Marko Kloos: Lines of Departure

A hundred meters behind us, a towering gray mass appears above the ravine. I barely dare to move my head as the Lanky pauses at the edge of the ravine and then steps across it in a single stride. As always, when a Lanky is within a quarter of a kilometer, the earth quakes from the impacts of their slow steps. Nobody has ever managed to airlift an entire Lanky body back to a fleet ship for dissection, but we’ve salvaged their corpses in bits and pieces after battles, and our science people estimate that the average Lanky weighs close to a thousand metric tons.

As the Lanky disappears from sight and walks up the hill toward our discarded pods, a second one shows up at the edge of the ravine. This one is even closer than the first, maybe eighty yards, and it doesn’t follow the first one across. Instead, it pauses at the ledge and turns its head to look down into the ravine. Lankies have no visible eyes in their massive skulls, but I can almost feel the Lanky’s gaze on me as it seems to study the depression in the terrain. Then it turns to the right and starts walking along the ledge, toward the spot where we are trying to blend in with the local geology.

“Don’t anybody start shooting yet,” the lieutenant warns us over the team channel in a low voice. “He reaches into the ravine, we light him up. He walks past, we sit tight. Weapons hold .”

I watch as the Lanky ambles toward us, its huge head swinging slowly from side to side. Even after a few years of seeing them close up, they still look utterly alien and unsettling to me. Some of the SI troopers think the Lankies look like an evolved version of prehistoric Earth dinosaurs, with their toothless mouths and shield-like protrusions on the backs of their skulls.

By now, the Lanky is so close to us that his red and my blue icon are overlapping on my tactical display. The impacts of his three-toed feet on the rocky ground shake loose cascades of sand on the far side of the ravine. If he discovers us at this range and decides to stomp on us, we won’t have much time to get our weapons into play, but a preemptive burst of rifle and rocket fire would bring the other Lankies down on us in a flash. It’s a gamble, but the odds are better for us if we sit tight and play rocks until the last possible moment.

The Lanky ambles past our position and walks along the ravine for a few more moments. Then he steps across the ravine fifty meters in front of our position and continues up the hill. I can feel his progress up the hillside by the tremors underneath my feet. If there’s a good thing about opponents that are eighty feet tall, it’s that they can’t sneak up and surprise you.

“Let’s move. Down the ravine, double-time.”

We gather our stuff and start running, away from the landing spot that has become a local Lanky attraction. We were discovered, which is the worst possible start for a recon mission, but we’re still alive, which is far from the worst outcome. Every kilometer we put between us and the drop site will increase our odds of staying alive.

“You know, this shit would be a lot easier if we could take some wheels along for the drop,” Sergeant Keller pants as we trot down the ravine with all our heavy gear. Nobody argues the point.

The ravine runs out into the rocky plain three kilometers from the hillside. Our landing site is now far away, so Sergeant Humphrey chances a few sweeps with the millimeter-wave radar to check the area for Lankies. Half a dozen red icons pop up on our tactical screens, all clustered on the hillside. The nearest Lanky is roaming the area between the ravine and the drop pods, two and a half kilometers from our position. For now, we’re in the clear, but if the Lankies figure out our egress route, they can catch up with us in a hurry.

“Well, that almost went into the pants, didn’t it?” the lieutenant says. “Haven’t gotten that close to one of them in a while.”

“We’re in a bad spot, LT,” I say. “Too close to that atmo exchanger. We have no weather to hide in.”

The area around the Lanky terraforming tower is mostly featureless and devoid of vegetation. The Lankies have their own fast-growing plant life, but they never grow anything close to their own atmo exchangers. Lanky worlds are foggy and rainy, but there’s always a clear area around the mile-high terraforming towers, like the eye in a hurricane.

“Let’s get to the weather line and then head north from there,” the lieutenant orders. “North-northwest, looks like ten klicks. If we haul ass, we can be in the soup in an hour and a half.”

We move out in dispersed formation, a hundred meters between each trooper, so we can’t all get taken out as a group by a mine or a lucky Lanky. So far, we haven’t done any fighting, just a lot of running and hiding, but that’s the usual breakdown of activities on a typical recon drop—brief periods of sheer terror punctuating long stretches of running around. Any mission where we bring back our full ammo issue is a good one, because it means we didn’t get spotted.

We make it back into the weather without any contact. The Lankies milling about on the distant hillside don’t seem to be interested in looking for the passengers of those empty drop pods, which suits us fine. If the situation were reversed, and one of our SI garrisons stumbled across an empty Lanky conveyance on one of our colony planets, every trooper on that rock would be combing the place for the infiltrators, but the Lankies don’t think like we do. Whenever they take over a colony, they just drop nerve gas on the population centers, but they rarely bother individuals or small groups. It’s as if we’re insignificant to them in small numbers, much like we would smoke out an ant hive in the wrong spot but not bother hunting down stray ants one by one.

Back in the fog and rain, we take a short break, and I take the time to send a status update to the fleet via encrypted burst transmission—contact reports and targeting markers for the atmo exchanger and the nearby cluster of buildings.

“Okay, people. We are still go, unless Fleet has any objections,” Lieutenant Graff says. He outranks me by several pay grades, and he is in charge on the ground, but on the few drops I’ve done with him, he has usually sought my input on the overall tactical picture. Lieutenant Graff is unusually bright for a junior officer.

“Fleet is still go,” I say. “Be a shame to waste all that ordnance just for a walk in the dirt. Let’s go find us something to nuke.”

Mission aborts are costly business. The Linebacker cruisers still have to clear a part of the minefield, which takes a hundred or so of very expensive ballistic interceptor missiles, but the rest of the fleet won’t waste the even more expensive nuclear ordnance without precise targeting data. We would spend most of the missiles in the cruiser’s magazines just to make a hole for the pickup drop ships. We don’t abort drop-and-shop missions unless most of the team is dead and the survivors are bleeding from the eyeballs.

“Fabulous,” the lieutenant replies. “Five more minutes for rest and water, and then let’s go downtown.”

With the new bug suits, avoiding the enemy is ludicrously easy. Our tactical computers do most of the brainwork. They scan the terrain, predict enemy movement vectors, and map out the safest and stealthiest route for us. We weave our way through settlement clusters of ever-increasing size and density as we get closer to the main Lanky city on this rock. My computer keeps count of all the individual Lankies we detect and projects the presence of several thousand of them in the area of the settlement. We’re just five troopers, the only human beings on the entire planet, sneaking through what is alien suburbia like Jack tiptoeing through the giant’s castle at the top of the beanstalk. Of course, we’re not looking for treasure but for a target fix, so our warships can turn the giant’s castle into rubble with a few dozen atomic warheads.