A cannon burst streaks by our right side on the way to some unseen Lanky behind us, and more than once I hear rifle fire pinging off the lightly armored hull of the Weasel. To his credit, Lieutenant Stahl drives his vehicle like Halley flies a drop ship. He bobs, weaves, and anticipates the moves of the Lankies in front of us so he can thread the needle with the agile little scout car. With nothing to shoot at or spot, all Dmitry and I can do is to sit tight and hope we don’t have cannon shells exploding in our laps before we’ve made it back to the ever-shrinking patch of friendly territory surrounding the hardened spacecraft shelters.
A kilometer before the outer edge of the defensive line, there’s a loud explosion at the front of the scout car, and something blows up one of the Weasel’s tires. The vehicle jolts violently and starts fishtailing, and Dmitry and I hold on to the grab handles above our seats, expecting the ride to tumble and flip any second. But Lieutenant Stahl manages to get the Weasel under control after a few terrifying seconds. When he opens the throttle again, there’s a distinctly broken sound coming from the front-left quarter of the Weasel, a grinding scrape combined with a rhythmic thumping that tells of a shredded wheel at least, and probably a broken axle or suspension. Every time we hit a depression in the ground, the front end of the Weasel thumps hard enough to jar our teeth. With eight hundred meters to go to friendly lines, we may even make it at a run if we’re forced to abandon the scout car, but the idea of climbing out into that much outgoing gunfire makes my stomach clench with fear.
Finally we are through the beaten zone and across both runways. Lieutenant Stahl lets off the throttle a bit. From my position in the right rear of the Weasel, I can see that his face is drenched in sweat. We’re all breathing heavily. Dmitry reaches out and pats Lieutenant Stahl on the shoulder.
“Excellent driving. I take back the durak. For this, you can come drink with me on Kiev any time.”
The infantry between the hangars gradually pulls back, letting the sentry guns and the few close-air-support units overhead do the work of holding back the surge of attacking Lankies. Hundreds of them are strewn across the beaten zone in front of the runways, but hundreds more are advancing. Evac window or not, this base will fall in the next thirty minutes unless we get relieved by a fresh regiment and a few dozen Shrikes.
We roll over to the drop-ship landing pad, where hundreds of people are trying to get into fewer than a dozen remaining drop ships. We get into the line for one of the ships, a Dragonfly, and the crew chief ushers us in. The seat rows are already packed with troops, most of them exhausted-looking SI troopers with thousand-yard stares. I take a spot on the floor and strap myself into the cargo eyelets set into the deck. I’ll still get bounced around if it gets choppy, but at least I won’t free-fall through the troop compartment and break my neck on the tail ramp. The Dragonfly, made for forty-odd troops and gear, has almost twice as many in it. Belatedly, I realize that I forgot my rifle inside the Eurocorps scout car, but it’s not like it would do me any good in here. If we get shot down by a proximity mine, I’ll be dead with or without a gun, and right now I am way too exhausted to care. Dmitry and Lieutenant Stahl are in different aisles, and I can’t see them from where I am strapped down, but I know they’re on board, so our fates will be intertwined for just a little while longer.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” a familiar voice says from the row of seat slings to my right. I turn to see Sergeant First Class Crawford, the trooper who did the breakneck ride from Tuttle 250 back to the spaceport with me on the ATVs.
“Sergeant Crawford,” I say. “Glad to see you made it to pickup.”
“You, too, sir. You look like hammered shit, by the way. No offense.”
“Rough day,” I say. “Did you ever get your hot shower?”
“Not yet. Maybe up on the carrier.”
“They have to run you through decon anyway.”
“Well, there you go. First bright spot of the day.”
“No, it ain’t,” I say. “You’ll get to strip in front of the whole flight deck.”
“At this point,” she replies, “I’m so fucking tired that I wouldn’t care if they broadcasted that live to the whole fleet.”
We are the second-to-last drop ship to take off from Olympus Spaceport, the battered and tired remnants of First Brigade. Red Beach will be crawling with Lankies in a few minutes, but we left none behind except for our dead. I know we’ll be passing through the hole in the minefield at the very end of its safe window, and if the Lanky mines have regrouped themselves a little ahead of their usual schedule, we’ll all be frozen corpses in space in thirty minutes.
The scene outside is apocalyptic. I tap into the ship’s cameras with tired fingers, using my combat-controller access one more time in regulation-skirting fashion, and almost wish I had remained ignorant about what’s going on down on the surface. The Lankies are flooding into the spaceport on all sides, only held back in some spots by cannon fire from automatic sentry guns set up to cover the retreat of the last infantry troops. The Shrikes escorting us are making attack runs into the surging enemy crowd, dropping dozens with cannon shells and blowing more of them apart with wing-launched missiles, but already it’s like trying to put out a bonfire with half a cup of water.
On the plains beyond the spaceport, where Sergeant Crawford and I battled the Lankies on our ride back from Tuttle 250, many more are coming out of holes in the ground that I know weren’t there when we set out for the Tuttle 250 rescue. I never thought we’d be able to kill every last Lanky on Mars, but seeing more of them on the surface than we ever saw when we still had our full combat strength is disheartening and demoralizing. The cruisers don’t have the nukes or the kinetic warheads to kill all of these new Lankies. And knowing how long it took just to train the troops we just lost, I know that we’d need twenty years of boot-camp cycles to get enough boots on the ground to stand a chance. Whatever the next phase of this fight will look like, we’ll have to think of an entirely new angle to take.
In the distance, I can see the blinding spheres of nuclear detonations. The fleet got the word, and they are dropping all the nukes they have onto the Lanky “settlements.” If every single one of them is a buried seed ship under construction—growing perhaps?—we can’t afford to leave a single site untouched. But I take some grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that if we have to come up with new tactics, so do they, because they can’t rely on the overwhelming advantage of those seed ships anymore.
I lie down on the rubber-lined deck of the Dragonfly between rows of strange SI troopers in filthy and dusty uniforms, and I find that I wasn’t even aware of how tired my body is until I let all my muscles relax. And even with all the chaos thousands of feet below me, with the uncertainty of the orbital ascent and the nuclear strikes lighting up the surface of Mars, I find myself drifting off to exhausted sleep.
I don’t wake up again until we’re on the flight deck of NACS Polaris an hour later.