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.”
“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.