The ravine runs out into the rocky plain three kilometers from the hillside. Our landing site is now far away, so Sergeant Humphrey chances a few sweeps with the millimeter-wave radar to check the area for Lankies. Half a dozen red icons pop up on our tactical screens, all clustered on the hillside. The nearest Lanky is roaming the area between the ravine and the drop pods, two and a half kilometers from our position. For now, we’re in the clear, but if the Lankies figure out our egress route, they can catch up with us in a hurry.
“Well, that almost went into the pants, didn’t it?” the lieutenant says. “Haven’t gotten that close to one of them in a while.”
“We’re in a bad spot, LT,” I say. “Too close to that atmo exchanger. We have no weather to hide in.”
The area around the Lanky terraforming tower is mostly featureless and devoid of vegetation. The Lankies have their own fast-growing plant life, but they never grow anything close to their own atmo exchangers. Lanky worlds are foggy and rainy, but there’s always a clear area around the mile-high terraforming towers, like the eye in a hurricane.
“Let’s get to the weather line and then head north from there,” the lieutenant orders. “North-northwest, looks like ten klicks. If we haul ass, we can be in the soup in an hour and a half.”
We move out in dispersed formation, a hundred meters between each trooper, so we can’t all get taken out as a group by a mine or a lucky Lanky. So far, we haven’t done any fighting, just a lot of running and hiding, but that’s the usual breakdown of activities on a typical recon drop—brief periods of sheer terror punctuating long stretches of running around. Any mission where we bring back our full ammo issue is a good one, because it means we didn’t get spotted.
We make it back into the weather without any contact. The Lankies milling about on the distant hillside don’t seem to be interested in looking for the passengers of those empty drop pods, which suits us fine. If the situation were reversed, and one of our SI garrisons stumbled across an empty Lanky conveyance on one of our colony planets, every trooper on that rock would be combing the place for the infiltrators, but the Lankies don’t think like we do. Whenever they take over a colony, they just drop nerve gas on the population centers, but they rarely bother individuals or small groups. It’s as if we’re insignificant to them in small numbers, much like we would smoke out an ant hive in the wrong spot but not bother hunting down stray ants one by one.
Back in the fog and rain, we take a short break, and I take the time to send a status update to the fleet via encrypted burst transmission—contact reports and targeting markers for the atmo exchanger and the nearby cluster of buildings.
“Okay, people. We are still go, unless Fleet has any objections,” Lieutenant Graff says. He outranks me by several pay grades, and he is in charge on the ground, but on the few drops I’ve done with him, he has usually sought my input on the overall tactical picture. Lieutenant Graff is unusually bright for a junior officer.
“Fleet is still go,” I say. “Be a shame to waste all that ordnance just for a walk in the dirt. Let’s go find us something to nuke.”
Mission aborts are costly business. The Linebacker cruisers still have to clear a part of the minefield, which takes a hundred or so of very expensive ballistic interceptor missiles, but the rest of the fleet won’t waste the even more expensive nuclear ordnance without precise targeting data. We would spend most of the missiles in the cruiser’s magazines just to make a hole for the pickup drop ships. We don’t abort drop-and-shop missions unless most of the team is dead and the survivors are bleeding from the eyeballs.
“Fabulous,” the lieutenant replies. “Five more minutes for rest and water, and then let’s go downtown.”