Then came the day we got a pair of fresh-off-the-floor Whiskey Wasps, so new that their pilot seats were still covered in plastic wrap. Normally, a pair of brand new ships in the wing triggers a complex series of trickle-down upgrades as the senior pilots claim the new birds and pass their old ones down the roster to the junior jocks. This time, Lieutenant Colonel Connolly came to me and offered me the brand new Whiskey Wasp he was slated to receive if I let him have Lucky Thirteen in exchange.
It was a singular pleasure to decline his offer.
The Fleet has another tradition: once you find something that works for you, and you get attached to it, you end up losing it.
Lucky Thirteen died on a cold and sunny day out on some desolate rock around Fomalhaut. She didn’t get blown out of the sky or stomped flat by a Lanky. I killed her myself.
I went down to the planet to pick up a recon team that had been compromised. When we got to the rendezvous point, our four Recon guys were engaged with what looked like an entire company of Russians. I’ve done hot pickups before, but never one where I had to pry our guys from the embrace of half the planetary garrison.
The Russian troops were not very keen on having their prize snatched away by a solitary drop ship. As soon as I came swooping into the pickup zone, all kinds of shit came flying our way. Judging by the amount of hand-held missiles launched from the ground, every other trooper in that company must have taken an anti-aircraft tube along for the chase. My threat scanner lit up, and soon I was busy dodging missiles and pumping out countermeasures. All the while, the guys on the ground were screaming for us to come back and pluck them out of the mess. Finally, the ground fire slacked off a bit, and I rolled back into the target area with my thumb on the launch button.
The Russians had our team pinned down, and their lead squad was so close to our guys that you couldn’t have driven a utility truck through the space between them without rolling over somebody’s feet. I made a close pass with the cannons, and the Russians ran for cover. By then, I had the attention of the whole company, and everyone aimed their rifles and belt-fed guns skyward and let fly. The small arms fire pinging off Lucky Thirteen’s armor was so dense that it sounded like hail in an ice storm. On my next pass, I emptied most of the rocket pods on my external ordnance pylons, gave my left-seater instructions to use our chin turret liberally, and then put our ship down right between the Russians and our chewed-up recon team.
Staff Sergeant Fisher was the bravest crew chief I’ve ever had. He had that ramp down the second our bird hit the dirt, and he was out to help the injured Recon guys into our ship, even though the incoming fire was churning up little dust fountains all over the place. Only one of the Recon guys was still able to walk onto the ramp on his own feet. Sergeant Fisher went out three times to get the other guys, dashing across fifty yards of live-firing shooting range every time, and hauling back two hundred pounds of armor-suited Recon trooper on each trip. Finally he had everyone back in the hold, and I redlined the thrust gauge getting our bird off the ground and out of there.
We didn’t get too far. The Russians had called in their own gunship for support, and it managed to sneak up on us right above the deck without pegging the threat scanner. I was focused on keeping us going at low level and high speed when I heard a sharp warbling sound from the radar warning sensor. He must have been almost on top of us when he launched, because I didn’t even have time to thumb my countermeasures button. The Russian missile went right into our starboard engine, which was running at a hundred and twenty percent, and blew it all to hell. For a second or two, we were headed for the dirt at seven hundred knots, but then I caught her, and brought the ship out of the spin we had been knocked into. I pointed her up at the blue sky and goosed her last remaining engine.
The Russian had been so close behind us that he ended up overshooting us, which was a stroke of luck, because I still had all four of my Copperhead air-to-air missiles on the wingtips. I launched two of them cold, waited until the Russian pilot kicked out his countermeasures, and then launched the remaining pair right up his ass with a solid lock. One nailed his port engine, and the other one chopped off the last third of his ship’s tail, along with the tail rudder and the vertical stabilizers. We were only a thousand feet or so off the deck, and the Russian pilot barely had time to eject his crew before his ship cartwheeled into the rocks and went up in a lovely fireball.
Our ship was only in slightly better shape. I stabilized our attitude and let the computer figure out how badly we were hurt. The Russian missile had taken out our engine, and some of the secondary shrapnel had severed the main data bus along with three out of the four hydraulic lines. We were still airworthy, but only barely, and spaceflight was out of the question. With the hurt Recon guys in the back, we couldn’t do like the Russians and eject, so I backed off the throttle and looked for a good place to put down my wounded bird.
Fomalhaut’s moon is a rocky, dusty piece of shit, like most of the places we fight over with the SRA. It looked like the desert out in Utah where I went to Basic, only without even the little bit of vegetation we had out there. With my remaining engine starting to cough up its inner workings, I couldn’t be too picky, so I chose the first patch of ground that looked reasonably even and rock-free, and directed whatever juice I had left in the battered ship to cushion our descent. We actually hit the dirt lightly enough for me to put down the skids and do a proper three-point touchdown. The way the landing site was laid out meant that I had to make my final approach facing the way we had come. Those turned out our lucky breaks in the end. The skid landing meant that the chin turret could still rotate, and the approach had the ship come to rest pointing at the plateau where we had just picked up our recon team.
As soon as we were down in the dirt, I turned off the engine to keep it from tearing itself to shreds. At that point, Thirteen was still salvageable—missing an engine and chewed up by shrapnel, but they had brought her back from near-scrap condition twice before. Our electrical system still worked, and I sent out a distress call while Sergeant Fisher lowered the tail ramp and started hauling people out of the hull. But when my left-seater reached for the Master Power switch to turn off the ship completely, I waved him off.
“Just leave her on until the batteries run dry,” I said to him.
We were within line of sight of the plateau where half a company of pissed-off Russian marines had watched our descent, and not two minutes after our landing, the threat warning receiver started chirping again. I glanced at it to see that we were being targeted by millimeter-wave short range radar bursts, probably the Russian version of our MARS assault rocket launchers. One of those could blow up what was left of Lucky Thirteen, but we were at the limit of their effective range, and my ship still had her countermeasures suite. I switched the system to AUTONOMOUS and got out of my seat.
“Sergeant Fisher and Lieutenant Denton, get those grunts out of here and to cover somewhere.”
“Copy that, ma’am,” Lieutenant Denton said. “What’s the plan?”
“You wait for the evac birds and stay low. I’ll hop into the gunner’s seat and warm up the cannon. Now move. Doubletime.”