“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 concrete 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.