The main air/space-traffic-control tower for the Olympus City spaceport sits on a little hill on the north end of the base. The radar installation and fusion reactor a hundred meters away are little more than rubble, but the control tower is only slightly damaged. Sergeant Dragomirova and I break open a door and make our way up the emergency staircase of the tower.
The main control room at the top of the tower is empty, and other than the fact that half the windows in the place are shattered, things here look mostly intact, like someone could just turn the power back on and start directing inbound traffic again if the base radar down the hill wasn’t all wrecked to shit. We’re fifty meters above ground level, higher up than even Dmitry and his squad on their rooftop to the south of the base. The view from up here is excellent, and I can see far to the north, where the Martian plains extend underneath a gray and cloudy sky. And what I see in the distance makes me wish for a hole to crawl into.
“We have incoming from the south,” Lieutenant Perkins sends. Five orange icons pop up on my tactical map beyond the south end of the base, close to where Dmitry’s squad is providing overwatch for the SI guys.
“Uh-huh,” I say, preoccupied with the view from the north-facing windows of the control tower. “We’ve got incoming from the north, too.”
“How many?” Lieutenant Perkins asks.
In the distance, eight kilometers away according to my computer, the biggest group of Lankies I’ve ever seen together in one place is coming across the plains toward Olympus City and the spaceport. The only thing I can think of is Gateway Station on a busy day, when there are so many people moving on the central concourse that the crowd moves like a stream.
“Every last fucking one of them, I think.”
CHAPTER 15
RODS FROM THE GODS
I don’t even bother mourning the loss of my rifle, or the fact that only two of us are up here on the north end of the field instead of the entire team. What’s coming down from the plains is beyond our ability to stop with hand weapons. Depending on how they’re positioned in orbit relative to our location, it may even be beyond the fleet’s ability to handle.
“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. Priority fire mission. Sending TRP data uplink now.”
It takes a few seconds for the signal to travel up to Phalanx, and then a few seconds more for the tactical officer in CIC to process what he’s seeing on his display. The plain to the north of Olympus City is a sea of orange icons, hundreds of Lankies in motion, flowing in our general direction at twenty kilometers per hour.
“I read your uplink,” the tactical officer says, and I admire the professionalism that keeps the incredulity in his voice to a very slight note. “Call the ordnance, Tailpipe Red One. You are in the clear for a nuclear strike.”
I think about it for a moment. That many Lankies out in the open are a tempting target for a hundred-kiloton warhead. The whole group would be gone in a flash, but then the follow-up troops would have to deal with the fallout and the radiation. And I know that Phalanx has a pitifully low number of nuclear warheads on board. The battle has just begun, and we have no clue what else they may throw at us once the first wave is on the ground. If I have them start using nukes right now, we may all regret it later.
“Negative on nukes,” I say. “They’re bunched up enough for kinetics. But we’ll need a lot of them.”
God, I wish we had some close-air support already, I think. The Shrike pilots would have a party with that many Lankies out in the open and with no orbital support of their own.
“Give us a time-on-target strike,” I continue. “All the rail gun barrels you can bring to bear. Make it a hundred rounds. Saturate grid Romeo Alpha Nine-Seven as they pass through it, in”— I check my TacLink screen and do a quick calculation—“eight minutes, thirty seconds. I will call in follow-ups as needed.”
Rail gun projectiles are cheap, and the task force carries plenty of them, but a hundred rounds will make a big dent in our supply. The tactical officer on the other end of the link does not argue the need. He can read a plot, and he knows just as well as I do that if a few hundred Lankies overrun the spaceport and the city, Red Beach is going to be a no-go for landing troops.
“TOT strike, eight minutes, thirty seconds. Clock’s ticking,” he sends. “Can’t promise a hundred rounds, but it’ll be close enough to make no difference for those things. Keep your heads down.”
“Oh, that’s pretty much assured,” I reply. “Tailpipe Red One out.”
I relay the information to the rest of the team. Down to our south, there’s the sporadic booming from big anti-Lanky rifles as the SI fire teams engage the first Lankies coming out of the city and onto the spaceport from the south. Compared to what’s coming toward us from the north, it’s a trivial number of Lankies, but we’re only sixteen troops, and we’re spread out across three positions and as many kilometers of ground.
The next eight minutes are agonizingly long. Sergeant Dragomirova and I are keeping tabs on the Lankies coming in from the north, and that’s all we can do. I can’t leave my observation post and go to help out the teams in the south, and I wouldn’t be much good to them even if I did, because I lost my rifle. So I watch the plot and listen to the exchanges on the squad channel as my teammates fight off half a dozen Lankies three kilometers to my south. They’re too close for Dmitry to call in a kinetic strike, so the Russians decide to add their fire to the SI squad’s defense and pick off Lankies from the rooftops. One by one, the orange icons blink out of existence on the tactical plot. Five minutes into the fight, and four of the Lankies are dead, the last one felled just fifty meters short of the edge of the landing pad. Two more have decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and they’ve retreated from the coordinated rifle fire of the SI teams. I’ve never seen Lankies act on a sense of self-preservation until now.
“Two running away,” Dmitry says from his rooftop vantage point. “We go chase, or stay in position?”
“Sit tight,” I reply. “Kinetic strike is incoming in two and a half minutes. Stay in cover in case they have a flier or two.”
“We just used up half our ammo load,” Lieutenant Perkins warns. “If they make another push from the south, we may not be able to stop them again.”
“Cavalry will be here soon,” I say, and hope that it’s true.