“Fuck.” The lieutenant doesn’t deliberate for long before he cuts the private link and speaks up in the platoon channel.
“All right, cut the yapping. We are bugging out. Mark a spot for the bird. We’re getting out of here while we can. Banshee Two-Five, come on down for evac.”
“Copy that. ETA thirty seconds.”
We mark a clear spot for the drop ship and wait for our taxi, mindful of the Chinese civilians who are still loitering on the perimeter, unsure of the sudden burst of activity on our side. With my TacLink, I have a real-time picture of the battle overhead, and knowing the extent of our troubles, the thirty seconds until the arrival of our drop ship feel like three weeks. Then Banshee Two-Five comes descending out of the darkening blue sky, makes one low pass overhead to eyeball the landing spot, and sets down gracefully right on top of our markers.
I’m part of the rear guard, and I keep my weapon trained on the Chinese civvies as the first half of our decimated contingent runs over to board the Wasp. In front of me, I see forty or fifty locals in the narrow streets beyond the ruined admin building. Most of them are just watching us, but some of them have worked up the courage to yell insults or throw debris in our direction.
You poor bastards, I think. Survived our guns and our bombs, and now you’re all going to die anyway, either by Lanky nerve-gas pods or by choking like fish on dry land.
I don’t speak enough Chinese to inform them of their fate, but even if I knew more than the few phrases we learned in fleet training—stuff like stop, surrender, go fuck yourself—I wouldn’t take the time to tell them. They’ll know soon enough, if the nukes going off in high orbit didn’t already make things clear. We don’t use atomic arms against the SRA, and they don’t use them against us, because it’s bad policy to start irradiating the very same resources you’re fighting over. The only time we use nuclear warheads is when we go up against the Lankies.
“Second element, move, move, move!” the platoon sergeant calls out. I trust the other half of the platoon to watch my rear, and turn around to run for the tail ramp of the drop ship idling a hundred meters away. In the pile of rubble to my right, the bodies of our platoon mates still lie buried and unclaimed, in the spots that will have to serve as their graves until we can come back to reclaim Sirius Ad from the Lankies, who will own the place completely in another month.
I run up the ramp, strap into a seat in the cargo hold, and look out of the back of the Wasp. As the tail ramp rises up, my last view of Sirius Ad is that of a gaggle of Chinese civvies swarming over the rubble that was their government’s local outpost, and it feels like I’m leaving a prison full of death row inmates, with the executioner striding into the place just as I’m walking out.
While we’re climbing back into orbit, I have nothing to look at except for gray-painted bulkhead, and nothing to do but to tighten my seat straps, so I stay glued to the tactical screen. The battle overhead is a shootout between profoundly unequal adversaries, our best technology employed against an enemy so advanced that we might as well be hurling rocks and sticks instead of twenty-megaton warheads for all the damage we’re failing to do. Our cruisers are between the Lanky ship and the retreating carrier, pumping out salvo after salvo of antiship missiles, but the trajectory of the seed ship isn’t changing as it shrugs off our warheads. The Manitoba and her two escorts are leaving the neighborhood at maximum acceleration, but the Lanky ship has a lot of momentum, and the cruisers aren’t even slowing it down.
We climb into low orbit at full throttle, but our progress feels agonizingly slow. With every minute our ship is clawing for more altitude, the carrier and her bodyguards are increasing the distance. When I finally feel the weightlessness of orbital flight lifting me out of my seat and into the harness straps, the Manitoba is almost a quarter million kilometers away. The Lanky seed ship is much closer.
“Ain’t no way we’re going to catch up,” the crew chief says to us from his jump seat by the forward bulkhead. “Not unless they slow down a bit and let us close the gap.”
“If we don’t, we’ll just go back dirtside,” Lieutenant Benning replies. “Can’t get fucked much worse than we are right now anyway.”
As if on cue, the pilot chimes in on the intercom.
“Brace for evasive.”