by Marko Kloos
“Tailpipe One, TacOps. The Shrikes are having dwelling time issues down there. You have a visibility bubble of less than half a klick, and they have to fire blind before they clear the low ceiling.”
“We’ll have to shift the close air burden to the Dragonflies for now,” I reply.
The pilot pivots his ship around and puts down the skids a hundred yards to the south of the greenhouse complex, skidding sideways in a heavy wind gust at the last seconds and dragging the starboard skid across the ice for a few meters. I hold my breath and wait for the ship to flip onto its side and explode, but it stays upright and settles on all three skids just a moment later. For once, I am glad not to be in my controller seat by the bulkhead, because when I unbuckle and grab my rifle, I am among the first troops down the ramp.
The garrison’s SI troopers are deployed in a pitifully sparse firing line directly in front of the two greenhouses making up the north-facing side of the complex. I do a quick headcount and come up with fewer than twenty—way too few for a platoon, even counting the rocket crew on top of the greenhouse on the northwest corner. The troopers from First Platoon don’t need to ask for directions or further orders. They spread out and strengthen the firing line with their three full squads, thirty-six fresh troops with full ammunition loads and two Mars launchers per squad.
Behind us, the drop ship rises into the sky again. The position and earning lights on the ship paint red-and-orange streaks on the snow. Ten meters off the ground, the pilot retracts the landing skids and soars off to take position above and ahead of our firing line. The winds are shaking the Dragonfly, but the pilot holds station and turns on all his forward-mounted lights to cut through the swirling white mess in front of us. The weather is getting less hospitable with every passing minute, and the more the visibility drops, the less time even the drop ships will have to bring their weapons to bear. To me, it feels like Greenland all over again, only magnified fivefold.
I check my TacLink screen and see that we aren’t the only platoon in contact with the Lankies. The southern perimeter at the far end of the airfield is deployed in battle line and firing into a large group of Lankies approaching out of the storm from the southwest. The platoons from Bravo Company made it down to that end of the base just in time to shore up the defense there as well.
Guess you owe me a bottle of booze, Major, I think.
I know how to read the flow of a battle on TacLink, and I don’t like what I see. Even with our two extra companies on the ground and more on the way, we aren’t enough to hold off attacks from the north and south simultaneously. The perimeter is simply too large. If we get another push by the Lankies in one of the lightly defended sectors, they’ll bull right through the line and split our forces in two.
“We need reinforcements on the northern perimeter,” I send to the Major. “Whatever you can send, as soon as it comes out of the drop ships, or you’ll have Lankies on the airfield in ten minutes.”
“Understood. We have a flight landing right now. I don’t know what the fuck the things are they’re unloading, but I’ll send them your way.”
Exos. I grin into my helmet and watch as eight icons representing augmented armor units pop up on the airfield one by one. Whoever is in charge of loading the drop ships on Ottawa’s flight deck right now deserves a medal for that decision.
“We have armor coming,” I tell the platoons on the north perimeter. “Hold the line until they get here.”
“Contact front!” one of the sergeants from First Platoon bellows. The visibility has dropped to only two hundred meters at most, and there are familiar tall shapes emerging from the squall again. The snow is now coming in sideways, and the wind is in our faces. I check the loading status of my rifle and find that the bolt is frozen shut. I smack the charging handle with the edge of my armored glove, and the bolt retracts halfway to reveal an armor-piercing round.
The drop ship opens up again, this time with both the hull-mounted cannon and the smaller-caliber chin turret. A hail of copper-plated steel casings rains down onto the snow in front of our position. Every fifth round in the rotary chin turret gun is a tracer, and the gun is set to such a high rate of fire that it looks like the gunner is working over the advancing Lankies with a laser beam.
The entire firing line opens up with rifles and MARS rockets. The Lankies blend into the swirling snow eerily well for creatures their size. The lights from the Dragonfly illuminate the battlefield and add to the surrealism.
In front of us, several Lankies fall to the concentrated fire from the drop ship and the rifle platoon, but more are behind them, and they stream around the fallen bodies and advance. The engines of the drop ship increase in pitch as the pilot fights the eighty-knot headwind to stay on station. He’s only a hundred meters in front of the advancing Lanky line, barely visible in the polar maelstrom. Then one of the Lankies rises up from its crouched walk and swings a long arm toward the drop ship. The creature gets half a dozen cannon rounds to its chest almost instantly, but one of the huge four-fingered hands brushes the nose of the Dragonfly. Engines screaming, the ship rotates around its vertical axis and tilts to starboard. The Lanky goes down with a wail, but the drop ship is very obviously in trouble. The pilot tries to right it and swing the nose back around. My heart stops for a second when I see the nose of the Dragonfly dropping as the ship picks up speed.
The pilot almost clears the dome of the nearest greenhouse, but only almost. I hear a dull cracking sound as the nose of the Dragonfly pierces the polyplast dome two or three meters underneath the observation platform at its top. Then the drop ship’s belly armor crushes the alloy lattice framework underneath, and the Dragonfly falls into the greenhouse dome at sixty or seventy knots of forward speed with a thunderous crash that sounds like the sky falling down.
The Dragonfly smashes out of the other side of the thirty-meter dome and then plows into the dome right next to it before hitting the ground with a resounding metallic thunder. Then something ignites—external ordnance, fuel tanks, maybe both—and the second dome goes up with a cataclysmic bang and a huge orange-black fireball. Burning parts of drop ship and greenhouse structure start raining down on us. I can’t feel the fireball’s heat through the face shield of my sealed armor, but the temperature readout on my visor jumps up well into the positive Celsius range for a few moments.
The closest Lanky is a hundred meters in front of our defensive line when the ground around it starts erupting, dozens of impacts throwing up snow and ice geysers. A second later, I hear the deep, sonorous roar of a Shrike’s multibarrel cannon. The Lanky stumbles under the hammer blows of armor-piercing rounds that can cut through a mule from front to back. The Lankies are advancing into a ferocious volume of fire, rifles, and MARS rockets from our firing line and cannon fire from overhead, but they keep pushing on. In another twenty seconds, they will overrun our line with sheer mass and momentum.
The snow in the air and on the ground muffles most sounds, so I don’t see the first exos charging through our line until they are already almost right behind our position, striding toward the approaching Lankies and kicking up geysers of snow with every step.
“Armor passing through,” the warning comes on our tactical channel.
“Make a corridor,” I warn my troops. “We have exos coming in from the rear!”
The exo striding past me aims an arm-mounted cannon at the approaching Lankies and lets rip with a short burst. The muzzle blast blows a dish-shaped hole three meters across into the snow in front of the exo. In front of our line, a Lanky crashes into the snow, felled by superdense twenty-five-millimeter slugs. The exo pilot wastes no time acquiring a new target. I watch as the gun arm swivels from Lanky to Lanky with computer precision—three rounds, swivel, three rounds, repeat. More exos are coming out of the gaps between the buildings, almost unencumbered by the meter-high snow, and the noise picks up tenfold as they add their own weapons fire to the fusillade. All the systems on the exos are networked, so unlike panicking SI troo
pers with hand weapons, the exos don’t waste a shot by engaging the same target twice. It’s a marvelous display of power-augmented efficiency. In front of us, the Lankies are falling to the sudden large-caliber precision fire much faster than they succumbed to our rifle shots. In what seems like only seconds, the exos are past our defensive line and right between us and the attacking Lankies. The jackhammer sounds of the arm-mounted cannons are interspersed with the whooshing report from MARS launchers.
“Hold fire,” I send to my platoon, but the warning isn’t necessary. Every trooper I see is watching the spectacle in front of us. The Lankies are still much bigger than the exos and probably a dozen times stronger, but the exos are stronger and faster than my unprotected troopers, and their guns hit a lot harder. It’s like someone crossed the offensive attributes of a drop ship with the mobility of an infantry soldier.
“Frostbite Actual, thanks for the support,” I send to the major. “That was in the nick of time.”
“Still don’t know what the fuck they are,” the major replies. “But if they’re working, I hope they send a hundred more.”
The merciless firing line of exos pushes forward, guns blazing, until we can barely see the orange warning strobes on top of the frames. The fire slacks off slowly as more Lankies fall and fewer volunteer to push up and die next to their species mates.
So many last-second rescues, I think. So much riding on twenty seconds of borrowed time.
Up ahead and to the right of me, I see the glow of the burning greenhouse shimmering through the snow squall.
“TacOps, we have a drop ship down,” I send up to Ottawa. “Don’t bother with a SAR flight. His external ordnance cooked off on impact.”
“Copy that. We read the crash beacon.”
“At least he was already empty,” I say, and instantly feel terrible for feeling glad that only three people died instead of forty. “You got ID markers on the pilots?”
“That bird was Eagle 05 from ATS-11, sir. Captains Fisher and Beals.”
The recognition of the name sends an unpleasant shock through my body. Once upon a time, I would have found some satisfaction in Captain Beals’s death, late justice extracted for the pilots and SI troopers his strafing run killed on Arcadia. But he died in the defense of our platoon, flying impossibly close-air support in unsafe weather, and I feel my hate for him evaporating like snowflakes on a hot gun muzzle. Whatever he did before, and however I felt about him, he earned a measure of redemption for this.
The exos emerge from the squall again a few minutes later, walking through the deep snow in an orderly battle line. There are eight of them, and they just held off an advance that almost overran a reinforced platoon of unaugmented SI. I am reasonably sure that this settles the question of whether four of them are worth ten times as many SI riflemen on a dropship.
“The Lankies halted their push,” the exo platoon commander says on the tactical channel. “I don’t want to pursue so we don’t stumble into an ambush.”
“Can’t say I disagree,” I say. “Thanks for bailing us out.”
The storm slacks off a little, precisely ten minutes too late to do us any good. The glacier field in front of our position is littered with at least two dozen dead Lankies, although it’s hard to get a good count because of the sheer size of their bodies. Behind us, the fire started by the crashing Dragonfly is still burning. The greenhouse dome right behind us is smashed comprehensively, and the one next to it is completely destroyed, a twisted mess of charred support arcs and melted polyplast. Both of the surviving domes have blown-out polyplast panels all over their northern quadrants. We won the skirmish but failed our mission, even if the Lankies never got to within swinging range of these domes, all because of one well-placed Lanky arm swipe and a pilot who was three feet too low. I know that the pilot wasn’t Halley because her squadron is in charge of the reserve battalion, not mine. But the flaming wreckage nearby is a stark reminder that the pilots live every bit as dangerously as the squishy grunts on the ground.
“Reload, and let’s keep our eyes peeled,” I tell my platoon. “I don’t think they’re done with us yet. They want this place too badly.”
“Retreat to the northern defensive line, five hundred meters to your south,” Major Coburn says when I inform him of the loss of the greenhouse complex. “With the domes gone, there’s nothing to defend there, and you’re in front of the line and exposed. Let those exoskeletons screen your redeployment. Reinforce the northern perimeter with those things and hold that line until the weather lifts and we can bring close air to bear again.”
“Aye, sir.” I cut the channel and relay the major’s order to First Platoon’s lieutenant.
“Well, that was a fucking waste of effort,” the lieutenant grumbles when I’m finished.
“Tell that to the garrison squaddies we just bailed out,” I reply. “We pull out by squads. Bounding overwatch. Two squads cover; the others move. It’s half a klick, and we don’t have a ride anymore. Let’s get out of here before they decide to come back for seconds.”
“Make it quick,” the exo platoon leader says. “We just burned over half our ammo stopping that push. Reloads are all the way in orbit.”
A few minutes later, we start our run back to the relative safety of our own defensive line at the edge of town. With the exos drawn up in a defensive line in front of our old positions, we leapfrog back across the glacial plain in pairs of squads, switching off the running and covering tasks every hundred meters. The snow on the glacial plain is knee-deep, and even with the power assist from my armor’s servos working at maximum output, the half-kilometer run back to the town is one of the most physically demanding tasks I’ve ever had to do. By the time we pass the defensive line and get into the cover of the first buildings, I feel weak and drained from the exertion. I stop to catch my breath.
“First Platoon of Alpha Company is back inside the perimeter,” I send to Major Coburn once I am no longer panting, even though he probably knows this information from our data links if he keeps even half an eye on his TacLink screen.
“Copy that,” Major Coburn replies. “Reinforce the line in that sector and hold. I am sending a platoon from Charlie Company your way, too.”
I turn around to look back at the greenhouse complex we just abandoned to the next Lanky advance. The fires set by the crashed drop ship are still burning, casting the white haze in the distance in an orange glow. The remaining domes are almost invisible in the weather from this range. If the nuclear bombardment of the Lanky crash site didn’t doom this colony, the loss of one of their main food sources probably sealed that fate unless we can scrape the Lankies off this moon completely. And right now, without the full power of our air and space support and only eight exos on the ground so far, it’s likely that we’re the ones getting scraped off New Svalbard instead.
CHAPTER 21
SECOND NEW SVALBARD
The lull in the storm doesn’t last very long. Ten minutes after Charlie Company’s fourth platoon arrives to reinforce our position, visibility is back down to under two hundred meters. The heaters in my suit have to work so hard to keep me alive that the battery level is dropping at a concern-inducing rate. This is the harshest environment I’ve ever experienced, and having to fight in it seems like suicidal madness. But we are the defensive line against whatever lurks in that storm, so we settle down in our hastily prepared positions and wait for the onslaught.
“The southern perimeter defense stopped the Lanky advance cold,” Major Coburn reports when I update our status. “We can pull off a platoon or two to help shore up the northern perimeter, but they’ll have to ride in mules or walk your way. Weather’s too bad for safe drop ship ops.”
“Understood,” I reply. “Send up whatever you can. We are stretched mighty thin on the flanks, and visibility is shit. One good push by the Lankies, and they’ll break right through our line.”
“Radar says we’ll get a break in the weather soon. The storm should slack off in an hour.�
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“That’s fantastic news,” I say. “Let’s hope the Lankies will do us a favor and wait until then.”
With the arrival of the new platoon, our sector is now the most well-defended one on the northern perimeter, so when the Lanky push from the north comes fifteen minutes later, it’s naturally in a different sector. I hear the small-arms fire and rocket launches to our left, but the driving snow muffles the sounds so much that I couldn’t even begin to guess the distance. The TacLink screen is unambiguous, however. As soon as the first Lankies come into view of the defending unit to our west, their orange icons pop up on the map. They are coming right at the center of the northern perimeter line, five hundred meters from our position. In the blinding storm, and with knee-deep snow to contend with at every move, five hundred meters may as well be fifty miles.
“Center is under attack and getting pushed hard. Can you redeploy and flank the enemy spearhead?” Major Coburn asks over the company command channel.
“Negative,” I reply. “Not without vehicles. It’ll take us half an hour in this shit. It’ll all be over by the time we get there, and we’ll leave the right flank open if we do. Redeploy the exos.”
“Already did, but they’re low on ammo. The bastards are hugging our belt buckles. Cover the front, but watch your left flank if they manage to get through.”
The distant weapons fire from our left increases in intensity until it sounds like a mad minute at the range where everyone empties their magazines at the berm as quickly as they can reload their guns. The sharp reports from M-95 rifles are interspersed with explosions from MARS rockets and the shrieking wails of stricken Lankies. Overhead, I see four Shrikes and two drop ships circling the battlefield, but our troops are already intermingled with the Lankies at point-blank range, and any bombing or strafing run would take out more friendlies than hostiles. Two of the Shrikes dive in anyway and drop canisters of tungsten darts and cluster bombs in front of the defensive line in hopes of catching unspotted Lankies in the open and blunting the main body of this advance. But whatever they are hitting out there, it’s not enough to make a difference. A few minutes later, the gunfire ebbs. I see on the TacLink screen what’s happening even before the leader of the platoon to the west confirms the situation on the company channel.