“You want me to take a picture with you in front of the head instead?” I ask with a grin, and Dmitry grins back.
“Head would look much better on wall of Alliance carrier flight deck than little picture. I could trade to chief engineering officer for many bottles of vodka.”
The Lankies in the area are definitely stirred up and alert. We leapfrog across intersections and along streets littered with broken vehicles and building debris, and take cover whenever a Lanky walks past within a block of our route. Every once in a while, we spot the familiar empty oblong husks of Lanky nerve-gas containers, which are the size of hydrocars. The Lankies followed their usual protocol when they took over Mars—gas the population from orbit, move in and mop up the remnants, then set up the terraformers. They got to skip their usual step of seeking out our own terraforming stations and smashing them to rubble, because Mars had been colonized for decades, and all the terraformers have long been deactivated and converted to fusion plants. But as much destruction as we see here on the streets of Olympus City, I see very few dead bodies. Some are still in vehicles, decomposed and desiccated after a year in the humid and CO2-heavy atmosphere. More bodies are in the buildings we cut through for cover and concealment. But out on the streets, there aren’t many bodies when there should be thousands of corpses out here, civilian casualties or troops who died trying to fight off the invaders. It’s eerie to be in a city devoid of people, dead or alive.
Lieutenant Bondarenko, the leader of the SRA marine squad, saved himself a twenty-story climb by pure accident. His pod landed on the roof of a residence tower. When we get to the top of the building after climbing twenty flights of stairs in the darkness, we see that his free ride to the top of the tower almost came with an express elevator down to street level. His pod is right at the edge of the roof, a meter or two away from tipping over the side and tumbling onto the plaza eighty meters below. His drogue chute, having already collapsed, would have been no help at all. Judging by how pale the SRA lieutenant still looks, I can tell he knows very well how close he just came to splattering on the asphalt like a bug on a windshield.
Up here on the roof and no longer dodging Lankies in the streets for a bit, we can finally get our comms gear into action. I break out my admin deck and send a burst message to our C2 center on Phalanx.
>Red Team One infil success. Commencing approach to Red Beach.
The reply comes via encrypted burst just a few minutes later.
>Task Force Red standing by for target coordinates. Good hunting.
The SI Force Recon team from the starboard launch tubes landed at the other end of the drop zone. Our target, the huge air and spaceport outside Olympus City, is four kilometers to our northeast and three kilometers to their northwest. I fire up the platoon channel and contact the SI group.
“Red Team Two, this is Red Team One. You guys all make it down in one piece?”
“That’s affirmative,” Lieutenant Perkins replies. “We had some hostiles near the drop zone, but we managed to avoid them. Take it the gunfire earlier was from you.”
“Yeah, we had to drop one. Now they’re stirred up.”
“Can’t be helped. Let’s get the data link going. Can’t see how it can hurt at this point anyway.”
I turn on my TacLink, and almost immediately I see the icons for the eight SI troopers on my tactical map, five klicks almost directly to our east.
“We’re legging it to grid Echo One-Eight and get eyeballs on target from the south end,” Lieutenant Perkins sends.
“Copy that,” I reply. “I’m going to use the high ground for overwatch and then move up to grid Delta One-Five and go in from the northwest. We’ll meet in the middle when the LZ is clear.”
“Let’s get to it,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “We got a whole brigade up there waiting for us to roll out the welcome mat.”
“Don’t get stomped,” I send. “Grayson out.”
From up here on the roof, I have a good view of a large swath of Olympus City. Every time I spot a Lanky in the streets below, my tactical computer marks its position with an orange icon and shares the information with everyone else on our TacLink node. I spend a few minutes marking Lankies and mentally mapping out a way over to the spaceport. Four kilometers to our east, there are half a dozen runways and drop-ship landing pads that need to be cleared for our first and second assault waves to land. I can see that the hardened shelters on the military side of the spaceport are still standing. Designed to survive a near miss from a tactical nuke, they were either too hard for the Lankies to demolish, or they didn’t want to bother with the spacecraft shelters once they had cleaned out the people. I wonder just how much ammunition, ordnance, and fuel is still safely sheltered in those concrete domes, waiting to be put to good use by our SI regiments. It’s precisely that fuel and ammo, and those largely undamaged facilities, that make the spaceport the most important landing zone on this hemisphere. Other cities on Mars have airports and space facilities, but the one here right by the capital is the largest military base outside Earth.
“Look at that,” Lieutenant Stahl says. He’s standing by the edge of the roof and looking north. I walk over to where he’s standing and follow his gaze.
There’s a Lanky settlement well north of Olympus City, out in the plains a good thirty kilometers away. I switch my optics to maximum magnification. The strange, reef-like latticework structures the Lankies built look just like I remember them from my last drops onto conquered colonies. On the plains between the Lanky structure and the outskirts of Olympus City, dozens of Lankies have gathered. But they aren’t advancing toward us or the airfield. Instead, they are looking at the sky. I shift my view upward and cycle through all the filters until I spot what they are looking at.
“What is that up there?” the Eurocorps lieutenant asks.
I let the suit computer track the object in the sky that is just now breaking through the cloud cover and streaking across the horizon in a steeply descending arc. Then I dial up the magnification again until I recognize what it is.
“It’s one of theirs,” I say. “One of the seed ships we destroyed. Or part of it, anyway.”
The piece of wreckage is trailing flames and smoke, smearing a wispy arc across the dirty gray sky. Then it disappears from view behind the Alba Mons mountain range on the northern horizon. The trail of smoke remains for a little while until the winds begin to disperse it.
“Take a good look at it, motherfuckers,” I say to the Lankies gathered on the plain. “That’s a bad omen for you.”
Then I get out my admin deck and draw a box around the map grid where two or three dozen Lankies are still looking to the skies.