by Marko Kloos
“Motherfuckers are big,” Halley says. All I can do is grunt my agreement.
I’ve seen many Lankies, and while these appear no different from those I’ve seen in the past, the human habitat surrounding them gives them a whole new terrifying sense of scale. Two of them are walking away from the wreckage of their pod with brisk, long strides, and the tops of their cranial shields are six stories off the ground.
“Hold on to something back there,” Halley shouts over the intercom to the grunts in the back of the Dragonfly. Then she guns the engines and accelerates at full throttle. She swings the nose of the ship to the left, past the nearest undamaged residence tower, and loops back around into the plaza between the buildings. She flips a few overhead switches, and when she starts talking again, her voice is booming out of the speakers for the external public-address system of the drop ship, amplified a few thousand times.
“Seek shelter. Get indoors and away from the windows. Go to the upper floors. Get out of the plaza!”
The scene below is utter pandemonium. The plaza between the four towers is a big square of maybe two hundred meters on each side, and it’s packed with people who are retreating from the sight of the Lankies like a swift ebb pulling away from a shoreline. I see the muzzle flashes of gunfire, the sounds too distant and the cockpit glass too thick for me to hear them, as some of the people in the crowd open fire with whatever weapons they have on hand.
Halley pulls the Dragonfly into a hover again between the two nearest residence towers, each reaching three hundred meters into the night sky, a hundred floors of tiny apartments stacked on top of each other. We are close enough that I can see people in the windows staring at us wide-eyed, the position strobes of the drop ship illuminating the scene in regular sharp flashes of red and orange.
Halley pops the safety cover off the launch button on her flight stick.
“Let’s rock,” she says.
The heavy antiarmor cannons on the underside of the Dragonfly rap out a thundering staccato: boom-boom-boom. The reports echo in the artificial canyon between the buildings and reverberate off the concrete surfaces all around us until it sounds like an entire wing of drop ships just opened fire. Tracers shoot across the plaza and smack into the nearest Lanky in a shower of sparks and flying shrapnel. I realize that Halley made her loop around the towers to get a clear shot at the Lankies, to minimize the risk of these heavy cannon shells hitting the buildings instead. She works her trigger like a musician timing a beat.
The Lanky shrieks that unearthly wail that has chased me through many dreams in the last few years. In this place, it sounds utterly foreign. The sound is so earsplittingly loud that it almost drowns out the thunder from the Dragonfly’s weapons. It flails its long, spindly limbs and ducks from the hail of gunfire pouring from Halley’s autocannons. Halley doesn’t give it any reprieve. She keeps up a methodic staccato of bursts that rake the Lanky’s head and torso. Several cannon shells ricochet off the cranial shield that makes the Lankies look a little like old Earth dinosaurs. The tracers careen into the darkness and explode against unseen obstacles in brilliant little bursts of white-hot sparks.
The Lanky turns around and strides away from the cannon fire in long, halting steps. Halley shifts her fire and sends a stream of tracer shells into its lower body. The Lanky stumbles, and its own momentum carries it forward. It flails wildly as it crashes to the concrete of the plaza. Its head hits the wall of the nearby residence tower and tears a three-meter gash into the concrete facade. When the Lanky hits the ground, a cloud of concrete dust billows up around it.
The two other Lankies are crossing the plaza in long, thundering strides, away from the drop ship and its lethal cannon fire. Halley fires another burst into the Lanky on the ground and then swings the nose of the Dragonfly around. The spindly bastards can move amazingly fast for something that large. Not twenty seconds have passed since Halley first opened fire, and one of the remaining pair of Lankies is already all the way across the plaza and disappearing behind another one of the residence towers. The other is right in the middle of the plaza, stalking after its companion in the biggest hurry I’ve ever seen one move. Halley puts the thumb down on her flight stick button, and the cannons spit out their hail of red-hot fire and death again.
The shells pepper the Lanky’s torso and the backs of its legs. Its stride falters, and the huge alien stumbles and falls to the ground with a dull and resonant concussion. Halley keeps up her fire—short, deadly accurate bursts of two or three shells at a time, using the entire ship to aim the guns. There’s a cluster of small one-story buildings where the Lanky fell—food-distribution booths or vendor stalls maybe—and the Lanky’s enormous mass flattens them as if they were empty ration boxes. It tries to scramble to its feet in the rubble, but Halley rakes its legs with another burst, and it crashes back down to the ground, wailing its shaky and warbling cry at deafening volume. The unearthly sound reverberates from the concrete canyons nearby. I’ve always wondered what that noise would sound like in the middle of a major city, and now I don’t have to wonder anymore. It sounds like something from an old monster feature on the Networks.
“Goddammit,” Halley shouts. “Will you just fucking die already?”
But the Lanky doesn’t do us the favor. Instead, it rights itself once more and scoops up what looks like half a ton of random debris with a long and spindly arm. Then it flings the load of shattered bits of concrete wall and corrugated roofing at us from maybe fifty meters away.
“Whoa,” Halley says. She ceases her cannon fire and pulls up the nose of the Dragonfly sharply. The engines increase the pitch of their noise, and then we are flying backwards. For a moment, I see the tops of the nearest two residence towers through the windshield of the drop ship, and the dirty night sky beyond. I am keenly aware that we are between two of those towers, with very little clearance for maneuvering. I look to my right and see windows, and faces staring back at me. Then a bunch of debris noisily hits the armored underside of the drop ship. The Dragonfly shakes with the impacts. From the cargo bay in the back of the ship, I can hear some concerned shouts from the grunts, who are undoubtedly hanging on for dear life as Halley yanks our ship’s nose almost straight up into the sky and hurls us backward and upward, away from the immediate danger.
I hold my breath as the Dragonfly hurtles backwards on the tip of its tail for what seems entirely too long considering how close we are to the ground and the buildings on either side of us. Then we are clear of the towers, and Halley gooses the throttle and pivots the ship to the left and downward in one swift, stomach-lurching move. When the nose of the drop ship tilts down again, we are so close to the ground that I could hop out of the cockpit and jump onto the concrete below without hurting myself.
“Testy little fucker,” Halley says almost conversationally, as if she had just done nothing more exciting than duck away from a swing. She turns the nose of the drop ship to the left and accelerates the ship. We are flying alongside one of the residence towers now, this time with a little more clearance than before, but we’re still much closer than I want to be to that much unyielding concrete and steel when I’m hurtling through the night air at over a hundred knots.
When we swing back around the tower and point the nose of the ship back toward the plaza again, the Lanky is no longer there.
“Where’d he go?” she says. She rotates the Dragonfly around its dorsal axis and skids into the plaza sideways, like she’s drifting a hydrocar around a corner. In five years of frequent passenger status on drop ships, I’ve never seen a pilot handle one like Halley is flying hers.
“There he is.” I point to our starboard. At twenty-five meters in height, Lankies can’t hide all that well even in their own environments, much less in a place built for beings a tenth their size. The Lanky is crouching in the entrance vestibule of one of the residence towers, hammering away at the concrete of the tall archway with its head.
“Shoot him,” I urge. “Shoot his ass.”
&n
bsp; “I can’t,” Halley replies. “Not with the big guns. I’ll hit the building.”
She switches to the smaller-caliber multibarreled cannon mounted in the chin turret. This one has a much higher rate of fire than the big antiarmor cannons on the side of the fuselage. Halley mashes down on her trigger button, and a rapid-fire hail of smaller tracers streaks over to the Lanky. They ricochet off into every direction, kicking up little puffs of concrete dust wherever they hit the walls and ground all around the Lanky. The archway of the atrium entrance is four floors tall, at least forty feet, and with another violent push, the Lanky dislodges a few meters of reinforced concrete from the top of the archway and breaks through, away from Halley’s relentless gunfire. The Lanky disappears into the atrium beyond with a long and tortured-sounding wail, leaving a cloud of concrete dust and falling debris in its wake.
“I can’t get to him in there,” Halley says. “Not without guided munitions. Goddamn, I wish I had some missiles on these wings.”
“Put us on the ground,” I say. “I’ll take a squad inside and smoke the Lanky out. You take the other squads down the street and hunt down the other one that got away.”
Halley nods and swings the nose of the Wasp around for a landing on the plaza below.
“Get them ready,” she says. “I don’t want to spend more than a second and a half with the skids on the ground in this place—do you understand?”
I push the release for the seat harness and toggle the switch for the Dragonfly’s intercom.
“Fallon, Grayson. Get a squad onto the tail ramp. We are going hunting.”
“Affirmative,” the answer comes from the cargo hold.
“Your show down there, but call in the guns if you need help,” Halley says to me. “Don’t you dare get yourself killed.”
“This is what I do,” I say, and peel myself out of the seat to go aft. “Honey.”
She flinches a little and then flips me the bird without taking her eyes off the Dragonfly’s instrument screen.
“Have fun, but be back for dinner,” she says.
I rush down the passageway aft. In the cargo compartment, the HD troopers are gearing up, distributing rocket launchers from the armory’s magazine and stacking a bunch of them on the tail ramp.
“We land, you kick all the shit we can’t carry out of here and leave it in a pile on the ground,” I yell into the din of clanking gear and pre-battle banter. “We’ll come back for that stuff later. We go inside and after the Lanky. Second and Third Squads go with Halley. She’ll drop them off on the far side of the next residence block to run down the other Lanky.”
“Only two of them left?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Be glad,” I say. “Fuckers don’t drop easy.”
The drop ship swerves and rotates around its dorsal axis. The red caution light comes on over the tail hatch, and the ramp starts to lower while we are still in the air. Outside, there’s the plaza between the four residence towers that make up this block, acres of dirty concrete and a collection of some booths and shacks over to one side.
Then the ship’s skids touch down on the plaza with a solid thud.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. “Kick out the gear. First Squad, off the bus!”
We file out of the drop ship at a run. I am carrying entirely too much hardware—an M-66 fléchette carbine for human targets, an M-80 for Lankies, ammunition for both, and a pistol. If I stumble, I may be stuck on my back like a turtle.
Behind us, Second and Third Squads are tossing out our spare MARS rockets. Then Halley gooses her engines again and lifts off, not even bothering to close the tail ramp. She pitches the nose down slightly and swings the ship around. She thunders across the plaza at low level, so close to us that I can almost read the name tag taped to the browridge of her flight helmet. As she flies by, she gives me a quick thumbs-up, and the Dragonfly disappears from sight behind one of the nearby residence towers.
I turn and follow the squad into the ruined vestibule. Ahead of us, inside the atrium, the Lanky wails again, a sound only slightly less intense than an explosion.
The new fifth-gen residence towers are massive things, a hundred floors of apartments and facilities arranged around a large hollow core for ventilation. The atrium on the ground floor is a big plaza, fifty meters on each side. We rush in through the crumbling archway of the vestibule, weapons at the ready. The Lanky is impossible to miss even in the huge atrium. It has retreated into a corner of the plaza, and the shield-like protrusion on the back of its head is brushing the balcony of the sixth-floor concourse.
“MARS rockets,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. Four of the troopers with us take the launcher tubes they brought off their shoulders.
“Go armor-piercing,” I say. “Remember—joints and the neck nape. And if it comes for us, you get your ass to cover.”
We spread out and seek cover underneath the overhang of the second-floor concourse above. The atrium level has balcony ceilings that are at least triple the height of those on the floors above. The concourse levels open to the central core, are noisy with yells and shouts from hundreds of civilians with premium seats to the fight that is about to unfold. Then there’s some small-arms fire coming down from the higher levels, armed civvies unwilling to just be spectators. The rifle and pistol bullets splash off the tough hide of the Lanky, as effective as thrown pebbles.
“Two left, two right,” Sergeant Fallon orders. “On my mark.”
The troopers with the rocket launchers take position on either flank of our short firing line. I raise my M-80 rifle and aim it at the neck nape of the Lanky. If anything, the alien looks like it really doesn’t want to be here. It tries to merge with the corner of the atrium, letting out its sharp, earsplitting wails in irregular intervals. I almost feel sorry for the thing—it looks out of place, maybe even scared, as if it just wants to get away. It’s stranded on a strange world, surrounded by things that want to kill it, and separated from its own. But my empathy only goes so far. They chose to come here and bring this fight to us, and because they did, many of my friends are dead.
Sergeant Fallon turns up the public-address system of her suit, and her voice thunders through the atrium and echoes off the concrete chasm that stretches a hundred floors over our heads.
“Heads down, people! Get away from the atrium and cover your ears. Fire in the hole!”
The Lanky turns its head toward the new sound and responds with a drawn-out wail that hurts my ears even through the hearing protection. For a moment, all the gunfire from the upper floors ceases completely.
“Launchers One and Two. Fire!”
Two MARS launchers pop-whoosh, and four missile trails shoot across the atrium in the blink of an eye. The Lanky lowers its head toward the incoming fire at the last fraction of a second. One of the missiles clips the shield on its skull, and the armor-piercing warhead glances off with a dull, sickening thud and buries itself in the concrete of the sixth-floor overhang. It explodes out of the floor and blows out twenty feet of balcony floor in a cloud of debris. The second warhead bores into the Lanky’s side and knocks it back into the wall in a tangle of ungainly flailing limbs. The alien shrieks again, at a volume I’ve never thought possible. Out in the open, it would be earsplitting. In the confines of a hundred-story concrete box, it’s like standing in front of a starship’s fusion-rocket nozzles at full thrust. My helmet’s hearing protection kicks in and makes me deaf for my own safety, but I can feel the sonic energy of the Lanky’s scream slamming against my chest like a physical push. All over the lower floors, windows shatter, and when my hearing returns after a few moments, I can hear people screaming in agony and fear on the concourse levels right above us.
Then the Lanky scrambles to its feet on the other side of the atrium, unfolds its limbs again, and rises out of the dust. It plants a massive three-toed foot onto the concrete and swings its head toward us. Lankies have no eyes in their odd, elongated skulls, but I could swear an oath that if they can see at a
ll, this one is looking right at us.
“Fire at will,” Sergeant Fallon shouts.
I yank the M-80 rifle to my shoulder and put the targeting reticle in the middle of the Lanky’s chest. Then I pull the triggers for both barrels. The recoil slams the stock of the gun violently against my armor. To my left and right, more rifles thunder their deep, sonorous reports. The Lanky takes half a dozen rounds to its chest and midsection, and for a moment it looks like it is going to falter and fall back into the debris. Then it puts one foot in front of the other and steps toward us. Whenever it puts its foot down on the surface of the atrium, I can feel the vibration through the soles of my boots.
We manage one more volley of rifle fire before the Lanky is already halfway across the expanse of the atrium, moving faster than I have ever seen one move, despite the very obvious still-smoldering hole that our MARS tore into its side.
“Get to cover!” I shout into the squad channel. Nobody needs the encouragement. We retreat from the atrium and dash underneath the overhang and toward the nearest hallway. Even with the equipment strapped to my armor, I am making what feels like personal record time for the fifty-meter dash. Behind us, the Lanky thunders across the atrium and toward the position we just abandoned in a hurry.
We’re into the hallway maybe twenty meters when the Lanky hits the overhang behind us with a thundering crash. I get swept off my feet and hit the floor hard. My M-80 skitters down the hallway in front of me. Then it feels like the entire building is coming down on top of us. I curl up and cover my head with my armored hands and arms as chunks of debris fall all around me and bounce off my battle armor. The air in the hallway is instantly saturated with dust, so thick that I can’t see half a meter in front of me. I turn on the augmented vision of my helmet visor and look back the way we came. The Lanky is wedged underneath the atrium overhang, blocking all the daylight from the atrium. His massive skull is maybe fifteen meters behind me. More debris is falling with every movement of the Lanky’s head. With my M-80 out of my grasp, I reach for the M-66 fléchette rifle on its sling, punch the fire-control selector all the way down to “FULL AUTO,” and fire an entire 250-round magazine at the Lanky’s head at maximum cadence, one hundred rounds per second. The alien recoils and lets out another wail, but this one sounds a lot more strained than before.
