Free Terms of Enlistment 01.1: Lucky Thirteen by Marko Kloos Page B

runs, and picked up recon teams from hostile worlds. In all that time, I didn’t have a single 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