“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. Fire mission,” I send on the tactical channel. “Kinetic strike, target reference point Alpha One. Twenty-plus hostiles. There are no friendlies within twenty klicks of the TRP.”
“Tailpipe Red One, copy. Fire mission, TRP Alpha One,” Phalanx sends back. Right now, the cruiser is orienting one of her dorsal rail gun mounts toward the target reference point coordinates I uploaded. We are strictly limited on nuclear-fire missions because we used most of the warheads in existence for the Orions, but kinetic warheads are cheap, and we have plenty of them.
“Firing Delta mount. Three-round burst, shots out.”
I close the admin deck again, warn the SI team to expect fireworks in the distance soon, and keep watching the Lankies, who are in no particular hurry to be somewhere else right now, even though they must know that something out of the ordinary is happening. The rail gun shots from Phalanx are much faster than the pods in which we arrived because they don’t have a living payload. The kinetic warheads streaking through the atmosphere are too far away for me to hear the sound they make as they slice through the air when they arrive.
The Russians and the Eurocorps lieutenant holler in surprise and amazement when the three kinetic rounds from Phalanx hit their target a few minutes later. The geysers of Mars dirt that follow the impacts reach hundreds of meters into the sky. The thunderclap from the impacts reaches our helmet audio feeds a minute and a half later, and the echo rolls through the streets of the city below, a sound like a giant clearing its throat. It’ll take an hour or more for all the dust to settle, but I already know that the Lankies within a quarter kilometer of the impact points are no longer cohesive organisms. Tough as they are, they still have to obey the laws of physics, and while the rail guns are useless against the seed ships, they will make mincemeat out of their passengers once they are outside their protective shells.
“Let’s catch up to the SI boys,” I suggest. “We have a spaceport to clear for the drop ships.”
“Cannot let marines sit on asses up in space all day,” Dmitry agrees.
“Yeah, that’s what the fleet is for,” Lieutenant Perkins contributes via squad comms.
“Hey,” I grumble. “Watch it, ground pounder.”
CHAPTER 14
RED BEACH
For once, the size of the Lankies works in our favor in battle. Here in the confines of Olympus City, they are obvious, easy to predict and avoid, and not very nimble. We make our way east through the empty streets, using alleys and buildings as cover, hiding whenever a Lanky passes nearby, and cutting through buildings as much as we can to stay out of sight. There are fewer of them prowling the city than I would have predicted, maybe fifteen or twenty at the most. Still, the dash-and-hide march across the rubble-strewn city takes us a good hour before we have the spaceport in sight. The SI troopers have beaten us—their tactical symbols are already in position on the south side of the spaceport, and more and more orange Lanky symbols pop up on our TacLink screen as the SI Force Recon guys spot them. The spaceport is huge, with a civilian and a military part, four runways for atmospheric landings, and a sprawling administrative complex. Our combined force of sixteen troopers would be hopelessly inadequate if we had to secure the whole place, but that’s not our task. We are here to give the big guns something to aim at. We pick the highest structure in the immediate neighborhood, an eight-story building that’s only lightly damaged, and climb up to the top floor. From up here, Dmitry and I have a good view of much of the spaceport, and the SRA squad is pulling security on the roof edge, keeping an eye out for Lankies in all directions.
“We have eyes on roughly twenty at the south end. They’re all over the tarmac between the hard shelters,” Lieutenant Perkins reports from his position a kilometer to our southeast. “Make that twenty-three confirmed.”
My TacLink updates accordingly, and I study the map. “That’s right near one of the refueling nodes. If we call in kinetics and they crack an underground tank, the place will go sky high.”
“How do you propose we get them out of there?” Lieutenant Perkins asks.
“I don’t know. You feel like running out onto runway zero-five and blowing a few raspberries in their direction?”
The SI lieutenant laughs. “Not if we can avoid it.”
The Lankies between the hangars are out of the effective range of our weapons, so we can’t start picking them off with gas rounds, but there are too many of them anyway, and we don’t have the ammo to drop twenty or thirty of them. We need to get them off the spot that has a few hundred thousand liters of aviation fuel under it. As satisfying as it would be to see the whole group disappear in a huge fireball, losing all the fuel would be a major setback for the landing force. With the installation relatively intact, they can refuel and rearm the drop ships without having to get back to the carrier.
“We need to get them to move so the fleet can drop kinetics on their heads,” I tell Dmitry. “Any ideas?”
Dmitry ponders my question for a few moments. “Make them come to us? Get closer, shoot. When they come to us, we move. Take new position, shoot again.”
“That’ll get them off the pad and into the city. But then we’re in the way of the kinetic strike.”
“Make them go other way, then. Out to runway.”
Give them something to chase, I think. What’s good for getting a Lanky’s attention?
I have a sudden flashback to the graduation exercise of my last boot-camp flight a few months ago, when I let them defend a simulated terraforming station against a Lanky assault. Some of the more adventurous recruits commandeered an ATV and distracted several Lankies from the terraformer. The Lankies were computer generated, but we know they react to anything that makes mechanical noise or puts out radiation. I have a transmitter in my armor that can put out thousands of watts of radio energy, but I don’t want to test my sprinting abilities against twenty Lankies, and we don’t have any ATVs around to outrun them once they come chasing us.
I step over to the edge of the roof and look down at the street below, where a bunch of cars are cluttering the roadway. Some are burned out, others smashed, but there are quite a few that still look operable.
“Any of you people know how to chip-jack a car?” I ask.
“What is ‘chip-jack’?” Dmitry asks.
“Disable the security chip in the computer console and steal the car,” I reply.
He grins and looks at his SRA comrades. Then he says something in Russian, and Sergeants Anokhin and Dragomirova laugh.
“You want to steal car, we go steal car.”