Lucky Thirteen Read online

  Lucky Thirteen

  Marko Kloos

  The story of rookie pilot Lt. Halley’s first drop ship command.

  A short story in the Terms of Enlistment universe.

  Marko Kloos

  LUCKY THIRTEEN

  The Fleet has a tradition: the rookie drop ship commander in the unit always gets the ship nobody else wants.

  My hand-me-down was Lucky Thirteen. There was nothing wrong with her, technically speaking. She was an older model Wasp, not one of the new Dragonflies, but most of our wing was still on Wasps back then. But pilots are a superstitious bunch, and it had been decided that Lucky Thirteen was an unlucky ship. Before they gave her to me, she had lost two crews with all hands, one of them with the entire troop compartment loaded to the last seat. Both times, they recovered the ship, hosed her out, and patched her up again. A ship surviving an all-hands loss without being destroyed is very unusual—surviving two of them is so rare that I’ve never heard of such a thing before or since.

  Her hull number wasn’t actually 13. She wore a dark red 5 on her olive drab flanks. But one of the grease monkeys had found her assembly number plate while swapping out some fried parts one day, and the news made the rounds that the unlucky ship’s serial number was 13-02313. Not only did it have a leading and trailing 13 in it, but all the digits of her serial number also added up to 13. So branded, she was named “Lucky Thirteen”, and put in storage as a cold spare until they needed an airframe for the new Second Lieutenant. Then they dusted her off, updated the computers, and handed me the keys.

  She came with a new crew chief—Staff Sergeant Fisher. I met him for the first time when I went down to the storage hangar to check out my new ride. He was already busy with her, plugging all kinds of diagnostics hardware into the data ports in her bowels. When I walked around Lucky Thirteen for the first time, I noticed that he had already painted my name onto the armor belt underneath the cockpit window: 2LT HALLEY “COMET”.

  “I took the liberty,” Sergeant Fisher said when I ran my fingers across the stenciled letters of my call sign. “Hope you don’t mind, ma’am.”

  “Not at all,” I told him. “She’s really yours anyway. I just get to take her out every once in a while.”

  He smiled, obviously pleased to be assigned to a pilot who knew the proper chain of ownership in a drop ship wing.

  “Don’t let the talk bother you. About her being unlucky, I mean. She’s a good ship. I checked her top to bottom, and she’s in better shape than some of the new crates.”

  “Talk doesn’t bother me, Sarge,” I told him. “I’m not the superstitious kind. It’s just a machine.”

  “No, ma’am,” Sergeant Fisher replied, and the smile on his face morphed into a bit of a smirk.

  “She ain’t just a machine. They all have personalities, same as you and I.”

  Lucky Thirteen did have a personality, all right. Fortunately, it meshed well with mine.

  I’ve flown dozens of Wasp drop ships, from the barebones A1 models they mostly use as trainers now to the newest Whiskey Wasps that are so crammed full of upgrades that they might as well give them their own class name. None of them had the same responsive controls as Lucky Thirteen. The Wasps have always been twitchy in any version—you have to fly them with your fingertips, because they’re so sensitive to control input. No Wasp likes a heavy hand on the stick. Lucky Thirteen was even twitchier than the average Wasp, but once you had her figured out, you could pull off maneuvers that most new pilots would consider physically impossible. Something about Lucky Thirteen was just right. Maybe it was the harmonics of the frame, maybe the way all her parts had worked themselves into synchronicity with each other—but flying her felt like you were an integral part of the ship, not just her driver.

  Thirteen and I had five weeks to get used to each other before we had our first combat drop together. We were the tail end of a four-ship flight, tasked to ferry a Spaceborne Infantry company down to Procyon Bc’s solitary moon. We had beaten the local Chinese garrison into submission from orbit, and now the 940th SI Regiment was going to drop into the path of the retreating Chinese troops to finish them off before they could rally and reform.

  Intel never figured out what went wrong that day. I don’t know if the Chinese managed to hack into our secure battle network, or if it was just a case of really shitty luck. What I do know is that our drop ship flight went skids down to let the troops disembark near a ridge line, and that all hell broke loose as soon as we hit the ground. The landing zone was lined with those new autonomous anti-aircraft gun pods the Chinese put in service—thirty-six barrels in six rows of six, each stacked from front to back with superposed loads. The whole thing is hooked up to a passive IFF module and short-range radar and parked out of sight. We didn’t get a whiff of them on our threat scanners until they opened fire. Each of those things shoots a quarter million rounds per minute, and while each individual shell won’t do a great deal of damage to an armored drop ship, the cumulative effect is like aiming a high-pressure water hose at an anthill.

  We had landed in diamond formation, Lucky Thirteen at the tail end of the diamond, furthest away from the row of gun pods waiting for us. That’s what saved our bacon that day. My crew chief had just released the tail ramp when I saw hundreds of muzzle flashes lighting up the night in front of us.

  I yelled at the Sarge to pull the ramp back up and goosed the engines to get us off the ground again. In front of us, the lead drop ship had already started disgorging its platoon, and half their troops were already out of the ship and in the line of fire. For a moment, I fully intended to drop my bird between the exposed troops and the guns, but then the lead Wasp just blew up right in front of me. One moment, it was squatting on the ground, SI troopers seeking cover all around it, and the next moment it was just a cloud of parts getting flung in every direction.

  I got us back in the air at that point. I flew Thirteen about three hundred meters backwards on her tail, to keep the belly armor between us and those guns. Then I flipped the ship around, did the lowest wing-over I’ve ever done, and high-tailed it out of the landing zone at a hundred and thirty percent emergency power.

  Lucky Thirteen was the only surviving drop ship of the flight that day. Banshee 72, the ship that blew up in front of me, was dispersed over a quarter square kilometer, along with her two pilots, her crew chief, and thirty-eight SI troopers in full kit. Banshee 73 and 74 got so chewed up that they never got off the moon either, and the Fleet had to send in a flight of Shrikes to destroy the airframes in place where they did their emergency landings. Lucky Thirteen didn’t even have a scratch in her new paint.

  After I had the ship back in the docking clamp, I started quaking like a leaf in high wind, and I didn’t stop for two hours. Mentally, the shakes lasted a lot longer. I still blame myself for not diving back into that LZ right away and putting some suppressive fire onto those gun pods, even though I did exactly what you’re supposed to do when the bus is full of mudlegs—you get out of danger and keep the troops safe.

  Nobody from Banshee 72 survived. Thirty-one troopers and one pilot died on Banshee 73, and fourteen troopers and the crew chief bought it on Banshee 74. Yeah, I still blame myself for not going back to help them, even though I played it precisely by the book.

  But the first time some jackass First Lieutenant from SI told me off for not staying in the hot LZ on Procyon Bc, I punched him in the nose, and hit him with his own meal tray for good measure. It was an almost cathartic experience, and well worth the forty-eight hours in the brig.

  I flew nineteen more combat missions in Lucky Thirteen after that. I ferried troops into battle, dropped off supplies, made ground attack runs, and picked up recon teams from hostile worlds. In all that time, I didn’t have a sin
gle casualty on my ship. Three times out of nineteen, my Lucky Thirteen was the only airworthy unit in the entire flight at the end of the mission. She brought us home safely every time, even when the ground fire was so thick that you could have stepped out of the cockpit and walked down to the ground on shrapnel shards. After the tenth mission in a row had passed with my ship remaining unscratched, the other pilots actually started to mean it when they called her “Lucky Thirteen.”

  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.”

  “No need for heroics, ma’am,” Sergeant Fisher said from the outside of the ship. “We’ll all head for cover, bring some rifles from the armory.”

  “I’ll bail just as soon as that cannon is empty. Now move it, and stay way the fuck away from the ship. Rescue birds don’t get here before the Russkies, I’ll pull the boom handle on my way out.”

  I waved Lieutenant Denton out of the c
ockpit and climbed into the gunner’s seat to take control of the ship’s chin turret. I wasn’t even strapped in all the way when the threat warning warbled again, and the dust on the plateau a mile away stirred with the launch of a pair of rockets.

  You can kill a Wasp with an assault rocket, but it has to be a lucky shot. Those rockets are designed for use against ground fortifications and big biological targets like Lankies, not fast-moving drop ships with sophisticated electronic warfare kit. Even stationary in the dirt, a Wasp is not an easy kill for a rocket gunner. The jamming suite zapped the warhead seekers of the incoming rockets, and they went wild and exploded in the rocks before they had crossed the distance halfway. The Russians tried again, this time with a brace of three rockets, but being stationary just made my ship’s jamming suite all the more effective, and those went wild almost as soon as they were out of the launchers.

  Line of sight works both ways. I plugged my helmet into the gunner’s console, cranked the magnification of the gun sight to maximum, and popped the safety cap of the fire control with my thumb. Then I returned the favor.

  The chin turret of a Wasp is fitted with a three-barreled twenty-five millimeter cannon that fires caseless shells at twelve hundred rounds per minute. From a mile away, the chain of impact explosions from the dual-purpose rounds looked like a chain of tiny volcanoes had just erupted in sequence on the ridge line. I held the trigger down for about five seconds and raked the ridge from left to right. There were no follow-up rocket shots from the Russians.

  My cannon fire bought us about five minutes. I took the time to wipe the data off the memory banks of my ship, rendering her as dumb as she had been in the storage hangar. The self-destruct mechanism would blow the entire ship into fine shrapnel, but sometimes it doesn’t trigger properly, and we were all instructed to lobotomize our birds if we ditched on enemy soil. By the time I was done, the Russians had worked up enough courage again to shoot at us again, this time with small arms fire. I took up my spot in the gunner’s seat again and popped off bursts at likely hiding spots. My crew had gotten clear of the ship and taken up position a few hundred meters behind the bird, out of the line of fire for now. The Russians were out for blood now, and if they managed to get around the zone covered by my gun turret, they would have us all in the bag anyway.