“Don’t let up,” the captain orders on the company channel. “Don’t stop to shoot. Drive right through them if you have to.”
The first two mules reach the Lanky line just as they close ranks and march inward. The first mule makes it through the gap between two Lankies and shoots off into the darkness beyond. The second mule can’t quite make the gap, and the driver decides at the last second that ramming speed is an adequate last fuck-you. He aims for the legs of one of the Lankies and plows right into them, twenty tons of wedge-shaped armored fighting vehicle against a creature that weighs hundreds of tons. The center of gravity difference favors the mule, but the laminate-composite armor on the nose of the vehicle isn’t meant to survive that sort of high-speed impact against something so solid. The Lanky goes down, but the mule flips sideways, spewing armor panels everywhere, and rolls across the plateau violently around its longitudinal axis. I flinch at the sight—even if the grunts in the back were in sling seats, there’s no way anyone’s walking away from that under their own power.
The remaining mules have given up all semblance of coordinated formation driving. Everyone tries to find a gap in the wall of Lankies closing in on us. Some of the mules stop and open fire with their cannons, ignoring their commanders’ order while trying to blast a hole into the ranks. Several Lankies fall, but others take their place almost instantly. I watch as a Lanky strides swiftly toward the firing vehicle from the side. Before the gunner can turn his turret mount around, the Lanky kicks the mule over, sending shards of armor flying. Then another steps on top of the overturned mule and starts crushing it methodically with its huge feet. Another mule opens fire from a different spot and hoses the Lanky off the wrecked mule with a long burst of cannon rounds.
The space between the Lanky battle lines turns into complete chaos. Each individual vehicle is maneuvering and fighting for its life separately. The Lankies simply kick the mules over or rip their weapons mounts off the tops of the vehicles. Lieutenant Stahl has engaged the polychrome camouflage again and is weaving between mules and Lankies at top speed. I decide that in some situations, the omnivision afforded by the DAS sensors is a little too much information. This is a nightmare run through a merciless close-range battle between machines and twenty-meter monsters.
“Day is turning less fun now,” Dmitry says from the gunner seat. He has fired up the weapons mount again, and he’s emptying the magazine in measured bursts, strafing Lankies as we shoot past them and pumping grenades from the automatic launcher into their midst.
We sideswipe a mule that appears next to us seemingly out of nowhere, and the impact makes the Weasel jolt and momentarily lifts the two right-side wheels off the ground. The Weasel fishtails for twenty or thirty meters and then almost runs right into the legs of an advancing Lanky. Lieutenant Stahl straightens out the fishtailing and immediately steers hard left, a turn so tight that it lifts the left-side wheels off the ground now. We bump over the tip of the Lanky’s toe with one wheel just as the thing is starting another step. The left-side wheels hit the dirt again hard.
“Look forward, durak!” Dmitry shouts at Lieutenant Stahl.
“My name is not durak!” he shouts back. “It’s Thorsten.” He yanks the wheel left, then right, and we clear another Lanky by less than a meter as it swings for us. “And this is not easy driving, you know.”
Amazingly, Dmitry laughs at this. “Is like driving car in Moscow on Saturday evening,” he says. “Maybe little less dangerous.”
“You Russians are all insane,” Lieutenant Stahl growls back.
“Just fucking drive!” I shout.
I don’t know how we make it through the gauntlet of Lankies and zigzagging mules, but a few moments later, we are out in the clear, away from the melee, and racing across the Martian plains. I swivel the optical mast backwards to see if we have Lankies in pursuit, but they’re all pushing inward and pressing in on the mules that are still trapped in the pocket between them. I hate running away from the battle, but there is nothing we can do here.
Dmitry has been working the weapons mount for the whole mad dash, and now the magazines are empty except for a few thermobaric grenades for the automatic launcher, which aren’t very effective in open spaces. We are out of ammo, down to hand weapons, and there’s a disconcerting grinding noise coming from the right side of the Weasel. The TacLink screen is a total mess, orange and blue icons layered on top of each other, and more and more blue icons winking out of existence as the transmitters in the vehicles get crushed. Two more blue icons have made it out of the cluster of orange ones and are headed away from the battle at top speed as well, taking different headings. What was a full-strength light-armored-fighting-vehicle company just five minutes ago has been reduced to a handful of damaged survivors running for their lives. Our tactics were sound, our approach by the book, our execution flawless—and we got our asses kicked up to our ears. Too many Lankies on too big a planet, and too few of us to stem that tide, even after a whole year of cranking out new troops.
Lieutenant Stahl drives the Weasel south for ten minutes before we dare to stop on a small hill to take stock of what’s left. The two surviving mules have been going roughly in the same direction, but they’re several kilometers to our west. Both have SI squads in the back, led by staff sergeants, which means I am the senior surviving NAC member.
“Head south around that mountain; then make for Olympus Spaceport,” I tell the commanders of the two mules. “Get your troops back to safety. There’s Lankies all over the rock between here and there, so keep your eyes open, and don’t take risks.”
“Copy that, sir. See you back at the base. Good luck.”
We get out of the Weasel and observe the exterior damage. The grinding sound is a piece of hull plating that is rubbing against one of the honeycomb tires. The side of the Weasel is dented and scraped all to shit from the collisions with the mule and the Lanky. The front-left wheel bearing is shot as well, but the recon car should get us back to the spaceport. Dmitry and I pull off the dangling piece of laminate armor and chuck it away.
“Which way do you want to go?” Lieutenant Stahl asks me when we’re back in the vehicle.
“I want to go back north and come around the slope of that mountain the other way,” I say. “High enough so we can use your superperiscope here and check out the plateau to the northeast of that Lanky village. I have some suspicions I want to lay to rest.”
Lieutenant Stahl plots our course on the navigation screen. “We have the range,” he says.
“Then let’s head out. I’ll try to get C2 at LZ Red along the way, once we’re on that slope.”