“Incoming friendly CAS from bearing three-five-five degrees!” I shout into the company channel. “Splash in ten seconds. Heads down, heads down. All drop ships, turn to starboard immediately at takeoff.”
The first drop ship is in the air and clawing for altitude at full throttle. The second is just now leaving the ground, swinging the nose of his ship hard to starboard as instructed as soon as his skids are clear of the dirt. Nobody wants to be in the line of fire between a ground-attack flight and its targets.
The Lankies are now two hundred meters away and closing fast. I’m fifty meters behind the tail end of the drop-ship line in the entrance of the bunker, directing the close-air support and updating targets on my combat-controller deck for the pilots overhead, who are charging into the cloud cover to save our hides. To my left and right, MARS launchers pop and send their high-velocity rockets downrange. More Lankies crash into the Martian soil. One gets hit by two silver-bullet rounds at the same time and in the same general area of its chest, and the creature seems to blow apart from the inside, spraying bits of eggshell-colored skin and yellowish-white body fluid as it tumbles to the ground and kicks up a huge cloud of red dust.
I can only wait for the close-air-support ordnance to arrive, so I shoulder my own rifle and fire off a magazine into the charging group of Lankies. I know there are too many of them for us to stop them with hand weapons or even the rotary cannon turrets on the Wasps. Every time a Lanky falls, another steps over it and fills in the gap, and their line stretches a hundred meters or more. The third drop ship takes off, followed by the fourth, and now the lead Lankies are only a hundred meters from the remaining drop ships. There’s no way the grunts will be able to make the ships in time, and I know that nobody would try even if they could. Every Lanky we kill is one less threat to the civvies on the remaining ships. I don’t have time to get angry at Captain Parker for his call to put all drop ships on the ground at the same time and forego an aerial overwatch. I may have made the same call in his spot, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway. I am in the back because I want to update target data for the fighters until the last possible moment, but I can already see that I may not make that last drop ship if help doesn’t arrive fast. The Lankies are surging on like a twenty-meter tsunami, slowly but unstoppably powerful. Like so many battles, this one turned on just a single decision made in a second.
The SI troopers on the ground are mostly green, young privates and corporals just out of training, led by sergeants without much combat experience, but they stand their ground and do as they were trained. Facing the relentless wave of Lankies coming toward them, they probably feel like infantry of the Middle Ages facing a massed cavalry charge. They keep their firing lines between the drop ships and reshuffle their formation whenever another drop ship takes off and leaves a gap in the line. But the line gets shorter the more gaps they have to fill, and the Lankies aren’t dropping fast enough even though rifle rounds and silver bullets from the MARS launchers thin out their lines at the rate of one every few seconds.
This is what death looks like, I think. There’s a bunker behind me, but I don’t even consider ducking into it for shelter to avoid the flood of Lankies that is going to flatten us in thirty seconds, grind us into the Martian dust like pesky insects. There’s no air left to breathe and wait out yet another rescue, and even if the oxygen tanks were full, my place is out here with the SI troopers. At least we’ll go quickly under an open sky instead of getting buried in the dark.
Hope you make it, I think in Halley’s direction. At least we made them pay for it.
“Shorten the line!” the captain shouts into his radio. “Fall back fifty meters by fire teams, bounding overwatch! Let’s go, let’s go!”
The ordnance from the Euro ships arrives in dramatic fashion before I can even see the launching units on my TacLink display. I hear the distinctive dull bursts of disintegrating cluster munitions containers high over our heads, and then many little explosions go off a thousand feet up in the air. A second or two later, the ground in front of our firing line is churned with impacts from many hundreds of kinetic penetrators. The effect on the attacking Lankies is immediate. Dozens of them crash to the ground, pierced by superdense, sharpened tungsten rods shooting from the sky, taking other Lankies with them as they fall, and many of the ones that are still advancing twitch and shriek their high-pitched wails as the submunitions injure them. But there are still too many left, and our rifle and rocket fire isn’t thinning out the remaining line quickly enough. So many Lankies. We are like a formation of rabbits trying to stop a herd of charging bulls down here.
“On target!” I shout into the TacAir channel. “Do that again.”
“Too close for cluster kinetics,” Eagle One-Four replies in his German accent. “We have a visual on your TRP. Commencing strafing run.”
The cannon rounds arrive before I can hear the reports from the ground-attack fighters that fire them. They’re not the devil’s ripsaw sound of the Shrike antiarmor cannon, but a higher-pitched bark at a slower rate of fire. The cannon bursts from two attack craft carve a swath of small explosions through the remaining Lankies, and more of them drop to the ground, screaming and flailing their limbs. The fifth and sixth drop ship are off the ground and roaring off to the south at top speed right above the deck, safe from the approaching Lankies but depriving the remaining grunts cover and the fire support of their chin turrets. The Eurocorps attack birds thunder across the leaden sky overhead, two hundred feet above the deck, sleek machines with gray paint jobs and Iron Crosses painted on their wings and fuselages.