by Marko Kloos
Instead of stomping it flat, the Lanky kicks the ATV at full stride and catapults it through the air toward me. I flinch and duck away instinctively, and the vehicle flies past me and tumbles across the Mars soil in the distance. I can hear it breaking apart and spewing bits and pieces everywhere. I swing the rifle up at the Lanky, which is now mostly obscured by a big cloud of red dust, and I know that the next kick will have me as a target. But unlike in my dream, I know that the impact will not be painless.
Behind me and to my right, I hear the pop-whoosh of a MARS rocket launch. A very fast and angry firefly zooms past me and hits the Lanky high in the chest, near the vulnerable crook of the neck. The rocket can’t be anything but a silver bullet, because the effects are instant and dramatic. The warhead pierces the Lanky’s thick hide and explodes after a very short delay. A MARS rocket has a diameter of eighty millimeters, and the rocket’s payload is almost ten times bigger than those of the rifle rounds. The dull explosion of the aerosolized and ignited gas inside the Lanky almost decapitates the creature, struck as it is in one of its vulnerable spots. Its momentum carries it forward, and it falls toward me without any semblance of control. I leap to my right, dropping my rifle in the process, and barely clear the bulk of the Lanky as it slams into the Martian ground. The impact lifts me off my feet and propels me ten or fifteen meters, and I crash to the ground myself in a graceless and uncontrolled manner.
When I get to my knees again and turn around, Sergeant Crawford has lowered her MARS launcher and is detaching the empty rocket cartridge. She has another round strapped to the back of the ATV that’s parked twenty meters behind her, but I know how close that second group of Lankies must be by now, and there are six of them for just one more MARS round.
“Saw your flare!” she shouts at me. “I came as quickly as I could. Almost got stuck in a ravine.”
“You did great!” I shout back. “Forget the reload. Six more coming our way. Let’s get the fuck out of here, now.”
We run to the ATV. She gets into the driver’s seat, and with me having to take the backseat, there’s no space for the MARS launcher or the spare round. She chucks the launcher tube into the dirt while I unlash the spare round and throw it away as well. Then I swing myself onto the ATV behind her and pat her on the back of her armor.
“Go northeast, and hook around to the west in three klicks!” I shout. “And don’t let up on the throttle.”
By now, the new group of Lankies is close enough for me to feel the ground bounce with their strides. I don’t dare try to look past the corpse of the Lanky that Sergeant Crawford just dropped with a well-placed silver bullet from a MARS. Sergeant Crawford wastes no time. She throws the ATV into drive and guns it to the northeast, tires spinning in the red-brown gravel and dirt.
Overhead, a four-ship flight of Shrikes comes thundering out of the clouds. They make a low-level pass over the plateau and split up as they zoom overhead, two peeling off to the north and two to the south. Thirty seconds later, I hear the unmistakable roaring of the Shrikes’ multibarreled, big antiarmor cannons ripping across the landscape, and the rapid firecracker sound of impact explosions follows a second or two later. In the distance behind us, the Lankies on the plateau shriek as they get pelted by heavy-caliber cannon shells, caught in a deadly rain with no protection or shelter. The cavalry has spotted my flares and arrived, and as usual they were a minute too late. Without Sergeant Crawford, those Lankies would still be dead, but I’d be a bloody smear on the Martian rock somewhere back there right now.
We roll into the perimeter of Olympus Spaceport twenty minutes later, with a low-battery warning blinking in red on the ATV’s control display and a “LOW OXYGEN-19%” alert on my helmet visor screen. The runways are a giant staging area for SI and SRA marines, hundreds of them. Overhead, the aerial ballet has not abated—drop ships of all nationalities coming in and depositing their human cargo on the airfield, then taking off again to repeat the trip into orbit and back. I don’t know which wave we’re currently dropping, but we’re still landing troops, so the offensive must still be in full swing.
Sergeant Crawford steers the ATV over to the VTOL landing pad from where we started the rescue mission. A dozen drop ships are refueling simultaneously from the underground tanks. I hear portable power units humming everywhere. Nearby, a bunch of haggard-looking civvies are boarding a drop ship.
When the ATV comes to a stop, I climb off and stand on the tarmac for a moment on shaky knees. Sergeant Crawford gets off the ride as well and gives the saddle an affectionate pat.
“Good girl,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say to her. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you’re a podhead now. I don’t know too many troopers who have two confirmed Lanky kills.”
“I did what needed doing,” she says. “But to be totally honest with you, I am looking forward to wrestling databases again. I don’t know how you grunts do it. All the time, I mean.”
“Be careful out there. I hope to see you back at Gateway when this is done, Sergeant.”
“I hope to be back at Gateway when this is done. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“Me, neither,” I say. “Now go grab that hot shower.”
We don’t exchange salutes as would be proper considering our rank difference. Instead, we shake hands. I watch as she walks over to the staging area set up in a nearby hangar, hot food and ammo resupply stations set up along the walls, and wish we had about a thousand more like her.
I walk up the ramp of one of the refueling ships and commandeer spare battle armor from the ship’s armory. Then I use the airlock between cockpit and crew compartment to depressurize my broken bug suit safely and change into the armor. It’s not fitted to me, but each drop ship has half a dozen spare suits in predefined stock sizes, and a size 5 usually comes close enough to a proper fit whenever I don’t carry extra garrison flab.
Once I’m in my new battle armor, I plug my battered admin deck into the suit and log into TacLink with my combat-controller access. “Red Beach C2, Tailpipe Red One, come in.”
“Tailpipe Red One, this is Red Beach C2. We had you written off, Lieutenant.”
“Not quite yet. Pass me on to Ground Force Red Actual.”
“Stand by.”
There’s a pause on the command channel, and the C2 officer comes back on the line a few moments later. “Red Actual is tied up, but he says for you to get your ass over to the C2 post.”
“Copy that,” I reply, feeling mild irritation. “Be there in five.”
C2, the brigade’s command-and-control center, is in the back of a hardened spacecraft shelter halfway between the drop-ship pad and the control tower. On my way there, I roll the ATV past drop ships that are unloading mules, the SI’s eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles. We rarely ever take armor along on missions, because it’s not weight efficient, but someone upstairs decided to throw the whole kitchen sink at Mars. The mules have modular weapons stations on top, and the ones rolling off the drop ships right now are fitted with what the armor guys call the Bastard, a large turret containing a thirty-five-millimeter automatic cannon and twin guided missile launchers. Nearby, several SI squads are geared and lined up to board their rides.
I drive the ATV right into the shelter and park it over to the side, out of the way of the troops rushing in and out of the place. The commanding officer on the ground is a brigadier general, quite a few pay grades higher than the field commanders I usually deal with on drops. The brigadier general has a bunch of staff and junior officers around him, there’s a field-comms relay, and they even dragged out a portable holotable that’s displaying the tactical situation in this section of the northern hemisphere.
I don’t know the SI general in charge. The face behind the visor of his helmet is thin and haggard, but his eyes are sharp and alert as he looks me up and down. He has gray beard stubble, and on the whole, he looks to be about twenty years older than any brigadier general I’ve seen before. His name tag says “STERLI
NG, P.”
“Lieutenant Grayson reporting back from Tuttle 250, sir,” I say, and salute. “I’m the red hat you sent along with the rescue birds.”
The general returns the salute. “Those ships left for the carrier over an hour ago, as far as I know.”
“All but one, sir. The Lankies got one bird on the ground when they overran the position.”
“And you made it out? Holy hell, son.”
I shake my head. “I was already out, calling in close air on the Lankies. The bird they took out had no survivors. Sixty KIA, mostly civvies. And Captain Parker. I got back here with another survivor. Sergeant First Class Crawford. Once we’re done with this mess, I want you to put her in for a Silver Star at least. She took out two Lankies with hand weapons in close combat. Saved me from getting stomped into jelly.”
“You and Sergeant Crawford hoofed it all the way back here on foot?”
“We took a pair of ATVs from the facility, sir. Had a close call or two along the way.”
“I bet you did,” the general says. “We’ve got Lankies crawling around on this rock in every direction. Well done, Lieutenant. I’d love to tell you to get some rest, but I’ll have to send you back out. It’s going to be a long day yet.”
“Yes, sir. What’s the situation outside of our LZ?”
“We’re pushing the Lankies back wherever we meet them, but the low cloud cover is a bitch for proper close-air support. Our guys are in the weeds so much, we’re using fuel at four times the projected rate. Thank the gods we got this spaceport intact. Without the fuel tanks down here, we’d have to send all those birds back into orbit and through the minefield to refuel. Phalanx is already down to less than half her missile load.”
He steps back and waves me over to the holotable. Then he zooms into the display and spins it around so I can see the map sector he has magnified.
“We’re expanding out from Red Beach pretty steadily, but the Lankies are pushing Orange Beach hard. We’re going to use our armor and see if we can take the pressure off LZ Orange. There’s a Lanky town right here”—he points to its marker roughly halfway between Red and Orange Beach—“and we’ll push at it from the south to make them pull back their line to reply to the threat. You’re going in with a forward-observer team. Insert will be here, and you’ll set up shop on this hill. Once the armor gets close, you call in the thunder on whatever they manage to draw out of that settlement.”
“I won’t have much mobility up there,” I say. “If the tactical situation changes, I won’t be able to keep up with the flow of battle.”
“The Euros have graciously provided us with one of their shiny new recon MAVs, Lieutenant. You are riding with their red hat and the one from the SRA. Kirov and Westfalen are repositioning themselves in orbit right now so they can support our push. Close air will be your job because most air assets at Red Beach are NAC, but orbital bombardment will be SRA and Euro bailiwick. Dustoff is in thirty-five minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“Dismissed, Lieutenant, and good luck.”
I salute and turn to leave but stop halfway through my heel turn. “Uh, sir?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“Do we have word on the other LZs? My wife is flying a drop ship at Purple Beach.”
The general looks at me for a moment. Then he turns back to the holotable and pans out the map until it’s a large-scale hologram of the entire planet. He rotates it so that the southern hemisphere points up.
“The Lankies overran Green because the space control cruiser for Task Force Green hit a mine and couldn’t keep the hole in the minefield open after the first wave. We’ve consolidated Blue and Purple and sent reinforcements through their joint beachhead. Last word I got, they’re still holding the line, but the Lankies are pressing hard.”
I think of Halley, ferrying wave after wave down to the beach and then flying close air for her troops, in a hotly contested LZ, and I try not to recall the images of the shattered wreckage of the Wasp back at Tuttle 250.
She’s the best at what she does, I think. She’s fine. Probably having the time of her life, mowing down Lankies.
“Thank you for the intel, sir,” I say. Then I repeat my salute and walk off to leave the general to his strategic business.
One Lanky mine, and an entire landing zone is overrun. One brigade of troops, four battalions, almost three thousand men and women, wiped out because of a single proximity mine hitting the wrong ship in the wrong spot. Whoever planned this thing left the margins way too thin, and Halley and I are riding the edge of those margins. But three thousand more troops in LZ Orange are about to suffer the same fate if we don’t relieve them, so there’s no alternative but to saddle up and pick up the spears again.
CHAPTER 18
RED HAT EXPRESS
Dmitry is standing on the drop-ship landing pad with Lieutenant Stahl when I arrive on my ATV. Before all of this happened, I never thought I could be so glad to see an SRA marine’s face. Just as I pull up on the pad, the battery of the ATV dies completely, and I roll to a stop. I disengage the electric motors from the drivetrain and roll the ATV off the landing pad so it’s not in the way of the next drop ship.
“You are still alive, Andrew. This is good. What happened to insect armor?”
“It broke,” I say. “Seventeen million Commonwealth dollars down the drain. Where’s our ride?”
“Our ride will be here in two minutes,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “We will not have much time for our mission briefing.”
“The general gave me the idea,” I say. “They drop us off in your MAV, we climb the hill, and we spot targets for the armor and the flyboys.”
“That is the rough plan. You will both have to learn very quickly, though. The flight to the drop zone is only thirty minutes,” Lieutenant Stahl says.
“Learn what quickly?” I ask.
“How to operate that,” Lieutenant Stahl says, and points behind us, where an armored vehicle is rolling toward us across the tarmac in complete silence.
The Eurocorps scout vehicle is the coolest piece of military hardware I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of the Blackfly drop ships we used for our commando raid on Arcadia two months ago. It’s a four-wheeled, light-armored car, roughly similar in shape to the multipurpose assault vehicles used by the Spaceborne Infantry, but it looks somewhat bigger and much more imposing. In fact, it looks like a miniature version of the Blackfly put on all-terrain wheels. The armor is faceted everywhere, not a straight line in sight, and the windshield is so tiny that it looks like a pair of squinty eyes in the face of a predator about to jump. There’s a weapons module on top and a sensor system on an extendable mast. As the vehicle pulls up to us and comes to a stop, the armor seems to ripple before our eyes, and the entire vehicle practically disappears, a vague outline that shows a slightly distorted view of the area behind the armored car.
“I will be in the command seat and drive,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “You will be operating the weapons and the sensor array. Do not worry; it is very easy. But you will have to wear our helmets, because yours will not interface with the vehicle.”
“Friggin’ German engineering,” I say. “This is a German design, right?”
“Yes,” the lieutenant replies, with no small measure of pride in his voice. “It is called the LGS Wiesel.”
“Weasel,” I say. “What’s LGS stand for?”
“Leichter Gepanzerter Spähwagen,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Light armored scout car.”
“Very fancy,” Dmitry says. He runs his hand over the side of the Weasel, and the polychromatic armor shimmers under his armor’s glove, like he’s putting his hand into an oil slick.
The driver turns the polychromatic armor off, and the vehicle becomes defined again. The hatch on the side of the Weasel opens, and the driver exits and salutes Lieutenant Stahl. They exchange a few sentences in German, and the driver salutes again and walks off.
“Please,” Lieutenant Stahl says. He gestu
res toward the open hatch. Dmitry and I look at each other and file into the vehicle. The rooftop is lower than our heads, and we have to bend down to keep our helmets from knocking into the flanges of the steel hatch.
Inside, there are three chairs. One is up front and is obviously the driver’s seat. The two seats in the back are arranged side by side. They have helmets sitting on them, which Lieutenant Stahl tells us to put on. He closes the hatch and climbs into the driver’s seat. I wait until the air-quality display of my own helmet shows a green light before I pull it off my head and put on the Euro helmet instead.
“Where’s the data-link jack?” I ask Lieutenant Stahl.
“There isn’t one. It’s a wireless system,” he replies.
I don’t know if the Weasel uses hydrogen or electric engines, but whatever is under the power-pack hatch, it’s whisper quiet. When the German lieutenant hits the throttle, we roll off the landing pad with barely a sound. We cross over into a different part of the base, where a line of Euro drop ships is assembled.
“I have switched the control languages for the screens to English and Russian, respectively,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Please activate your screens and familiarize yourselves with the sensor system before we board the drop ship.”
I turn on the control screen next to my armrest. The menu is different from the ones in NAC vehicles, but translated into English I have no problem finding my way to the sensor submenu. I turn on my helmet, and the view in my helmet’s targeting monocle instantly changes.
“Whoa,” I say. “It’s a DAS array.”
“What is DAS?” Lieutenant Stahl asks.
“Distributed aperture system. You have optical sensors all over the outer armor.”
