Marko Kloos - Lucky Thirteen

The Fleet has a tradition: the rookie drop ship commander in the unit always gets the ship nobody else wants.

My hand-me-down was Lucky Thirteen. There was nothing wrong with her, technically speaking. She was an older model Wasp, not one of the new Dragonflies, but most of our wing was still on Wasps back then. But pilots are a superstitious bunch, and it had been decided that Lucky Thirteen was an unlucky ship. Before they gave her to me, she had lost two crews with all hands, one of them with the entire troop compartment loaded to the last seat. Both times, they recovered the ship, hosed her out, and patched her up again. A ship surviving an all-hands loss without being destroyed is very unusual—surviving two of them is so rare that I’ve never heard of such a thing before or since.

Her hull number wasn’t actually 13. She wore a dark red 5 on her olive drab flanks. But one of the grease monkeys had found her assembly number plate while swapping out some fried parts one day, and the news made the rounds that the unlucky ship’s serial number was 13-02313. Not only did it have a leading and trailing 13 in it, but all the digits of her serial number also added up to 13. So branded, she was named “Lucky Thirteen”, and put in storage as a cold spare until they needed an airframe for the new Second Lieutenant. Then they dusted her off, updated the computers, and handed me the keys.

She came with a new crew chief—Staff Sergeant Fisher. I met him for the first time when I went down to the storage hangar to check out my new ride. He was already busy with her, plugging all kinds of diagnostics hardware into the data ports in her bowels. When I walked around Lucky Thirteen for the first time, I noticed that he had already painted my name onto the armor belt underneath the cockpit window: 2LT HALLEY “COMET”.

“I took the liberty,” Sergeant Fisher said when I ran my fingers across the stenciled letters of my call sign. “Hope you don’t mind, ma’am.”

“Not at all,” I told him. “She’s really yours anyway. I just get to take her out every once in a while.”

He smiled, obviously pleased to be assigned to a pilot who knew the proper chain of ownership in a drop ship wing.

“Don’t let the talk bother you. About her being unlucky, I mean. She’s a good ship. I checked her top to bottom, and she’s in better shape than some of the new crates.”

“Talk doesn’t bother me, Sarge,” I told him. “I’m not the superstitious kind. It’s just a machine.”

“No, ma’am,” Sergeant Fisher replied, and the smile on his face morphed into a bit of a smirk.

“She ain’t just a machine. They all have personalities, same as you and I.”

Lucky Thirteen did have a personality, all right. Fortunately, it meshed well with mine.

I’ve flown dozens of Wasp drop ships, from the barebones A1 models they mostly use as trainers now to the newest Whiskey Wasps that are so crammed full of upgrades that they might as well give them their own class name. None of them had the same responsive controls as Lucky Thirteen. The Wasps have always been twitchy in any version—you have to fly them with your fingertips, because they’re so sensitive to control input. No Wasp likes a heavy hand on the stick. Lucky Thirteen was even twitchier than the average Wasp, but once you had her figured out, you could pull off maneuvers that most new pilots would consider physically impossible. Something about Lucky Thirteen was just right. Maybe it was the harmonics of the frame, maybe the way all her parts had worked themselves into synchronicity with each other—but flying her felt like you were an integral part of the ship, not just her driver.

Thirteen and I had five weeks to get used to each other before we had our first combat drop together. We were the tail end of a four-ship flight, tasked to ferry a Spaceborne Infantry company down to Procyon Bc’s solitary moon. We had beaten the local Chinese garrison into submission from orbit, and now the 940th SI Regiment was going to drop into the path of the retreating Chinese troops to finish them off before they could rally and reform.

Intel never figured out what went wrong that day. I don’t know if the Chinese managed to hack into our secure battle network, or if it was just a case of really shitty luck. What I do know is that our drop ship flight went skids down to let the troops disembark near a ridge line, and that all hell broke loose as soon as we hit the ground. The landing zone was lined with those new autonomous anti-aircraft gun pods the Chinese put in service—thirty-six barrels in six rows of six, each stacked from front to back with superposed loads. The whole thing is hooked up to a passive IFF module and short-range radar and parked out of sight. We didn’t get a whiff of them on our threat scanners until they opened fire. Each of those things shoots a quarter million rounds per minute, and while each individual shell won’t do a great deal of damage to an armored drop ship, the cumulative effect is like aiming a high-pressure water hose at an anthill.

We had landed in diamond formation, Lucky Thirteen at the tail end of the diamond, furthest away from the row of gun pods waiting for us. That’s what saved our bacon that day. My crew chief had just released the tail ramp when I saw hundreds of muzzle flashes lighting up the night in front of us.

I yelled at the Sarge to pull the ramp back up and goosed the engines to get us off the ground again. In front of us, the lead drop ship had already started disgorging its platoon, and half their troops were already out of the ship and in the line of fire. For a moment, I fully intended to drop my bird between the exposed troops and the guns, but then the lead Wasp just blew up right in front of me. One moment, it was squatting on the ground, SI troopers seeking cover all around it, and the next moment it was just a cloud of parts getting flung in every direction.

I got us back in the air at that point. I flew Thirteen about three hundred meters backwards on her tail, to keep the belly armor between us and those guns. Then I flipped the ship around, did the lowest wing-over I’ve ever done, and high-tailed it out of the landing zone at a hundred and thirty percent emergency power.

Lucky Thirteen was the only surviving drop ship of the flight that day. Banshee 72, the ship that blew up in front of me, was dispersed over a quarter square kilometer, along with her two pilots, her crew chief, and thirty-eight SI troopers in full kit. Banshee 73 and 74 got so chewed up that they never got off the moon either, and the Fleet had to send in a flight of Shrikes to destroy the airframes in place where they did their emergency landings. Lucky Thirteen didn’t even have a scratch in her new paint.

After I had the ship back in the docking clamp, I started quaking like a leaf in high wind, and I didn’t stop for two hours. Mentally, the shakes lasted a lot longer. I still blame myself for not diving back into that LZ right away and putting some suppressive fire onto those gun pods, even though I did exactly what you’re supposed to do when the bus is full of mudlegs—you get out of danger and keep the troops safe.

Nobody from Banshee 72 survived. Thirty-one troopers and one pilot died on Banshee 73, and fourteen troopers and the crew chief bought it on Banshee 74. Yeah, I still blame myself for not going back to help them, even though I played it precisely by the book.

But the first time some jackass First Lieutenant from SI told me off for not staying in the hot LZ on Procyon Bc, I punched him in the nose, and hit him with his own meal tray for good measure. It was an almost cathartic experience, and well worth the forty-eight hours in the brig.

I flew nineteen more combat missions in Lucky Thirteen after that. I ferried troops into battle, dropped off supplies, made ground attack runs, and picked up recon teams from hostile worlds. In all that time, I didn’t have a single casualty on my ship. Three times out of nineteen, my Lucky Thirteen was the only airworthy unit in the entire flight at the end of the mission. She brought us home safely every time, even when the ground fire was so thick that you could have stepped out of the cockpit and walked down to the ground on shrapnel shards. After the tenth mission in a row had passed with my ship remaining unscratched, the other pilots actually started to mean it when they called her “Lucky Thirteen.”