Terms of Enlistment 01.1: Lucky Thirteen by Marko Kloos Page A

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