“Yes, sir,” she says again.
“And if we get Lankies on our ass, point that thing downhill. The ATVs can outrun them, but only barely. If we get separated because of enemy contact, don’t hang around for me. Head for the base, and have them send out some close-air support.”
“Got it.” She looks over the scene all around us, the wrecked drop ship, the bodies strewn everywhere. “I’m scared as hell, sir, to be honest.”
“I am, too,” I say. “Battle sucks. Don’t let the grunts tell you otherwise. It’s unnatural. Anyone who isn’t scared of it is a fucking psych-ward candidate.”
“I’ll never bitch about my boring S4 job again, that’s for sure.”
I grin at her and nod over to the west. “Let’s hit it. Your hot shower is waiting.”
We set out from the science facility, leaving behind a small but bloody battlefield with dozens of dead Lankies and humans on it. The ATVs are made for Mars conditions, so they have big, knobby honeycomb tires and a bit more ground clearance than their terrestrial counterparts, but that makes them slightly more top heavy, and I almost end up flipping into a ditch before I get used to the handling.
We are going off-road, which on Mars means driving across a hilly, rocky landscape that looks like the places on Earth usually labeled “Badlands” or “Death Something-or-other.” The ATVs can go eighty kilometers per hour at full throttle on a paved road, but out here, that speed would be suicidal. So we weave our way among rocks and across gravel fields going thirty, forty, sometimes fifty. I keep scanning the horizon for Lankies, but for a good while, I don’t see anything except for rocks and dust devils. The ATVs spool off the kilometers dutifully, the battery status bars on our displays steadily depleting as the high-density cells discharge. Every few kilometers, we stop and compare map fixes, to make sure we’re not following each other blindly off-course.
We see the first Lankies on this run when we’re on the north slope of Hill 1818. They’re moving across the plains to our north a kilometer in the distance, roughly away from the spaceport and toward the science outpost we just left half an hour ago. If the comms link in my bug suit worked, I could call in help from the air units we keep hearing above the cloud cover and rub the bastards off the map, but I’m as helpless as I’ve ever been on a recon run. Thirty klicks to our west, there’s a base with dozens of drop ships and ground-attack birds, and they might as well be in orbit around Luna for all the good they’re doing us right now.
As we come around the side of Hill 1818 and start to descend its western slope, we almost run into a group of Lankies that are coming up the hill in the opposite direction. We don’t see them until we are around the bend of the slope and heading downhill, and we both hit our brakes and come to skidding stops. The Lankies, a hundred meters away and stomping up the slope, seem to sense us at the same time. There are six of them, and the two in the lead change their direction slightly to head straight for us.
“They can sense the electric engines!” I shout to Sergeant Crawford. “Go right, down the hill; hook left when you’re at the bottom. I go left. We split them between us.” I underscore the commands with hand signals that I hope to be unambiguous. That way, double-time. Sergeant Crawford looks terrified, but she nods and throws her ATV back into gear. Then she shoots off down the slope, and I shift my ride into drive and turn up the throttle to go left.
The ad hoc plan works—in a fashion. The Lankies split up to go after the radiation signatures from our vehicles. Two move to the left to intercept my ride. Four more angle to the right and go after Sergeant Crawford, who is kicking up long rooster tails of red dirt with the tires of her ATV as she’s flooring it downhill. I correct my course to the left some more. We have the speed advantage because we’re going downhill, and they’re just now moving laterally on the slope. I don’t need a ballistic computer to see that I’ll outrace the Lankies on my way down the slope, but I can also see that it’ll be close. Too late, I realize that doubling up on one ATV would have let one of us shoot while the other drives, but we also would have lost top speed and redundancy. Right now, all that’s left for me to worry about is that window of space and time ahead of me, the invisible square I have to pass through with my ATV in the next ten seconds to make it out of the Lankies’ reach. The two to my right quicken their pace, but they’re not as fast as they’re on level ground, because they’re walking with the elevation lines on a twenty-five-degree slope. At their size, there are easily ten meters of height difference between their right and left feet, which gives an awkward, shambling quality to their gait.
The ATV shoots downhill much faster than I’d ever dare to drive without Lankies chasing me. One of my front wheels hits a cluster of rocks, and the bump makes me fishtail wildly for a few terrifying seconds. I bring the ATV back under control, keenly aware how close I just came to flipping over. If I do crash, I hope I break my neck instantly so I’m dead before a Lanky can stomp me flat or rip me in half.
I make it past the Lankies with very little leeway. The lead Lanky swings a giant arm at me to knock me off my ATV. It parts the air next to the vehicle, so close that I can feel the gust of changing air pressure. I straighten out the ATV and change course very slightly to my right, to make the angle unfavorable for them if they try to turn and follow me. I don’t dare to check my mirrors. Like a pod launch through a minefield, I keep my focus on what’s right in front of my nose so I won’t know if death is about to catch up with me. Ten seconds pass, then twenty. The slope of Hill 1818 transitions into the plain beyond at a gentle angle, but there’s a ravine at the very bottom of the slope, and I have to slow down if I don’t want to make the ATV sail over the edge. I throttle back and turn the steering bar to cut across the edge of the ravine at an angle. When I take a second to look sideways, I see that the Lankies are still halfway up the hill. They’ve resumed their climb, apparently having decided that the bounty isn’t worth the effort.
Sergeant Crawford’s data link is off-line, so I can’t see her blue icon on my tactical map, and as I drive down into the ravine, I have no eyeballs on anything except the rocky slope in front of me. I drive up the other side of the embankment and go full throttle again, in case the Lankies change their minds about my desirability as a chase target.