“Weapons free,” he says.
Dmitry lets out a satisfied little grunt. He flexes his hand and flips up the safety cover on the control stick’s trigger. Then he holds down the trigger, and the heavy machine gun on the roof mount hammers out a burst toward the Lankies in the front of the advancing pack.
The German gun is astoundingly accurate even without laser ranging, which doesn’t work on Lanky hides anyway. The first burst from the gun hits a Lanky square in the upper chest, very close to the relatively vulnerable throat area. The gun has a smaller caliber than our autocannons, but the rounds have a much higher muzzle velocity and cover the range in a little over a second. The Lanky stumbles and drops to its knees. Dmitry follows up the first burst with a second one, which mostly hits the cranial shield of the now-crouching Lanky and sends ricochets everywhere. Dmitry shoots a few more short bursts along the Lanky line—not enough to drop one reliably with the smaller machine-gun rounds, but enough to inflict injury and hopefully piss them off. Then Lieutenant Stahl accelerates away from the Lankies.
We repeat the same process at every one-kilometer grid line. They are marked in northings on the TacLink map, a standard measuring unit for grid squares in the absence of other navigational references, and we started engaging the Lankies at the 60 northing line. We stop and shoot at 59 northing, then 58, 57, and 56, each time expending a hundred rounds of MG ammo and causing the occasional full-on casualties among the Lankies. The armor company has their battle line drawn up at 47 northing.
“You have them walking right into your guns,” I tell the company commander.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” he says. “When they make that little ridgeline between 54 and 53, we have them in the bag.”
“Just mind your fire,” I reply. “This thing can’t take more than a stray hit or two.”
In theory, the computer controls on the mule guns shouldn’t allow the mules to fire at a positively identified friendly target blaring NAC or Eurocorps IFF ID, but at the ranges we’re engaging, autocannons aren’t exactly sniper rifles. As we speed toward the 54 northing ridgeline, I hope that the mule gunners are all experienced and alert, because one of those thirty-five-millimeter shells would wreck the Weasel comprehensively.
“TacAir, stand by to drop the hard stuff,” I send to the drop ships overhead. “Dmitry, tell the SRA attack jock to stand by until they cross the ridge and we have them in the kill zone. Don’t want to run them off before they can get into gun range.”
“Remember: short, controlled bursts,” the company commander says to the platoons. “We lay everything we have on them, then retreat to 45 northing. Repeat and leapfrog two northings until they stop coming.”
Lieutenant Stahl seems to have the Mars gravity dialed in now. We shoot over the low ridgeline at 54 northing, and the Weasel momentarily catches air. We bounce back onto the dirt a moment later, the vehicle staying true on its track and absorbing the shock from the landing. It’s definitely geared for recon, not hard combat, but for the job we’re doing right now it’s absolutely perfect—small, very agile, and with an outstanding sensor package. If I had a dozen of these for SOCOM, we could survey a planet the size of Arcadia or Mars completely within five days, and in air-conditioned comfort. I bet they even have the capability for a great sound system.
“Red Hat Express, we have you in sight,” I hear on the company channel when we’re across the ridgeline. The speed readout on my screen reads 110 kilometers per hour, the fastest I’ve ever gone off-world in anything that didn’t have wings bolted to it.
Not quite a minute later, the Lankies come pouring over the low ridgeline, dozens of them in the leading group, and hundreds more right behind them. The tank platoon waits patiently until the bulk of the Lanky crowd is over the ridgeline and half a kilometer into the kill zone.
“Red Hat Express, break left to reading ninety and come around behind us.”
“Understood,” the German lieutenant replies. “Going around from bearing ninety degrees.”
He corrects the course of the Weasel until we’re almost parallel with the advancing front of Lankies a kilometer and a half behind us. Dmitry stows the gun again with a look of mild regret on his face behind the Euro helmet’s visor.
“All units, switch fire control to autonomous. Weapons free, weapons free.”
Just like back at the Lanky village, fourteen cannons open up with burst fire. The muzzle blasts from the thirty-five-millimeter cannons are enormous despite the flash dissipaters on their muzzle ends. From our perspective, over to the right side of their formation but still in front of the guns, the blasts from the guns look alarming. But the computers on the mules stay true to their programming, and the heavy shells streak over our low-slung ride and into the advancing Lankies.
For the next thirty seconds, the plateau is a shooting range with live targets. The cannons mow down Lanky after Lanky. The dual-purpose rounds from the thirty-five-millimeter guns are so powerful that Lanky limbs get torn off by direct hits on occasion, a very satisfying sight. Some of the Lankies assume their defensive postures, advancing at a crouch so their cranial shields cover most of their spindly bodies from the front, and I’m amazed to see that even the cannons from the Bastard mounts can’t pierce those skull shields reliably. Lankies stumble and fall out of the group with fatal injuries right, left, and center, but the ones behind them simply climb over them and continue the advance into the murderous hail of fire coming from the mules.
I don’t get it, I think. They retreated earlier at the village, showing self-preservation impulses, but these out here on the plateau aren’t perturbed by clearly effective gunfire. We’ve already dropped over a dozen, but the others come surging forward, around or over their own dead, and advance on the mules. Then they’re close enough to make the company commander concerned, and he blows the retreat signal.