Angles of Attack Read Free

cannon on the Akula drop ship overhead.
    “Dmitry, tell those Akula pilots we have close air incoming. They’ll sweep that area over there. Let’s not have any incidents.”
    Dmitry gives me a lazy thumbs-up without stopping his work on the control deck he has set up on a piece of rubble in front of him.
    “Don’t worry, my man,” he says, in what sounds like a mock American surfer-dude accent. “Russian soldiers are trained professionals.”
    Over by the north end of the airfield, beyond the runway, three Lankies appear, their eighty-foot forms towering over the rocky landscape. The drop ship overhead opens up with its cannons again. I can’t feel the concussions of the muzzle blasts through my bug suit, but the dust underneath my boots gets kicked up as the Russian drop ship rakes the incoming Lankies with armor-piercing explosive grenades. One of them falls, then another, both shrieking and wailing. Their vocalizations sound like nothing I’ve ever heard on Earth. They’re sharp and piercing and full of deep, rumbling intensity at the same time.
    Above our heads, the drop ship pulls up and ascends away from the airfield. Dmitry shouts something to his troops, who form a double line on the tarmac in front of me. The SRA marines in the front row drop to one knee. All of them aim their rifles at the remaining Lanky, 150 meters away and closing in on us. The Russians have big, powerful anti-Lanky rifles, but theirs aren’t twin-barreled like ours. Instead, the SRA equivalents are single-shot breechloaders, with bores that look even bigger than those of the M-80 I carry. The kneeling row of SRA marines fire their rifles at the Lanky to a command I can’t hear, and six rifles pound out shots at the same instant, a deep thunderclap that sounds almost like a single report. The breeches on their guns fly open and eject the brass bases of their caseless rounds, and the second row of marines prepare their own guns. I watch as the SRA marines fire three, four, five volleys in rapid succession, each row shooting while the other reloads, like line infantry of the old colonial days on Earth. The advancing Lanky takes six, then twelve, then eighteen impacts to its head and chest, each marked by the small violent puff of a high-explosive armor-piercing round. By the fifth volley, the Lanky stumbles and falls. Then it crashes to the ground, its bulk shaking the earth underneath my boots. The marines’ five volleys took maybe eight or nine seconds. Their Lanky-engagement tactics are completely unlike ours, but I’ll be damned if they don’t work at least as well.
    All over the SRA settlement, I hear gunfire, like a discordant martial symphony: the deep booms of our M-80s and SRA anti-Lanky rifles, the pop-whoosh of MARS rocket launchers, the thunderclaps of exploding grenades and rockets, all mixed in with the wailing of Lankies and the din from the cannons of the overhead drop ships. Every bit of aboveground infrastructure here in town is wrecked, and only some of the squat and sturdy settlement buildings are still standing amid the rubble. But there are no Lanky nerve-gas pods littering the ground here, no clusters of dead settlers anywhere. It’s like they’re fighting with their hands tied behind their backs. Whatever the reason, I’m perfectly happy with this change in our fortunes, however temporary it may be.
    As the NAC troops on the ground spot and engage targets, contact icons pop up on my tactical display. I can’t see what the Russians are seeing because our tactical networks don’t talk to each other, but everything our own troops see and do gets transmitted to my bug suit’s computer and the control deck I’m carrying. The human troops are an enclave of blue icons, the Lankies a wide and irregular circle of orange symbols all around us, clustered in groups of three or four at the most.
    The SRA base and town sit at the end of a rocky plateau. On one end of the town, there’s a gradual drop-off into a