Fomalhaut’s moon is a rocky, dusty piece of shit, like most of the places we fight over with the SRA. It looked like the desert out in Utah where I went to Basic, only without even the little bit of vegetation we had out there. With my remaining engine starting to cough up its inner workings, I couldn’t be too picky, so I chose the first patch of ground that looked reasonably even and rock-free, and directed whatever juice I had left in the battered ship to cushion our descent. We actually hit the dirt lightly enough for me to put down the skids and do a proper three-point touchdown. The way the landing site was laid out meant that I had to make my final approach facing the way we had come. Those turned out our lucky breaks in the end. The skid landing meant that the chin turret could still rotate, and the approach had the ship come to rest pointing at the plateau where we had just picked up our recon team.
As soon as we were down in the dirt, I turned off the engine to keep it from tearing itself to shreds. At that point, Thirteen was still salvageable--missing an engine and chewed up by shrapnel, but they had brought her back from near-scrap condition twice before. Our electrical system still worked, and I sent out a distress call while Sergeant Fisher lowered the tail ramp and started hauling people out of the hull. But when my left-seater reached for the Master Power switch to turn off the ship completely, I waved him off.
“Just leave her on until the batteries run dry,” I said to him.
We were within line of sight of the plateau where half a company of pissed-off Russian marines had watched our descent, and not two minutes after our landing, the threat warning receiver started chirping again. I glanced at it to see that we were being targeted by millimeter-wave short range radar bursts, probably the Russian version of our MARS assault rocket launchers. One of those could blow up what was left of Lucky Thirteen, but we were at the limit of their effective range, and my ship still had her countermeasures suite. I switched the system to AUTONOMOUS and got out of my seat.
“Sergeant Fisher and Lieutenant Denton, get those grunts out of here and to cover somewhere.”
“Copy that, ma’am,” Lieutenant Denton said. “What’s the plan?”
“You wait for the evac birds and stay low. I’ll hop into the gunner’s seat and warm up the cannon. Now
move
.
Doubletime
.”
“No need for heroics, ma’am,” Sergeant Fisher said from the outside of the ship. “We’ll all head for cover, bring some rifles from the armory.”
“I’ll bail just as soon as that cannon is empty. Now
move
it, and stay way the fuck away from the ship. Rescue birds don’t get here before the Russkies, I’ll pull the boom handle on my way out.”
I waved Lieutenant Denton out of the cockpit and climbed into the gunner’s seat to take control of the ship’s chin turret. I wasn’t even strapped in all the way when the threat warning warbled again, and the dust on the plateau a mile away stirred with the launch of a pair of rockets.
You
can
kill a Wasp with an assault rocket, but it has to be a lucky shot. Those rockets are designed for use against ground fortifications and big biological targets like Lankies, not fast-moving drop ships with sophisticated electronic warfare kit. Even stationary in the dirt, a Wasp is not an easy kill for a rocket gunner. The jamming suite zapped the warhead seekers of the incoming rockets, and they went wild and exploded in the rocks before they had crossed the distance halfway. The Russians tried again, this time with a brace of three rockets, but being stationary just made my ship’s jamming suite all the more effective, and those went wild almost as soon as they were out of the launchers.
Line of sight works both ways. I plugged my helmet into the gunner’s console, cranked the magnification of the gun sight to maximum, and popped the safety cap of the fire control with my thumb. Then I returned the favor.
The chin turret of a Wasp is fitted with a three-barreled twenty-five millimeter cannon that fires caseless shells at twelve hundred rounds per minute. From a mile away, the chain of impact explosions from the dual-purpose rounds looked like a chain of tiny volcanoes had just erupted in sequence on the ridge line. I held the trigger down for about five seconds and raked the ridge from left to right. There were no follow-up rocket shots from the Russians.
My cannon fire bought us about five minutes. I took the time to wipe the data off the memory banks of my ship, rendering her as dumb as she had been in the storage hangar. The self-destruct mechanism would blow the entire ship into fine shrapnel, but sometimes it doesn’t trigger properly, and we were all instructed to lobotomize our birds if we ditched on enemy soil. By the time I was done, the Russians had worked up enough courage again to shoot at us again, this time with small arms fire. I took up my spot in the gunner’s seat again and popped off bursts at likely hiding spots. My crew had gotten clear of the ship and taken up position a few hundred meters behind the bird, out of the line of fire for now. The Russians were out for blood now, and if they managed to get around the zone covered by my gun turret, they would have us all in the bag anyway.
For the next ten minutes, it was a gun duel--my autocannon against their rifles and belt-fed guns. Every time I saw movement on the rocky plain in front of me, I put a short burst into the general vicinity. I don’t know how many of them I actually got, but I didn’t kill enough to discourage the rest, because they kept coming, and their fire kept getting more accurate. The Wasp shrugged off the rifle fire, but some of the belt-fed guns were loaded with harder stuff, and the armored cockpit glass started falling apart under the cumulative hits. One of the Russians had a heavy-caliber anti-materiel rifle, and the first round from that beast came clean through the middle of my center cockpit panel and center-punched the pilot seat I had been sitting in until we crash-landed. I hunkered down behind the front instrument panel and kept shooting back, pumping out explosive rounds and watching the ammo counter work its way down to triple and then double digits.
The first time one of their rounds hit me, I didn’t even realize I had been shot. I just felt something wet run down my right arm and drip off my fingertips, and when I tore myself away from the gun sight to investigate, I saw that something had zipped through the sleeve of my flight suit. As I was peeling the wet sleeve off my skin, another burst of fire finally shattered the front panel completely, and I took a shard in the same arm, almost down by the elbow. That one hurt like hell right away.
I guess they knew they had tagged me when I didn’t return fire right away, because that’s when the incoming fire really picked up. I think every Russian left alive between those rocks started hosing down the front of Lucky Thirteen. I was just about out of ammo anyway, so I slipped out of the gunner’s seat and dropped to the floor while the flechettes and tungsten darts from the Russian guns tore up the cockpit just above my head. I crawled through the open hatch and pulled it shut behind me with my good hand. The rounds pinging off the laminated armor sounded like hail hitting a window pane.
I got up, stepped into the ship’s armory to grab a rifle and a bag of magazines, and then went over to the bulkhead that held the trigger for the Wasp’s built-in demolition charge.
Removing the safety and pulling that lever felt like putting a gun to the head of a puppy, and pulling the trigger. But I knew she’d never fly again, and I didn’t want her to end up as a war trophy, parked in front of some Russian company building. Thirteen would have a fast and thorough death, with nothing left behind to rust away in a scrapyard somewhere.
I pulled the lever, hard. Then I gathered my rifle and dashed out of the troop compartment, down the lowered tail hatch, and into the open.
The Russians didn’t see me at first because the bulk of Lucky Thirteen was between me and them, and by the time their flanking elements had spotted me, I was already fifty yards away and headed for cover. They still shot at me, of course. It’s amazing how fast you can run when enemy rifle rounds are kicking up the dust next to you. The self-destruct mechanism on a Wasp has a fifteen-second fuse before it sprays all the remaining fuel into the ship’s interior to make a huge fuel-air bomb. My shipmates were all hunkered down behind a rock ledge maybe eighty yards away, and I cleared the ledge with two seconds to spare.
Nothing happened.
I waited another ten, twenty, then thirty seconds with my face in the dirt and my hands over my ears, waiting for Lucky Thirteen to rend herself apart like a giant grenade, but all I heard was the staccato of the Russian rifles. After a minute or two had passed, I chanced a peek over the rock ledge, and saw Lucky Thirteen still sitting in the same spot, smoke trailing from her destroyed engine, and Russian marines advancing on her in the open. With our wounded, there was no way we could outrun the Russians once they figured out we had all flown the coop. There was only one thing left to do--sell ourselves as dearly as possible. I lowered my head again, checked the loading status of my rifle, and signaled the others to get ready to engage.
The sky overhead was a lovely cobalt blue, the stars bright even in the planetary afternoon. I knew our own sun was among them. I briefly marveled at the thought that since the moment those photons left our own sun, I had been born, raised, educated, inducted into the Commonwealth Defense Corps, and trained to fly a drop ship, and I had still beaten the light to Fomalhaut by a few days.
Then I flicked the safety of my rifle to salvo fire and got up to fight, because there was nothing else left to do.
We were seven against fifty, and most of us were wounded. When we engaged, the Russians were caught by surprise, and our first bursts of fire took out half a dozen of them. After that, we were screwed. They knew where we were, they had the numbers on us, and they had Lucky Thirteen for cover. We got two or three more, and then the return fire had us ducking back behind cover.
“I got Fleet on comms,” Staff Sergeant Fisher told me over the din of the gunfire. “Air support is on the way. ETA ten minutes.”
“That’s super,” I replied. “You speak any Russian? Tell those guys to take a piss break until then, and we’re good.”
The next time I popped my head up to fire back, I glanced at Lucky Thirteen and saw that the Russians were all over her, using her armored hull as cover.
I’ll never be able to tell for sure how I knew what was about to happen. There was something in the air all of a sudden--a whiff of burnt ozone smell, and a strange sound, like a piezo switch. It felt as if the air itself was electrically charged. All I remember is that I ducked back behind the rock ledge, and yelled at the others to get down, get down,
get the fuck down.
Lucky Thirteen blew up with the loudest
bang
I’ve ever heard in my life. The shock of the explosion traveled through the rock and knocked us all flat on our asses. From one moment to the next, the air was so thick with dust that I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me.
I have no idea how long we were huddled down behind the rock ledge, blind and deaf, with debris and dust raining down on us. The Russians could have finished us off easily at that point, if there had been any left. When we dust finally settled, and we gathered ourselves up, the little plateau where Lucky Thirteen had crash-landed was swept clean. In the spot where the ship had been, there was a shallow depression in the rock, and streaks of black burn marks fanning out in every direction. All around, there were burning and smoldering drop ship parts, none of them bigger than a mess table.
Lucky Thirteen had done me a last favor. The fuse for the self-destruct charge had delayed until the ship had Russians crawling all over and inside her--until the explosion would do the most good.
I’m not one of the superstitious pilots. My rational side knows it was a technical fluke, a delay in the trigger mechanism, a circuit that didn’t close in time, a fortunate defect. But part of me wants to believe that the ship saved my life that day--that this collection of parts bolted together thirty years ago in a factory back on Earth, a Wasp-C like a thousand others and yet like no other ship I’ve ever flown, knew our peril and immolated itself at just the right moment, in a final act of service to its pilot.
The cavalry arrived ten minutes too late, as it often does. The Shrikes made a few passes overhead, but if there were any Russians left alive, they wisely remained under cover. Twenty minutes after that, a pair of SAR drop ships swooped in and scooped us up.
While we were waiting for the drop ships, Sergeant Fisher picked up something in the dirt, looked it over briefly, and tucked it into his pocket. Later, when we were strapped into our jump seats and on the way back to the ship in orbit, he fished the item out and handed it to me without a word.
It was a chunk of Lucky Thirteen’s assembly number plate, twisted and charred on both ends. The manufacturer’s name was missing, but I could clearly read her serial number on the mangled little strip of steel:
13-02313.
I bit my lip and slipped the number plate into my own pocket, also without a word.
They patched us up and gave us medals. I put Sergeant Fisher in for a Silver Star, and he got it. The Captain in charge of the recon team we picked up recommended me for an award as well. The division brass looked over the records and decided that I should get a Distinguished Flying Cross for Fomalhaut. Two months later, they called me down to the hangar deck, and the regiment’s CO pinned the DFC onto my baggy flight suit.
I didn’t turn it down, even though I didn’t want it. You don’t turn down awards just because you think you don’t deserve them. If the drop ship jocks started doing that, the only people wearing ribbons would be the desk jockeys, the officers who let their buddies put them in for medals after milk run missions that may have involved shots fired within half a parsec. Promotions ride on points, and those ribbons count for a lot of those points. I took the medal, saluted, and smiled like a good Second Lieutenant who wants to make Captain someday.