“Hook a bit east, and make a low pass over the power plant, too.”
“Copy,” the pilot replies. I already know what he’s going to find there. Wherever the Lankies attack one of our settlements, they go for the fusion plants first and smash them to rubble. I don’t know if there’s something about the emissions they don’t like—which is the common theory—or if they’ve figured out that most of our tech is powered by the fusion bottles in those buildings and that we can’t last long without heat and lights and water pumps.
“Plant’s on fire,” the pilot sends a few moments later. “What’s left of it, anyway. No contacts.”
“The hell did they run off to?” I wonder aloud.
“Maybe we got ’em all,” the pilot offers.
“Negative. HD guy said it was maybe a dozen. We only dropped two so far.”
“What do they usually do out on the colonies?”
“They wreck our shit and kill our settlers, and then they stick around,” I reply. “Hit-and-run isn’t their battle plan. They’re nearby.”
The awareness bubbles on TacLink grow and shift around over the next few minutes, the four platoons on the ground changing positions and moving carefully through the ruined base to flush out the Lankies, who have made the very best of the lousy weather. I don’t want to think of them as intelligent and wily, because that would be profoundly unfair considering the huge physical advantage they have over us already. But as our company methodically reclaims the base meter by meter without running into any Lankies, I can’t shake the unsettling feeling in the back of my head that we’ve been had. We are on our own turf, on the planet we’ve evolved on, in weather and terrain we’ve adapted to for tens of thousands of years, and we once again have to react to Lanky initiative, change our tactics to adapt to theirs. Dance to their music.
“NAC forces, this is Eurocorps. Do you copy?” I hear over the local defense channel. The voice has a strong Scandinavian accent. I fall back to my combat-controller mode and address the hail while scanning TacNet for the new arrivals. An eight-ship flight of atmospheric drop ships is descending into the airspace over Thule in a double-V formation.
“Eurocorps units, this is NAC Homeworld Defense,” I reply. “We are on the ground with a company of infantry. We have platoons on the ground at the drop-ship landing pad, in the ops center, and at the south end of the airfield. Two confirmed LHOs are down. There are more that are unaccounted for, so watch yourselves. Visibility down here is under a hundred meters. You won’t see the bastards until they’re almost on top of you.”
“NAC, understood. We will land on the drop-ship pad and at the north end of the runway. Check your weapons, and hold your fire.”
I hear the Euro ships long before I can see the first one, but the sounds have a muffled quality to them in the swirling snowstorm overhead. The new engine noises have an unfamiliar pitch. A minute or so after I hear the Euros overhead, the first Eurocorps drop ship descends out of the storm, does a 180-degree turn to face the open area to our north, and then sets down on the concrete landing pad in front of the hangar where my platoon has taken cover. In size, the Eurocorps drop ships are bigger than Wasps or Hornets, but not as large as Dragonflies. They look sleeker than our ships, less angular and utilitarian, and infinitely more elegant than the SRA’s martial-looking Akula-class drop ships. Unlike both NAC and SRA drop ships, the Eurocorps ships have a modular cargo-hold arrangement. The entire back and bottom of the hull from the wing roots back is a detachable module that can be swapped out depending on mission requirements. The ships that now descend out of the storm one by one and go skids down on the landing pad have troop-transport modules attached. Their tail ramps drop onto the concrete surface of the pad, and Eurocorps soldiers in battle armor start pouring out of the holds. They immediately deploy in quick 360-degree cover formations around their ships. I wave at the nearest of the Euros facing the hangar, and the soldier looking at me lowers his rifle and gives me a curt wave back. I leave cover and trot to the front of the hangar, my carbine at low ready.
The Euro troopers are wearing battle armor that’s almost dainty looking compared to our bulky NAC kit. Their helmets are streamlined, without a single hard angle on them, and they look like they’re about two-thirds the size of ours. The soldier I’m approaching raises his hand in a brief greeting and then flips open the visor of his helmet. The camo pattern on his armor is a blotchy mélange of black, reddish brown, and light and dark green tones that looks like someone kicked over a few buckets of earth-tone paints. The only signets on the armor that stand out are the Danish flag on one arm, and the rank insignia on his chest—two five-pointed stars, first lieutenant rank.
“Lieutenant Grayson, NAC Fleet!” I shout my introduction over the noise of the drop ships nearby.
“Lieutenant Hansen, Danish army,” he replies. “Eurocorps.”
I give the Danish lieutenant a quick rundown of the situation. Our TacLink battlefield-data network doesn’t interface with the Euros, and every time I have to lay out with my words what would take five seconds to display via helmet-visor screen, I marvel at the ability of precomputerized armies to communicate efficiently at all.
“We will expand the perimeter,” Lieutenant Hansen says when I am finished sketching the rough situational picture for him. “Cover east and west with two platoons each.”
“You’ll need a bit more than that in this weather,” I caution.
Lieutenant Hansen smiles curtly and nods at the second wave of drop ships landing on the pad behind him.
“We brought more,” he says. “Don’t worry. We know this place well.”