by Marko Kloos
Lieutenant Bondarenko, the leader of the SRA marine squad, saved himself a twenty-story climb by pure accident. His pod landed on the roof of a residence tower. When we get to the top of the building after climbing twenty flights of stairs in the darkness, we see that his free ride to the top of the tower almost came with an express elevator down to street level. His pod is right at the edge of the roof, a meter or two away from tipping over the side and tumbling onto the plaza eighty meters below. His drogue chute, having already collapsed, would have been no help at all. Judging by how pale the SRA lieutenant still looks, I can tell he knows very well how close he just came to splattering on the asphalt like a bug on a windshield.
Up here on the roof and no longer dodging Lankies in the streets for a bit, we can finally get our comms gear into action. I break out my admin deck and send a burst message to our C2 center on Phalanx.
>Red Team One infil success. Commencing approach to Red Beach.
The reply comes via encrypted burst just a few minutes later.
>Task Force Red standing by for target coordinates. Good hunting.
The SI Force Recon team from the starboard launch tubes landed at the other end of the drop zone. Our target, the huge air and spaceport outside Olympus City, is four kilometers to our northeast and three kilometers to their northwest. I fire up the platoon channel and contact the SI group.
“Red Team Two, this is Red Team One. You guys all make it down in one piece?”
“That’s affirmative,” Lieutenant Perkins replies. “We had some hostiles near the drop zone, but we managed to avoid them. Take it the gunfire earlier was from you.”
“Yeah, we had to drop one. Now they’re stirred up.”
“Can’t be helped. Let’s get the data link going. Can’t see how it can hurt at this point anyway.”
I turn on my TacLink, and almost immediately I see the icons for the eight SI troopers on my tactical map, five klicks almost directly to our east.
“We’re legging it to grid Echo One-Eight and get eyeballs on target from the south end,” Lieutenant Perkins sends.
“Copy that,” I reply. “I’m going to use the high ground for overwatch and then move up to grid Delta One-Five and go in from the northwest. We’ll meet in the middle when the LZ is clear.”
“Let’s get to it,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “We got a whole brigade up there waiting for us to roll out the welcome mat.”
“Don’t get stomped,” I send. “Grayson out.”
From up here on the roof, I have a good view of a large swath of Olympus City. Every time I spot a Lanky in the streets below, my tactical computer marks its position with an orange icon and shares the information with everyone else on our TacLink node. I spend a few minutes marking Lankies and mentally mapping out a way over to the spaceport. Four kilometers to our east, there are half a dozen runways and drop-ship landing pads that need to be cleared for our first and second assault waves to land. I can see that the hardened shelters on the military side of the spaceport are still standing. Designed to survive a near miss from a tactical nuke, they were either too hard for the Lankies to demolish, or they didn’t want to bother with the spacecraft shelters once they had cleaned out the people. I wonder just how much ammunition, ordnance, and fuel is still safely sheltered in those concrete domes, waiting to be put to good use by our SI regiments. It’s precisely that fuel and ammo, and those largely undamaged facilities, that make the spaceport the most important landing zone on this hemisphere. Other cities on Mars have airports and space facilities, but the one here right by the capital is the largest military base outside Earth.
“Look at that,” Lieutenant Stahl says. He’s standing by the edge of the roof and looking north. I walk over to where he’s standing and follow his gaze.
There’s a Lanky settlement well north of Olympus City, out in the plains a good thirty kilometers away. I switch my optics to maximum magnification. The strange, reef-like latticework structures the Lankies built look just like I remember them from my last drops onto conquered colonies. On the plains between the Lanky structure and the outskirts of Olympus City, dozens of Lankies have gathered. But they aren’t advancing toward us or the airfield. Instead, they are looking at the sky. I shift my view upward and cycle through all the filters until I spot what they are looking at.
“What is that up there?” the Eurocorps lieutenant asks.
I let the suit computer track the object in the sky that is just now breaking through the cloud cover and streaking across the horizon in a steeply descending arc. Then I dial up the magnification again until I recognize what it is.
“It’s one of theirs,” I say. “One of the seed ships we destroyed. Or part of it, anyway.”
The piece of wreckage is trailing flames and smoke, smearing a wispy arc across the dirty gray sky. Then it disappears from view behind the Alba Mons mountain range on the northern horizon. The trail of smoke remains for a little while until the winds begin to disperse it.
“Take a good look at it, motherfuckers,” I say to the Lankies gathered on the plain. “That’s a bad omen for you.”
Then I get out my admin deck and draw a box around the map grid where two or three dozen Lankies are still looking to the skies.
“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. Fire mission,” I send on the tactical channel. “Kinetic strike, target reference point Alpha One. Twenty-plus hostiles. There are no friendlies within twenty klicks of the TRP.”
“Tailpipe Red One, copy. Fire mission, TRP Alpha One,” Phalanx sends back. Right now, the cruiser is orienting one of her dorsal rail gun mounts toward the target reference point coordinates I uploaded. We are strictly limited on nuclear-fire missions because we used most of the warheads in existence for the Orions, but kinetic warheads are cheap, and we have plenty of them.
“Firing Delta mount. Three-round burst, shots out.”
I close the admin deck again, warn the SI team to expect fireworks in the distance soon, and keep watching the Lankies, who are in no particular hurry to be somewhere else right now, even though they must know that something out of the ordinary is happening. The rail gun shots from Phalanx are much faster than the pods in which we arrived because they don’t have a living payload. The kinetic warheads streaking through the atmosphere are too far away for me to hear the sound they make as they slice through the air when they arrive.
The Russians and the Eurocorps lieutenant holler in surprise and amazement when the three kinetic rounds from Phalanx hit their target a few minutes later. The geysers of Mars dirt that follow the impacts reach hundreds of meters into the sky. The thunderclap from the impacts reaches our helmet audio feeds a minute and a half later, and the echo rolls through the streets of the city below, a sound like a giant clearing its throat. It’ll take an hour or more for all the dust to settle, but I already know that the Lankies within a quarter kilometer of the impact points are no longer cohesive organisms. Tough as they are, they still have to obey the laws of physics, and while the rail guns are useless against the seed ships, they will make mincemeat out of their passengers once they are outside their protective shells.
“Let’s catch up to the SI boys,” I suggest. “We have a spaceport to clear for the drop ships.”
“Cannot let marines sit on asses up in space all day,” Dmitry agrees.
“Yeah, that’s what the fleet is for,” Lieutenant Perkins contributes via squad comms.
“Hey,” I grumble. “Watch it, ground pounder.”
CHAPTER 14
RED BEACH
For once, the size of the Lankies works in our favor in battle. Here in the confines of Olympus City, they are obvious, easy to predict and avoid, and not very nimble. We make our way east through the empty streets, using alleys and buildings as cover, hiding whenever a Lanky passes nearby, and cutting through buildings as much as we can to stay out of sight. There are fewer of them prowling the city than I would have predicted, maybe fifteen or twenty at the most. Still, the dash-and-hide march across the rubb
le-strewn city takes us a good hour before we have the spaceport in sight. The SI troopers have beaten us—their tactical symbols are already in position on the south side of the spaceport, and more and more orange Lanky symbols pop up on our TacLink screen as the SI Force Recon guys spot them. The spaceport is huge, with a civilian and a military part, four runways for atmospheric landings, and a sprawling administrative complex. Our combined force of sixteen troopers would be hopelessly inadequate if we had to secure the whole place, but that’s not our task. We are here to give the big guns something to aim at. We pick the highest structure in the immediate neighborhood, an eight-story building that’s only lightly damaged, and climb up to the top floor. From up here, Dmitry and I have a good view of much of the spaceport, and the SRA squad is pulling security on the roof edge, keeping an eye out for Lankies in all directions.
“We have eyes on roughly twenty at the south end. They’re all over the tarmac between the hard shelters,” Lieutenant Perkins reports from his position a kilometer to our southeast. “Make that twenty-three confirmed.”
My TacLink updates accordingly, and I study the map. “That’s right near one of the refueling nodes. If we call in kinetics and they crack an underground tank, the place will go sky high.”
“How do you propose we get them out of there?” Lieutenant Perkins asks.
“I don’t know. You feel like running out onto runway zero-five and blowing a few raspberries in their direction?”
The SI lieutenant laughs. “Not if we can avoid it.”
The Lankies between the hangars are out of the effective range of our weapons, so we can’t start picking them off with gas rounds, but there are too many of them anyway, and we don’t have the ammo to drop twenty or thirty of them. We need to get them off the spot that has a few hundred thousand liters of aviation fuel under it. As satisfying as it would be to see the whole group disappear in a huge fireball, losing all the fuel would be a major setback for the landing force. With the installation relatively intact, they can refuel and rearm the drop ships without having to get back to the carrier.
“We need to get them to move so the fleet can drop kinetics on their heads,” I tell Dmitry. “Any ideas?”
Dmitry ponders my question for a few moments. “Make them come to us? Get closer, shoot. When they come to us, we move. Take new position, shoot again.”
“That’ll get them off the pad and into the city. But then we’re in the way of the kinetic strike.”
“Make them go other way, then. Out to runway.”
Give them something to chase, I think. What’s good for getting a Lanky’s attention?
I have a sudden flashback to the graduation exercise of my last boot-camp flight a few months ago, when I let them defend a simulated terraforming station against a Lanky assault. Some of the more adventurous recruits commandeered an ATV and distracted several Lankies from the terraformer. The Lankies were computer generated, but we know they react to anything that makes mechanical noise or puts out radiation. I have a transmitter in my armor that can put out thousands of watts of radio energy, but I don’t want to test my sprinting abilities against twenty Lankies, and we don’t have any ATVs around to outrun them once they come chasing us.
I step over to the edge of the roof and look down at the street below, where a bunch of cars are cluttering the roadway. Some are burned out, others smashed, but there are quite a few that still look operable.
“Any of you people know how to chip-jack a car?” I ask.
“What is ‘chip-jack’?” Dmitry asks.
“Disable the security chip in the computer console and steal the car,” I reply.
He grins and looks at his SRA comrades. Then he says something in Russian, and Sergeants Anokhin and Dragomirova laugh.
“You want to steal car, we go steal car.”
There’s no shortage of vehicles out on the street in this neighborhood. The burned-out hulk of a hydrobus blocks the street diagonally, and several other cars are wedged up against it. From the burn marks, it looks like they rammed into each other and all burned up in the same hydrogen fire. But there are some cars in parking nooks on the other side of the street that mostly look undamaged.
“The hydrocars are no good,” I say. “They’ve been standing around for a year. The fuel cells will be broken down by now. Look for an EV.”
We fan out and check every vehicle in the row, keeping an ear out for the footsteps of approaching Lankies. Near the corner of the block, Sergeant Dragomirova looks into a little commuter car and shouts something in Russian. We trot over to her position.
“Figures,” I say. “The only all-electric around, and it’s the size of a gym locker.”
Dmitry tries the door and finds it locked. Then he takes out the combat knife he wears strapped to his leg armor, taps the laminate panels on the frame next to the car door for a few moments, and puts the tip of his knife against a spot ten centimeters from the edge of the door. He smacks the pommel of his knife hard with his palm, and the blade pops through the laminate of the car body. There’s a sharp, short hissing sound, and when Dmitry pulls on the handle again, the door opens without resistance.
“Main pressure cylinder for environmental control,” he says. “Controls door locks, too.”
“Good to know,” I say. “For the next time I want to jack a ride.”
Dmitry calls Sergeant Anokhin over, who climbs into the driver’s seat and taps the center console screen. It comes to life with the logo of the car manufacturer. Sergeant Anokhin uses his own knife to work loose the bezel of the control screen and pulls the whole thing out of the console. Thirty seconds later, I hear the hum of an electric engine, and the car’s running lights turn on. Sergeant Anokhin tosses the control screen out the driver-side window, and it clatters onto the asphalt of the parking nook. Then he gets back out of the car. Dmitry pops his head into the passenger compartment and looks around.
“Battery is fifteen percent,” he says. “You want to go fast, you will not drive for very long.”
“It’ll have to do,” I say. “We’re not going far in this anyway.”
We work out a battle plan on the fly. Dmitry is going to go back up to his eighth-floor vantage point and spot targets with Sergeant Gerasimov. Lieutenant Bondarenko and Sergeant Anokhin will provide cover, and Sergeant Dragomirova will join me and drive the comically small electric car we just hot-wired.
“We’ll get within rifle range, I’ll pop off a few rounds, and turn my suit to maximum transmitting output so they get nice and pissed off,” I say. “We’ll drive out onto the runway and see how many of them come after us. If there are any left over on the landing pads, you go with your original idea. Put rounds into them from this end so they’ll come looking for you, and get the hell off that roof and to an alternate OP. When the Lankies are out in the open, you call down the thunder from Kirov. We hook around the north end of the base and find cover over there, and then we have eyes on the place from both ends.”
“What if little car breaks when you are in middle of runway?” Dmitry asks.
“Then we’re fucked,” I say, and Dmitry grins. “Let’s get to it. And I really hope that your artillery is accurate. We won’t be too far ahead of the Lankies.”
“Is Russian artillery,” he says. “Mostly hits right target. Mostly.”
The vehicle is built for two passengers riding tandem, one behind the other, but it’s not designed to accommodate armored troops and their weapons. Luckily, Sergeant Dragomirova is fairly small even in her angular battle armor, so we both fit. Dmitry and I pop the rear window out of the car and throw it aside so I have clearance to fire my rifle out the back. Then the Russians trot back to the building we just left a little while ago to resume their observation posts. I send an update to the SI troopers on the south end of the base and let them know what we are about to do.
“We’re going to move up toward the hangars as soon as you start your run,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “Just for the record, that’s some cr
azy-ass shit. But good luck.”
“We just got here by letting them shoot us out of missile tubes,” I reply. “And we’re fighting five-hundred-ton creatures with hand weapons. There’s no part of this that’s sane.”
Sergeant Dragomirova speaks just a few words of English, but Dmitry translates the plan for her so I won’t have to rely on the accuracy of my suit’s interpreter software in the heat of battle. She takes her spot in the driver’s seat and places her rifle across her lap. The Russian anti-Lanky rifle is a bit longer than our models, and the muzzle end and about thirty centimeters of barrel are sticking out the right-side window.
I sit in the backseat, which can swivel to face rearward, and rest my own rifle on the frame of the rear window.
“Tell me you are talking to your arty guys, Dmitry,” I send on the squad channel.
“Yes. All good. They will shoot when I say to shoot.”
“They better. If I get stomped flat, you’re the only one with a direct line to the gods.”
“So drive faster than Lankies.”
“Brilliant idea,” I reply. “I’ll give that a shot. Keep us in sight, and stay on the radio. Grayson out.”
I check the chamber of my rifle and make sure there’s a fifteen-millimeter gas-filled round ready to ruin some Lanky’s morning. Then I turn to Sergeant Dragomirova and pat the back of her headrest.
“Let’s go,” I say.
She puts the car in drive, and we start down the street and toward the spaceport a quarter kilometer away.
