by Marko Kloos
The SI captain listens to a message coming on over a channel I’m not tied into. Then he looks at me and points his thumb over his shoulder toward the waiting drop ships.
“Hop in the lead bird, Lieutenant. You’ll ride with me. Dustoff in two minutes.”
“Aye, sir,” I reply.
We lift off a few minutes later. The lead ship is first to take to the air, and the other ships follow in short intervals. I’m strapped into one of the jump seats at the front of the cargo hold next to the crew chief. I’m tied into the drop ship’s camera system and watch as the landing pad falls away from us. Two hundred feet up in the air, the lead drop ship executes a sharp starboard turn around its dorsal axis and drops the nose to pick up speed. We cross the tarmac next to the spaceport’s runways, which are packed with personnel and gear at this point. An entire brigade is using Red Beach as their jump-off point, more than we’ve ever put into one place away from Earth, and that’s just an eighth of the forces we are landing on Mars right now. We have almost three thousand pairs of boots on the ground just on Red Beach, heavy weapons, air support, and plenty of ammo and fuel for resupply. But it still feels like the eerie calm before a bad storm, like a hard rain is about to fall. And all I can do is strap in and hold on and do what I can to keep dry.
CHAPTER 16
TUTTLE 250
The eight Wasps in our flight are thundering over the Martian landscape just a few hundred feet above the deck, to stay below the cover of thick gray clouds that are blanketing almost the entire hemisphere. We see Lankies on either side of the flight path, groups of five or ten or twenty, hundreds and thousands of meters away, but the drop ships hammer past those targets of opportunity at five hundred knots. With no ordnance on the pylons, the pilots don’t want to waste cannon ammunition. I upload every target I spot to the TacLink network for any follow-up forces to engage or avoid. We’re close enough for me to contact the bunker’s command center on short-range comms.
“Tuttle 250 shelter, this is Lieutenant Grayson, NAC Defense Corps. Do you read?”
“We read you, Lieutenant. We read you loud and clear. This is the officer in charge, Colonel Mackay.”
“Colonel, we are inbound with two flights of drop ships to evac your personnel. ETA five minutes. Make ready for a quick egress.”
“Understood. We’ve been ready to get out of here since you showed up in orbit.”
“I hear you, Colonel. You’ll be on the way home soon.”
“Two minutes out,” the pilot calls out from the cockpit. I top off my suit’s oxygen from the onboard system and make sure all my magazine pouches are full and ready to go. We are now forty kilometers behind the forward line of battle, far away from any ground support. I check the airspace for nearby units. Other than our eight drop ships, there’s a flight of Shrikes twenty-five klicks to our north on a parallel heading, and three SRA attack birds about the same distance to our southwest.
Tuttle 250 is a research facility the size of a small college campus. Or rather, it was before the Lankies moved in and reduced every structure above ground level to piles of twisted steel and rubble. We swoop in over the facility, and the cloud ceiling is so low that we’re practically on top of the first Lanky by the time we see it. Three of them are walking across the little plateau at a brisk pace, and all three turn their heads when they hear the noisy Wasps thundering over their heads.
“Tallyho,” the pilot says. “Three LHOs in the open. All units, break right and weapons free.”
We’ve shot past the Lankies already as soon as we’ve spotted them, and to me it seems like there’s maybe a hundred feet of separation between our ship and the head of the lead Lanky. The pilot yanks the Wasp hard to starboard and pulls the nose up to slow the ship down as he swings it around. When we’re through the turn, we’ve lost another fifty feet of altitude, and we’re a hundred meters from the Lankies. The lead Lanky turns away from the drop ship and strides off in long, thundering steps. The other two move off in different directions, none of them attempting to come close to the drop ship.
“Where ya goin’, pal?” the Wasp’s gunner says, and opens up with the large-caliber autocannon mounted on the underside of the ship. The thirty-five-millimeter antivehicle cannons on the Wasp don’t fire the new anti-Lanky silver bullets, the vicious gas-filled rounds we now use in our rifles, but they make up for it with sheer penetration power. The armor-piercing rounds can shoot through an up-armored mule from front to back, and not even Lanky hide is thick enough to stop the hyperdense penetrators in their tips. The pilot’s burst catches the striding Lanky in the lower back and the legs, and it falls forward, carried by its own momentum. It crashes to the ground in a cloud of red dust. Behind us, the other ships of the flight swing around one by one and give the other two Lankies the same treatment, knocking them off their spindly legs with cannon shells and putting bursts into their prone forms just to be on the safe side. I scan for more threats in visual range and don’t find any. The wind has picked up, and the visibility has dropped with the breeze to less than a kilometer, and I don’t feel entirely sure about making the call, but Lankies don’t show on thermal or radar, and I can’t see further than the cameras in the nose of the drop ship.
“LZ is clear,” I say on the tactical channel. “Propose we keep two birds in the air for overhead support while we load most of the civvies.”
“We have to hustle,” Captain Parker says. “Put ’em all down, but keep the nose guns hot, just in case, and watch your sectors. Fire teams, on the bounce.”
We set down on the square in the middle of the facility, with the nearest dead Lanky just a few dozen meters to the right of the lead drop ship. With only eight fire teams and cases full of FEPOS rescue breathers to carry, there’s no manpower for a security perimeter. The drop ships sit on a little hill among the ruins of the facility, so the optical sensors can see a few hundred meters, but if we get jumped by Lankies, the gunners have just a few seconds to bring their weapons into action. I keep the admin deck linked to the ship’s systems, bring the feed up on my helmet display, and grab my own rifle to contribute to the rescue in progress.
The main bunker entrance is buried underneath the rubble of the research station. We dig chunks of heavy concrete out of the way for fifteen minutes with our entrenching tools and our bare hands until we’ve made a hole big enough to reach the door that’s set five meters down in the vertical wall of the vestibule, and the piles of rubble look like they could shift and bury us at any time. Ideally, we’d have combat engineers and heavy equipment with us. But ideally went out the window the first time we made contact with the Lankies.
The bunker has an airlock system that’s too small to support all the troops we brought with us. The SI troopers carry the boxes of emergency breathing devices into the airlock and then take up perimeter guard outside while Captain Parker and I stay in the lock until it cycles again. The air outside, with its almost 10 percent CO2 content, would be fatal to anyone who isn’t wearing a suit or a rebreather.
The air inside the bunker itself isn’t much better. When the inner lock cycles and opens, the air-quality reading from my environmental monitor merely goes from “HAZARDOUS/LETHAL CO2 ALERT” to “HAZARDOUS/POOR.” Inside, the lights are on, and a handful of officers and civvies are waiting for us behind the airlock door. Behind them, there’s a large entrance area with equipment racks and ATVs parked by the walls, and the place is packed with people, a few uniformed Defense Corps personnel and civilians, lots of civilians. There’s a cheer going through the room when they see us.
Captain Parker and I salute the senior officer in the group, a female fleet colonel with the name tag “MACKAY, J.” Her name triggers something in my memory. She looks tired and haggard, and everyone in the group is lean and looks like the shelter ran out of full-calorie rations quite a while ago, but Colonel Mackay’s uniform is regulation clean and doesn’t have a loose stitch anywhere. I check the patch on her shoulder: “NACS CALEDONIA CG-99.”
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p; “Colonel Mackay, Fleet,” she introduces herself after returning our salutes. “I can’t tell you how glad we are to see you. We are down to emergency chow and seven percent oxygen. The scrubbers quit over a month ago.”
“What is your current personnel count, Colonel?” Captain Parker asks.
“Four hundred seventeen, myself included,” Colonel Mackay replies. “Three hundred eighty-three civilians, sixty-nine of them children. Thirty-four military, mostly Fleet. And the nineteen bodies we left lined up outside. We didn’t have space for a morgue.”
“What bodies?” I ask. “We didn’t see any when we pulled up.”
Colonel Mackay looks puzzled, then concerned. “We had nineteen dead over the last year. Most were injured from the Lanky attack. Two suicides. We moved them outside months ago.”
“There are no bodies outside,” the captain reaffirms.
I try to imagine what may have happened to the corpses the colonists stashed outside the shelter entrance, and I decide that I don’t like the ideas my brain is feeding me.
“Let’s get these breathing units distributed, and then let’s get the hell out of here,” Captain Parker says. “This area is not secured yet, and we don’t have the firepower to deal with anything more than stragglers.”
“No argument,” Colonel Mackay says. She waves over the military personnel nearby. “Tom and Adam, get these passed out as quickly as you can.”
It takes ten minutes for all the breathing units to be distributed, and we barely brought enough for everyone in the shelter. I look around in the place, not much bigger than the flight deck of a cruiser, and shudder at the thought of spending a year in such a confined space with four hundred other people. But Colonel Mackay seems to have run a tight ship down here, because there is no pushing or complaining, as if they had all practiced their emergency and evacuation drills a lot while they were locked up down here.
“Caledonia,” I say to the colonel after we’ve briefed her on the exfil plan. “Your ship was destroyed in orbit last year. I saw the marker on the tactical display when we flew by. I was on Indianapolis with Colonel Campbell. He said he went to the academy with you.”
“I did,” she says. “Is Indy with the task force?”
“Indy was destroyed last year when a seed ship broke through to Earth. I know you’ve been out of the loop.”
“You can say that again.” She looks at the patch on her sleeve. “We made it down in the escape pods. Some of us. Thirteen out of four hundred and fifty-nine. Caledonia took a hit to the fusion bottle and went up right as we were launching pods.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I say. “But if it’s any consolation, we just got ’em back. We killed twelve seed ships. Everything they had in orbit.”
Colonel Mackay smiles, but the smile has a slightly hollow, haunted quality to it. “It’s a good start,” she says.
The civvies have been well drilled. They leave the shelter in a hurry, but very orderly, even though I know they’ve been confined to that bunker for the last year. Many of them stare at the dead Lankies in the dirt nearby, at the holes torn into their thick hides by dual-purpose cannon rounds. The crew chiefs are loading people up into the drop ships and filling up the seating rows quickly. A Wasp holds forty troops, and we only have eight of them, so we are short three ships if we want to get everyone out of here without violating weight limits and safety regulations. But the regs are the last thing on anyone’s mind right now, and I’m glad the captain in charge sees it the same way.
“Fifty-two per bird!” Captain Parker shouts to the crew chiefs. The weight won’t be far off from a regular infantry load because the civvies don’t wear 150 pounds of armor and weapons each, but the space is definitely tight for almost twenty additional people.
Loading hundreds of people into military drop ships they’ve never been in takes some time. There’s some shuffling and arguing as families want to stay together and go on the same ships, and the crew chiefs are visibly stressed out after a few minutes, but the ships are filling up faster than I would have predicted. I keep my TacLink screen up in one corner of my helmet display to scan for trouble, even though the information is limited to whatever the cameras on the drop ships and trooper helmets see.
I feel the incoming Lankies before I can spot them in the red haze. They weigh hundreds of tons each, and a group of them walking makes the ground below your feet alive with a multitude of impact vibrations. From the way the drumbeat of their footsteps feels under the soles of my boots, we are about to have a lot of uninvited twenty-five-meter guests at this party.
“Wind ’em up!” Captain Parker shouts. The civvies aren’t trained in combat, but they can feel trouble when it’s coming their way. They must have heard a lot of Lankies marching overhead when they were locked in their bunker for months on end after the Lanky takeover. The formerly neat and orderly boarding process degenerates as people rush ahead to get onto the ships. The crew chiefs have their hands full with the crowd, and one of them has to fire his sidearm into the air to restore a semblance of order on his loading ramp.
“Contact,” one of the pilots calls out. “LHOs up ahead, coming in from the west, vector four-five. Distance nine hundred.”
“All units, weapons free, weapons free. We have multiple targets in the open,” I send to the drop-ship pilots.
“Multiple targets” seems like a slight understatement. Out of the dusty air to the northeast, dozens of Lankies appear, and they’re not advancing cautiously. They know where we are, and they’re striding with purpose. I know that at a brisk walk, a Lanky can cover those nine hundred meters in two minutes.
“Get those fucking ships off the ground,” Captain Parker orders. “Take ’em up as they’re loaded. We need to leave now.”
The grunts don’t try to board the ships with the civilians, and they don’t need to be ordered into fighting positions. They run and deploy in the spaces between the drop ships, which are lined up on the plateau in a rough semicircle with the bows facing out and twenty meters of space between them.
I get on the local defense channel and boost my transmitting power to maximum. “All air units, all air units, this is Tailpipe Red One. We need priority close-air support at map grid Yankee Papa Five-Two. We have fifty-plus incoming LHOs and four hundred civvies in the way.”
The drop ships open up first. Because they are on the ground, they can’t use their heavy antiarmor cannons, which are rigidly mounted to the hull and need the whole ship to be aimed at the target. The ships with line of sight to the Lankies swivel their chin turrets around and open fire with their multibarreled autocannons. Hundreds, thousands of tracer rounds fly out across the distance and start tearing into the approaching Lankies. At eight hundred meters, more of the grenades ricochet off their thick hides than do any damage. The Lanky line starts getting thinned out, but not nearly fast enough. The stricken ones wail and flail around on the ground, but the others stream around them like river current around obstacles. Some of the SI troopers have MARS launchers, and at five hundred meters, the first rockets shoot out from our defensive line.
“Hold the MARS rounds!” I shout into the company channel. “Wait until they’re two hundred meters out. And don’t aim at their skulls. Center-mass shots.”
With the heavy gunfire and the Lanky shrieks in the distance, all semblance of order on the loading ramps disappears as the civvies rush the drop ships to cram into the remaining space. I very much doubt anyone’s bothering with seat belts right now. On my right, the first drop ship lifts off, closing its tail ramp as the skids leave the ground, and I can see that the room between the seat rows is packed with standing civvies that are going to get bounced around like loose shells in an ammo crate.
“Tailpipe Red One, this is Eagle One-Four,” someone replies on the TacAir channel I just used for the emergency support call. “Copy your priority call. We are thirty kilometers to your north with air-to-ground.” The pilot has a strong German accent, and I’m guessing this is a Eurocorps dr
op-ship or attack-bird flight.
“Eagle One-Four, expedite if you can. Stand by for TRP data.”
I collate all the information from the gun cameras of the drop ships and the helmet cams of the troopers and draw a target rectangle on my PDP. The digital line of the western TRP border is practically in front of our drop ships’ noses, but I know the Lankies will be on top of us in another minute. I put target markers on a dozen Lankies in the crowd surging toward us.
“We’re going to drop right on top of you,” the Eurocorps pilot says.
“I am aware of that. Just keep ’em in the TRP. Danger close, danger close.”
“Roger that, Tailpipe Red One. Splash in fifteen seconds.”
“Incoming friendly CAS from bearing three-five-five degrees!” I shout into the company channel. “Splash in ten seconds. Heads down, heads down. All drop ships, turn to starboard immediately at takeoff.”
The first drop ship is in the air and clawing for altitude at full throttle. The second is just now leaving the ground, swinging the nose of his ship hard to starboard as instructed as soon as his skids are clear of the dirt. Nobody wants to be in the line of fire between a ground-attack flight and its targets.
The Lankies are now two hundred meters away and closing fast. I’m fifty meters behind the tail end of the drop-ship line in the entrance of the bunker, directing the close-air support and updating targets on my combat-controller deck for the pilots overhead, who are charging into the cloud cover to save our hides. To my left and right, MARS launchers pop and send their high-velocity rockets downrange. More Lankies crash into the Martian soil. One gets hit by two silver-bullet rounds at the same time and in the same general area of its chest, and the creature seems to blow apart from the inside, spraying bits of eggshell-colored skin and yellowish-white body fluid as it tumbles to the ground and kicks up a huge cloud of red dust.
