by Marko Kloos
“Fucking die already,” I shout, echoing Halley’s sentiment from a few minutes ago.
Behind me, some of Sergeant Fallon’s squad join in with their own weapons, the low booming reports from the M-80s making the dust jump on the concrete floor. The Lanky wails and pulls its head back, away from the gunfire. Then it lurches forward and rams its cranial shield into the hallway opening again. There’s a tortured groaning sound from overhead, and an avalanche of debris crashes down between us and the Lanky. I cover my head as the hallway turns completely dark.
“Holy hell,” Sergeant Fallon says into the squad channel with a cough. “That thing is pissed. Go augmented, people.”
I turn on the vision augmentation of my helmet visor, and the interior of the hallway comes into view again in the ghostly green-and-amber glow of night vision.
I switch frequencies on my comms suite and toggle into the drop ship’s support channel.
“Halley, do you read?”
“Barely,” she sends back. Even with my suit’s power cranked up all the way, the connection is horrible, too much ferroconcrete filling the space between us.
“We are on the ground floor,” I tell Halley. “The Lanky brought half the floor down on us. He’s hurt badly, but he’s still moving around in the atrium somewhere. If he gets out of there again, you’ll need to finish him off.”
“Second Squad is engaging the other Lanky three blocks down from where you are,” Halley replies. “I’m flying fire support. Stand by.”
I hear the staccato of cannon fire in the background of the transmission. A few seconds later, Halley’s voice returns.
“I have almost nothing left in the guns. Hold that Lanky in the atrium and finish him off. That one’s all on you. Don’t let him get away. These guys can do a ton of damage out here among the civvies.”
“No shit.” I cough out some dust. “We’ll do what we can.”
I toggle back into the squad channel.
“They’re tussling with the other Lanky three blocks away,” I tell Sergeant Fallon. “We’re on our own with this one. Can’t let him get out of here and into the streets.”
“Let’s go, then,” Sergeant Fallon says, and comes over to help me to my feet. “Gotta find a way around this rubble.”
On the other side of the rubble pile, in the direction of the atrium, the small-arms fire has started again, the irregular cacophony of gunshots from dozens of different weapons. The civvies are shooting at the Lanky again from the safety of the upper-level concourses, but if we can’t bring it down with our guns, they might as well be pissing on it from above.
I pick my M-80 rifle up, eject the bases of the empty shells from the barrels, and load the chambers with two fresh rounds. Then I follow Sergeant Fallon and the rest of the squad down the dark corridor, away from the wall of concrete debris that’s blocking our way back to the atrium.
Whatever the Lanky did knocked out the power in this part of the building. We rely on our augmented vision to traverse the hallways. Sergeant Fallon and her squad seem to be very familiar with the layout of a fifth-gen residence tower, because they never stop and check for directions as we make our way back to the atrium through unblocked corridors.
The atrium is still noisy with the sound of sporadic gunfire. The Lanky is nowhere in sight from my vantage point of the hallway, but there are chunks of concrete raining down onto the atrium floor from above.
“He’s up on the wall,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Didn’t know the bastards could climb.”
“Me, neither,” I reply.
“Five left, five right,” she says, and points to the covered space beyond the hallway entrance, where we will still be sheltered by the second-floor overhang.
I dash out of the hallway and to the nearest cover, a hip-high set of planters holding artificial flowers that have a thick frosting of concrete dust on them. Behind a nearby column, there’s a pair of armed civilians. They have weapons pointed toward the atrium. One of the civilians sees me and recoils a little in surprise. For a moment, it looks like he’s thinking about swinging his rifle toward me, but then he holds up his hand and points across the atrium.
“He’s out there on the wall,” he shouts. I dash over to their position and skid to a stop on my knees.
“You’re fleet,” he says.
“I am,” I confirm. “Followed the Lanky in. Brought some friends.”
Both civilians are dressed in olive-drab fatigues that look like they’re straight from an old history show on the Networks. They have rank insignia on their collars, the old pre-reform United States ranks we used before the services got unified four years ago. One of the civvies wears the three chevrons of a sergeant. The other wears the single chevron of a private. Their guns are a mismatched pair of antique cartridge rifles—a hundred-year-old M4 that has most of the finish worn off its metal parts, and a scoped rifle with a handle for manual bolt operation.
“Friends,” he says, and eyes the nearby HD troopers. “That kind usually ain’t friendly around here.”
“You got more people here?”
“One more fire team, up on the tenth-floor balcony. About twenty volunteers. No big guns, though. We called in for reinforcements, but they’ll be awhile yet.”
“Who are you with?” I ask.
“Lazarus Brigade,” he says.
“What the fuck is that?”
“We are the militia,” he replies, as if the answer is self-evident. “Ask those guys there. We do the job they ought to have done all these years.”
“Stop socializing over there, Andrew,” Sergeant Fallon says on the squad channel. “We have work to do. Get me eyeballs on that alien son of a bitch.”
Two of the troopers dash out to where the overhang ends and peer upward. Instantly, our TacLink feeds update with a three-dimensional representation of the Lanky, hanging on to the wall of the atrium ten floors above us. The rest of the squad follow, and we hurry out into the open, dodging rubble and falling debris.
“Not so much fun now, is it,” I say when I spot the Lanky with my own eyes. It’s crawling—or rather trying to crawl—up the inner wall of the atrium, using the overhangs of the concourse levels as hand- and footholds. But its size and mass work against it. We watch as the Lanky claws for purchase and breaks loose big shoals of concrete, which fall to the atrium in front of us with dull crashes. There’s concerted rifle fire coming from one of the higher concourses—probably the militia squad—and sporadic, random gunfire from the other balconies. The Lanky is slow and sluggish, and there are many holes and scorch marks on its hide.
“MARS launchers,” Sergeant Fallon orders. “Shoot him down, and for fuck’s sake, stay way clear. Fucker’s gonna make a splash when he hits the ground. On my mark.”
She cranks up the amplification on her suit’s PA system and shouts into the hundred-story void above us.
“Cease fire, cease fire. We are shooting rockets. Step back from the atrium. Fire in the hole!”
The civilian gunfire ebbs. Sergeant Fallon jabs an arm upward at the Lanky.
“Three, two, one, fire!”
Four rockets burst from the launcher tubes and shoot upward to where the Lanky is scrambling for purchase on the wall like some gigantic cave spider. This time, nobody misses. Four armor-piercing warheads plow into the Lanky’s torso from below and pluck the creature off the wall like the world’s biggest flyswatter.
“Back off!” Sergeant Fallon shouts, but nobody needs the encouragement. We dash back to the overhang on the opposite side of the atrium. The Lanky screams, and the sound amplifies and reverberates in the giant hollow concrete tube of the atrium until it seems to come from every direction. It flails for purchase and manages to hook a spindly hand into a concourse ledge maybe twenty floors up, but all that mass hanging off it is too much for the concrete, and a ten-foot section of it breaks loose. Then the Lanky and the concrete slab tumble to the ground in a terrifying display of mass in motion.
When the Lanky hits the concr
ete of the atrium plaza, it feels like we’re at the epicenter of an earthquake. Everyone in the squad is swept off their feet and sent tumbling. The crash from the impact sounds like the explosion of a thermobaric warhead. I feel the ground buckling underneath me. All over the residence tower, windows shatter and things pop out of place noisily and violently. The Lanky lets out one more wail, rolls over, and lies still.
Soldiers don’t leave things to chance. We get to our feet, and everyone unloads whatever weapon they are holding into the bulk of the prone alien fifty meters away. After a few moments, the civvies from the upper floors join in with their own guns, and for a good ten or twenty seconds, there’s a cacophonic fusillade of uncoordinated gunfire, a mad minute with no direction and no other purpose but to put rounds on target. The Lanky in the center of the storm never moves.
“Cease fire,” Sergeant Fallon orders over the squad channel. “Cease fire. He’s done.”
The military gunfire stops immediately, while the civilian fusillade ebbs bit by bit.
“Halley, strike two,” I pant into the air-support channel. “We took out the one in the atrium. What’s your situation?”
It takes a few moments for Halley to reply to my hail. She sounds very stressed when she does.
“Third one’s down, too. Second and Third Squads have casualties, and I’m all out of cannon rounds. Get out here if you can.”
“Affirmative,” I reply. Then I toggle over to Sergeant Fallon and the squad channel. “The other squads need a hand with wounded. Let’s regroup outside.”
“First Squad, grab your toys and let’s go,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We take the east exit.”
Outside, the night is chaotically loud. The security alarms of the tower block are sounding their unpleasant ascending klaxon. On the plaza between the four residence towers, people are streaming out of buildings to either flee or witness the spectacle. I hear gunshots in the distance, the familiar rolling booms of M-80 rifles firing their heavy armor-piercing shells. Overhead, Halley’s drop ship circles above the block, engines roaring, and her searchlights are painting bright streaks across the broken hull of the Lanky seedpod nearby. The sight of so many civilians surging onto the plaza, many of them armed, fills me with more dread than the idea of taking on another Lanky. The last time I was here, fifteen or twenty kilometers to the east, a mob like this fought a battle-hardened squad of Territorial Army troopers to a draw and damn near killed us all. If this crowd decides that we aren’t welcome here despite the Lanky presence, we are about to have a very unpleasant evening.
I turn around to tell Sergeant Fallon to retreat back to the building and go up to the roof for pickup, but there’s another group of civvies pouring out of the high-rise behind us. They’re not as numerous, but most of them are armed as well, and we can’t just bull our way through that crowd without starting a fight.
Then there’s a loud, tortured rumbling groan in the air. It’s an organic sound, not a mechanical one. It sounds like someone has taken a gigantic chicken bone in both hands and is slowly breaking it apart.
“There’s movement at the wreckage,” Halley sends to the platoon. “Oh, shit. There’s more of them coming out.”
From our vantage point on the eastern side of the building, we can only see the nose of the crashed Lanky seedpod. The bulk of it is around the corner from our perspective. But the sound of material failure is coming from there, and that doesn’t foretell happy news.
Halley turns on the public-address system on her ship, and her voice booms across the plaza, amplified by thousands of watts.
“Everyone get clear,” she bellows. “Everyone get off the plaza and under cover. The wreckage is not empty.”
A murmur goes through the crowd like a wave. Some people heed the warning and try to stream back to the buildings, only to push against the stream of people who decided to stick around and get closer for a look.
We start running toward the corner of the building, toward the spot where the nose of the seedpod has ground a furrow into the concrete plaza. We’re not even halfway there when a chunk of the seedpod’s flank ejects from the hull forcefully and sails through the cool nighttime air. It lands on the ten-meter concrete dam that forms the outer wall between the residence towers and glances off, leaving a deep gouge in the concrete and crashing onto the ground just on the edge of the plaza.
Another Lanky climbs out of the wreckage and onto the plaza, and the mood of the crowd tips from curiosity and concern to full-blown panic in the span of three or four seconds. The crowd surges back, this time in only one direction—away from the Lankies.
Then the hull of the seedpod shudders, and another Lanky emerges, unfolding its limbs and clambering off its broken ride like a giant bug leaving a used-up garbage receptacle. It slides down the hull and lands feetfirst on the plaza with a thud.
Gunshots roll across the plaza as some of the armed civilians start firing at the Lankies. I can’t tell them it won’t do much good because they have no comms gear, and I doubt they’d listen even if they could hear me. The gunfire increases in volume as more and more people join the fusillade. The Lankies look indecisive, like they just woke up from a nap and aren’t quite all there yet, or maybe they are intimidated by the unusual sight of so many human beings right in front of them. The lead Lanky lets out its trilling wail and starts walking forward into the plaza, and the one behind it follows after a moment.
“MARS rockets,” Sergeant Fallon bellows.
I know we brought maybe two rockets per launcher, and we used up most of our supply on a single Lanky already, but there’s nothing else left to do other than run away and let the Lankies wreak havoc down here.
I shoulder my M-80, which seems ludicrously inadequate for this scenario. Then I grab a new pair of shells and stuff them into the barrels. Next to me, our four MARS gunners take a knee and aim at the closest Lanky, fifty meters away. The noise and chaos all around us are apocalyptic.
“On my mark. Three, two, one, fire!” Sergeant Fallon shouts. Four launchers disgorge their payloads, and the closest Lanky is blown off its three-toed feet by the impacts. It goes down in a flailing tangle of limbs.
I hear the thundering staccato of a heavy machine gun. Tracers streak across the plaza and over the heads of the crowd. They lay into the Lankies and deflect off their tough hides in puffs and sparks. I look for the source of the fire and see a machine gun mount on a tripod, set up on the low roof of one of the administrative buildings in the center of the plaza. The people manning the gun are wearing the same olive-drab fatigues as the militia soldiers I met in the atrium of the tower. Lazarus Brigade. I have a brief flashback to a hot summer night five years ago, when a gun mount just like that hosed one of our drop ships out of the sky and killed half my squad when we went out to rescue the pilot.
Everyone is firing at the Lankies now—HD troopers, armed civilians, and the uniformed militiamen with the canister-fed automatic cannon. I load and fire, load and fire, again and again, until the ammo loops on my armor are empty. The Lankies are backing away from the volume of fire that’s getting thrown their way. They cluster in front of the barrier wall, safety in numbers and proximity. Then they start climbing the retaining wall, which is only half as tall as they are.
“Coming in hot,” Halley shouts over the platoon channel.
“I thought you have no cannon shells left,” I shout back.
“I don’t,” she says. “But I have seventy tons at five hundred knots.”
I almost drop my rifle in shock. “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t do this.”
The distant wailing of the Dragonfly engines increases in pitch and volume. It’s coming from the east, a drop ship at full throttle and well above the speed of sound. Then it appears in the sky between the two eastern towers, engines aglow. Halley banks the ship smoothly and elegantly and shoots right through the space between the towers. Then there’s the muffled sound of a low explosion, and Dragonfly Delta Five streaks across the plaza like a huge missile a
nd plows into the barrier dam the Lankies are climbing onto.
The fireball that blooms into the sky and outward from the barrier dam illuminates the whole plaza in a furious shade of orange. The Lankies disappear in the inferno, crushed and flung aside by the impact force of millions of joules, far more punch than all the MARS rockets we are carrying on our backs combined.
I can’t even find the strength to shout, or cry, or do anything but stare at the fireball and the enormous gash the drop ship has torn into the top of the barrier wall. The heat wave from the explosion washes across the plaza and over me, and I don’t even flinch when my helmet lowers the face shield automatically to protect my eyes.
“Good chute,” I hear Sergeant Fallon over the squad channel. “Good chute. Hot damn, that was some warrior shit.”
I look up and see the white triple canopy of a fleet emergency parachute in the sky beyond the damaged tower. From the chute’s suspension lines dangles the cockpit-escape module of a drop ship.
The sudden relief I feel makes my knees buckle, and I sit down on the ground, hard. Sergeant Fallon walks up to me, rifle still at the ready and pointed downrange. Then she takes one hand off the gun and pats me on the shoulder.
“Relax, Romeo. She’s fine.”
“Can we just please stop killing shit tonight by flying into it?” I shout, and Sergeant Fallon laughs as she walks off.
