Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(91)

When we swing back around the tower and point the nose of the ship back toward the plaza again, the Lanky is no longer there.

“Where’d he go?” she says. She rotates the Dragonfly around its dorsal axis and skids into the plaza sideways, like she’s drifting a hydrocar around a corner. In five years of frequent passenger status on drop ships, I’ve never seen a pilot handle one like Halley is flying hers.

“There he is.” I point to our starboard. At twenty-five meters in height, Lankies can’t hide all that well even in their own environments, much less in a place built for beings a tenth their size. The Lanky is crouching in the entrance vestibule of one of the residence towers, hammering away at the concrete of the tall archway with its head.

“Shoot him,” I urge. “Shoot his ass.”

“I can’t,” Halley replies. “Not with the big guns. I’ll hit the building.”

She switches to the smaller-caliber multibarreled cannon mounted in the chin turret. This one has a much higher rate of fire than the big antiarmor cannons on the side of the fuselage. Halley mashes down on her trigger button, and a rapid-fire hail of smaller tracers streaks over to the Lanky. They ricochet off into every direction, kicking up little puffs of concrete dust wherever they hit the walls and ground all around the Lanky. The archway of the atrium entrance is four floors tall, at least forty feet, and with another violent push, the Lanky dislodges a few meters of reinforced concrete from the top of the archway and breaks through, away from Halley’s relentless gunfire. The Lanky disappears into the atrium beyond with a long and tortured-sounding wail, leaving a cloud of concrete dust and falling debris in its wake.

“I can’t get to him in there,” Halley says. “Not without guided munitions. Goddamn, I wish I had some missiles on these wings.”

“Put us on the ground,” I say. “I’ll take a squad inside and smoke the Lanky out. You take the other squads down the street and hunt down the other one that got away.”

Halley nods and swings the nose of the Wasp around for a landing on the plaza below.

“Get them ready,” she says. “I don’t want to spend more than a second and a half with the skids on the ground in this place—do you understand?”

I push the release for the seat harness and toggle the switch for the Dragonfly’s intercom.

“Fallon, Grayson. Get a squad onto the tail ramp. We are going hunting.”

“Affirmative,” the answer comes from the cargo hold.

“Your show down there, but call in the guns if you need help,” Halley says to me. “Don’t you dare get yourself killed.”

“This is what I do,” I say, and peel myself out of the seat to go aft. “Honey.”

She flinches a little and then flips me the bird without taking her eyes off the Dragonfly’s instrument screen.

“Have fun, but be back for dinner,” she says.

I rush down the passageway aft. In the cargo compartment, the HD troopers are gearing up, distributing rocket launchers from the armory’s magazine and stacking a bunch of them on the tail ramp.

“We land, you kick all the shit we can’t carry out of here and leave it in a pile on the ground,” I yell into the din of clanking gear and pre-battle banter. “We’ll come back for that stuff later. We go inside and after the Lanky. Second and Third Squads go with Halley. She’ll drop them off on the far side of the next residence block to run down the other Lanky.”

“Only two of them left?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“Be glad,” I say. “Fuckers don’t drop easy.”

The drop ship swerves and rotates around its dorsal axis. The red caution light comes on over the tail hatch, and the ramp starts to lower while we are still in the air. Outside, there’s the plaza between the four residence towers that make up this block, acres of dirty concrete and a collection of some booths and shacks over to one side.

Then the ship’s skids touch down on the plaza with a solid thud.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. “Kick out the gear. First Squad, off the bus!”

We file out of the drop ship at a run. I am carrying entirely too much hardware—an M-66 fléchette carbine for human targets, an M-80 for Lankies, ammunition for both, and a pistol. If I stumble, I may be stuck on my back like a turtle.

Behind us, Second and Third Squads are tossing out our spare MARS rockets. Then Halley gooses her engines again and lifts off, not even bothering to close the tail ramp. She pitches the nose down slightly and swings the ship around. She thunders across the plaza at low level, so close to us that I can almost read the name tag taped to the browridge of her flight helmet. As she flies by, she gives me a quick thumbs-up, and the Dragonfly disappears from sight behind one of the nearby residence towers.

I turn and follow the squad into the ruined vestibule. Ahead of us, inside the atrium, the Lanky wails again, a sound only slightly less intense than an explosion.

The new fifth-gen residence towers are massive things, a hundred floors of apartments and facilities arranged around a large hollow core for ventilation. The atrium on the ground floor is a big plaza, fifty meters on each side. We rush in through the crumbling archway of the vestibule, weapons at the ready. The Lanky is impossible to miss even in the huge atrium. It has retreated into a corner of the plaza, and the shield-like protrusion on the back of its head is brushing the balcony of the sixth-floor concourse.