The ship lurches violently to the right, then pitches down, then up again, a bouncing cork in churning rapids. Without our seat harnesses, the platoon in the hold would be flying all over the place right now. The hull of the Hornet creaks under the stress, and I find myself wondering just how much atmospheric stress these old and tired birds can endure before metal fatigue and physics see us raining out of the sky over Greenland in a loose cloud of debris.
“Visibility on the ground is going to be shit, and Lankies don’t show on thermal,” I tell the platoon sergeant and my squad leaders. “Once we’re off the tail ramp, we form an extended firing line. Fifty meters’ space between each trooper. That way we at least have TacLink share of visuals beyond our individual lines of sight. Anything comes out of the storm, you light it up without delay. This will be a short-range fight, so stay alert. And keep active transmissions to a minimum. They can sense those.”
The squad leaders click back their acknowledgments one by one. The crew in the hold of the Hornet looks tense but determined. These aren’t the green kids who dropped into Greenland with me almost two months ago. They’re almost all HD troopers, not the battle-hardened platoon of SI space apes I’d rather have with me right now, but none of them look like they are just out of Basic, and quite a few are seasoned enlisted and NCOs who look and act like they’ve seen plenty of combat drops before. The new doctrine for Lanky incursions emphasizes a rapid response: go in with what you have and hit them as soon as you can, instead of wasting time waiting for just the right force composition. Everyone in the North American Commonwealth Defense Corps gets training on anti-Lanky weaponry now because everyone may end up facing them at any time.
“Showtime in three,” the pilot announces. “Passing through three thousand feet. Lotta thermal signatures below.”
My suit’s computer shows us a few kilometers outside Joint Base Thule, the sprawling military facility we operate in cooperation with the European Union’s defense force. Thule has a large drop-ship airfield and two five-thousand-meter runways that will accommodate anything with wings in the NAC arsenal. I check the sensor feeds from the drop ship’s nose and see nothing but swirling snow on the optical feed. The thermal sensors show a different story. Up ahead, there are dozens of large and small fires burning in the spot where the base is hugging the northwestern coastline of Greenland.
“Make a low pass before you drop us,” I send to the cockpit.
“For whatever good it’ll do,” the pilot replies. “Visibility is zero-zero out there.”
I turn off the visual feed from the outboard cameras because they don’t do anything but give me vertigo and anxiety right now. Without any visual references out there, no sky or horizon, I can’t tell whether we’re oriented right side up or upside down, and my inner ear is trying to convince me that it’s the latter. So I focus on the world right in front of my nose again, the drop-ship cargo hold packed with thirty-six troopers under my charge.
“Sixty seconds,” the pilot calls out. The red light above the tail ramp starts blinking. All around me, troopers are doing last-minute checks of their equipment.
“Firing line,” I call out over the platoon channel. “Fifty-meter spacing. Weapons free as soon as your boots are on the ground. Something large moves in front of you, shoot it a lot.”
I check the local TacLink for the other platoons in the air with us. They are descending slightly behind us on our portside, half a kilometer astern and poised to set down half a klick to our north. The Eurocorps drop ships are still fifty kilometers out, ten minutes or more of flight time. Right now, it’s us and whoever else is left on the ground at Thule base. I toggle into the local defense channel.
“Thule base personnel on the ground, this is HD flight Burlington One-Five. We are about to go skids down at the midpoint of runway oh-eight Tango with a full platoon of infantry. Anyone down there, uplink your TacLink data and sit tight.”
The TacLink transmitters in our suits are designed to connect to other suit computers in range and join the ad hoc network of whatever NAC units are on the ground, so there’s no time delay in sharing information in the heat of battle. As we descend toward the runway at Thule, there are worryingly few updates popping up small bubbles of awareness in the gray haze that is the tactical picture on my computer’s data overlay.
“Got a visual on multiple fires,” the pilot says.
I check the optical feed and see blots of orange through the swirling white mess outside—half a dozen large fires at least. My computer uses the visuals and does a quick overlay with the tactical map. The largest orange glow is coming from the refueling facilities next to the large drop-ship landing-pad cluster beyond the runway. But it looks like the Lankies didn’t limit themselves to breaking the fuel infrastructure. If my computer’s navigational bearings are correct, they’ve also wrecked the main barracks building and the fusion reactor that powers the whole facility. Of course they went for the reactor. They always do.
“Give me a count on silver bullets,” I send to my squad leaders.
“Three,” the reply comes back.
That’s it? I want to say out loud but don’t. The silver bullet, the troops’ nickname for the new anti-Lanky round for the MARS launchers, is a scaled-up version of the new gas-filled rifle round, with ten times the amount of explosive gas and a much sturdier penetrator needle. They are expensive and have a very limited shelf life, and most of the production is going to the stocks of the Mars invasion fleet, so I should be glad we have any on this boat at all.
“Put one on each flank and one in the center,” I say. “And try not to miss with those.”
“Copy that,” the platoon sergeant replies, and I can almost hear his eye-roll. Shit-hot second louie from Fleet, thinking we HD grunts don’t know how to do our fucking jobs.
The drop ship’s tail ramp starts opening right before the skids touch the icy runway, and an arctic blast of air cuts through the cargo hold like an invisible blade. Outside, the storm is in full swing, an environment as inhospitable as the worst, barely terraformed moons I’ve seen out in the settled part of the galaxy. I don’t know why we as a species insist on living in places where the weather can kill you almost as quickly and just as surely as a Lanky or an enemy fléchette round.
“Off the boat!” the platoon sergeant shouts when the tail ramp touches down on the snowy runway with a muffled thump. “First Squad left. Second center. Third right. Haul ass!”