Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(90)
Halley pops the safety cover off the launch button on her flight stick.
“Let’s rock,” she says.
The heavy antiarmor cannons on the underside of the Dragonfly rap out a thundering staccato: boom-boom-boom. The reports echo in the artificial canyon between the buildings and reverberate off the concrete surfaces all around us until it sounds like an entire wing of drop ships just opened fire. Tracers shoot across the plaza and smack into the nearest Lanky in a shower of sparks and flying shrapnel. I realize that Halley made her loop around the towers to get a clear shot at the Lankies, to minimize the risk of these heavy cannon shells hitting the buildings instead. She works her trigger like a musician timing a beat.
The Lanky shrieks that unearthly wail that has chased me through many dreams in the last few years. In this place, it sounds utterly foreign. The sound is so earsplittingly loud that it almost drowns out the thunder from the Dragonfly’s weapons. It flails its long, spindly limbs and ducks from the hail of gunfire pouring from Halley’s autocannons. Halley doesn’t give it any reprieve. She keeps up a methodic staccato of bursts that rake the Lanky’s head and torso. Several cannon shells ricochet off the cranial shield that makes the Lankies look a little like old Earth dinosaurs. The tracers careen into the darkness and explode against unseen obstacles in brilliant little bursts of white-hot sparks.
The Lanky turns around and strides away from the cannon fire in long, halting steps. Halley shifts her fire and sends a stream of tracer shells into its lower body. The Lanky stumbles, and its own momentum carries it forward. It flails wildly as it crashes to the concrete of the plaza. Its head hits the wall of the nearby residence tower and tears a three-meter gash into the concrete facade. When the Lanky hits the ground, a cloud of concrete dust billows up around it.
The two other Lankies are crossing the plaza in long, thundering strides, away from the drop ship and its lethal cannon fire. Halley fires another burst into the Lanky on the ground and then swings the nose of the Dragonfly around. The spindly bastards can move amazingly fast for something that large. Not twenty seconds have passed since Halley first opened fire, and one of the remaining pair of Lankies is already all the way across the plaza and disappearing behind another one of the residence towers. The other is right in the middle of the plaza, stalking after its companion in the biggest hurry I’ve ever seen one move. Halley puts the thumb down on her flight stick button, and the cannons spit out their hail of red-hot fire and death again.
The shells pepper the Lanky’s torso and the backs of its legs. Its stride falters, and the huge alien stumbles and falls to the ground with a dull and resonant concussion. Halley keeps up her fire—short, deadly accurate bursts of two or three shells at a time, using the entire ship to aim the guns. There’s a cluster of small one-story buildings where the Lanky fell—food-distribution booths or vendor stalls maybe—and the Lanky’s enormous mass flattens them as if they were empty ration boxes. It tries to scramble to its feet in the rubble, but Halley rakes its legs with another burst, and it crashes back down to the ground, wailing its shaky and warbling cry at deafening volume. The unearthly sound reverberates from the concrete canyons nearby. I’ve always wondered what that noise would sound like in the middle of a major city, and now I don’t have to wonder anymore. It sounds like something from an old monster feature on the Networks.
“Goddammit,” Halley shouts. “Will you just fucking die already?”
But the Lanky doesn’t do us the favor. Instead, it rights itself once more and scoops up what looks like half a ton of random debris with a long and spindly arm. Then it flings the load of shattered bits of concrete wall and corrugated roofing at us from maybe fifty meters away.
“Whoa,” Halley says. She ceases her cannon fire and pulls up the nose of the Dragonfly sharply. The engines increase the pitch of their noise, and then we are flying backwards. For a moment, I see the tops of the nearest two residence towers through the windshield of the drop ship, and the dirty night sky beyond. I am keenly aware that we are between two of those towers, with very little clearance for maneuvering. I look to my right and see windows, and faces staring back at me. Then a bunch of debris noisily hits the armored underside of the drop ship. The Dragonfly shakes with the impacts. From the cargo bay in the back of the ship, I can hear some concerned shouts from the grunts, who are undoubtedly hanging on for dear life as Halley yanks our ship’s nose almost straight up into the sky and hurls us backward and upward, away from the immediate danger.
I hold my breath as the Dragonfly hurtles backwards on the tip of its tail for what seems entirely too long considering how close we are to the ground and the buildings on either side of us. Then we are clear of the towers, and Halley gooses the throttle and pivots the ship to the left and downward in one swift, stomach-lurching move. When the nose of the drop ship tilts down again, we are so close to the ground that I could hop out of the cockpit and jump onto the concrete below without hurting myself.
“Testy little fucker,” Halley says almost conversationally, as if she had just done nothing more exciting than duck away from a swing. She turns the nose of the drop ship to the left and accelerates the ship. We are flying alongside one of the residence towers now, this time with a little more clearance than before, but we’re still much closer than I want to be to that much unyielding concrete and steel when I’m hurtling through the night air at over a hundred knots.