There’s no shortage of vehicles out on the street in this neighborhood. The burned-out hulk of a hydrobus blocks the street diagonally, and several other cars are wedged up against it. From the burn marks, it looks like they rammed into each other and all burned up in the same hydrogen fire. But there are some cars in parking nooks on the other side of the street that mostly look undamaged.
“The hydrocars are no good,” I say. “They’ve been standing around for a year. The fuel cells will be broken down by now. Look for an EV.”
We fan out and check every vehicle in the row, keeping an ear out for the footsteps of approaching Lankies. Near the corner of the block, Sergeant Dragomirova looks into a little commuter car and shouts something in Russian. We trot over to her position.
“Figures,” I say. “The only all-electric around, and it’s the size of a gym locker.”
Dmitry tries the door and finds it locked. Then he takes out the combat knife he wears strapped to his leg armor, taps the laminate panels on the frame next to the car door for a few moments, and puts the tip of his knife against a spot ten centimeters from the edge of the door. He smacks the pommel of his knife hard with his palm, and the blade pops through the laminate of the car body. There’s a sharp, short hissing sound, and when Dmitry pulls on the handle again, the door opens without resistance.
“Main pressure cylinder for environmental control,” he says. “Controls door locks, too.”
“Good to know,” I say. “For the next time I want to jack a ride.”
Dmitry calls Sergeant Anokhin over, who climbs into the driver’s seat and taps the center console screen. It comes to life with the logo of the car manufacturer. Sergeant Anokhin uses his own knife to work loose the bezel of the control screen and pulls the whole thing out of the console. Thirty seconds later, I hear the hum of an electric engine, and the car’s running lights turn on. Sergeant Anokhin tosses the control screen out the driver-side window, and it clatters onto the asphalt of the parking nook. Then he gets back out of the car. Dmitry pops his head into the passenger compartment and looks around.
“Battery is fifteen percent,” he says. “You want to go fast, you will not drive for very long.”
“It’ll have to do,” I say. “We’re not going far in this anyway.”
We work out a battle plan on the fly. Dmitry is going to go back up to his eighth-floor vantage point and spot targets with Sergeant Gerasimov. Lieutenant Bondarenko and Sergeant Anokhin will provide cover, and Sergeant Dragomirova will join me and drive the comically small electric car we just hot-wired.
“We’ll get within rifle range, I’ll pop off a few rounds, and turn my suit to maximum transmitting output so they get nice and pissed off,” I say. “We’ll drive out onto the runway and see how many of them come after us. If there are any left over on the landing pads, you go with your original idea. Put rounds into them from this end so they’ll come looking for you, and get the hell off that roof and to an alternate OP. When the Lankies are out in the open, you call down the thunder from Kirov. We hook around the north end of the base and find cover over there, and then we have eyes on the place from both ends.”
“What if little car breaks when you are in middle of runway?” Dmitry asks.
“Then we’re fucked,” I say, and Dmitry grins. “Let’s get to it. And I really hope that your artillery is accurate. We won’t be too far ahead of the Lankies.”
“Is Russian artillery,” he says. “Mostly hits right target. Mostly.”
The vehicle is built for two passengers riding tandem, one behind the other, but it’s not designed to accommodate armored troops and their weapons. Luckily, Sergeant Dragomirova is fairly small even in her angular battle armor, so we both fit. Dmitry and I pop the rear window out of the car and throw it aside so I have clearance to fire my rifle out the back. Then the Russians trot back to the building we just left a little while ago to resume their observation posts. I send an update to the SI troopers on the south end of the base and let them know what we are about to do.
“We’re going to move up toward the hangars as soon as you start your run,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “Just for the record, that’s some crazy-ass shit. But good luck.”
“We just got here by letting them shoot us out of missile tubes,” I reply. “And we’re fighting five-hundred-ton creatures with hand weapons. There’s no part of this that’s sane.”
Sergeant Dragomirova speaks just a few words of English, but Dmitry translates the plan for her so I won’t have to rely on the accuracy of my suit’s interpreter software in the heat of battle. She takes her spot in the driver’s seat and places her rifle across her lap. The Russian anti-Lanky rifle is a bit longer than our models, and the muzzle end and about thirty centimeters of barrel are sticking out the right-side window.
I sit in the backseat, which can swivel to face rearward, and rest my own rifle on the frame of the rear window.
“Tell me you are talking to your arty guys, Dmitry,” I send on the squad channel.
“Yes. All good. They will shoot when I say to shoot.”
“They better. If I get stomped flat, you’re the only one with a direct line to the gods.”
“So drive faster than Lankies.”
“Brilliant idea,” I reply. “I’ll give that a shot. Keep us in sight, and stay on the radio. Grayson out.”
I check the chamber of my rifle and make sure there’s a fifteen-millimeter gas-filled round ready to ruin some Lanky’s morning. Then I turn to Sergeant Dragomirova and pat the back of her headrest.
“Let’s go,” I say.
She puts the car in drive, and we start down the street and toward the spaceport a quarter kilometer away.
Both of us have our tactical screens up on the visors of our helmets, and we can see all the information from the respective TacLink feeds of our allies. Sergeant Dragomirova races the electric car through the city streets at breakneck speed. She’s able to avoid streets and intersections with Lankies in them because the spotted ones show up on our map overlay complete with movement vectors. We make it to the perimeter fence of the base, which is torn down in many spots. Sergeant Dragomirova slows down for a hard left turn and steers our ride through one of the gaps in the fence. Then she floors it again, and we’re headed for the VTOL pad of the base, driving up to the dragons to tickle their tails and run away.
We’re a hundred meters from the VTOL pad when I spot the first Lankies. They’re much taller than the surrounding buildings and almost as tall as the hardened concrete domes of the big spacecraft shelters nearby. I turn my suit’s transmitter up to full power, which is enough radio energy to send messages to the waiting ships in orbit. If the Lankies are really sensitive to radiation, I just turned on a superbright flashlight in a dark basement.
“Come on, you bastards!” I shout. “Over here.”