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 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 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 cockpit 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.

For the next ten minutes, it was a gun duel—my autocannon against their rifles and belt-fed guns. Every time I saw movement on the rocky plain in front of me, I put a short burst into the general vicinity. I don’t know how many of them I actually got, but I didn’t kill enough to discourage the rest, because they kept coming, and their fire kept getting more accurate. The Wasp shrugged off the rifle fire, but some of the belt-fed guns were loaded with harder stuff, and the armored cockpit glass started falling apart under the cumulative hits. One of the Russians had a heavy-caliber anti-materiel rifle, and the first round from that beast came clean through the middle of my center cockpit panel and center-punched the pilot seat I had been sitting in until we crash-landed. I hunkered down behind the front instrument panel and kept shooting back, pumping out explosive rounds and watching the ammo counter work its way down to triple and then double digits.

The first time one of their rounds hit me, I didn’t even realize I had been shot. I just felt something wet run down my right arm and drip off my fingertips, and when I tore myself away from the gun sight to investigate, I saw that something had zipped through the sleeve of my flight suit. As I was peeling the wet sleeve off my skin, another burst of fire finally shattered the front panel completely, and I took a shard in the same arm, almost down by the elbow. That one hurt like hell right away.

I guess they knew they had tagged me when I didn’t return fire right away, because that’s when the incoming fire really picked up. I think every Russian left alive between those rocks started hosing down the front of Lucky Thirteen. I was just about out of ammo anyway, so I slipped out of the gunner’s seat and dropped to the floor while the flechettes and tungsten darts from the Russian guns tore up the cockpit just above my head. I crawled through the open hatch and pulled it shut behind me with my good hand. The rounds pinging off the laminated armor sounded like hail hitting a window pane.

I got up, stepped into the ship’s armory to grab a rifle and a bag of magazines, and then went over to the bulkhead that held the trigger for the Wasp’s built-in demolition charge.

Removing the safety and pulling that lever felt like putting a gun to the head of a puppy, and pulling the trigger. But I knew she’d never fly again, and I didn’t want her to end up as a war trophy, parked in front of some Russian company building. Thirteen would have a fast and thorough death, with nothing left behind to rust away in a scrapyard somewhere.

I pulled the lever, hard. Then I gathered my rifle and dashed out of the troop compartment, down the lowered tail hatch, and into the open.

The Russians didn’t see me at first because the bulk of Lucky Thirteen was between me and them, and by the time their flanking elements had spotted me, I was already fifty yards away and headed for cover. They still shot at me, of course. It’s amazing how fast you can run when enemy rifle rounds are kicking up the dust next to you. The self-destruct mechanism on a Wasp has a fifteen-second fuse before it sprays all the remaining fuel into the ship’s interior to make a huge fuel-air bomb. My shipmates were all hunkered down behind a rock ledge maybe eighty yards away, and I cleared the ledge with two seconds to spare.

Nothing happened.

I waited another ten, twenty, then thirty seconds with my face in the dirt and my hands over my ears, waiting for Lucky Thirteen to rend herself apart like a giant grenade, but all I heard was the staccato of the Russian rifles. After a minute or two had passed, I chanced a peek over the rock ledge, and saw Lucky Thirteen still sitting in the same spot, smoke trailing from her destroyed engine, and Russian marines advancing on her in the open. With our wounded, there was no way we could outrun the Russians once they figured out we had all flown the coop. There was only one thing left to do—sell ourselves as dearly as possible. I lowered my head again, checked the loading status of my rifle, and signaled the others to get ready to engage.

The sky overhead was a lovely cobalt blue, the stars bright even in the planetary afternoon. I knew our own sun was among them. I briefly marveled at the thought that since the moment those photons left our own sun, I had been born, raised, educated, inducted into the Commonwealth Defense Corps, and trained to fly a drop ship, and I had still beaten the light to Fomalhaut by a few days.

Then I flicked the safety of my rifle to salvo fire and got up to fight, because there was nothing else left to do.

We were seven against fifty, and most of us were wounded. When we engaged, the Russians were caught by surprise, and our first bursts of fire took out half a dozen of them. After that, we were screwed. They knew where we were, they had the numbers on us, and they had Lucky Thirteen for cover. We got two or three more, and then the return fire had us ducking back behind cover.

“I got Fleet on comms,” Staff Sergeant Fisher told me over the din of the gunfire. “Air support is on the way. ETA ten minutes.”

“That’s super,” I replied. “You speak any Russian? Tell those guys to take a piss break until then, and we’re good.”

The next time I popped my head up to fire back, I glanced at Lucky Thirteen and saw that the Russians were all over her, using her armored hull as cover.

I’ll never be able to tell for sure how I knew what was about to happen. There was something in the air all of a sudden—a whiff of burnt ozone smell, and a strange sound, like a piezo switch. It felt as if the air itself was electrically charged. All I remember is that I ducked back behind the rock ledge, and yelled at the others to get down, get down, get the fuck down.

Lucky Thirteen blew up with the loudest bang I’ve ever heard in my life. The shock of the explosion traveled through the rock and knocked us all flat on our asses. From one moment to the next, the air was so thick with dust that I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me.

I have no idea how long we were huddled down behind the rock ledge, blind and deaf, with debris and dust raining down on us. The Russians could have finished us off easily at that point, if there had been any left. When we dust finally settled, and we gathered ourselves up, the little plateau where Lucky Thirteen had crash-landed was swept clean. In the spot where the ship had been, there was a shallow depression in the rock, and streaks of black burn marks fanning out in every direction. All around, there were burning and smoldering drop ship parts, none of them bigger than a mess table.

Lucky Thirteen had done me a last favor. The fuse for the self-destruct charge had delayed until the ship had Russians crawling all over and inside her—until the explosion would do the most good.

I’m not one of the superstitious pilots. My rational side knows it was a technical fluke, a delay in the trigger mechanism, a circuit that didn’t close in time, a fortunate defect. But part of me wants to believe that the ship saved my life that day—that this collection of parts bolted together thirty years ago in a factory back on Earth, a Wasp-C like a thousand others and yet like no other ship I’ve ever flown, knew our peril and immolated itself at just the right moment, in a final act of service to its pilot.

The cavalry arrived ten minutes too late, as it often does. The Shrikes made a few passes overhead, but if there were any Russians left alive, they wisely remained under cover. Twenty minutes after that, a pair of SAR drop ships swooped in and scooped us up.

While we were waiting for the drop ships, Sergeant Fisher picked up something in the dirt, looked it over briefly, and tucked it into his pocket. Later, when we were strapped into our jump seats and on the way back to the ship in orbit, he fished the item out and handed it to me without a word.

It was a chunk of Lucky Thirteen’s assembly number plate, twisted and charred on both ends. The manufacturer’s name was missing, but I could clearly read her serial number on the mangled little strip of steel: 13-02313.

I bit my lip and slipped the number plate into my own pocket, also without a word.

They patched us up and gave us medals. I put Sergeant Fisher in for a Silver Star, and he got it. The Captain in charge of the recon team we picked up recommended me for an award as well. The division brass looked over the records and decided that I should get a Distinguished Flying Cross for Fomalhaut. Two months later, they called me down to the hangar deck, and the regiment’s CO pinned the DFC onto my baggy flight suit.

I didn’t turn it down, even though I didn’t want it. You don’t turn down awards just because you think you don’t deserve them. If the drop ship jocks started doing that, the only people wearing ribbons would be the desk jockeys, the officers who let their buddies put them in for medals after milk run missions that may have involved shots fired within half a parsec. Promotions ride on points, and those ribbons count for a lot of those points. I took the medal, saluted, and smiled like a good Second Lieutenant who wants to make Captain someday.

But back in my berth, I took that DFC out of its silk-lined case and put it into the chest pocket of my Class A uniform, the one I wear maybe once a year. Then I got out Lucky Thirteen’s number plate fragment and tucked it into the medal case instead. It seemed a more appropriate tenant for that nice little silk-lined case.

They gave me a new ship, of course. I got a brand new Whiskey Wasp after all. It’s a fine ship, the newest and most advanced version of the Wasp drop ship, twice as powerful and four times as capable as my old crate.

Still, I’d trade it off in a second if I could get back Lucky Thirteen just for a little while.