by Marko Kloos
“Going weapons hot,” I send. “In three, two, one. Firing.”
The launcher spits the first missile out the back of the drop ship. The expeller charge is just powerful enough to kick the missile out of the launcher tube and through the tail ramp opening. Then the full propellant charge fires with a loud bang-whoosh, and the missile takes a nosedive and streaks toward the ground, following the computer’s guidance for a rendezvous with the Lankies a few kilometers off our port side. The launcher rotates with a loud whirring noise, and the next missile fires, then the next. I watch as the eight-meter missiles drop out of the back of the ship with just a meter of clearance between their unfolding guidance fins and the edges of the tail ramp opening. Like everything else we’ve cobbled together to fight the Lankies in the last few years, this gear and these tactics have safety margins thin enough for a very close shave.
At just under four kilometers, the supersonic missiles take very little time to reach their targets. The Lankies are still unaware of our presence when the warheads execute their top-down attack profile from only a few thousand feet overhead. The explosives in the bases of the warheads each propel two dozen superdense and needle-sharp depleted uranium penetrators downward in a narrow cone. I watch the video feed on my console with grim satisfaction. The projectiles hit the Lankies and the ground around them at many times the speed of sound. Amazingly, even the missile penetrators with all their kinetic energy concentrated on a fine point will sometimes glance off a Lanky’s cranial shield if it hits at a steep angle, but the warheads fire enough of those rods into such a small space that every single missile hit on a Lanky has been a guaranteed kill so far.
These are no exception. The Lankies on my screen drop to the dirt as if someone had turned their off switch. The spray of sharpened uranium rods churns up the soil all around them, throwing up ochre-colored geysers ten meters high. I’ve seen the aftermath of those kinetic warhead impacts many times, and those rods will penetrate a Lanky from top to bottom and still make a meter-deep hole in the ground. It’s one hell of a grim way to recycle our spent uranium, but swatting Lankies is the best use for it I can imagine.
A second or two later, the other two missiles I fired launch their warheads into the mouth of the cave. One explodes against the rock wall and disintegrates, but the other disappears into the dark crevice, and a gust of rock dust and debris billowing from the cave mouth a moment later confirms that the warhead exploded inside and dispersed its payload into the tunnel. The Lankies have been smart enough to build sharp bends into their tunnel system so we can’t just clear them out with direct fire, but I wasn’t counting on killing many hidden Lankies with that shot. I was betting on the explosive charge to collapse the tunnel entrance. When the dust from the impacts clears, I can see that the crevice is now filled with rock and gravel. It wouldn’t keep them from digging themselves back out and clearing the exit, but they never dig an entry point twice in the same location because they’ve learned that we chart and observe them for easy future kills.
“Target,” I tell the pilots on the flight deck. “Two kills, one exit closed.”
“Least we got something done today,” the pilot replies.
“Let’s stay on station for another five and then RTB. I’m good and ready for some rack time.”
“I hear that. Five minutes it is,” the pilot says.
Almost eight hours in the air, four missiles expended, and two-thirds of our fuel load burned for two Lanky kills and a closed-off tunnel entrance. It doesn’t seem like the result is worth the time and expense, but on average, this has been a successful patrol, and the crew gets to paint another two Lanky silhouettes onto the side of their bird. Tomorrow, I’ll get to fly another patrol in the back of a drop ship, and then again and again, until my three-month rotation is up and I get to spend a three-month stretch on Earth or near it, far away from this irradiated rock and its stubborn squatters.
There’s a loud metallic-sounding tearing noise coming from the right side of the ship. The entire hull of the Dragonfly vibrates and shudders. From the open hatch of the cockpit passageway, I can hear loud warning buzzers going off. Then the world goes topsy-turvy. The Dragonfly violently flips around its longitudinal axis, and I get yanked backwards into my seat. From the way I am hanging in my harness a second later, I can tell that the drop ship has flipped through a full 180-degree turn and is now flying inverted and with a nose-down attitude. We’re no longer in controlled flight; we’re on a ballistic arc.
“Eject, eject, eject,” the pilot shouts into the intercom. His voice doesn’t sound nearly as excited and panicked as I feel it should, considering we are now heading for a ground that was only two thousand feet below us when we were flying level and controlled.
The drop ship’s computer takes over to save the crew. Faced with an unrecoverable aircraft attitude, it overrides all manual controls and initiates the emergency eject procedure far faster than even the best human pilot could. The straps of my harness tighten to painfully taut levels, and I can feel the leg and arm restraints wrapping around my extremities and yanking them close to the chair. Then the eject capsule shoots out of the base of the seat and ensconces me in a titanium shell in a fraction of a second. I hear a muffled explosion, and then I feel a mighty push from below. My stomach lurches with the sudden and rapid upward movement. It has been three seconds at most since the ship flipped over suddenly, and I’ve not had enough time to process the situation enough to get scared. The drop ship’s computer thinks it’s time for the crew to get shot out of the Dragonfly to save us, and I am disinclined to argue with the silicon brain of our ride.
I know I’ve cleared the drop ship’s hull when I hear the sound of rushing wind outside. I feel the capsule arcing into the sky for a few more seconds. Then another teeth-jarring jolt announces the deployment of the capsule’s parachutes. I’ve never left a drop ship in this particular fashion, and I don’t much care for it. At least the automatic restraint tighteners managed to get all of my limbs inside the capsule before it snapped shut. The rescue capsules have a reputation for breaking arms or legs on activation.
What the fuck just happened? I wonder. But I don’t broadcast that inquiry out to the pilot and gunner because I don’t want to send out radio signals for the Lankies to sense. In any case, I’ll find out soon enough.
When the ship malfunctioned, we were just a little over two thousand feet up in the air, so the ride down to the surface doesn’t take very long. I’m blind and deaf inside the capsule for just a minute at the most before it hits the Mars surface with the bone-jarring sound of metal on rock. The rescue capsules are not nearly as well cushioned as the bio-pods, and they hit a lot harder, hard enough to send a flare of pain up my spine and punch the breath from my lungs for a moment.
The rescue capsules don’t open automatically like the bio-pods do. I fumble for the luminescent release handles on the inside of the capsule and give each a hard yank in turn. The shell opens halfway and comes to a stop with a grinding crunch. I release my restraints and grab the upper and lower halves of the titanium shell to move them further apart. They budge for another few centimeters, then get stuck again. I turn on the assist servos on my armor and use their power augmentation to wrench the shell halves apart all the way.
My rescue pod is lying on its side in a rubble field. The orange triple canopy of the parachute is draped behind the pod, tangled up in the lines attached to the top of the pod roof. This is my first emergency eject from atmospheric flight, and I hope I won’t ever have to repeat the experience. The bio-pods are cushy and gentle rides in comparison. But I guess getting jarred and bounced around a bit beats burning up in a flaming wreck.
The drop ship hit the ground half a kilometer away while I was descending in the rescue capsule. A huge orange-black fireball marks the spot to the north where the only orbital taxi in a thousand-kilometer radius just explosively disassembled itself all over the surface.
“Fucking fabulous,” I mutter to myself, carefu
l to keep the comms cold. The entrance to that Lanky tunnel isn’t too far from here, a few kilometers at best, and we still have no idea just how sensitive these things are to radiation.
There’s an emergency kit in the back of the ejection capsule. I pop open the access latches and drag the kit box out of its receptacle. Then I take inventory of the contents. One standard water module for the battle armor connector, a handheld backup radio, ten packs of emergency rations, and an M109 service pistol with five magazines, a hundred rounds in total. I take the water module and the radio, but leave the pistol and the food behind. I don’t intend to stay down here long enough to need extra calories, and if a Lanky finds me, that pistol will be about as useful as a kickstand on a drop ship. If I need to shoot myself, I already have my personal sidearm in a holster strapped to the front of my chest armor, and that will do the job just fine.
I look around for signs of the pilot’s and copilot’s chutes. The area where our bird went down is mostly flat but craggy and run through with ravines and sinkholes. In the distance to the north, I see something orange billowing close to the ground, so I gather my spare kit and set out that way.
The environmental controls of my battle armor practically go apoplectic with warnings and bright red readouts. The radiation sensor tells me that my surroundings are radioactive enough to give me fatal radiation poisoning with less than half a day of unprotected exposure. My suit’s filters report they’re good for another twenty-one hours. After the comprehensive nuking we put on all the Lanky building sites, the planet is a lethal wasteland, and I have no idea how the Lankies managed to hang on month after month without dying like flies in those caves. But our own settlers hung on and waited for rescue for over a year, and maybe hope against hope is a trait that both our species have in common.
The drop ship pilot is gathering his stuff out of his own rescue capsule when he sees me coming toward him across the rocky landscape. He has taken the time to gather the orange parachute and is now stuffing the silk canopy and its attached spaghetti of nylon lines into the cavity of the open capsule.
“What the hell happened just now?” I ask when I’m in voice range.
“We lost the starboard wing,” the pilot replies. “I was flying straight and level, and all of a sudden, boom. Came off the bird like a loose piece of trim.”
“What did we have hanging off it?”
“Just the two external tanks, but those were already empty. We were on internal tanks. No weight left on the wing pylons.”
“Super. Brand-new drop ship, and the wing just fucking falls off in the middle of a patrol.”
“It wasn’t new.” The pilot finishes cramming the parachute into the empty rescue capsule and pulls the clamshell closed over the telltale orange fabric. It’s standard E&E protocol, even though we’re pretty sure the Lankies can’t even see like we do.
I look over to the spot where the Dragonfly hit the ground, tens of millions of Commonwealth dollars and a priceless war machine converted into a black cloud and a debris field around a shallow crater.
“Material fatigue,” the pilot continues.
“That ship was five years old at most.”
“Yeah. But we’ve been flogging the shit out of those birds. That one’s been flying twenty surface missions a week in this shit. High winds and radiation and all.”
“Twenty times a hundred and fifty,” I count. “Three thousand flight hours.”
“And not in blue skies with minimal loadout. These things weren’t meant to be ridden like that. They get more combat hours in a month than they usually get in two years.”
“Material fatigue,” I repeat. Everything’s tired, man and machine, and now things start falling apart even without Lankies helping with the disassembly.
“Yeah.” The pilot—a second lieutenant whose name tag says “BRASSEY”—unloads the contents of the emergency box and starts filling his flight suit with gear.
“Let’s go find your left-seater,” I say. “He can’t be too far from here.”
We look around the area for a few minutes before we see the remnants of a dust plume to our south. It takes twenty more minutes to navigate the ravine-riddled terrain to the spot where the copilot’s capsule hit the ground. It’s obvious from a hundred meters away that the capsule is completely destroyed and that nobody’s going to walk away from this spot. The emergency chute must have failed to deploy properly, because the remnants of the capsule look like they’ve been stomped on by a Lanky a few times.
“Goddammit,” the pilot says. He sounds bone-tired and defeated.
“Yeah,” I concur. Surviving a drop ship crash and then dying anyway because the rigger for the emergency chutes fucked up on the job is a pointless and disheartening way to go. But at least it’s a quick death, and in the windowless capsule, he probably never even knew that something had gone wrong.
“Someone needs to get his dog tags,” Lieutenant Brassey says, in a tone that makes it very obvious he’d rather be fighting a Lanky hand-to-hand. I wasn’t particularly close to the copilot, so I sigh and shrug off my pack.
“I’ll get ’em,” I say. “You sit and watch the neighborhood. Anything Lanky-like shows up, you let me know the very same second.”
“Got it,” Lieutenant Brassey says. “And thank you.”
The rescue pod broke apart when it hit the Mars surface. The copilot is still strapped into the remnants of his seat, which got ripped from the base of the pod and flung a good fifty meters from the main part of the debris field. I don’t need to remove the pilot’s helmet to know that he’s dead. There’s a splatter of blood on the inside of his face shield, and his limbs are splayed out in an unnatural fashion. Still, I let my suit’s sensors check for vital signs. There aren’t any, of course. But the pilot’s dog tags are around his neck, inside that flight suit, so I have to remove the helmet anyway.
The face underneath the helmet is young, even for a new second lieutenant. There’s blood coming from the copilot’s nose and mouth, and his eyes are half-opened. He has sandy-blond hair shorn into a slightly shaggy buzzcut, the standard hairdo among pilots who wear heavy flight helmets most of the day. I fish for the chain of his tags inside the collar of his flight suit and pull out the dog tag. It’s a rectangular piece of metal with rounded corners, designed to be broken in half. I take the tag in both hands, snap off the bottom half, and tuck the rest of it back into the collar of the dead pilot’s flight suit, in case a grave detail is ever going to come and bury him properly. Most likely, the Lankies are going to claim him as bonus protein for their building projects, and if I had a thermal charge, I would give this poor bastard a proper funeral pyre on the spot. As things stand, all I can do is leave him where he is and hope the Lankies overlook him. He’s probably not much older than twenty, and his life ended here, on this irradiated piece of shit planet, due to a technical defect that could have been caught if the maintenance guys had paid twenty seconds’ more attention. Or maybe they did everything right, and a piece of steel or string of nylon rope just gave way at the wrong time. Either way, the end result is a dead pilot and a smashed capsule, and the hows and whys don’t matter much at this point. I tuck the bloodied dog tag into one of my exterior pockets and turn away from this grim little graveyard.
The cloud cover over Mars is so low that it looks like I could jump up and brush the bottom of the clouds with my gloved hand. The exterior temperature is well over thirty degrees Celsius, and the cooling elements in my armor are already busy. My battery will last a week or more, and the new improved filters in the standard battle armor are now good for days on a Lanky planet, but I really don’t want to stick around that long.
“We need to clear datum,” I tell Lieutenant Brassey when I get back to where he is standing.
“Shouldn’t we stay by the crash site so the SAR flight can find us?”
“The pods have a distress beacon built in. You know that. It’s radio energy. If there’s a Lanky in the area, it’s like a summoning flare. We nee
d to haul ass and call down a SAR bird from a safe spot.” I look around at the red-and-ochre wasteland around me. “If we can still find one in this place.”
CHAPTER 2
MATERIAL FATIGUE
I’ve never liked Mars outside of the big cities. It didn’t lend itself to large-scale farming or growing vegetation despite eighty years of terraforming, and the Lankies have undone all our work in just a few years. Now it’s the same dusty red desert as before, only with a high-CO2 atmosphere and enough heat and humidity to make the visors on our helmets fog up. And after the big battle with the Lankies three years ago, it’s a graveyard for too many of my friends and comrades-in-arms. We are in the southern hemisphere, not the northern one where I dropped during the great assault, but I still have the most unpleasant flashbacks at the sight of the barren landscape.
We have put two kilometers between us and the crash site when we see the first Lanky in the distance. It’s striding across the Martian plains toward the plume of black smoke from the shattered drop ship, but it’s almost a kilometer to our left and seemingly unaware of our presence. Still, we take no chances. There’s a small cluster of rocks nearby, and we huddle behind it to keep out of sight.
“What do we have?” Lieutenant Brassey asks.
“For what? Fighting that thing?”
“Yeah.”
“I have bad news for you. If he finds us, we’re dead. Worse than dead, maybe.” I think back to the scene from the Battle of Mars, when we discovered that the Lankies bring human bodies back to their tunnels. Food, protein for building—whatever they use us for, I have no interest in ending up that way. I nod to the pistol Lieutenant Brassey wears strapped to the chest of his armor.
