Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(3)
The SRA marines work like a well-oiled machine of which I am no part. They take up a standard covering formation as the drop ship dusts off again behind us, engines screaming their banshee wail, sixty tons of laminate steel and weaponry put together into a hulking shape that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly at all. The drop ship isn’t a hundred meters off the ground when it pivots around and opens fire with its cannon again. Blind without any TacLink information, I have to rely on my own suit’s sensors and my eyes and ears. I look downrange to see where the drop ship is firing, but I can’t see what they’re hitting. I do, however, hear the unearthly wail of a stricken Lanky, a sound that has followed me in many dreams over the last few years. Then I see the Lanky appearing behind a structure two hundred meters away, limbs flailing, trying to get out of the hail pouring from the drop ship’s heavy-caliber autocannons. As big and formidable as they are, their size makes them excellent targets for our air support. For the first time, we are fighting them with all the air and space power at our disposal, and that is making all the difference.
Overhead, I hear a missile coming off the ordnance rack of our ride. It streaks across the distance in a flash and tears into the Lanky’s midsection, blowing it off its feet in a tangle of spindly limbs. The SRA marines around me holler their approval.
The SRA architecture on the ground is almost as sturdy as the housing in New Longyearbyen, but for different reasons. The SRA moon is a hot, dusty, rocky place, much closer to Fomalhaut’s sun than our little ice moon. The squat bunker-like buildings here must be even sturdier than they look, because I can’t see much destruction in this settlement despite the fact that the place has been under Lanky management for a few weeks. They usually gas the settlements first and then dismantle the terraforming infrastructure before taking down our settlements. From the data my suit delivers, it looks like they’ve not even gotten around to step one yet. The atmosphere down here is perfectly normal. No biohazards, no ChemWar alerts. I could pop my helmet off and breathe fresh air if I wanted.
In the distance, on the other side of the settlement, tracers and missile-exhaust trails mark the arrival of the SRA attack birds that have been escorting us into the LZ. I hear the explosions from their ordnance rolling across town, followed by the unnerving wail of stricken Lankies.
The Russians set up a perimeter, guns and rocket launchers at the ready, calling out threat vectors and directions to each other. I fire up all the active stuff in my suit and check the situation. One drop ship overhead, three on the ground, four more about to land. The next NAC unit is claiming a patch of ground on the other side of the garrison town. Each of our SI platoons has at least one SRA marine as a liaison, to make sure that the local defenders don’t start blowing away the people that came to rescue them.
“Air-defense network is not active,” Dmitry tells me over our top-level comms circuit. “Is out of commission. They broke radar, lidar, everything that puts out radiation.”
Our scouting runs from orbit indicated as much, but the brass didn’t want to risk a bunch of drop ships getting blown out of the sky by automated defenses primed to shoot at anything without SRA friend-or-foe transponders, which is why the first wave consists solely of SRA drop ships, carrying mostly NAC infantry in their holds. Now that we’re on the ground, I can call in the NAC hardware.
“Regulus TacOps, Tailpipe One. Boots on the ground, landing zone is crawling with hostiles. Requesting close air support for a sweep north of the LZ.”
“Tailpipe One, TacOps. Copy that. Close air inbound, ETA ten minutes. Call sign is Hammer.”
“Hammer flight inbound, ETA one-zero minutes,” I confirm. The last word almost gets drowned out by the staccato of the machine cannon on the Akula drop ship overhead.
“Dmitry, tell those Akula pilots we have close air incoming. They’ll sweep that area over there. Let’s not have any incidents.”
Dmitry gives me a lazy thumbs-up without stopping his work on the control deck he has set up on a piece of rubble in front of him.
“Don’t worry, my man,” he says, in what sounds like a mock American surfer-dude accent. “Russian soldiers are trained professionals.”
Over by the north end of the airfield, beyond the runway, three Lankies appear, their eighty-foot forms towering over the rocky landscape. The drop ship overhead opens up with its cannons again. I can’t feel the concussions of the muzzle blasts through my bug suit, but the dust underneath my boots gets kicked up as the Russian drop ship rakes the incoming Lankies with armor-piercing explosive grenades. One of them falls, then another, both shrieking and wailing. Their vocalizations sound like nothing I’ve ever heard on Earth. They’re sharp and piercing and full of deep, rumbling intensity at the same time.
Above our heads, the drop ship pulls up and ascends away from the airfield. Dmitry shouts something to his troops, who form a double line on the tarmac in front of me. The SRA marines in the front row drop to one knee. All of them aim their rifles at the remaining Lanky, 150 meters away and closing in on us. The Russians have big, powerful anti-Lanky rifles, but theirs aren’t twin-barreled like ours. Instead, the SRA equivalents are single-shot breechloaders, with bores that look even bigger than those of the M-80 I carry. The kneeling row of SRA marines fire their rifles at the Lanky to a command I can’t hear, and six rifles pound out shots at the same instant, a deep thunderclap that sounds almost like a single report. The breeches on their guns fly open and eject the brass bases of their caseless rounds, and the second row of marines prepare their own guns. I watch as the SRA marines fire three, four, five volleys in rapid succession, each row shooting while the other reloads, like line infantry of the old colonial days on Earth. The advancing Lanky takes six, then twelve, then eighteen impacts to its head and chest, each marked by the small violent puff of a high-explosive armor-piercing round. By the fifth volley, the Lanky stumbles and falls. Then it crashes to the ground, its bulk shaking the earth underneath my boots. The marines’ five volleys took maybe eight or nine seconds. Their Lanky-engagement tactics are completely unlike ours, but I’ll be damned if they don’t work at least as well.