by Marko Kloos
“That is correct. The monocle will ignore the vehicle around it so the operator can see the surroundings.”
Wherever I look with the helmet monocle, it’s like the armored car isn’t even there, and I’m floating above the ground at fifteen klicks per hour. When I look down, I see the rough texture of the airfield concrete rolling past underneath the Weasel.
“You can switch to the feed from the sensor mast. It extends up to twenty-five meters and has two hundred magnification levels. You can read the name on a uniform from a kilometer away.”
Dmitry looks around with his own Euro helmet, and from the little grin on his face, I know that he has tapped into the DAS feed as well.
“This is not so bad,” he says. “Better than walking.”
“Much better than walking,” I agree.
Lieutenant Stahl does a few rounds on the tarmac in front of the Eurocorps ships. Then he rolls up to one of the drop ships and lets the crew chief guide him into the cargo hold, which has been cleared of seat slings. The hold is just wide enough for the Weasel, and it looks big enough to maybe hold two of them nose-to-butt. We watch with the DAS system as the Euro crew tie down the vehicle with remote quick-release clamps so we don’t roll forward and crash through the bulkhead, or backward through the tail ramp, if the ship maneuvers hard.
We’re in the air a minute later. The Euro drop ship doesn’t have a DAS setup, so we can’t make its hull disappear to our monocles as well. I turn the system off and familiarize myself with the recon setup of the Weasel. The Euros have a small military, but they love to use tech as a force multiplier, and their engineering is probably the best out there. With one of these babies, we could do the job of an entire podhead recon team and cover the ground in a fifth of the time. Of course, the Weasel is much too big to fit into a bio-pod, so it wouldn’t be of any use against Lankies at all unless we had air superiority, which has only happened twice in our history—in the Fomalhaut system during the joint rescue mission of the SRA colonists, and today.
The flight to the target area takes thirty minutes. The seat I’m sitting in is comfortable enough that I could take a nap if I wasn’t wired with the anticipation of the upcoming drop, my third one today. I am bone tired, but the adrenaline keeps me afloat mentally, and I know that my life may depend on how well I know the systems of this battle taxi, so I learn what I can while I have time. The remote weapons turret can be operated from any of the three seat positions, although the driver would have to stop the Weasel to shoot the guns. The weapons pack in the turret contains a fifteen-millimeter machine gun, a much smaller bore than our autocannons, but more suitable for precise fire at long range. It also has a semiautomatic grenade launcher alongside the machine gun. I check the ammo load for both weapons. Twelve hundred rounds for the gun, one hundred twenty rounds for the launcher.
For a vehicle of its size, the little Weasel can put down a pretty good ass-beating on infantry, although the weapons load is not exactly optimized against Lankies. The gun rounds are dual-purpose rounds with tungsten cores and explosive payloads behind, and the grenades are an almost even mix of fragmentation and dual-purpose rounds, with ten thermobarics in the magazine as well. I would not feel underarmed taking this little death buggy into battle against the enemies Eurocorps usually face—belligerent smaller nations on Earth, or the occasional armed insurrectionists—but the invisibility of the Weasel will be much more valuable against the Lankies than its armament.
“Very German,” Dmitry comments on the armament configuration.
“How so?”
“Small gun. Accurate. High rate of fire. Is made for precision. Russian guns are opposite. Not so accurate, but bigger shells. For bigger bang.”
We put down in a narrow valley a few kilometers from our observation-post site. The Euro drop ship touches down and opens the tail ramp, and the crew chief remotely unlocks the safety clamps holding us to the deck. Lieutenant Stahl backs the Weasel out of the cargo hold smoothly and with obvious practice. The drop ship is back in the air before we’re even fully turned around, and we’re on our own in the semidarkness of the Martian evening.
“Whoa. This thing can really move,” I say when Lieutenant Stahl takes us out into the fading light at full speed.
“Need to steal one,” Dmitry agrees. “For taking home. Maksim would enjoy.”
We drive out of the valley and onto the plateau at the foot of our target hill, and Dmitry and I turn on the DAS system to get all-round vision. The sensors automatically amplify the light outside, and the computer stabilizes the optical input to smooth out the bumps we hit. It’s like I’m a disembodied 360-degree camera gliding above the ground at two meters of altitude. I scan the horizon for Lankies and don’t see any, so I fire up the gun turret and get used to the targeting system in case we have need for the guns later. Lieutenant Stahl didn’t lie—the systems are very easy to figure out, and the computer does most of the work anyway.
“This goes faster here on Mars,” Lieutenant Stahl says jovially from the driver’s seat. “Less gravity.”
“Just make sure you remember that when you have to brake or make a sharp turn,” I say.
The German lieutenant gives me a thumbs-up without taking his eyes off his heads-up display.
We climb the target hill at low throttle, carefully and with the polychromatic-camouflage mode engaged in case we stumble into a pack of Lankies on the hillcrest. But the top of the hill is empty, just a relatively flat peak two hundred meters above the surrounding surface. When we crest the hill, I can see our objective in the distance—the strange latticework structures of a Lanky settlement. They usually remind me of coral reefs a bit. I’ve always wondered whether “settlement” was an accurate assessment of their function. They are too airy to keep out wind and weather, but that’s where the Lankies congregate, so that’s what we called them when we first encountered them on colony planets.
I send a burst transmission to the forces that are now making their way to this map grid from Olympus Spaceport and waiting for our update.
“Ground Force Red, this is Tailpipe Red One. We are on station at OP Promontory. We have eyes on objective Lima.”
“Tailpipe Red One, copy that,” the reply comes. “Armor is rolling. ETA three hours, thirty minutes.”
I relay the information to Dmitry and Lieutenant Stahl, who both mutter soft curses in their mother tongues.
“We will keep watch in shifts,” Lieutenant Stahl suggests. “Thirty-minute watches. One of us can sleep while two are keeping the watch.”
“Sounds lovely,” I say.
“You go sleep first,” Dmitry tells me. “I play with gun system and fancy computer. We wake you if trouble comes.”
Lieutenant Stahl voices his assent—I must look much more tired than I thought—and I nod and recline my seat. Then I close my eyes. With the adrenaline from the drop subsiding, it takes me no time at all to fall asleep.
We each get in two shifts of thirty-minute naps by the time the armor arrives to the southeast of us. The fleet has managed to land a full armor company, three line platoons with four vehicles each, and the command platoon with two mules bringing up the rear. Overhead, we have close-air support as well, several flights of drop ships and attack birds from three different alliances. We hold the strings up here in our hilltop OP, and it’s time to start yanking on them.
“Team Yankee coming up on your eight o’clock,” the company commander sends. “Damn, you guys are well hidden. I can’t even range you with the laser.”
“That’s the idea,” I reply, still shaking off the sleep from the last nap I took. “Still got eyes on objective Lima, still no movement. Repeat, no LHOs in evidence.”
“We will proceed to max firing range and start putting rounds into Lankyville. Get ready to call down the thunder.”
“We’ve been ready,” I reply. “Go ahead and advance. We have the overwatch.”
The light tanks fan out into a long battle line with small gaps between each four
-vehicle platoon. Fourteen mules advance across the plateau to our left toward the Lanky village. At this range, our near-field TacNet works, and I won’t even have to call out targets for the tanks to be aware of them. They’ll see what I see the moment I spot something.
The thirty-five-millimeter guns on the Bastard mounts have an effective range of five kilometers in direct fire. The battle line of mules rolls to within four and a half kilometers of the Lanky village. By now they are past our vantage point on the hill, and whatever is going to unfold now will happen in front of and below our elevated position. The mules all halt their advance and bring their gun mounts to bear.
“Engage enemy structure at twelve o’clock, twenty-round burst,” the company commander sends. “Weapons free, weapons free.”
Fourteen large-caliber autocannons start thundering. The muzzle blasts light up the valley floor, and hundreds of tracer rounds fly out and tear into the Lanky structure.
For a few long moments, nothing happens. Then there’s movement in the structure, and a couple of seconds later, it’s like someone hit a wasp nest with a broomstick. Dozens of Lankies come pouring out of the south side of the structure. Even from my elevated position, I have no real idea where they were hiding just a minute ago, in a structure so irregular and airy that you can see clear through it in places.
“Targets in the open,” I call out. “Multiple LHOs at forty-five hundred meters and closing in fast.”
The mules don’t need any encouragement to open fire again. The automatic cannons that were firing twenty-round probing bursts just a moment ago switch to automatic control, with the computers all linked and the command vehicle’s TacLink node calling the shots. It’s a brutally effective method for coordinating fire—the computer shoots every single round, and no human gunner wastes ammo by engaging a target that’s already under fire by another mule. Our firing line stretches for over half a kilometer, a mule every forty meters, and the guns fire in long, precisely calculated bursts. From up here, the streams of tracers cutting through the darkness and into the advancing Lankies look like laser beams from old Network movies. There are sparks whenever a round hits the ground or glances off the hard cranial shield of a Lanky, but most rounds find their mark, and the Bastard mounts are chopping them down one by one.
Overhead, I hear the wail of a drop ship’s engines—not our Shrike, but an SRA attack bird. It starts firing its cannon even before it breaks through the cloud ceiling, and more Lankies drop to the hammer blows of armor-piercing cannon shells. Next to me, Dmitry is giving the pilot cool and precise-sounding instructions in Russian. Then I see the glowing fireflies of rocket motors from overhead, and dozens of unguided rockets pour from the sky and plow into the Lankies at a high angle. All their size and strength, all their resilience isn’t doing them any good against our ranged weapons and the fire we can rain on their heads from the sky. With their seed ships keeping our air and space units away, against infantry with hand weapons, they are terrifying and overpowering opponents. Without their protector ship in orbit, facing attack craft built to obliterate armor columns, they are hard-to-miss targets. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction as I watch the slaughter, and I’m sure almost everyone on the ground with me feels the same way. We have lost so much to them, suffered so many casualties, had our lives upended so often, that seeing them die by the dozens is a grimly joyful experience. The SRA attack bird pulls out of its run, and another follows it with the same attack pattern. The tide of Lankies coming from the village seems to stall, then reverse itself as the creatures try to retreat from the withering fire.
So they’re not completely suicidal, I think. Whether by instinct or conscious decision, they aren’t willing to run into effective gunfire.
“Team Yankee, advance as a company and engage on the move,” the company commander orders.
Down on the plateau, the line of mules starts moving toward the village again, closing the distance meter by meter, their cannon mounts popping off bursts at retreating Lankies as the computers spot them. Gradually, the fire from the tank company slacks off until all guns are silent again, their targeting systems having run out of moving targets to shoot at. They close to three thousand, two thousand, then a thousand meters. A flight of four drop ships comes swooping from the sky, takes up formation above the tank column, and soars over the Lanky village. On the far side, five hundred meters from the southern edge, they drop cluster kinetics and fire their cannons. I hear the piercing wails of the stricken Lankies all the way at the top of our observation hill, five kilometers away. On the ground in front of the Lanky village, the mules’ battle line gets untidy as individual mules have to swerve around the massive bulks of fallen Lankies.
“There’s an opening wide enough for armor,” I hear on the company channel. “Two hundred meters northeast.”
I zoom into the spot with the magnified view from the Weasel’s sensor mast. There’s not a trace of movement beyond the opening in the latticework.
“It’s clear from up here,” I tell the company commander. “No activity.”
“We’re rolling in,” the company commander replies. “Second Platoon, take the lead. Then First and Third. Go in pairs. And be ready to back out.”
The platoon commanders toggle back their acknowledgments.
I spend a few pulse-pounding moments watching the first pairs of our armor column drive up to the opening and disappear inside the structure. From up here, I can see them turning on their infrared illuminators and targeting lasers. One of the lead mules turns on its external high-powered searchlight, and the others inside follow suit. I can see the light from the beams bleeding through the holes in the latticework and drawing dancing shadows onto the ground in front of the structure.
“It’s empty,” one of the platoon commanders sends. “Looks like they all cleared out the back. I repeat, the structure is empty. There’s nobody home.”
“That was little too easy,” Dmitry says.
“I don’t mind easy,” I reply. “But yeah. I know what you mean.”
I relay the information back to Ground Force Red Actual, the general who’s calling the shots back at the spaceport a few hundred kilometers to our southeast. We have only a sliver of the available ground forces up here for this diversion, all the personnel that fit into the back of the mules, a hundred troops total. A full brigade has thirty times that manpower, but even three thousand troops stretch thin when you have to cover many square kilometers of ground with them. Our beachhead has expanded steadily, but now we’re stretched to the limit, even with the reinforcements thrown in. If the line breaks anywhere, it’ll be like someone sticking a needle into a balloon.
“Advance and recon in force; then swing northwest until you make contact with the Lankies pressing the attack on Orange Beach,” the general orders. “But don’t get in over your heads. Your job is to draw them back towards you and relieve the pressure on Ground Force Orange.”
“Affirmative,” our company commander replies.
“We are rolling,” I add. There’s not a Lanky in sight anymore, and the mules in the structure are advancing without resistance, but I feel reluctance when Lieutenant Stahl puts the Weasel into drive and turns off the polychromatic camouflage.
“Maybe now we use weapons a little,” Dmitry says, and pats the handle of the fire-control system.
We catch up to the armor column just as the last tanks of the company roll through the gap in the Lanky structure. The experience of driving into one of their reef-like edifices is disconcertingly vivid through the many lenses of the Weasel’s DAS sensors. I’ve gotten close to Lanky structures before, but I’ve never actually been inside one. The structure is much bigger on the inside than it looked from a few kilometers away, or maybe it just feels that way because of scale, because the armored vehicles look almost insignificantly small inside. Whatever the Lankies use for building material looks a lot like bone, but it’s so airy and transparent that the searchlights from the mules shine through the structure and l
ight it up from the inside. The scale reminds me of walking through a cathedral. There are many irregular arches and openings in the walls. It looks like a discarded carapace or the plaster cast of an organ more than a building, and the Lankies have never seemed more organic and biological to me than right now.
We roll through the structure slowly and carefully, weapons swiveling on their mounts as the gunners look for targets.
“I take gunner seat, we have nothing to shoot,” Dmitry says with a tone of genuine disappointment in his voice.
The structure is several hundred meters across, and subdivided into smaller sections with those strange, semitransparent interior walls that look like they wouldn’t keep much out or in. We should probably stop and take samples of the stuff, but I find that my curiosity has its limits. Any second, I expect the Lankies to spring some sort of unexpected trap or ambush, because that’s what they seem to do whenever we feel like we have the upper hand for once. But we make it through the edifice and out of the other side without spotting a single Lanky.
There are dead Lankies on the other side of the structure where the drop ships strafed the retreating group. I count a dozen bodies, some still smoking from the bombardment. The armored column re-forms by platoons, and Lieutenant Stahl gooses the engine of the Weasel to take the lead. We’re faster, and our sensors reach further, so we’re playing eyes and ears again.
We’re too far out, I think. On my TacLink screen, our column is a small cluster of blue icons halfway between Red and Orange Beach, and it’s 150 kilometers to safety no matter which way we turn out here. Our air support is circling overhead and giving me some reassurance, but I’m very aware of just how far we’re sticking our necks out right now, and I keep scanning the darkness outside with the green-tinged night vision of the Weasel for the blade that’s sure to drop any minute now. But with every passing moment, we put more distance between us and the Lanky structure, and nothing is jumping out of the darkness at us.
