“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.”