I walk from the tower back along the hangar alley to the drop-ship landing pads on the south end of the base. Overhead, new drop-ship flights come in every few minutes. There are Shrike attack birds circling overhead above the cloud cover—I can’t see them, but the banshee wail of their engines is unmistakable. All around me, platoons and companies gather in staging areas and move out toward their objectives. On the tactical screen of my suit, I can see that we are steadily expanding our bubble of control from the spaceport into the city and surrounding areas. The Lankies have not contested the beachhead since we plowed the ground north of the base with kinetic munitions. I am not unhappy about the rapid progress we’re making, but something about this doesn’t feel quite right. Our third wave is landing already, and we haven’t run into any meaningful resistance yet, despite the presence of thousands of Lankies on the planet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from fighting them, it’s that whenever we seem to get the upper hand against these things, there’s a nasty surprise lurking just around the corner. I remember just how thoroughly a mere dozen Lankies managed to confound us on Greenland just by switching their tactics, and I wonder if they’ve been exchanging notes with their friends on Mars somehow. If this sudden knack for threat management is a species-wide development, then we’re in deep shit.
Out on the Charlie pad, eight drop ships are standing in a staggered row with their engines idling and their tail ramps down. A bunch of SI troopers are busy loading modular equipment boxes into the cargo holds of the ships and strapping them down. I look for the brass in charge and see an SI captain and two lieutenants nearby. They see me trotting up in my bug suit and wave me over.
“You the combat controller?” the captain says.
“Affirmative, sir,” I say. “What do we have?”
The captain—his name tag says “PARKER, M.”—points over to the east of the spaceport.
“There’s a science facility fifty klicks out, Tuttle 250. The Lankies wrecked the shit out of it like they did everything else, but their nuke shelter is still occupied. Four hundred personnel, military and civvies. We are going to go out there and fetch them.”
“With eight Wasps,” I say. “That’ll be a tight squeeze.”
“It’s what we have, so it’ll have to do. We need to go light because of all the weight we’re about to add. No external ordnance on the hardpoints. Cannons only, and only one fire team per bird, ’cause we need as much space as possible for the civvies. I need you along in case we run into problems we can’t fix with autocannons.”
“Understood. What’s the kit we’re taking along?”
“FEPOS,” Captain Parker says. “Tuttle 250 is low on oxygen, and their CO2 scrubbers are shot. We’re bringing five hundred FEPOS units with us so the civvies can make it to the drop ships without getting CO2 poisoning.”
The FEPOS units, fleet emergency personal oxygen supplies, are the successors to the NIFTI units that saved Halley and me when we had to evacuate the wreck of NACS Versailles over half a decade ago. They’re little oxygen tanks connected to mouthpieces and computer-controlled rebreather elements. In an emergency, they provide enough breathing oxygen for maybe half an hour, and they work as CO2-filtration units for bad air, like the atmosphere on Lanky planets.
The SI captain listens to a message coming on over a channel I’m not tied into. Then he looks at me and points his thumb over his shoulder toward the waiting drop ships.
“Hop in the lead bird, Lieutenant. You’ll ride with me. Dustoff in two minutes.”
“Aye, sir,” I reply.
We lift off a few minutes later. The lead ship is first to take to the air, and the other ships follow in short intervals. I’m strapped into one of the jump seats at the front of the cargo hold next to the crew chief. I’m tied into the drop ship’s camera system and watch as the landing pad falls away from us. Two hundred feet up in the air, the lead drop ship executes a sharp starboard turn around its dorsal axis and drops the nose to pick up speed. We cross the tarmac next to the spaceport’s runways, which are packed with personnel and gear at this point. An entire brigade is using Red Beach as their jump-off point, more than we’ve ever put into one place away from Earth, and that’s just an eighth of the forces we are landing on Mars right now. We have almost three thousand pairs of boots on the ground just on Red Beach, heavy weapons, air support, and plenty of ammo and fuel for resupply. But it still feels like the eerie calm before a bad storm, like a hard rain is about to fall. And all I can do is strap in and hold on and do what I can to keep dry.
CHAPTER 16
TUTTLE 250
The eight Wasps in our flight are thundering over the Martian landscape just a few hundred feet above the deck, to stay below the cover of thick gray clouds that are blanketing almost the entire hemisphere. We see Lankies on either side of the flight path, groups of five or ten or twenty, hundreds and thousands of meters away, but the drop ships hammer past those targets of opportunity at five hundred knots. With no ordnance on the pylons, the pilots don’t want to waste cannon ammunition. I upload every target I spot to the TacLink network for any follow-up forces to engage or avoid. We’re close enough for me to contact the bunker’s command center on short-range comms.
“Tuttle 250 shelter, this is Lieutenant Grayson, NAC Defense Corps. Do you read?”
“We read you, Lieutenant. We read you loud and clear. This is the officer in charge, Colonel Mackay.”
“Colonel, we are inbound with two flights of drop ships to evac your personnel. ETA five minutes. Make ready for a quick egress.”
“Understood. We’ve been ready to get out of here since you showed up in orbit.”
“I hear you, Colonel. You’ll be on the way home soon.”
“Two minutes out,” the pilot calls out from the cockpit. I top off my suit’s oxygen from the onboard system and make sure all my magazine pouches are full and ready to go. We are now forty kilometers behind the forward line of battle, far away from any ground support. I check the airspace for nearby units. Other than our eight drop ships, there’s a flight of Shrikes twenty-five klicks to our north on a parallel heading, and three SRA attack birds about the same distance to our southwest.
Tuttle 250 is a research facility the size of a small college campus. Or rather, it was before the Lankies moved in and reduced every structure above ground level to piles of twisted steel and rubble. We swoop in over the facility, and the cloud ceiling is so low that we’re practically on top of the first Lanky by the time we see it. Three of them are walking across the little plateau at a brisk pace, and all three turn their heads when they hear the noisy Wasps thundering over their heads.