The news from C2 confirms my worst fears. I call in and inform command of the disastrous outcome of our mission, but it turns out that in the grand scheme of things, that’s a minor problem right now. In the background of the transmission from C2, I hear heavy-weapons fire from airborne platforms.
“We have Lankies in our rear everywhere,” Brigade Command says. “They started popping up behind the lines out of nowhere. Our perimeter around LZ Red is down to ten klicks around the base, and it’s shrinking by the hour. LZ Orange is gone, and LZ Brown is in doubt. They’re doing what they can with orbital support, but the cruisers are rapidly running out of missiles and kinetic warheads. Division is preparing for an emergency dustoff, so I suggest you double-time it back here if you want to be included.”
“What about the southern hemisphere?”
“Second Division and the SRA are pulling out of there already. We’re cutting our losses, Lieutenant. Get back to base, and Godspeed. C2 out.”
We let the news sink in for a bit. Several LZs overrun, with a brigade lost in each of them. We gave them an ass-kicking in orbit, wiped out thousands on the ground, and then they punched right back. Maybe you can’t effectively fight an enemy you haven’t even begun to understand.
“Let’s get going,” I say. “I want to get eyes on the Lanky village again on the way back to base.”
We make our way around the mountain, clinging to its side about halfway up the slope. I’m running the sensor mast, extended to its full height of twenty-five meters, and my field of view is a swath of Mars surface hundreds of kilometers wide. At one point, we get to within ten klicks of the site where the armor platoon got comprehensively folded up, and I train the mast sensors on the spot and crank them up to maximum magnification. It’s still dark out, and the image intensifiers don’t make for a very sharp picture from this far out, but I can see the wrecks of the vehicles scattered in the Mars dirt. Luckily, I am too far away to spot bodies if there are any.
A little while later, I see movement in the darkness on the plateau between the battle site and the Lanky village. We’re five hundred meters above the plateau and six kilometers away, and even with the fuzzy, green-tinted imaging of the low-light sensors, I can see that a whole bunch of Lankies are converging on a spot out there.
“Stop the ride for a moment,” I tell Lieutenant Stahl, who complies and lets the Weasel roll to a stop.
I focus on the spot out in the Martian desert. The plateau is pretty flat—I was able to see for several klicks while we were driving across it scouting for the mules earlier—but there are deep furrows and ravines from old erosion on either side of the plains, near the spots where the terrain starts to rise again. The Lankies out on the plateau, many dozens of them, are making their way into one of those ravines. I follow their movement until I find a spot where the familiar spindly silhouettes disappear in the darkness and out of sight. I had a suspicion earlier, about the way the Lankies managed to slam the trap door shut behind us so quickly even though we had just swept the plateau, and now I know how they pulled it off. I share the imagery with Dmitry and Lieutenant Stahl.
“It’s a goddamn tunnel,” I say. “They went underground. Into the rock. Just like they did on Greenland.”
“That is why they can come up behind our lines,” Lieutenant Stahl muses. “They hide in the tunnels and come back out when we are gone.”
“We think we have a frontline, but they’ve been letting us push them on purpose. On the surface. So we’d overextend ourselves.”
“I do not think this is battle we can win, Andrew,” Dmitry contributes.
“No,” I say. “Not on the ground.”
We watch as the Lankies disappear in the tunnel mouth one by one. Unbidden, I remember the darkness in the tunnel on Greenland, my feelings of total fear and helplessness, and that same fear starts welling up again just at the thought of having to go after these things, down dark tunnels hundreds of meters below the surface. Just a dozen of them made themselves a nest and a small tunnel network on Greenland in one month. Mars has been in their hands for over a year, and there are probably tens of thousands of Lankies here. They had a lot of time to dig in and prepare. If these Lankies were half as busy and efficient as the ones on Greenland, there’s a tunnel and cave network under the surface of Mars now that a hundred thousand SI troopers wouldn’t be able to clear out in a year.
“What are they carrying?” Lieutenant Stahl asks.
“What?”
“The Lankies. It looks like they are carrying something. The ones that are going into the tunnel.”
I zoom in at maximum. The image stabilization even at two-hundred-power magnification is a thing of marvel. The Germans really know how to do optics, but right now I wish they weren’t quite as good as they are, because I can clearly see arms and legs dangling from the huge clawed hands of the Lankies. A sudden wave of nausea floods my brain.
“Bozhe moy,” Dmitry mutters when I freeze the image and share it on the Weasel’s central screens.
“Bodies,” I say. “Those are human bodies.”
CHAPTER 20
NO SUCH THING AS OVERKILL
The sun comes up an hour later while we’re still making our way around the slope of the mountain. I am busy scanning the plateau and the approaches to the Lanky village with the optical sensors. The area, which was empty when we breezed through it with our scout car and an armored company in tow, is now busy with Lanky activity again. They’re not bunching up in the massive groups we saw during the night, but it’s clear that they’ve gone back to business as usual. The village has Lankies going in and coming out of it. Some are dragging the bodies of their dead along with them. I see that even Lankies have physical limitations, because it takes two of them to move one body.
“What do they do with our dead?” Lieutenant Stahl muses. “Why do they collect the bodies? That is why there were almost no bodies in the city. They took them all.”
“Food,” Dmitry suggests. “Maybe they eat the dead.”
“I don’t know. Those things are thousands of times our body weight. There’s not enough of us around. It would be like you trying to live off cockroaches.”
Dmitry shrugs and opens his mouth, but I hold up a hand to make him hold in what he’s about to say.
“If you actually have cockroach recipes from the Russian prisons,” I say, “I am really not interested.”
He grins and shrugs. “Is protein. Everything needs protein.”
“Everything needs protein,” I repeat.
“Could be for food,” Lieutenant Stahl says. “Or could be for raw material. For building. I was an engineer before I became a soldier,” he adds, almost apologetically.
“What the hell do you build with protein?” I ask.