“Tallyho,” the pilot says. “Three LHOs in the open. All units, break right and weapons free.”
We’ve shot past the Lankies already as soon as we’ve spotted them, and to me it seems like there’s maybe a hundred feet of separation between our ship and the head of the lead Lanky. The pilot yanks the Wasp hard to starboard and pulls the nose up to slow the ship down as he swings it around. When we’re through the turn, we’ve lost another fifty feet of altitude, and we’re a hundred meters from the Lankies. The lead Lanky turns away from the drop ship and strides off in long, thundering steps. The other two move off in different directions, none of them attempting to come close to the drop ship.
“Where ya goin’, pal?” the Wasp’s gunner says, and opens up with the large-caliber autocannon mounted on the underside of the ship. The thirty-five-millimeter antivehicle cannons on the Wasp don’t fire the new anti-Lanky silver bullets, the vicious gas-filled rounds we now use in our rifles, but they make up for it with sheer penetration power. The armor-piercing rounds can shoot through an up-armored mule from front to back, and not even Lanky hide is thick enough to stop the hyperdense penetrators in their tips. The pilot’s burst catches the striding Lanky in the lower back and the legs, and it falls forward, carried by its own momentum. It crashes to the ground in a cloud of red dust. Behind us, the other ships of the flight swing around one by one and give the other two Lankies the same treatment, knocking them off their spindly legs with cannon shells and putting bursts into their prone forms just to be on the safe side. I scan for more threats in visual range and don’t find any. The wind has picked up, and the visibility has dropped with the breeze to less than a kilometer, and I don’t feel entirely sure about making the call, but Lankies don’t show on thermal or radar, and I can’t see further than the cameras in the nose of the drop ship.
“LZ is clear,” I say on the tactical channel. “Propose we keep two birds in the air for overhead support while we load most of the civvies.”
“We have to hustle,” Captain Parker says. “Put ’em all down, but keep the nose guns hot, just in case, and watch your sectors. Fire teams, on the bounce.”
We set down on the square in the middle of the facility, with the nearest dead Lanky just a few dozen meters to the right of the lead drop ship. With only eight fire teams and cases full of FEPOS rescue breathers to carry, there’s no manpower for a security perimeter. The drop ships sit on a little hill among the ruins of the facility, so the optical sensors can see a few hundred meters, but if we get jumped by Lankies, the gunners have just a few seconds to bring their weapons into action. I keep the admin deck linked to the ship’s systems, bring the feed up on my helmet display, and grab my own rifle to contribute to the rescue in progress.
The main bunker entrance is buried underneath the rubble of the research station. We dig chunks of heavy concrete out of the way for fifteen minutes with our entrenching tools and our bare hands until we’ve made a hole big enough to reach the door that’s set five meters down in the vertical wall of the vestibule, and the piles of rubble look like they could shift and bury us at any time. Ideally, we’d have combat engineers and heavy equipment with us. But ideally went out the window the first time we made contact with the Lankies.
The bunker has an airlock system that’s too small to support all the troops we brought with us. The SI troopers carry the boxes of emergency breathing devices into the airlock and then take up perimeter guard outside while Captain Parker and I stay in the lock until it cycles again. The air outside, with its almost 10 percent CO2 content, would be fatal to anyone who isn’t wearing a suit or a rebreather.
The air inside the bunker itself isn’t much better. When the inner lock cycles and opens, the air-quality reading from my environmental monitor merely goes from “HAZARDOUS/LETHAL CO2 ALERT” to “HAZARDOUS/POOR.” Inside, the lights are on, and a handful of officers and civvies are waiting for us behind the airlock door. Behind them, there’s a large entrance area with equipment racks and ATVs parked by the walls, and the place is packed with people, a few uniformed Defense Corps personnel and civilians, lots of civilians. There’s a cheer going through the room when they see us.
Captain Parker and I salute the senior officer in the group, a female fleet colonel with the name tag “MACKAY, J.” Her name triggers something in my memory. She looks tired and haggard, and everyone in the group is lean and looks like the shelter ran out of full-calorie rations quite a while ago, but Colonel Mackay’s uniform is regulation clean and doesn’t have a loose stitch anywhere. I check the patch on her shoulder: “NACS CALEDONIA CG-99.”
“Colonel Mackay, Fleet,” she introduces herself after returning our salutes. “I can’t tell you how glad we are to see you. We are down to emergency chow and seven percent oxygen. The scrubbers quit over a month ago.”
“What is your current personnel count, Colonel?” Captain Parker asks.
“Four hundred seventeen, myself included,” Colonel Mackay replies. “Three hundred eighty-three civilians, sixty-nine of them children. Thirty-four military, mostly Fleet. And the nineteen bodies we left lined up outside. We didn’t have space for a morgue.”
“What bodies?” I ask. “We didn’t see any when we pulled up.”
Colonel Mackay looks puzzled, then concerned. “We had nineteen dead over the last year. Most were injured from the Lanky attack. Two suicides. We moved them outside months ago.”
“There are no bodies outside,” the captain reaffirms.
I try to imagine what may have happened to the corpses the colonists stashed outside the shelter entrance, and I decide that I don’t like the ideas my brain is feeding me.
“Let’s get these breathing units distributed, and then let’s get the hell out of here,” Captain Parker says. “This area is not secured yet, and we don’t have the firepower to deal with anything more than stragglers.”
“No argument,” Colonel Mackay says. She waves over the military personnel nearby. “Tom and Adam, get these passed out as quickly as you can.”
It takes ten minutes for all the breathing units to be distributed, and we barely brought enough for everyone in the shelter. I look around in the place, not much bigger than the flight deck of a cruiser, and shudder at the thought of spending a year in such a confined space with four hundred other people. But Colonel Mackay seems to have run a tight ship down here, because there is no pushing or complaining, as if they had all practiced their emergency and evacuation drills a lot while they were locked up down here.
“Caledonia,” I say to the colonel after we’ve briefed her on the exfil plan. “Your ship was destroyed in orbit last year. I saw the marker on the tactical display when we flew by. I was on Indianapolis with Colonel Campbell. He said he went to the academy with you.”