Behind me, Sergeant Dragomirova turns on the little car’s entertainment system, which starts blaring a K-pop tune. She turns the volume all the way up, and the music is so loud in the confines of the car that my helmet reduces the incoming volume by three-quarters to preserve my hearing. I don’t speak Korean, so I don’t understand the lyrics, but the tune is pretty catchy, with lots of bass beat.
Our combined efforts to get the Lankies’ attention has the desired effect almost at once. I don’t know whether it’s the radio energy from my suit or the K-pop or both, but the nearest Lankies turn and start walking our way. Even when they’re not in a hurry, they can outrun a human easily with their five-meter strides, and when they are agitated, they can move much more quickly than their size would suggest. The first Lanky comes off the VTOL pad in a brisk walk that turns into a trot. Sergeant Dragomirova whips the electric car around and floors the accelerator. We race away from the VTOL pad and over to the open space of the triple runways. The tarmac is strewn with debris and destroyed vehicles, and the SRA sergeant has to do a slalom to avoid wreckage and concrete chunks.
The car is fast, but the Lanky isn’t much slower, and it doesn’t slow down for obstacles. Instead, it steps right over them. Behind the first one, four more have decided to give chase to our loud little car. I let my suit update the target data for the rest of the squad. Then I bring my rifle to bear and switch the fire-control system to computer control. With my finger on the trigger, the suit’s ballistic computer takes over. I center my helmet reticle on the closest Lanky, now eighty meters away and closing the distance, and point the muzzle of the gun in the same direction. The computer waits until the barrel of the gun lines up with the intended target, and then the gun adds its thundering report to the noise of the pop tune blasting from the car’s speakers. For a human, an eighty-meter hit on a moving target from a weaving and dodging platform would be a one-in-a-hundred shot, but for the computer, it’s a trivial matter. The round hits the Lanky in the upper chest, and the explosive gas payload blows a head-sized hole out of its thick hide. The Lanky collapses midstride and crashes into the wreckage of a fuel bowser, and the impact is so loud that it drowns out the pop music from the car momentarily. The Lankies behind the first one keep following, undeterred, but I notice that they’re loosening up their formation a little, fanning out past the fallen body of the one I just dropped.
“You have five behind you,” Lieutenant Perkins says over the squad channel. “Whatever you do, don’t fucking stop. They’re too far for us to engage.”
“Four more coming,” Dmitry announces. “From between hangars, trying to cut you off. Turn right and go faster.”
I turn to my right and see the four Lankies Dmitry announced, emerging at a fast clip from the space between the nearby hangars. I yell to Sergeant Dragomirova and point over to the newcomers, and she kills the entertainment system and silences the K-pop tunes warbling from the speakers at a hundred decibels. Then she steers to the right, away from both Lanky groups. We race across the runways on a diagonal course. With fewer wrecks and bits of debris out here in the open, Sergeant Dragomirova can go full throttle, and we’re up to a hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating by the time we’re across the third runway. I shoot the rest of the magazine at the Lankies trying to catch up to us to keep them pissed off.
“Now would be a great time to shoot some arty at these things,” I send to Dmitry.
“I sent request. Go over this point in twenty-five seconds; then go straight another ten seconds and make turn to three hundred degrees,” he says, and marks a spot on the map a kilometer ahead. Then he gives instructions in Russian to Sergeant Dragomirova, and she sends back a terse acknowledgment.
Somewhere out in high orbit past the Lanky minefield, a Russian cruiser is aiming its ventral rail gun battery at Dmitry’s target reference point right now and letting fly with whatever their gunnery department deemed appropriate for a squad-sized group of Lankies out in the open. It’s not a comforting thought at all, even though I know that Dmitry knows what he’s doing. But kinetic projectiles don’t distinguish between friend and foe, and an aiming error of a tenth of a degree can make a shot miss by hundreds of meters at this range. We race ahead of the group of Lankies, who are now keenly interested in the little electric car kicking up a rooster tail of red Mars dirt by the side of the runway. I eject the empty magazine from my rifle and insert a full one from one of the ammo pouches on my armor. The anti-Lanky rounds are so large that the magazines are way too cumbersome for something that only holds five measly rounds. Two quick engagements, and I’ve already gone through a quarter of my ammunition. And if we don’t clear this space for the main landing force soon, there won’t be any resupply.
Sergeant Dragomirova has to kill a few seconds to reach the spot marked by Dmitry at exactly the right time, so she slows the car down and whips it around in a circle before looping back to our old heading. That maneuver reduces our distance to the nearest Lanky from over two hundred meters to less than a hundred. The two groups of Lankies are converging on our position, and I have a good idea why Dmitry directed us the way he did.
“Mark,” Dmitry says. “Now ten seconds ahead, full speed. Next mark, turn to three hundred degrees. Chetrie, tri, dva, odin, mark.”
Sergeant Dragomirova turns the wheel and whips the nose of the car to the left. The electric engine is running at full output, and I don’t want to check how much battery life is left in this thing. If it dies on us in the middle of this wide-open stretch of dirt, the Lankies will only be a brief worry before the air strike gets here. I’ve called lots of ordnance down into my neighborhood, but I’ve never had any called down practically right on top of my head.
“Seven seconds,” Dmitry says, and now there’s urgency in his voice. “Go faster.”
I shout at Sergeant Dragomirova, who is yelling at Dmitry into her helmet’s headset, and the leading Lanky outside, now two hundred meters away again, lets out a screeching wail that sounds pissed off and frustrated at the same time.
Not having any fun, eh? Join the fucking club, I think.