by Marko Kloos
Dmitry gives me a lazy thumbs-up without stopping his work on the control deck he has set up on a piece of rubble in front of him.
“Don’t worry, my man,” he says, in what sounds like a mock American surfer-dude accent. “Russian soldiers are trained professionals.”
Over by the north end of the airfield, beyond the runway, three Lankies appear, their eighty-foot forms towering over the rocky landscape. The drop ship overhead opens up with its cannons again. I can’t feel the concussions of the muzzle blasts through my bug suit, but the dust underneath my boots gets kicked up as the Russian drop ship rakes the incoming Lankies with armor-piercing explosive grenades. One of them falls, then another, both shrieking and wailing. Their vocalizations sound like nothing I’ve ever heard on Earth. They’re sharp and piercing and full of deep, rumbling intensity at the same time.
Above our heads, the drop ship pulls up and ascends away from the airfield. Dmitry shouts something to his troops, who form a double line on the tarmac in front of me. The SRA marines in the front row drop to one knee. All of them aim their rifles at the remaining Lanky, 150 meters away and closing in on us. The Russians have big, powerful anti-Lanky rifles, but theirs aren’t twin-barreled like ours. Instead, the SRA equivalents are single-shot breechloaders, with bores that look even bigger than those of the M-80 I carry. The kneeling row of SRA marines fire their rifles at the Lanky to a command I can’t hear, and six rifles pound out shots at the same instant, a deep thunderclap that sounds almost like a single report. The breeches on their guns fly open and eject the brass bases of their caseless rounds, and the second row of marines prepare their own guns. I watch as the SRA marines fire three, four, five volleys in rapid succession, each row shooting while the other reloads, like line infantry of the old colonial days on Earth. The advancing Lanky takes six, then twelve, then eighteen impacts to its head and chest, each marked by the small violent puff of a high-explosive armor-piercing round. By the fifth volley, the Lanky stumbles and falls. Then it crashes to the ground, its bulk shaking the earth underneath my boots. The marines’ five volleys took maybe eight or nine seconds. Their Lanky-engagement tactics are completely unlike ours, but I’ll be damned if they don’t work at least as well.
All over the SRA settlement, I hear gunfire, like a discordant martial symphony: the deep booms of our M-80s and SRA anti-Lanky rifles, the pop-whoosh of MARS rocket launchers, the thunderclaps of exploding grenades and rockets, all mixed in with the wailing of Lankies and the din from the cannons of the overhead drop ships. Every bit of aboveground infrastructure here in town is wrecked, and only some of the squat and sturdy settlement buildings are still standing amid the rubble. But there are no Lanky nerve-gas pods littering the ground here, no clusters of dead settlers anywhere. It’s like they’re fighting with their hands tied behind their backs. Whatever the reason, I’m perfectly happy with this change in our fortunes, however temporary it may be.
As the NAC troops on the ground spot and engage targets, contact icons pop up on my tactical display. I can’t see what the Russians are seeing because our tactical networks don’t talk to each other, but everything our own troops see and do gets transmitted to my bug suit’s computer and the control deck I’m carrying. The human troops are an enclave of blue icons, the Lankies a wide and irregular circle of orange symbols all around us, clustered in groups of three or four at the most.
The SRA base and town sit at the end of a rocky plateau. On one end of the town, there’s a gradual drop-off into a craggy valley. The other end of the town, where the SRA base and its military airfield sit, opens out onto the flat and wide plateau beyond. Out there, Lankies are milling about, some advancing in our direction, some going the other way, away from the fight. In every engagement I’ve had with them before now, they’ve shown more coordination and aggression than this group does. These seem slower, weaker, almost unsure. Even with all the troops on the ground, the Lankies on the plateau could probably overrun us if they all came our way at once. But they don’t, and I don’t intend to let them have enough breathing room to change their minds.
Close air support comes in a few minutes later, three flights of Shrikes loaded to design capacity with air-to-ground ordnance. They drop out of orbit and come rushing toward the LZ at full throttle, forming up into a six-abreast formation just a few dozen klicks from the target area. I fire up the comms suite and toggle into the TacAir channel.
“Hammer flight, this is Tailpipe One. You have a target-rich environment down here. The plateau directly to the north of the LZ is crawling with Lankies. Consider it a free-fire zone. All friendlies are south of the airstrip. Uploading target reference-point data. And mind the Russkie drop ships right above the deck.”
“Tailpipe One, Hammer One,” the pilot of the lead Shrike sends back. “Confirm everything north of the airstrip is clear to engage. ETA one minute.”
I send the confirmation codes and look over to Dmitry, who is busy working his own comms kit.
“Air support coming in—sixty seconds,” I shout at him. “Tell those drop ships to clear the airspace.”
Dmitry gives me a thumbs-up again without taking his eyes off the screen of his control deck. A few moments later, the Akulas circling above the settlement abandon their positions and scurry off to the west and east to get out of the line of fire.
The Shrikes announce their arrival in a spectacular display of long-range guided-munitions firepower. Two dozen missile trails streak in from the south and cross the sky above the SRA settlement in a flash. They descend onto the plateau beyond the town and explode in a short and violent cacophony that makes the rubble bounce even from a kilometer away. In the distance beyond the runway, plumes of dust and smoke rise into the clear sky. Ten seconds later, the Shrikes are overhead, their huge multibarreled assault cannons firing thousands of armor-piercing shells at targets I can’t see. I’ve never seen six of our Shrikes make a coordinated attack run together, and it’s nothing short of awe inspiring, the fist of a god coming down on a gathering of hapless sinners. The nearby SRA marines, caught up in the moment, actually cheer the Shrikes as they pass overhead and split up into pairs again once they are past the settlement. The moment is so surreal that I find myself grinning at the absurdity of it. A few weeks ago, cheering would have been the last thing on the minds of these Russian grunts at the sight of a six-abreast formation of the NAC Defense Corps’s premier ground-attack spacecraft. The world has gone topsy-turvy, and it’s strangely exhilarating.
Through the TacLink data connection, I see what the Shrikes see as they come back around for another gun run on the plateau. The orange icons for Lanky contacts pop up on my map as the Shrikes target the Lankies, and then blink out of existence as the antiarmor cannons and missiles from the Shrikes hit home. The sheer size of the Lankies works against them—they can’t hide from our attack craft, and they seem to have no way to shoot back. As big and strong as they are, bereft of their mother ship’s defensive umbrella they’re no match for spacecraft designed to take on armored vehicles and SRA strongholds.
Of course, they’re still more than a match for us mudlegs on the ground, who don’t have the benefit of an armored shell that can fly away at eight hundred knots when things get dicey.
“Tailpipe One, Hammer One. We’re cleaning the rest of them off that plateau. Be advised there’s a group of twenty coming your way from two-seven-zero degrees. We don’t have enough ordnance left on the racks to take them all on before they’re on top of you.”
“Hammer One, copy,” I send back. “Keep clear of that area for orbital delivery.”
“Copy that,” Hammer flight’s leader replies.
I switch back to the fleet tactical channel and contact the Regulus.
“TacOps, Tailpipe One. Priority fire mission. Request immediate kinetic strike on the following TRP.” I upload the data for the target reference point passed on to me by Hammer flight, a ravine three kilometers to our northwest. Pissed-off Lankies can cover three klicks pretty da
mn fast, and I’d rather not see twenty of them show up on the runway in a few minutes, drop ships overhead or not.
“Tailpipe One, Regulus. Copy target data. Package on the way in seven-zero seconds.”
I send a “KINETIC STRIKE” warning to all the NAC troops nearby and run over to where Dmitry is hunched over his control deck. He looks up at me as I skid to a stop.
“Tell your guys we’re dropping kinetic munitions in a few minutes, three kilometers that way.” I indicate the direction of the target zone with my hand. You don’t realize how much of an advantage integrated data networks are until you have to coordinate a combined-arms melee with a group of people whose computers can’t talk to yours. Voice and hand signals are slow and cost precious time when ten kilotons’ worth of impact energy is descending into your neighborhood at twenty times the speed of sound.
Dmitry nods and talks on his comms again, presumably to let the SRA marines know that the Hand of God is about to touch down three klicks away. Kinetic strikes are almost as impressive as low-yield nukes, and having one occur nearby without warning can be a bit startling, to put it mildly.
Nearby, a squad of NAC Spaceborne Infantry bring down a pair of Lanky stragglers with a barrage of MARS rockets, assisted by a squad of SRA marines with their own rocket launchers. Theirs load from the front, ours from the back, but they both serve the same purpose and achieve the same results. One Lanky goes down, hit by several armor-piercing explosive warheads and dozens of rifle rounds. The other soaks up the hits and keeps coming, right into the defensive fire put out by the two squads. I take the M-80 from my shoulder, let the computer take aim for me, and fire both barrels at the approaching Lanky just as it bears down on the mixed squad of human troops. I’m still fifty meters away and in relative safety, but some of the other troopers are not so lucky. The Lanky flings them aside with a huge, spindly arm, and they get tossed through the air like debris in a hurricane. I open the breech of my rifle, pluck two more rounds from my harness, and reload the chambers. By the time I’ve raised the weapon again, the cumulative fire from the surrounding troopers has brought the Lanky to its knees. It wails its earsplitting cry as rifle rounds and rockets pelt it from all sides. Then it crashes onto the rubble-strewn ground, finally succumbing to the dozens of super-dense penetrators we shot through its hide. They are so large, so thick-skinned, so incredibly hard to kill that whenever we bring one down, it feels like we’ve felled a god.
The kinetic warheads from the Avenger announce their arrival with an unearthly ripping sound overhead. Then the first warhead strikes the ground three kilometers away, at the entrance of the ravine. There’s a blinding flash in the distance, and a few seconds later, an earth-shattering bang shakes the ground so violently that I have to regain my footing, and Dmitry’s control deck leaps off its makeshift pedestal and clatters to the ground. A plume of dust and rock shoots into the blue sky. Then a second round hits, and a third, and a fourth. The Avenger spaced her shots, put the first one into the mouth of the ravine to plug the Lankies’ ingress route, and then walked the other three into the ravine itself to do the killing work. Within thirty seconds, the cloud of rocks and dirt to our northwest towers a thousand feet above the plateau.
Dmitry looks at the fireworks in the distance for a few moments. Then he picks up his control deck, wipes off the dirt, and props it in front of himself again.
“You just committed treaty violation,” he says. “Svalbard Accords. We get home to Earth, I file complaint with United Nations war crimes tribunal.”
Nukes and kinetic weapons—and all other weapons of mass destruction—are banned for combat use by both sides when fighting each other. Technically, Dmitry is correct—the Avenger firing kinetic warheads at an SRA moon is probably a letter violation of that treaty—but I don’t think it counts in spirit, because we shot at Lankies and not SRA installations. In any case, I’m pretty sure Dmitry is joking, but I’m still getting used to the particular Russian sense of humor, or maybe just Dmitry’s.
“If we ever make it home to Earth, they can put that one on my tab,” I tell Dmitry. “I’m already looking at twenty years for mutiny anyway.”
Three more flights of drop ships arrive in five-minute intervals, all SRA boats with mostly NAC infantry on board. The mixed battalion of SRA and NAC troops mops up the remaining Lankies in the settlement one by one while the drop ships and Shrikes provide fire support from above. This is the first time I’ve been in action against the Lankies with a whole combined-arms combat team, with fire support from orbit and all the resources of a proper planetary-assault task force. And we are, for the first time, decisively winning against them on the ground. They’re not invincible after all. Too bad that we won’t be able to replicate this particular set of circumstances again any time soon.
I spend the next three hours coordinating the close air cover and the conga line of drop ships coming down from the task force to pick up troops and survivors, return to the carriers, refuel, and then make the trip again. Every drop ship in the combined task force, NAC and SRA alike, is in space or in the atmosphere of the moon at the same time, coming in or going out. It’s still bizarre to see Shrikes escorting a flight of SRA drop ships, or Wasps and Akulas flying in formation overhead, and no matter where this strange new arrangement is going to take us in the future, I’ve spent so much time shooting at these people that I doubt I’ll ever get fully used to the sight.
When the last drop ship full of SRA civvies and straggler garrison troops is in the air, the colony town is a deserted pile of rubble, littered with broken things and dead Lankies. The mixed platoon on the ground with me gathers our casualties and prepares for egress. Two drop ships are waiting for us on the edge of the old SRA military airfield, tail ramps down and engines running. There are still plenty of Lankies on this rock, but the ones that are spotted from the air by our recon flights are milling around singly or in small groups. After we blasted the approaching Lanky group in the nearby ravine with kinetic warheads, the Lankies have made no more attempts to retake the settlement and stop the evacuation. On the contrary, the ones that are still in the area seem to take pains to steer well clear of us. The Shrikes are still engaging targets of opportunity all over this part of the moon’s hemisphere, but there are still hundreds of Lankies scattered all over the moon, and it would take us another month to kill every last one of them from the air. We got what we came for, and now it’s time to hotfoot it away from this place before another seed ship shows up in orbit and ruins the party.
The waiting drop ships are a Wasp and an Akula. The Russian part of the platoon boards the Akula, while the NAC troops tromp up the loading ramp of the Wasp. We are returning to our respective bird farms, which don’t have docking clamps for the other side’s hardware.
“Good luck, Dmitry,” I tell my SRA counterpart as we walk over to our rides together.
“Same to you, Andrew,” he says. “Maybe we won’t kill each other for a while, eh? I see you on the battlefield, I try to wound you instead, maybe.”
I’m the last to walk up the Wasp’s ramp. When I glance back over the devastation that is the old SRA garrison, I see that Dmitry is over by the tail end of the Akula, watching me as I walk aboard. It’s only when my boots are on the steel of the Wasp’s ramp that he starts to board his own boat. I sketch a little salute, and he returns it precisely and by the book.
I know why he waited until I was off the moon before he climbed aboard his own ride.
First ones in, last ones out. Our profession makes us the first to put boots on the ground, and the last to leave the dirt at the end of a mission. This was an SRA settlement, so their combat controller made sure he was the last one onto the last ship off this rock. It seems that some traditions translate across our respective military cultures.
I strap into the last available seat on the crowded Wasp and secure my weapon. Behind me, the tail ramp whines as the crew chief seals the hatch for spaceflight. In the space down the centerline of the Wasp between
the two rows of seats, I count five body bags. We’ve done our share today, sweated and bled onto SRA-owned ground to rescue civilians we would have left behind to die just a month or two ago. Maybe we are evolving as a species after all, now that we’re facing our extinction.
Maybe the Lankies should have showed up a few thousand years ago.
CHAPTER 2
I’ve been in the fleet for five years, hopping ships every six months after combat-controller school, and I’ve never been on a Navigator-class supercarrier until this week. The Navigators are the pride of the fleet, half again as large by tonnage as the next-biggest class of carrier and easily the most powerful warships anyone has ever put into space. But they’re too rare and valuable to shove into the kind of action I’ve mostly seen in the last few years, so I’ve never gotten to walk the decks of one until now.
The sheer size of the Regulus is exaggerated by the lack of personnel on board. I know the staffing levels of a carrier and the general amount of activity on board, and if I had to guess, I’d say that the Regulus is running ops with half her regular crew at the most. She was in for an overhaul and resupply at the Europa fleet yards when the Lankies appeared in the solar system and took Mars, and they pressed her into action with her maintenance crew and whatever personnel they could scrounge up at Europa. The NAC Defense Corps took the worst mauling of its history in the failed defense of Mars, and there isn’t much left to scrape out of the barrel. Regulus wasn’t ready for combat until the Battle of Mars was already over, and all that was left to do for her was to take her escorts and run. For all I know, Regulus may be the last of the Navigators by now. For all I know, we humans in the Fomalhaut system may be the last of our species.
The post-mission debriefing in the Regulus’s SpecOps detachment’s briefing room is an agreeably low-key affair. I was the only NAC combat controller on the ground, and the other fleet SpecOps guys in the room are two Spaceborne Rescuemen and a SEAL team from the Regulus, and three teams of SI recon from Camp Frostbite’s Spaceborne Infantry garrison. The Midway left half her embarked SI regiment at Frostbite when she tucked tail and ran with the rest of the task force.
