Fields of Fire (Frontlines #5)
Marko Kloos
CHAPTER 1
RUN, INTERRUPTED
The Lanky in my gun sights is gigantic, far bigger than any I’ve ever seen before. It fills the optic of my M-90’s sight completely, even at zero magnification and even though I am still a few hundred meters away. It walks toward me unhurriedly, with slow steps that sound like artillery rounds exploding on the red soil. With every step, the Lanky’s three-toed feet send up clouds of dust.
I aim the targeting reticle at the center of the Lanky’s chest and squeeze the trigger, but it feels like the pull weight of it has increased a hundredfold. I press with all the force my finger can muster, but it moves backward with agonizing slowness. The Lanky in front of me, a hundred meters tall at least, takes another step that cuts the distance between us in half. Finally, the trigger on my M-90 clicks past the release point, and the shot breaks. Instead of the thundering boom and heavy recoil of my rifle’s anti-Lanky rounds, the shot sounds muffled and feeble, and the rifle barely moves against my shoulder. The warhead flies out and hits the Lanky somewhere in the vast expanse of its upper torso, but I know the round is ineffective even before I see the little puff of the impact. I cycle the rifle’s bolt manually to feed a new round and fire again, even though it’s futile. I empty the magazine, one feeble round after the other. The Lanky doesn’t seem to notice them. It’s like I’m throwing pebbles against a mountainside.
Then the Lanky is right in front of me, towering into the gray sky, its wide cranial shield swinging from left to right as the creature turns its head. It swings one of its spindly arms and swats me aside casually and without effort. The world tumbles wildly in my helmet display as I am flung violently backwards.
I know this isn’t reality because when I slam into the rock a few hundred meters away, the impact should have killed me instantly, crushed me like a bug on the polyplast windshield of a hydrobus, battle armor or not. Instead, I slide to the ground, fully awake and aware, and I feel no pain at all. My right hand still holds part of my rifle, but most of it is shattered. I throw away the piece of the gun I’m still holding and get to my feet.
The Lanky pays no further attention to me. It walks off to my left with huge, slow steps. As big as it is, it’s moving away so fast that an ATV at full throttle would have a hard time catching up, even though the creature isn’t moving in a particular rush. Following an urge, I run after the Lanky, not knowing what exactly I’ll do to stop it once I catch up to it.
The Lanky walks away from me with long, thundering strides. In front of me, the rocky ridge I’m standing on slopes down and leads into a wide valley. The sky is the color of dirty steel, the soil the pale ochre of Mars dirt. I come to a stop at the edge of the ridge and take in the scenery below with astonishment. The Lanky, already a kilometer away, is striding toward a town, which is the inadequate name we gave to their settlement structures. The Lanky “towns” are vast, interconnected latticework edifices that look a lot like coral reefs, impossibly fragile looking for something built by such enormous beings. In front of me, the entire valley is filled with Lanky structures. They cover the Martian soil for square kilometer after square kilometer, as far as my helmet optics can see. In the open spaces between the hundreds—thousands—of Lanky shelters, I can see Lankies moving around, alone and in groups, many hundreds of them, more than I’ve ever seen together.
The Lanky that swept me aside continues down the slope toward the cluster of Lanky buildings. Halfway down the incline, it stops and turns around. The massive head swivels in my direction until it appears that the Lanky is looking right at me. We regard each other for a long moment. Then the creature lets out a wail that is deafening even from over a kilometer away. I’ve heard that wail, or versions of it, on the battlefield and in my dreams hundreds of times, and it’s unsettling every time, as if it triggers some sort of instinctive response in the primitive parts of our human brains, the bits that make us scared when we’re alone in the dark without a light nearby. The wail rolls over the landscape like an aural tsunami, washing over me and reverberating from the hillside behind me until it sounds like it comes from every direction at once. It goes on for what seems like a minute, then fades slowly and ends on a single note that sounds mournful, like a funeral dirge.
Down in the valley, the other Lankies take up the call and reply with their own alien voices, first hundreds and then thousands, maybe tens of thousands. I can feel their calls through the ground and the soles of my boots, and in the air all around, as if every air molecule in the atmosphere is moved by the sonic energy of this overwhelming alien chorus. It seems that everyone on this planet should be able to hear this cacophony, which sounds weirdly harmonious despite being made up of tens of thousands of discordant voices. The chorus goes on for a long time before it dies down slowly, one voice at a time.