“Three incoming from four o’clock, bearing one-ten,” Sergeant Humphrey says in her terse and businesslike Canadian accent. We all had the symbols for “hostile troops” on our displays the moment one of us spotted the Lankies, but ingrained training dies hard. My tactical computer, ever helpful, calculates speeds and movement vectors, and informs me that we will reach the ravine just barely before the welcoming committee arrives at the hillside.
“Double-time,” the lieutenant orders, quite unnecessarily. We run down the hillside as fast as our hundred-pound loads of gear and weapons will allow.
“Turn on the camo, everyone. We hit the ditch, you spread out and lay low.”
Our suits have a brand-new polychromatic camouflage system. It’s an array of tiny electro-optical projectors, designed to blend us in with any terrain. It won’t turn us invisible, but it works well enough that you have to be pretty close to a trooper in polychrome camo to spot them. We don’t know if the Lankies see the way humans do—we don’t even know if they can “see” at all—but the few times where troopers in bug suits have turned on their PC camo to hide from nearby Lankies, nobody has gotten killed. The projector systems drain the batteries of our suits, so we’re only supposed to use them in dire emergencies. As far as I’m concerned, our current malaise qualifies for the classification.
The ravine looks like a desert wadi. It’s twenty meters wide, with a flat bottom that’s smooth and sandy from whatever seasonal torrents sweep through it a few times a year. The edges are steep and craggy, ten feet or more of almost vertical drop to the ravine bottom. We help each other down to the bottom. There are plenty of rocks and boulders of all sizes lining the sides of the ravine, but it occurs to me that the place will be a trap if the Lankies figure out our location, because there’s no quick way back out of here. Down at the bottom, my suit’s sensors no longer have an exact fix on the approaching Lankies, but by the time we have dispersed and ducked behind cover, they’re so close that I don’t need millimeter-wave radar to know they’re almost on top of us.
A hundred meters behind us, a towering gray mass appears above the ravine. I barely dare to move my head as the Lanky pauses at the edge of the ravine and then steps across it in a single stride. As always, when a Lanky is within a quarter of a kilometer, the earth quakes from the impacts of their slow steps. Nobody has ever managed to airlift an entire Lanky body back to a fleet ship for dissection, but we’ve salvaged their corpses in bits and pieces after battles, and our science people estimate that the average Lanky weighs close to a thousand metric tons.
As the Lanky disappears from sight and walks up the hill toward our discarded pods, a second one shows up at the edge of the ravine. This one is even closer than the first, maybe eighty yards, and it doesn’t follow the first one across. Instead, it pauses at the ledge and turns its head to look down into the ravine. Lankies have no visible eyes in their massive skulls, but I can almost feel the Lanky’s gaze on me as it seems to study the depression in the terrain. Then it turns to the right and starts walking along the ledge, toward the spot where we are trying to blend in with the local geology.
“Don’t anybody start shooting yet,” the lieutenant warns us over the team channel in a low voice. “He reaches into the ravine, we light him up. He walks past, we sit tight. Weapons hold.”
I watch as the Lanky ambles toward us, its huge head swinging slowly from side to side. Even after a few years of seeing them close up, they still look utterly alien and unsettling to me. Some of the SI troopers think the Lankies look like an evolved version of prehistoric Earth dinosaurs, with their toothless mouths and shield-like protrusions on the backs of their skulls.
By now, the Lanky is so close to us that his red and my blue icon are overlapping on my tactical display. The impacts of his three-toed feet on the rocky ground shake loose cascades of sand on the far side of the ravine. If he discovers us at this range and decides to stomp on us, we won’t have much time to get our weapons into play, but a preemptive burst of rifle and rocket fire would bring the other Lankies down on us in a flash. It’s a gamble, but the odds are better for us if we sit tight and play rocks until the last possible moment.
The Lanky ambles past our position and walks along the ravine for a few more moments. Then he steps across the ravine fifty meters in front of our position and continues up the hill. I can feel his progress up the hillside by the tremors underneath my feet. If there’s a good thing about opponents that are eighty feet tall, it’s that they can’t sneak up and surprise you.
“Let’s move. Down the ravine, double-time.”
We gather our stuff and start running, away from the landing spot that has become a local Lanky attraction. We were discovered, which is the worst possible start for a recon mission, but we’re still alive, which is far from the worst outcome. Every kilometer we put between us and the drop site will increase our odds of staying alive.
“You know, this shit would be a lot easier if we could take some wheels along for the drop,” Sergeant Keller pants as we trot down the ravine with all our heavy gear. Nobody argues the point.