“Contact,” Halley calls out. “Three hostiles on the ground. They are in the middle of a civilian residential area. I am engaging.”
Halley pulls the drop ship into a hover maybe three hundred meters from the crashed pod and the ruined barrier wall of the PRC block. She flicks on the searchlights on the nose of the drop ship, which instantly pierce the dusty darkness with blindingly white fingers of light. The Lankies have skin the color of eggshells. Under the glare of the Dragonfly’s lights, they are as obvious as buildings.
“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?”