Jacobi’s Skyrines disperse into three fire teams, arranged in a spread-out triangle. My status puts me as a fourth wheel on the short team, and Borden thrusts a pistol into my hands.
The hail and wind blow up and away, exposing us to anyone who cares to look (of course). The air is amazingly clear. Sizzling, popping ice litters the dust—hail drying faster than it can melt. Jacobi sticks up like a meerkat, surveys the flats from her full five nine, then swings her right arm to the northeast. I see our enemy, too, bobbing black dots out there at maybe half a klick. Jacobi pivots and swings her hand southeast—more dots. Things with ill intent fill fighting holes on both sides of our line of travel, as if they knew we’d be coming.
A bolt lifts up and screams to hit not twenty meters off, upending the flaming chassis of the Trundle, which emits that ghastly, up-smeared glow of spent matter depleting all at once into the sky—the vehicle’s energy rising in controlled detonation. Three surviving vehicles—two Tonkas and the Chesty—roll around us, any minute over us, firing with all they’ve got at the same targets Jacobi has spotted—quick curves of rising and falling bolts, the straight-out, washboard-roaring, nauseating rip of lawnmower pulses, whiz-screams of disruptors, concentrated on the fighting holes. Two broad patches become flaming blue-green luaus.
Then our team leaps as one and crazy-jogs the distance to where we saw heads bob. I take the run with Ishida and Jacobi. We square off at about ten meters and stoop. Something in the hole is blasting our direction without taking aim, single weapon sputtering half-charged bolts—down to almost nothing. I’m hit by a smoking green blob that tries to burn a hole through my chest but can’t do more than crisp the upper layer of skintight. More green blobs lob from the ditch—
One brighter than the others passes over my right, and the Skyrine behind me—the gunnery sergeant? Tanaka?—keels over flat with fire twisting from his back—
We’re within three meters of the ditch, staring down at a fucking Antag sprawled on its back, wings out, doing a dust angel, faceplate fogged, low on gasps, and scared shitless—even so, aiming its bolt rifle over the rim of the hole to zero us if it can.
Ishida drops to her knees, the pair of us behind her follow, and together, we all pump the hole with bolts and a lawnmower beam until dust and dirt and charred bastard kibble blow from the ditch like the plume from a small volcano.
Another brighter bolt flies over our lowered heads from the Chesty, I hope, and blows the ditch all to hell, knocking us back on our lightly padded asses. We’re kept busy for a few seconds cursing and brushing each other off, tamping out the smoking shit with the backs of our gloves. A comic display of self-concern before we even know the fight is over, but what the fuck, it’ll be over for us right now if our skintights don’t hold suck.
I’ve somehow hit the deck again and spread out. Borden has her arm over my back, cozy-protective. I try to shove her off but she stubbornly shields me. Jacobi stands again, slings her bolt rifle, daring more fire—she’ll take it or she’ll know where the fuck it comes from, and I admire that, I really do.
Then, “Thirty it. We’re done,” she says over comm.
Surrounded by little whirls of smoke, in the middle of our own fading dust devil of soot and flakes of enemy, we stop, lift our heads, look around, assess….
We’re alive.
Some of us.
I roll out from under Borden’s arm but we wait another few seconds to rise, not as ape-shit brave as Jacobi. And perhaps not as sensitive to when the action is over. I’m out of practice, I tell myself—but truly, I accept that Jacobi is superior, I’ll follow her anywhere, even knowing we’re going to die in the end, because she’s so fucking awesome.
Borden shadows me, just inches away. Our brand-new Tonka is behind us, flaring and slumping into puddles of silvery metal. I see maybe three crispy critters within the collapsed and sputtering frame. We are left with two intact vehicles and perhaps twelve Russians and as many Skyrines and of course Kumar, he made it, I’ve made it—
Shit. I’m pumped, I’m scared, I’ve pissed and filled my drawers—I’ve become shit sausage. My skintight works frantically to process what was once safely wrapped in bowels and bladder, as well as filtering the salty, smelly fluid leaking from all of my pores.
All I can say to Borden is “Stinky.”
Big-eyed, she nods.
Litvinov and three of his soldiers join us. The Russians take a knee and view the scene through scoped bolt rifles. I hear little seeking whees and clicks.
I can still hear. That’s good. One thing about air on the Red is—
Fuck that.
Litvinov sends four more soldiers across the flats to make sure the opposite attackers are down and scrapped. They drop and zig-crawl, rise and run hunched—a talent in low-g, where any little toe jab can loft you like a clay pigeon. When Jacobi gives the all-clear, we cross the dust and join them.
Along the horizon, as if nothing’s happened, rise more of those goddamned drunken pillars of dust, reeling and scribbling in Mars’s diary: What you say, Bwana? Bullll-shee-it. Don’t look at us. We’re busy.
Jacobi kicks her boot at a piece of charred reddish-gray fabric that barely covers what was once the arm or wing of an Antag warrior. Another step and she nudges a helm, weirdly intact after all that energy—a cup cradling the four-eyed, beaked head of a warrior who came all the way from the distant stars to die right here on the Red. This one looks at us with a lazy, crowlike leer—or maybe not—through two large outboard eyes and two smaller eyes above the bridge of the beak. The eyes are frosting over and shrinking now that the big heat is gone and moisture is being sucked away. Its raspy tongue is frozen between the open halves of the beak, like a bird’s, but studded with what look like teeth. Ishida comes over and pries open the beak. Inside—flatter teeth for grinding. It chews with its tongue. More like a squid or a snail, somehow.
Ishida mocks a gag and backs away.
As if conducting a tour, Jacobi joins Ishida and both wave us forward, then jump into one of the Antag fighting holes and pull back strips of camouflaged cover, sliced into six-inch ribbons by our lawnmower. The strips barely conceal a small pressure tank and a broken-bladed fan—a small fountain. For gathering sips and gasps and fuel from the thin atmosphere. The Antags weren’t many, at this point in their mission, but they were here for the long haul. And they knew they would die.
Litvinov approaches, opens comm, and turns to me. We’re wearing weird little skull grins, both of us; our cheeks hurt, Momma says our faces will freeze this way—but we’re alive, and it’s either grin or bawl like a baby, even the big, tough colonel.
He says, “Bet you other Antagonista soon come and finish. Is it bet?”
“House always wins,” I say.
“Truth,” he says. This is afterglow, we’re stinky and jazzy and fear isn’t in it, not now. We’re beyond that sour shit into hypercalm or just plain hyper, a weirdly happy state almost like an out-of-body experience. Like the Antags in the trench, we know we’re going to die out here. Nobody fucking goes home.
The colonel scans the smoking wrecks and our own charred dead. Skyrines and Russians join to assess our losses. Taking names and blazes if any. We’ve heard that Russians reduce their dead in place. There’s little oxygen for cremation so bolts do the work. Litvinov’s soldiers start that process, shooting energy into the shattered Trundle and two Tonkas, taking care of their dead and ours as well. The vehicles flare purple-white. The corpses wither and smoke. Bits of char and ash top our helms and shoulders. We brush them off.