander he has a company’s worth of Lankies incoming from the south-southeast. They’re hiding in the weather and advancing toward the settlement. Close air can’t get an accurate bead on them.”

  “Copy that, Tailpipe One. We’re going to drop kinetics on their probable route of advance. Keep your heads low and don’t backtrack.”

  The weather improves as we get close to the settlement, but not by much. When we cross the outer defensive ring in front of the spaceport runway on the western edge of the town, visibility is half a kilometer, and the winds are still strong enough for the pilot to have to rely on the spaceport’s automated landing assist instead of trying to fly it in by hand. The computer takes over the controls and puts us down in the middle of the drop ship landing pad on the first approach, but with no small amount of sideways skidding and rapid thruster corrections.

  When the tail ramp opens, cold air gushes into the cargo hold. The landing pad outside is covered in swirling snow. The last time I was here, it was planetary spring, and the weather was cold, but not unbearably so. But as I step out onto the pad, the temperature readout in my suit shows twenty-five degrees Celsius below zero, with eighty-knot winds that add up to a windchill factor of fifty below zero. I lower my helmet visor to keep the bitingly cold wind out of my armor and let the built-in heaters do their job.

  There’s a welcoming committee at the edge of the drop ship pad. We walk out to meet them, and I salute the highest-ranking officer among them, an SI major who must be the commander of the garrison battalion. Captain Porter does the same next to me, and the major returns our salutes and waves us away from the noisy drop ship pad.

  “I’d say we’re glad to see you, but that would be a massive understatement,” the major says. “Major Coburn, garrison commander.”

  “Captain Grayson,” I reply. “I’m the STO. This is Captain Porter, the CO of Alpha Company.”

  “Let’s go inside and out of the wind,” Major Coburn suggests. The control center is less than a hundred meters from the landing pad, and we trot over
to it, slowed down by the eighty-knot headwind that pushes into us like an insistent invisible hand.

  Inside the control center, we remove our helmets, which are already frosted with snow and ice. Major Coburn looks like he has had a very rough week. His face sports a stubble that’s two days old at least, and his eyes have dark rings under them.

  “Situation,” he says. “This is day seven since they showed up in orbit. At first, we hit the landing sites with our Wasps and tried to contain them far away from the town. But twelve drop ships aren’t enough to hold back Lankies at three different footfall sites. The ordnance bunkers at Camp Frostbite were empty in three days. The fuel lasted until day four.”

  We walk through the ground floor of the admin center. There are no civilians in sight, just SI troopers in battle armor. Major Coburn leads us up the staircase to the top of the control tower. The last time I was here, a missile from a Shrike blew up the fuel tanks not a hundred meters away and took out most of the windows in the tower. They’ve long since been repaired, but from the shopworn look of things up here, it looks like that was the only substantial repair this facility has seen in the last five years.

  The major activates the holotable in the middle of the room and brings up the tactical map. From up here, I have a good view of most of the airfield and the city. The snow is blowing through the streets and piling up against the buildings, and there’s no activity on the roads at all. I know that the admin building is a kilometer to the east, but the blowing snow obscures it from view, with only the occasional red blip from the anticollision light on the building’s roof antenna array visible through the swirling mess. Two pairs of Shrikes thunder over the town at low altitude and head off to the north. Major Coburn looks up from his display and grins curtly.

  “Never thought I’d see that sight again,” he says. “Beautiful.”

  He expands the map view and waves us close.

  “All right. The Lankies keep up probing attacks with half a dozen individuals at a time. They come in, get bloody noses, and disappear back into the weather. We can’t hold the whole perimeter with what we have left, so I concentrated the defense in a few key locations. Greenhouses, food-storage silos, the fusion plant, and of course the airfield. It will be a lot easier now that we have reinforcements and more air support.”

  He zooms the display scale until New Longyearbyen takes up half the plot and marks the locations he just mentioned on the map.

  “There’s no frontline anymore. Not in this weather. They push on one side of the city, we feed in reinforcements and kill a bunch, and they go back into the snowstorm and repeat the same shit on the other side of town half an hour later. The Lankies are no longer coming in dumb like they used to, and that worries me.”

  “They’re still taking a lot of pointless casualties,” I say. “Every time they poke you, they leave dead bodies behind.”

  “It’s only pointless if there’s no method to it,” Major Coburn says. “I still want to think they’re dumb as bullet ants, but they’re smart enough to move only when we can’t see them coming from a thousand meters away. It totally negates our range advantage. And we’re expending a shitload of ammunition every time we stop a probe.”

  “They were plenty smart on Mars,” I reply. “And Greenland. They may not think like we do, but they’re not dumb as bullet ants. They can lay ambushes. Respond to changes in tactics. Find ways to neutralize our technology advantages.”

  “Yeah, I think we’re in some deep shit. We may not be able to hold on to this moon.”

  “Where do you want my platoons?” Captain Porter asks. “We have my company on the ground right now, and Bravo Company is due on the pad in five minutes.”

  “I would love for your company to reinforce our four outposts. Send a platoon each to the greenhouse complex, the food silos, and over to the fusion plant. I have a strung-out platoon at each. They’re badly in need of relief.”

  “Copy that. We’re on the way,” Captain Porter replies. He switches over to his platoon-level command channel and walks off as he starts talking to his platoon leaders.

  “We saw a big group of Lankies on the glacier shelf to the southwest on our approach, thirty klicks out. If they are in a hurry, they could be here in half an hour. I suggest we send Bravo Company to reinforce the southern end of the airfield, sir.”

  “I’ll bet you a bottle of booze they won’t be coming from there now that you’ve observed their approach. But let’s send a company down there anyway. Push comes to shove, they can play mobile reserve. Whoops—hold for one second.”

  He holds up his hand and listens to a transmission over his command channel.

  “Copy that, Lieutenant. I am sending reinforcements your way right now. The first company from the relief ship is on the ground.”

  Major Coburn turns to me and points his thumb over his shoulder to the northeast.

  “You got here in the nick of time. The Lankies are making a push toward the greenhouses, and my guys are almost out of MARS rockets. Tell Captain Porter to send a platoon that way ASAP and support the position.”

  “I’ll go with them. I know where the greenhouses are.”

  I hurry down the stairs and hail Sergeant First Class Kaneda, who is the combat controller for Bravo Company and who is riding in the lead ship of the second drop ship flight about to touch down.

  “Tailpipe Two, Tailpipe One.”

  “Tailpipe One, go ahead.”

  “Sergeant Kaneda, make your way to the control tower as soon as your boots are on the ground and coordinate CAS from there. I am going with Alpha’s first platoon to hold back a Lanky push.”

  “Copy that, sir. Coordinate CAS from the control tower. Good hunting.”

  Out on the landing pad, First Platoon is loading into the cargo hold of their drop ship again, and I follow them up the ramp. I don’t bother with the controller seat at the front of the bulkhead and grab the nearest available sling seat to buckle in. The pilot guns the engines and goes skids up even before the tail ramp has fully closed.

  “Check the map for the round structures a quarter klick north of the northeast edge of the city,” I tell the pilot. “That’s the greenhouse complex.”

  “Copy that,” the pilot replies. “ETA fifty seconds.”

  The drop ship lowers its nose and picks up speed rapidly, and a few moments later, we are racing across the domed rooftops of New Longyearbyen at criminally low altitude. I have flashbacks to that day five years ago when I was passenger in a drop ship over this town, about to take part in a mutiny to prevent some desk-humping one-star general from seizing civilian assets for military use. The greenhouse complex we are racing toward was one of those assets, and now I have to help defend it against a different enemy altogether, one that can’t be made to back down.

  The greenhouses, four of them, are big domes made from alloy latticework and triangular polyplast panels. They rise thirty meters above the surface of the glacial plain half a kilometer from the edge of town. I know from my short time on this moon half a decade ago that the greenhouses are essential to the food supply chain of the colony, providing fresh fruit and vegetables for thousands of people.

  We make a pass above the complex, and the pilot brings the drop ship around to face north, toward New Svalbard. At least ten eggshell-colored Lankies are advancing out of the snow squall a few hundred meters in front of the greenhouses and almost invisible in the weather. Because of their long limbs and their strange joint arrangement, they never look particularly fast, but I know the ones below us are striding along at fifty klicks per hour. The pilot cuts loose with the automatic cannon mounted on the starboard side of the hull bottom. Then he follows up the burst with guided missiles from the wing pylons. They streak out into the swirling white landscape and connect with the first two advancing Lankies. The first one takes a missile to the chest, right below the neck. The Lanky falls forward and hits the ground in a billowing plume of snow. The second one lifts its arm and raises its four-fingered hand,
as if it wants to swat the missile out of the air. The warhead hits its upper arm and blows it in half. I watch in fascinated horror as the lower arm of the creature tumbles to the ground end over end. The Lanky wails loud enough for me to hear the sound over the wind and the gunfire from five hundred meters away through the hull of the drop ship. The cannon fire that follows rakes the Lanky from chest to knees, and it falls down thirty meters in front of the advancing line.

  Underneath the drop ship, I see the muzzle flashes from several rifles. Another Lanky stumbles, then rights itself and continues its speedy stride. Then there’s a missile launch from the right of the hovering drop ship. I switch my helmet view to the starboard array and see that the greenhouse domes have platforms at the top, and there’s a two-person MARS rocket crew on the one to the right of us. Their rocket covers the distance to the lead Lanky in a second and a half and makes it stumble again. It falls forward and crashes into the snow face-first, sliding a dozen meters on the snow-covered ice.

  I switch to the TacAir channel without bothering to check for assets in the airspace above the town. I know we have a dozen Shrikes overhead looking for something to shoot at, and this is as worthy a target for their ordnance as any.

  “TacAir, Tailpipe One. Requesting immediate close-air support. Hostiles in the open, four five zero meters northwest of the greenhouses. I am marking the TRP. Weapons free, weapons free. Everything to the north of the first line of houses is hostile.”

  Ahead in the snowstorm, the remaining Lankies turn one by one and stride back the way they came, leaving their dead behind on the frozen ground between us and them. When a pair of Shrikes rolls in twenty seconds later and strafes the ground in front of the greenhouses, the Lankies have passed back into the cover of the weather, like gigantic ghosts from a truly fucked-up nightmare. The explosive rounds from the cannons churn up the ice and snow, but none of them connect with anything that isn’t dead already.