This time, I can hear the whistling sound from the kinetic rounds overhead. It’s a sharp, shrill sound, like a knife blade hacking through sheet metal.
The kinetic warheads from the Russian cruiser smack into the dirt by the side of the runway where the Lankies are following us in an untidy gaggle. They hit the ground in half-second intervals, each pounding like giant sledgehammers. For just a second, I am convinced that the Russians have elected to use tactical nukes. Sergeant Dragomirova is aiming the car at a gap between two hangars, and we’ve almost reached it when the impacts bounce us off the ground and fling the car into the air like we’re a ration can that someone kicked down an alley. I hear a low explosion in the car, and then I see only white and dirty red in front of my eyes. The car rolls over, then again, and again. We were close enough to the hangars that I expect the world to end any second now, that we’ll get crushed against the concrete wall of a spacecraft shelter. But then the car rolls one last time and comes to a stop. The dashboard display still works, but it’s blinking a red “LOW BATTERY” warning among a host of error messages, and the whining from the electrical drivetrain ceases. The little stolen car has driven its last meter. I move my arms and legs, but it feels like I’m moving through syrup instead of air. The whole inside of the vehicle is filled with foam from the crash safety dispensers installed in the civilian car. It’s meant to keep the occupants of a vehicle from suffering impact injuries, and I very much appreciate that safety feature right now, but it makes it a lot harder to get out of the car quickly to get to cover. I guess the designers never had “getting chased by Lankies” or “narrowly getting missed by an orbital strike” on their list of possible safety hazards. I can’t see Sergeant Dragomirova, but I know she’s still alive as well, because she’s cursing up a storm in Russian as she, too, is trying to free herself from the embrace of the rapidly solidifying safety foam.
When I’ve finally freed myself from the wreck of the electric car, I can’t see anything outside but red dust. I cycle through my helmet’s sensor modes until I reach the microwave mode that warned me of the presence of the Lankies in the tunnels on Greenland. All around us, rocks and dirt are raining down. I can barely see my hands in front of my face, microwave mode or not, and I sure as hell wouldn’t notice a Lanky in this mess even if it walked right up to me.
Behind me, Sergeant Dragomirova struggles free from the overturned car and gives the wreck a last kick. We’re both covered in dust and the residue from the safety foam that probably saved our lives just now, because the car looks like it went three rounds with a battlecruiser in a head-on collision contest. My rifle is gone, but the sergeant still has hers. She checks the action of her rifle, points toward our west, and yells something my way in Russian.
“That way is cover,” my computer translates for me. I give her a thumbs-up, look around on the ground for my rifle, and then decide to write it off as a loss. If that M-95 is the only thing I’ll lose today, I’ll come out well ahead. I turn toward Sergeant Dragomirova again, who is already trotting off to the west, toward the row of spacecraft shelters we were trying to reach right before the kinetic rounds hit. I can’t see them in this mess, but my computer’s map says they’re seventy meters away, so I trust the silicon and follow my SRA companion.
It’s good to see that even the Lankies have limits to their physical strength. The spacecraft shelters are all still standing, domed structures made out of reinforced concrete several meters thick. But the heavy roll-away doors that sealed off their fronts are gone, torn off their tracks and scattered all over the tarmac in front of the shelters just like at Joint Base Thule back on Earth. Sergeant Dragomirova and I make our way into the nearest hangar for cover and gape at the destruction inside. This particular hangar had half a dozen civilian interplanetary passenger ships in it, and they’re all thoroughly wrecked, smashed into each other and reduced to component parts by the Lankies. The whole hangar floor is littered with twisted and mangled bits of steel and alloy. There are scorch marks and charred wreckage bits from long-extinguished fires, and the presence of several fuel trucks tells me that they were in the middle of fueling the birds in the hangars for a rapid evac when the Lankies landed. But just like in the streets of Olympus City, I see almost no human remains here. If they got jumped while trying to get the ships ready for takeoff, there should be dozens or hundreds of dead crew and service personnel out here among the wrecks, but I can’t see a single body out in the open.
“That was too fucking close, Dmitry,” I send over the squad channel to let him know we’re still drawing breath, in case he’s not watching our icons on the tactical screen.
“Was not too close,” he says. “If too close, you would be dead both.”
I bite back a cranky reply—can’t argue with the Russian’s logic, after all—and look back at the open end of the hangar, where the red Mars dirt is still raining down everywhere.
“Got eyes on the bad guys?”
“No more bad guys,” Dmitry says. “Not on landing pad. And cannot see too good out by runway, but no movement so far.”
“I concur,” Lieutenant Perkins sends from the south. “That strike wiped out half the map grid. Gotta hand it to the Russians: that was dead-on. Couldn’t have done it better with a guided shell and a laser to ride it in. We are advancing toward your position.”
I check my tactical map. “Copy that. You guys take up station at the south end and secure the VTOL pad and the refueling stations. We are moving north to get eyes past the northern end of the runway. Let’s secure this bitch so we can call down the grunts.”
“Let’s,” Lieutenant Perkins concurs.
By the time the dust from the kinetic strike settles, Sergeant Dragomirova and I are already half a kilometer north of the impact points. I don’t have to turn around and lay eyes on the area where the Lankies got caught out in the open by three kinetic rounds from Kirov to know the result of the strike. The airfield has three main runways, each five kilometers long to accommodate even the heaviest interplanetary shuttles and freighters, and one of them is now out of commission because one of the Russian kinetic rounds tore a twenty-meter crater into it. But we still have two runways undamaged, and the refueling stations are all intact as well. Lieutenant Perkins’s two fire teams take up perimeter guard around the VTOL pad and its subterranean fuel tanks to guard them from the Lankies that are still milling around in the city streets.