by Marko Kloos
“TOT strike, eight minutes, thirty seconds. Clock’s ticking,” he sends. “Can’t promise a hundred rounds, but it’ll be close enough to make no difference for those things. Keep your heads down.”
“Oh, that’s pretty much assured,” I reply. “Tailpipe Red One out.”
I relay the information to the rest of the team. Down to our south, there’s the sporadic booming from big anti-Lanky rifles as the SI fire teams engage the first Lankies coming out of the city and onto the spaceport from the south. Compared to what’s coming toward us from the north, it’s a trivial number of Lankies, but we’re only sixteen troops, and we’re spread out across three positions and as many kilometers of ground.
The next eight minutes are agonizingly long. Sergeant Dragomirova and I are keeping tabs on the Lankies coming in from the north, and that’s all we can do. I can’t leave my observation post and go to help out the teams in the south, and I wouldn’t be much good to them even if I did, because I lost my rifle. So I watch the plot and listen to the exchanges on the squad channel as my teammates fight off half a dozen Lankies three kilometers to my south. They’re too close for Dmitry to call in a kinetic strike, so the Russians decide to add their fire to the SI squad’s defense and pick off Lankies from the rooftops. One by one, the orange icons blink out of existence on the tactical plot. Five minutes into the fight, and four of the Lankies are dead, the last one felled just fifty meters short of the edge of the landing pad. Two more have decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and they’ve retreated from the coordinated rifle fire of the SI teams. I’ve never seen Lankies act on a sense of self-preservation until now.
“Two running away,” Dmitry says from his rooftop vantage point. “We go chase, or stay in position?”
“Sit tight,” I reply. “Kinetic strike is incoming in two and a half minutes. Stay in cover in case they have a flier or two.”
“We just used up half our ammo load,” Lieutenant Perkins warns. “If they make another push from the south, we may not be able to stop them again.”
“Cavalry will be here soon,” I say, and hope that it’s true.
The kinetic warheads from the task force arrive right on time, down to the second. The rounds from the first salvo, a dozen warheads or more, smack into the advancing Lankies simultaneously. Five kilometers north of the spaceport, a square kilometer of Martian soil erupts into dirt and rock geysers a thousand feet high. Then the next salvo hits, and the next, so many individual warheads that I lose count of the impacts. I’ve seen nuclear detonations, and they’re terrifying to see from close range, but this strike somehow seems more cataclysmic than even a nuke. The kinetic rounds keep smashing into the plain, one after the other, like blows from a giant sledgehammer, a pissed-off god working the planetary surface over with a vengeance. I’ve never felt any pity for the Lankies we’ve killed over the years, but witnessing this barrage, I come closer than ever before to working up a tiny bit of it. Fifteen seconds after we see the first impacts, the sound of the barrage pulverizing Mars rock reaches our position and rolls over us, and it’s the scariest, most ominous thunder I’ve ever heard.
“Bozhe moi,” Sergeant Dragomirova says next to me.
“Rods from the gods,” I say.
There’s a reason why the treaty that prohibits the use of weapons of mass destruction against each other’s territory in space explicitly includes kinetic weapons, and why we fight out our colonial battles with small-scale infantry actions instead of pelting each other with tungsten warheads from orbit. Once you start unleashing this much cheap and easy-to-deploy destructive power, it’s hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle. Against the Lankies, however, anything goes. We have no treaties with them, and they have no reservations about gassing our colonies like nuisance ant hives, so we’re free to give it back to them in spades whenever we can.
Without their seed ships keeping our cruisers away, the Lankies out in the open have no way to escape this death and destruction raining down on their heads. This is payback time, vengeance for all the fellow soldiers and sailors they’ve killed, for five years of hardship and fear and uncertainty. Still, it’s hard not to feel just the slightest bit of sorrow at the sight of this utter devastation. These are living, sentient beings, and if they have emotions at all, they must feel fear at getting killed from the sky by something they can neither see nor fight back against.
When the steady drumroll of impacts ceases a few minutes later, there’s a dust-and-debris cloud ten kilometers across on the plains north of the base. Five minutes pass, then ten, but I don’t see any movement other than billowing dirt.
“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. On target. Stand by for poststrike assessment and follow-ups.”
“Standing by for poststrike and follow-up,” Phalanx’s tactical officer confirms.
“That was something else,” Lieutenant Perkins says on the squad channel. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Neither have I,” I reply.
Fifteen minutes later, the dust from the kinetic strikes has settled enough for a visual poststrike assessment of the target area. I scan the plains for signs of Lankies, and my professional evaluation is that ten map grids of the Martian surface just got fucked all to hell several times over. There are Lankies on the very edge of my optics range, beyond the patch of ground the fleet just plowed with millions of joules of kinetic energy, but the closest one is ten klicks to the north and moving away from the spaceport instead of toward it, and none of the Lankies I see in the distance seem to be interested in coming any closer. Now the closest threats are the few Lankies remaining in the streets of Olympus City, but they’re out of sight of Dmitry’s team and moving away from the base as well. If there’s a window for a large-scale landing, it’s right now, while the neighborhood is freshly swept and the shock from the bombardment is still keeping the rest of the Lankies away from this place.
“Task Force Red, Tailpipe Red One,” I send up to the units waiting in high orbit. “Red Beach is open. I repeat, Red Beach is open.”
I can’t see anything from my position in a dark control tower on a world with a low cloud ceiling, but I know that up in high orbit, my announcement has just kicked off Phase Three for the waiting ships of Task Force Red. The battle plan has the cruisers use their rail guns and missile batteries to make holes in the Lanky minefield large enough for the drop ships to pass through unmolested, and then keep them open as the Lanky minefield tries to reconfigure and heal itself over time. And right now, the carriers are moving their drop ships into launch positions. I also know from experience that those first-wave drop ships are filled with scared and anxious troopers who want the trip down to the landing zone to be fast and take forever both at the same time.
The drop ships and the attack birds take a lot longer than kinetic rounds to make it down from orbit. Twenty minutes after I declare the drop zone safe, the first friendly air-support units show up overhead—not drop ships, but Shrike attack craft, wing pylons heavy with ordnance. Two pairs of Shrikes drop below the cloud ceiling and make a low pass along the runway of Olympus Spaceport, engines warbling the banshee wail that was probably partly responsible for the class name of the ship. It feels good to see close-air support overhead, to know that we have heavy ordnance on standby that doesn’t require a trip down from orbit. The Shrikes split up into pairs when they reach the end of the runway, with one pair breaking to the east and one to the west. Their sensors and cameras immediately expand our TacLink awareness bubble by kilometers.
The first flight of drop ships shows up ten minutes after the Shrikes, and I use my radio to guide them in toward the undamaged VTOL landing pads on the southern end of the base. They are followed in short intervals by a second, third, fourth, then fifth flight, and more are coming in every minute. I pick deployment points in sensible locations for every four-ship flight and guide the pilots in by TacLink. A very busy half hour later, thirty-two drop ships have disgorged their infantry payloads, and Red Beach has an entire regiment of troop
s securing it in all directions. One flight of drop ships has landed near the foot of the little control-tower hill, and I see from the tactical markings that it has a company of combat engineers on board, precisely the people I need in this location right now. With the first wave on the ground and the drop ships starting to head back to pick up the next wave of troops, I upload the latest TacLink data to the fleet and run down the staircase to the bottom of the tower, taking four or five steps at once. Outside, the combat engineers are unloading their gear from their drop ships. Their company commander, a captain named Coonradt, comes forward to meet me as I approach the drop ships.
“A cold LZ,” Captain Coonradt says after we exchange our brief introductions and courtesies. “I don’t mind that at all.”
“It wasn’t so cold an hour ago,” I say. “We dropped about a dozen. One of Kirov’s kinetics cracked the easternmost runway open, but the rest are whole. If I can suggest a priority list, let’s get the power for the control tower and the refuelers online, and we can turn those birds around a lot more quickly.”
“I have no issue with that list,” the captain says. “But we’ll have to bring in aux power for your consoles up there, ’cause that reactor over there ain’t fusion-powering shit anymore.”
Captain Coonradt summons his squad leaders and starts issuing orders. I trot up to the crew chief of the nearest drop ship.
“I lost my rifle in the orbital strike a little while back,” I say. “Mind if I borrow some of the gear from your boat’s armory?”
“Not at all, sir. Help yourself,” the crew chief replies.
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
I make my way up the ramp, through the cargo hold, and into the space between hold and cockpit, where the small armory of the ship is located. Every drop ship carries more than enough spare guns and ammunition to equip the embarked platoon with weapons and basic ammo loadouts all over again. To my dismay, this drop ship’s armory has lots of fléchette rifles and MARS launchers, but very few anti-Lanky rifles, and the ones they do have on the racks are older models, M-80s and M-90s. I grab an M-90 because it uses the same magazines as the M-95 I lost, and I already carry three spare magazines on my armor that will fit the gun. Then I replace the magazine I expended earlier with a fresh one from the ammo locker. I have to resist the temptation to take one of the MARS launchers out of the vertical wall racks along with a few of the new silver bullets, the eighty-millimeter gas-filled anti-Lanky rockets. My job down here isn’t to kill individual Lankies, as satisfying as it would be to one-shot them with those gas rounds.
Outside, the combat engineers have started to set up shop. Two of them are hauling a portable power pack to the base of the tower, where a third engineer is wrenching the cover off the universal connector panel on the outside of the building. I go back inside and climb the stairs to the control room again. Upstairs, Sergeant Dragomirova is looking out of the north-facing windows and talking in Russian on her radio while working on her admin deck, which is propped up on the windowsill. I clear off a space on a nearby console and set up my own admin deck. Because it’s an NAC facility, I can connect my system to the computers in the control center once the power is back and run the show off the big holographic display on the center console instead of the small screen of my admin deck.
With every flight of drop ships that puts down in the landing zone, another company of troops is on the ground to reinforce the LZ and prepare to advance on our next objectives. My tactical screen, which was sparsely populated with friendly blue icons when we landed, is getting busier every minute, individual trooper icons organizing themselves into platoons, and then platoons into companies.
“We are go on power down here,” Captain Coonradt sends from outside. “Say when, and we’ll flick the switch.”
“Go ahead on power,” I say.
A few moments later, the overhead lights turn on, and all around me, I hear the hum of restarting electronics. Outside, not fifty meters from the west-facing windows of the control tower, the combat engineers’ flight of drop ships takes off again one by one in five-second intervals, rattling the windows with the engine noise. I plug my admin deck into the main control console and fire up the systems. The Lankies smashed the radar and the fusion plant, but some of the auxiliary comms gear is still in one piece, and the data link works as well.
“Olympus Spaceport is back in business under new management,” I tell the combat engineers. “Keep hooking up the lines, and I’ll keep waving ’em in.”
Sergeant Dragomirova and I spend the next hour directing units into the spaceport and keeping the airspace as organized as possible. The base has no active radar, so we have to keep everything tangle-free and direct dozens of drop ships and attack birds with nothing but data links and eyeballs while the cloud cover hangs a mere two thousand feet over the ground. In Combat Controller School, they called the ATC sections of the training “icon-pushing.” I’ve learned over the years that pushing around icons on a screen can be just as stressful as being under fire if the spacecraft represented by those icons have forty or fifty people on them that will die a fiery death if you push one of those icons the wrong way at the wrong time.
“Tailpipe Red One, Red Beach C2. Come in.”
When I get the call on the tactical channel, it’s a distraction, but a welcome one from the high-stress monotony of directing air traffic.
“Red Beach C2, Tailpipe Red One. I read you; go ahead.”
“There are two drop-ship flights on landing pad Charlie that are about to take off for civvie evac thirty klicks east of the LZ. They want a combat controller to ride shotgun in case they run into LHO presence out there.”
“Copy that. You gonna send someone up to the control tower to take over ATC duties?”
“We will switch to local control for the time being. Can’t have the only red hat in the LZ pushing tin all day. You are authorized to leave without relief by Ground Force Red Actual.”
“Copy. Advise Actual I’ll be at landing pad Charlie in five,” I reply, glad at the thought of getting relieved of the important but tedious and boring air-traffic-control duty.
I let the local traffic know they’re on their own until Fleet sends another ATC up here, and then tell Sergeant Dragomirova I’ve been called off for a different assignment. Just to make sure the translator didn’t mangle my explanation beyond recognition, I also keep Dmitry in the loop.
“We have situation under control,” Dmitry says. “Many Alliance gunships around. We get trouble, I can manage.”
“See you when it’s over,” I reply. “Don’t get killed.”
“I will try,” Dmitry replies. “But is not entirely up to me. Good luck.”
I walk from the tower back along the hangar alley to the drop-ship landing pads on the south end of the base. Overhead, new drop-ship flights come in every few minutes. There are Shrike attack birds circling overhead above the cloud cover—I can’t see them, but the banshee wail of their engines is unmistakable. All around me, platoons and companies gather in staging areas and move out toward their objectives. On the tactical screen of my suit, I can see that we are steadily expanding our bubble of control from the spaceport into the city and surrounding areas. The Lankies have not contested the beachhead since we plowed the ground north of the base with kinetic munitions. I am not unhappy about the rapid progress we’re making, but something about this doesn’t feel quite right. Our third wave is landing already, and we haven’t run into any meaningful resistance yet, despite the presence of thousands of Lankies on the planet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from fighting them, it’s that whenever we seem to get the upper hand against these things, there’s a nasty surprise lurking just around the corner. I remember just how thoroughly a mere dozen Lankies managed to confound us on Greenland just by switching their tactics, and I wonder if they’ve been exchanging notes with their friends on Mars somehow. If this sudden knack for threat management is a species-wide development, then we’re in deep shit.
Out on the Charlie pad, eight drop ships are standing in a staggered row with their engines idling and their tail ramps down. A bunch of SI troopers are busy loading modular equipment boxes into the cargo holds of the ships and strapping them down. I look for the brass in charge and see an SI captain and two lieutenants nearby. They see me trotting up in my bug suit and wave me over.
“You the combat controller?” the captain says.
“Affirmative, sir,” I say. “What do we have?”
The captain—his name tag says “PARKER, M.”—points over to the east of the spaceport.
“There’s a science facility fifty klicks out, Tuttle 250. The Lankies wrecked the shit out of it like they did everything else, but their nuke shelter is still occupied. Four hundred personnel, military and civvies. We are going to go out there and fetch them.”
“With eight Wasps,” I say. “That’ll be a tight squeeze.”
“It’s what we have, so it’ll have to do. We need to go light because of all the weight we’re about to add. No external ordnance on the hardpoints. Cannons only, and only one fire team per bird, ’cause we need as much space as possible for the civvies. I need you along in case we run into problems we can’t fix with autocannons.”
“Understood. What’s the kit we’re taking along?”
“FEPOS,” Captain Parker says. “Tuttle 250 is low on oxygen, and their CO2 scrubbers are shot. We’re bringing five hundred FEPOS units with us so the civvies can make it to the drop ships without getting CO2 poisoning.”
The FEPOS units, fleet emergency personal oxygen supplies, are the successors to the NIFTI units that saved Halley and me when we had to evacuate the wreck of NACS Versailles over half a decade ago. They’re little oxygen tanks connected to mouthpieces and computer-controlled rebreather elements. In an emergency, they provide enough breathing oxygen for maybe half an hour, and they work as CO2-filtration units for bad air, like the atmosphere on Lanky planets.
