by Marko Kloos
I turn on my helmet’s data display again and cycle through all the systems to make sure I don’t have a last-second malfunction. Going through the checklist again gives me something to do while waiting to be loaded into the cruiser’s launcher magazine like a piece of ordnance. Some guys claim they can take naps in their pods throughout the launch process, but I know they’re full of shit. Getting fired at a planet is an unnatural act, one that tends to remind one of the fragility of the human body and the many ways it can break irreparably. I’ve not done a proper pod launch in over a year, but I find that I didn’t miss this feeling in the least.
When the lid of the pod closes on top of me, it has an air of finality to it. The fleet just pulled off the biggest surprise victory in our military history, but we don’t have the time to celebrate or even reflect on what just happened. For us podheads, the battle hasn’t even begun, and the hard part is still ahead.
The pod is airtight, and the hull is so thick that I can’t hear the warning klaxon in the pod bay, but I can feel the bump and the upward and forward motion as the loading arm of the rotary launcher picks up my pod and feeds it into one of the chambers.
One last drop, I think. Let me make it down to the deck just one more time. If I’m going to die today, let it be on the surface with a gun in my hands. But I know that the gunnery computer can’t hear my thoughts, and it wouldn’t give a shit even if it could.
CHAPTER 13
PODS AWAY
Early on in my podhead career, I used to keep my situational displays up and running whenever I dropped in a pod. After the third or fourth drop, I switched to running dark, all screens turned off, because I didn’t want to know when I’d be passing through the Lanky minefield. I didn’t want to see death coming if I ended up colliding with a mine or triggering its quills. For over two hundred drops, I rode down into the atmosphere blind and deaf, with only the buffeting from atmospheric entry signaling that I had once again made the gauntlet.
For this drop, I don’t want to be unaware.
When Phalanx launches my pod out of its dorsal missile tube and toward Mars, my suit’s visor display is on, the abstract tactical map that shows my trajectory and the space around me side by side with the feed from the camera in the nose of the bio-pod. Phalanx launches our pods at the very edge of her range, to keep far away from the Lanky minefield surrounding the planet, and I have plenty of time to reflect on the rashness of my decision to switch career tracks five years ago. The northern Martian hemisphere takes up most of my forward field of view, red and orange and white, swirling clouds over an ochre landscape. Even from the vantage point of the pod’s crummy fixed-magnification camera lens, the panorama is breathtaking and terrifying at the same time. There’s nothing like a pod launch, your body hurtling through space in a shell barely big enough to keep the vacuum out, to make you understand just how insignificantly small a single person really is.
The Lanky minefield surrounding Mars is much more dense than any I’ve ever seen around an occupied colony world. I know that the mathematical probability of my pod hitting a mine is very small considering the precision of the cruiser’s ballistic computer, but like on every other launch I’ve ever done, the stakes bother me much more than the odds. There are thousands of the irregularly shaped proximity mines out here in this pod’s camera field of view, each maybe twenty meters in diameter and loaded with lethal quill-shaped penetrator rods. My pod streaks through the minefield at hundreds of meters per second, and for the first time since my first few pod drops, I am very aware of the fact that I am tickling the surface of a spring-loaded trap with a hair-trigger release.
A few tense minutes later, my pod has cleared the orbital minefield. I take a long breath and unclench my fists. This phase of the entry is the calm between two stretches of white-knuckled terror, because the atmospheric entry that’s about to follow is as unnerving as the minefield in its own way. If there’s a defect in the pod’s surface, some unseen crack or unsealed gap, the hot gases from the atmospheric friction will enter it and start burning through the pod, and then I’ll burn up in the atmosphere. If I make it close to the ground and the mechanism for the descent chute fails, I’ll hit the Martian soil at a few hundred meters per second and get ground into paste. But at the same time, this is the most exhilarating, death-defying ride in the universe, and nothing will make you feel more alive than climbing out of a pod after a successful descent.
When I enter the top layers of the Mars atmosphere, the truly blind portion of the descent begins, helmet screen or not. As I arc down toward the planet’s surface at the precisely calculated angle computed by Phalanx’s artillery hardware, the pod is surrounded by a shroud of superheated plasma. I’ve seen the effect in a drop-ship cockpit a few times, and the incandescent, glowing plasma streaming past the cockpit windows is so bright that it blocks out everything else. In a pod, you don’t see anything at all except for sun-bright flares from the little nose-mounted camera lens.
The blind part of the descent takes another fifteen minutes. When I see the pale-blue Mars horizon and the swirling cloud cover of the planet again, my anxiety should lessen, but it doesn’t. The planet is shrouded in heavy clouds, the hallmark of a world that has been terraformed by the Lankies for a while. They like it warm and humid, and once they set up shop, their terraformers are amazingly efficient. The pod has no active sensors, so I’m slicking through the cloud cover almost blindly, with only the passive thermal vision and the useless view from the forward camera array to see where I am going. If Phalanx’s aim was true, I’ll be somewhere near the middle of Red Beach, on the outskirts of Olympus City. If their aim was off by a few dozen kilometers—something that’s rare, but not out of the question—I may end up coming down right in the middle of a Lanky settlement or somewhere else I definitely don’t want to be right now.
Luckily, Phalanx’s gunnery was on the mark. When my pod breaks through the cloud cover, I am less than five thousand feet above the ground. Behind me, there’s a muffled bang as the explosive charges blow the lid off the compartment for the drogue chute, and the triple parachute deploys behind the pod. Below the nose of the pod, I see the familiar geometry of human settlements—streets and buildings, lots of right angles, the boxy shapes of colonial housing units and power stations. Mars was the closest thing to Earth before the Lankies came and took it over, and Olympus City had more than half a million people living in it.
I bring up the tactical display again and let the computer figure out where I am. The Lankies destroyed every one of our satellites in orbit, so the computer looks at the topography underneath the pod’s camera lens and compares it to the stored map data for Mars instead of getting a satellite fix. Three seconds later, the pod’s CPU concludes that I am right at the edge of the landing zone designated Red Beach, halfway between Olympus City’s center and our objective, the huge spaceport on its outskirts. The cannon cockers on Phalanx only missed their bull’s-eye by two or three kilometers, which isn’t bad considering they took the shot from a fast-moving platform tens of thousands of kilometers away.
The pod is descending through three thousand feet when I spot the first Lankies in the camera’s field of vision. They’re so large that they’re obvious even from this altitude. Two of them are walking together, one behind the other, across the Mars plains, kicking up puffs of orange-red dust with every step. Another solitary Lanky is making its way down a street almost directly below the pod, stepping over piles of rubble and destroyed vehicles. The computer says I am descending into the campus of Sagan University, the main college in Olympus City and home to what used to be a cluster of research laboratories. Now there’s barely a building down there that hasn’t been at least partially destroyed, and the streets are littered with debris and hydrocar wrecks.
The pod descends through two thousand, then one thousand meters. The nearby Lanky is walking away from the projected landing site, but it’s still too close for comfort, just two hundred meters at the most. The pods don’t
have radios or radar, so I have no idea where the other pods in my launch group are descending in the area, and I have no way to warn them anyway until I am on the ground and out of my pod.
Just before it hits the ground, my pod clips the corner of a building, and I get jarred so hard that I nearly bite my own tongue. Despite the triple canopy of the drogue chute, the descent speed of the pod is still anything but gentle. The pod hits the pavement of the street in front of the building and slides a good twenty meters before the computer cuts the drogue-chute lines, and I hit something solid and come to a sudden stop. With the nearby Lanky in mind, I waste no time pulling the release lever for the pod’s lid, and the explosive charges blow out the locking bolts and eject the lid, which lifts half a meter off the rest of the pod and tumbles onto the street.
The air outside is typical Lanky atmosphere, warm and humid, gray skies the color of dirty concrete. I hit the quick-release latch on my harness and climb out of the pod, then release the clamp for my weapon and lift it out of its holder. I chamber a round and turn around to get my bearings. The building behind me is six floors high and may have been a sleek and elegant office tower when it was whole, but now most of the huge glass panes on the front of it are shattered, and a quarter of the structure is twisted rubble. My bio-pod came to rest with its nose against the burned-out hulk of a hydrocar with police markings. More car wrecks are littering the road, some turned over, some smashed flat, others charred black from hydrogen fires or explosions.
Nearby, I hear the familiar sound of thundering footsteps. They echo along the street, and the vibrations make some of the loose rubble on the sidewalk move a little. A hundred meters to my north, I see the familiar cranial ridge of a Lanky head towering over the roofline of some nearby buildings, and it’s heading my way.
I run for the entrance of the partially destroyed office building behind me and turn on my polychromatic camouflage at the same time. But as ruined as the top half of the building is, the security lock at the entrance is closed, a double-layer polyplast sliding door secured by a roll-down security barrier made from titanium-alloy mesh. I would need a MARS launcher to blow the door open, and I didn’t bring one and wouldn’t have the time to use it anyway. I turn left and run along the front of the building, away from the approaching Lanky, looking for a way in. The Lanky appears in the street behind me, half a block away, just as I reach the corner of the building and skid around it to find some cover. The polychromatic armor has worked well against the Lankies so far, but I’ve never had one come closer to me than a hundred meters, and I don’t want to be the test case to see if the electric camo can fool them at very short range.
The space next to the building is a service alley. Fifty meters ahead, I can see a ramp that leads down into the office building’s lower levels—a parking garage or emergency shelter. I sprint the distance and run down the ramp, very mindful of the vibrations of the concrete under my feet heralding the approaching Lanky on the other side of the building. But the vehicle-sized opening at the bottom of the ramp is sealed with another security barrier, and I crash into it with a curse.
Behind me, at the corner I just turned, the Lanky steps into sight and then stops at the mouth of the service alley. Its head swings around, first left, then right. Lankies look nothing like dogs, but the way this one is moving reminds me of a hound trying to catch a scent. I duck behind the retention wall of the vehicle ramp and make myself as small as possible. To my own helmet optics, I’m just a vaguely concrete-textured outline, but we know precisely fuck all about how the Lankies sense their environment, even after having dissected a few dozen back on Earth, so for all I know I could be as obvious to the fucking thing as a clown at a funeral. I check the loading status of my rifle again. If the Lanky decides to check out this alley and come any closer, I’ll have to see if one magazine of gas rounds is enough to stop one of those things in just fifty meters.
The Lanky turns the corner and takes one step into the alley. I know I have about three seconds to decide whether to keep running or stand and fight. I know I can’t outrun the thing if it has spotted me, so I slowly bring my rifle to bear over the lip of the retaining wall and aim the reticle square at the center of the Lanky’s spindly body.
The Lanky takes another step into the alley. Their strides are so long that he’s already a quarter of the way to the spot where I’m hiding. I tighten my finger on the trigger and take up the slack.
Five rounds, and then I’ll run my ass off if he’s not down, I tell myself.
Behind the Lanky, a rolling cavalcade of gunshots thunders. The echoes roll up the alley and bounce back from the nearby buildings. The Lanky shrieks its earsplitting, piercing wail and stumbles forward, then starts to turn around. Its cranial shield clips one side of the building to my left and sends chunks of polyplast and twisted steel raining into the alley between us. I put my targeting reticle right in the middle of the Lanky’s mass and pull the trigger once, twice, three times. The heavy gas rounds hit the Lanky in the side and tear big holes into it, the gas mixture from the rounds igniting inside the body and blowing chunks out of its tough skin from the inside. Whoever is firing at the Lanky from the other side lets loose another fusillade of half a dozen rounds at least. The Lanky wails again and falls onto its side, blocking almost the entire alley with its massive bulk. The head hits the concrete not ten meters from where I am crouching, and the impact knocks me off my feet and sends me sprawling on my ass. I get up again and aim my M-95 at the Lanky, but the head blocks my shot at the rest of its body, and I know better than to shoot at a cranial plate I’ve seen deflect autocannon rounds. But the Lanky’s wail dies, and then the creature stops moving. I take my finger off the trigger and exhale sharply.
Up at the mouth of the alley, behind the now-lifeless form of the Lanky, a group of troopers in SRA battle armor appears. One of them gives me a two-fingered little wave, and I know it’s Dmitry. He trots up the alley past the dead Lanky and ejects an empty case out of his rifle on the move. The brass case clatters onto the concrete with a metallic ringing sound, and Dmitry pulls a fresh round from his harness and reloads his gun before the empty shell case stops rolling.
Behind him, two of the SRA marines and the Eurocorps lieutenant bring up the rear of the little group. The German lieutenant looks at the fallen Lanky with awe, and I notice that he keeps as far away from the body as he can in the tight confines of the alley. I remind myself that the Euros have had very little exposure to the Lankies, and that this is probably the first time he’s ever seen one close up.
“You can turn off magic invisible armor now, I think,” Dmitry says over squad comms. I toggle the polychrome camouflage off, and my armor becomes matte black again instead of reflecting the background.
“Where’s the rest of your guys?” I ask.
“Leytenánt Bondarenko is one kilometer further in city,” he says. “Pod dropped on top of very tall building. Sergeant Anokhin is close, two blocks that way.” Dmitry gestures behind us with a gloved hand.
“Thanks for the backup,” I say. “Figures that my pod lands practically right in front of one of those things.”
“Is no problem,” Dmitry says. “Will be first kill of many today, I think.” He holds out his hand to help me up, and I get to my feet. “Come. We go meet Lieutenant Bondarenko. He is in good place for looking around.”
In the distance, we can hear the slow thrum-thrum of Lanky footsteps. They’re far off, probably several blocks away, but they sound like they’re heading our way. Maybe the gunshots got the attention of the nearby pair of Lankies, but the shrieking of the one we killed just now probably didn’t help to keep our entrance stealthy, either.
I check my suit’s vitals: oxygen 93 percent, power cell 97 percent, all functions in the green, no damage.
“Higher ground sounds good right now,” I say, but then remember the Lanky crawling up the atrium of a PRC building in Detroit a year ago. “Just bear in mind that these bastards can climb pretty well.”
> As we trot off toward Lieutenant Bondarenko’s position, Dmitry looks back at the dead Lanky sprawled out in the alley, five meters of cranial shield blocking most of the thoroughfare like a wall made from bone.
“Is shame we cannot take head with us. You know, as souvenir.”
“You want me to take a picture with you in front of the head instead?” I ask with a grin, and Dmitry grins back.
“Head would look much better on wall of Alliance carrier flight deck than little picture. I could trade to chief engineering officer for many bottles of vodka.”
The Lankies in the area are definitely stirred up and alert. We leapfrog across intersections and along streets littered with broken vehicles and building debris, and take cover whenever a Lanky walks past within a block of our route. Every once in a while, we spot the familiar empty oblong husks of Lanky nerve-gas containers, which are the size of hydrocars. The Lankies followed their usual protocol when they took over Mars—gas the population from orbit, move in and mop up the remnants, then set up the terraformers. They got to skip their usual step of seeking out our own terraforming stations and smashing them to rubble, because Mars had been colonized for decades, and all the terraformers have long been deactivated and converted to fusion plants. But as much destruction as we see here on the streets of Olympus City, I see very few dead bodies. Some are still in vehicles, decomposed and desiccated after a year in the humid and CO2-heavy atmosphere. More bodies are in the buildings we cut through for cover and concealment. But out on the streets, there aren’t many bodies when there should be thousands of corpses out here, civilian casualties or troops who died trying to fight off the invaders. It’s eerie to be in a city devoid of people, dead or alive.
