“I did,” she says. “Is Indy with the task force?”
“Indy was destroyed last year when a seed ship broke through to Earth. I know you’ve been out of the loop.”
“You can say that again.” She looks at the patch on her sleeve. “We made it down in the escape pods. Some of us. Thirteen out of four hundred and fifty-nine. Caledonia took a hit to the fusion bottle and went up right as we were launching pods.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I say. “But if it’s any consolation, we just got ’em back. We killed twelve seed ships. Everything they had in orbit.”
Colonel Mackay smiles, but the smile has a slightly hollow, haunted quality to it. “It’s a good start,” she says.
The civvies have been well drilled. They leave the shelter in a hurry, but very orderly, even though I know they’ve been confined to that bunker for the last year. Many of them stare at the dead Lankies in the dirt nearby, at the holes torn into their thick hides by dual-purpose cannon rounds. The crew chiefs are loading people up into the drop ships and filling up the seating rows quickly. A Wasp holds forty troops, and we only have eight of them, so we are short three ships if we want to get everyone out of here without violating weight limits and safety regulations. But the regs are the last thing on anyone’s mind right now, and I’m glad the captain in charge sees it the same way.
“Fifty-two per bird!” Captain Parker shouts to the crew chiefs. The weight won’t be far off from a regular infantry load because the civvies don’t wear 150 pounds of armor and weapons each, but the space is definitely tight for almost twenty additional people.
Loading hundreds of people into military drop ships they’ve never been in takes some time. There’s some shuffling and arguing as families want to stay together and go on the same ships, and the crew chiefs are visibly stressed out after a few minutes, but the ships are filling up faster than I would have predicted. I keep my TacLink screen up in one corner of my helmet display to scan for trouble, even though the information is limited to whatever the cameras on the drop ships and trooper helmets see.
I feel the incoming Lankies before I can spot them in the red haze. They weigh hundreds of tons each, and a group of them walking makes the ground below your feet alive with a multitude of impact vibrations. From the way the drumbeat of their footsteps feels under the soles of my boots, we are about to have a lot of uninvited twenty-five-meter guests at this party.
“Wind ’em up!” Captain Parker shouts. The civvies aren’t trained in combat, but they can feel trouble when it’s coming their way. They must have heard a lot of Lankies marching overhead when they were locked in their bunker for months on end after the Lanky takeover. The formerly neat and orderly boarding process degenerates as people rush ahead to get onto the ships. The crew chiefs have their hands full with the crowd, and one of them has to fire his sidearm into the air to restore a semblance of order on his loading ramp.
“Contact,” one of the pilots calls out. “LHOs up ahead, coming in from the west, vector four-five. Distance nine hundred.”
“All units, weapons free, weapons free. We have multiple targets in the open,” I send to the drop-ship pilots.
“Multiple targets” seems like a slight understatement. Out of the dusty air to the northeast, dozens of Lankies appear, and they’re not advancing cautiously. They know where we are, and they’re striding with purpose. I know that at a brisk walk, a Lanky can cover those nine hundred meters in two minutes.
“Get those fucking ships off the ground,” Captain Parker orders. “Take ’em up as they’re loaded. We need to leave now.”
The grunts don’t try to board the ships with the civilians, and they don’t need to be ordered into fighting positions. They run and deploy in the spaces between the drop ships, which are lined up on the plateau in a rough semicircle with the bows facing out and twenty meters of space between them.
I get on the local defense channel and boost my transmitting power to maximum. “All air units, all air units, this is Tailpipe Red One. We need priority close-air support at map grid Yankee Papa Five-Two. We have fifty-plus incoming LHOs and four hundred civvies in the way.”
The drop ships open up first. Because they are on the ground, they can’t use their heavy antiarmor cannons, which are rigidly mounted to the hull and need the whole ship to be aimed at the target. The ships with line of sight to the Lankies swivel their chin turrets around and open fire with their multibarreled autocannons. Hundreds, thousands of tracer rounds fly out across the distance and start tearing into the approaching Lankies. At eight hundred meters, more of the grenades ricochet off their thick hides than do any damage. The Lanky line starts getting thinned out, but not nearly fast enough. The stricken ones wail and flail around on the ground, but the others stream around them like river current around obstacles. Some of the SI troopers have MARS launchers, and at five hundred meters, the first rockets shoot out from our defensive line.
“Hold the MARS rounds!” I shout into the company channel. “Wait until they’re two hundred meters out. And don’t aim at their skulls. Center-mass shots.”
With the heavy gunfire and the Lanky shrieks in the distance, all semblance of order on the loading ramps disappears as the civvies rush the drop ships to cram into the remaining space. I very much doubt anyone’s bothering with seat belts right now. On my right, the first drop ship lifts off, closing its tail ramp as the skids leave the ground, and I can see that the room between the seat rows is packed with standing civvies that are going to get bounced around like loose shells in an ammo crate.
“Tailpipe Red One, this is Eagle One-Four,” someone replies on the TacAir channel I just used for the emergency support call. “Copy your priority call. We are thirty kilometers to your north with air-to-ground.” The pilot has a strong German accent, and I’m guessing this is a Eurocorps drop-ship or attack-bird flight.
“Eagle One-Four, expedite if you can. Stand by for TRP data.”
I collate all the information from the gun cameras of the drop ships and the helmet cams of the troopers and draw a target rectangle on my PDP. The digital line of the western TRP border is practically in front of our drop ships’ noses, but I know the Lankies will be on top of us in another minute. I put target markers on a dozen Lankies in the crowd surging toward us.
“We’re going to drop right on top of you,” the Eurocorps pilot says.
“I am aware of that. Just keep ’em in the TRP. Danger close, danger close.”
“Roger that, Tailpipe Red One. Splash in fifteen seconds.”