by Marko Kloos
The second stage of the assault commences as we coast into orbit above our landing zones. All the ships in the task force start unloading their space-to-ground missile silos, to hit the hundreds of priority targets designated by the SigInt drones. All we can hear in the drop ship is the muffled roar of the igniting missile motors in their silos well above our heads as the Manitoba disgorges her land-attack ordnance. After a few minutes, the tactical display looks like an air defense commander’s worst nightmare—swarms of missiles that streak into the atmosphere at thirty times the speed of sound, and then multiply their number twentyfold when the missiles release their nose cones and launch their independent warheads. All those MIRVs carry half-ton conventional explosives or high-density bunker busters instead of nuclear payloads, but with the sheer number of warheads raining down into Sirius Ad’s atmosphere, I imagine that this will be a small consolation to the troops we are targeting down there.
The first barrage is followed by a second, then a third, a steady rain of missiles that will multiply into hundred- and thousandfold death on the ground. And then it’s our turn to be launched at the enemy.
I don’t see the drop hatch opening below the ship, but I know the little jolt that goes through the hull when the automated docking clamp drops us the last few meters into launch position. All along the bottom of the hull, two dozen drop hatches have just opened, leaving nothing between our bodies and open space but the armored bottom hulls of our battle taxis.
Some drop-ship commanders use the intercom to ease the troops’ tension and their own with jokes, or they keep the mudlegs in the back apprised of what’s happening outside the overstuffed troop compartment, but our ship’s pilot isn’t the talkative type. Just before the docking clamp releases our ship, the status light on the forward bulkhead changes from green to red, and then my stomach lurches upward as our Wasp falls through the open hatch and out of the Manitoba’s artificial gravity field.
I’ve done these drops a hundred times or more, but every one of them feels a bit like what I imagine an execution must feel like to the condemned. You know you have time for a few more breaths before the switch is thrown, but you don’t know how many, and then the event takes you by surprise anyway.
Then we’re weightless in our seats as the drop ship races toward the atmosphere of Sirius Ad. On my tactical screen, we are one little blue inverted vee in a long chain of them, moving away from the safety of our host ship and into the teeth of the waiting defenses.
“SAM launch, SAM launch! Banshee Two-Eight, countermeasures.”
The Wasp has no windows back in the cargo hold, but with my TacLink display, I have a front row seat anyway. My comms set is dialed into the drop-ship flight’s channel, and my tactical display shows the plot from all the computers in the flight put together. We’re thirty klicks from our drop zone, and we just managed to fly past an enemy missile battery that survived our initial orbital bombardment. Thankfully, we’re at the very edge of the battery’s detection range, so we have plenty of warning about the eight supersonic surface-to-air missiles that just left the racks of the launcher to catch up with our four-ship flight.
“Rog.” Banshee Two-Eight’s pilot sounds almost bored as he turns on his active jamming pod and puts his bird into a series of jinks to shake off the missile’s lock. One by one, the Russian missiles go dumb, chasing imaginary electronic shadows. Only one of them stays on Two-Eight’s tail, and her pilot kicks out decoy drones and dives for the deck. Both red missile icon and blue drop-ship icon disappear from my plot. For a moment, I’m convinced that Two-Eight and the forty troops riding in her are now finely dispersed organic fertilizer, but then Two-Eight reappears from the shadow of a valley a few klicks off to our right.
“That one scraped off some paint,” Two-Eight’s pilot sends, and he doesn’t sound bored anymore.
I mark the location of the enemy battery on the tactical plot, and toggle my radio to the TacAir channel to contact the flight of Shrike attack craft patrolling nearby.
“Hammer flight, you have an enemy SAM battery at nav grid Alpha One-Four. Looks like an SA-255.”
“Hammer Two-Three, copy that. Y’all tell your bus driver to back off on the throttle, so we can clean up in front of you.”
“Three minutes to drop zone,” the pilot of our ship announces, and the status light on the forward bulkhead goes from a steady to a blinking red. A few moments later, the Shrikes pass our drop-ship flight, and even though they are a few thousand feet above us, their supersonic pass makes the hull of our Wasp vibrate. I watch the tactical plot as the Shrikes go into attack formation and streak ahead to sanitize the landing zone.
For once, our intel data seems to be spot-on. The landing zone is quiet as we swoop in. No hidden gun batteries, no missile launchers, and no entrenched troops are waiting to receive our company. The landing zone is a small plateau on a low mountain ridge ten miles from the target settlement. As far as combat landings go, this one is a walk in the park on a sunny day. We file out of the drop ships at a trot, assemble in battle marching order, and head out to pick a fight with the defenders of Sirius Ad, entrenched just a few miles away.
“Looks like they got one right,” Sergeant Ferguson says to me when we march off the little plateau and down into the valley leading east. “This is some real recruiting-vid shit right here.”
Behind us, the drop ships take off to clear the LZ and take up stations overhead. Whatever we tossed at the defending garrison from orbit, it wasn’t enough to take the fight out of them, because a few moments after the Wasps thunder off into the clear blue sky, I see the red vector lines of incoming artillery fire coming from the outskirts of the SRA town.
“Incoming arty, vector nine-two!” I shout into the all-company channel, and the troops dash for cover in the rocky landscape. My threat display isn’t picking up any targeting radar sweeps, but the plateau is a likely landing zone, and the enemy arty probably had the place dialed in as a target reference point. I hunker down beside a large boulder, mark the incoming fire for the Wasps, and wait for the enemy shells. Once more, our luck holds—the Chinese are firing blind, cranking out shells at preset coordinates, and their fire soars over our heads and lands on the plateau we have just vacated moments ago.
Some real recruiting-vid shit, I think to myself as the Chinese artillery shells shake the earth and rain dirt and rocks down on us.
CHAPTER 10
The Chinese marines are understrength, outnumbered, cut off from the rest of their regiment, and without air support, but they put up a good fight anyway. We push into town slowly and carefully, but the Chinese troops are well entrenched, and they’ve had years to prepare for this defense. By the time we have most of the town under control, my platoon has suffered eight casualties, a fifth of our combat strength. Chinese marines don’t surrender, and they rarely retreat.
“If I ever find the bastard who designed those new autonomous cannons, I’ll skin him with a salted pocketknife,” our platoon sergeant says. Ahead of us, the civil administration building has been turned into a strongpoint by the Chinese, and every other window on the top floor seems to have a crew-served weapon behind it.
“Alpha One-Niner, watch the emplacement on the top floor, northwest corner. They got one of them new cannons, the ones that fire duplex ammo,” the platoon sergeant warns.
“Alpha One-Niner, copy. I’m all out of MARS rockets. Send Third Squad around to that—what is that thing at Bravo Seven, a water tank? They should be able to get a clear shot at that corner from there,” First Squad’s leader replies.
“Charlie One-Niner, you listening in?” the platoon leader sends.
“Affirmative,” Third Squad’s leader sends. “I got two thermobarics left. We’re on our way.”
The Chinese civil administration building doesn’t look very civil at all. It’s a reinforced three-story structure that looks like it could survive a near miss from a five-kiloton nuke. I’m hunkered down with the platoon’s command section in an alley a
few hundred meters away. The Chinese autocannons fire sporadic bursts at buildings and intersections in our vicinity. The defenders don’t know where we are precisely, but they have a good idea, and trying to leapfrog across the intervening distance would get us killed. Their autocannons are remote-controlled via a data link that’s impossible to hack and very difficult to jam. The Chinese gunners can sit anywhere within a quarter mile of their gun, and hammer us from the air-conditioned safety of a command bunker. The new models can be switched to fully autonomous firing mode, where the gun’s computer selects its own targets. The Commonwealth Defense Corps had its own version, but erased the autonomous capabilities from the software after combat use showed that the computer had a 1.3 percent error rate when telling hostiles from friendlies. The Sino-Russians have a more lenient acceptable-friendly-fire ratio, so they left their guns capable of running themselves without humans behind the trigger.
I watch Third Squad’s little cluster of blue icons make its way to the water tank at nav grid B-7. They leapfrog across intersections and hug the walls of the modular Chinese colony housing. The heavy automatic cannon on the top floor of the admin building keeps hammering out short bursts of fire, but the gunners are not tracking the progress of our squad. Finally, Third Squad is in position to get a clear shot at the gun emplacement with their MARS launchers.
“Fire in the hole,” their MARS gunner calls. In the distance, I hear the muffled pop of a launching missile, and a second later we see the white-hot exhaust of a MARS rocket streaking over the low rooftops toward its target. Then there’s an earthshaking boom, the familiar low thunderclap of a thermobaric warhead explosion, and the enemy gun stops firing.
“Bull’s-eye,” Third Squad’s leader says. “Put in another one for good measure.”
“First and Second Squads, up and at ’em,” Lieutenant Benning orders. “First Squad on the northwest corner, Fourth on the southeast one. Third Squad, move up for overwatch. Let’s get this shit over with.”
Back in NCO school, I had to read a ton of papers by mostly clueless theoreticians, prattling on about the “changing nature of modern warfare,” and the need for the modern, post–Terran Commonwealth Defense Corps to be tooled and trained for “low-intensity colonial actions.” In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.
There’s nothing “low-intensity” about our final assault on the Chinese admin building in this colony town on Sirius Ad. We pop smoke and charge in, and the remaining Chinese marines open up with everything they have left. We dash from cover to cover, and plaster the building ahead with rifle grenades and MARS rockets as we advance across the last few hundred meters of narrow streets and uniform colonial box architecture. I summon down Third Platoon’s drop ship for close air support, and the Wasp comes shrieking out of the blue sky a minute or two later, gun pods blazing. The north face of the building ahead erupts in a shower of sparks and concrete dust as the Wasp rakes the structure with a stream of armor-piercing thirty-millimeter cannon shells. The Chinese admin building is designed to be an emergency shelter, and it has thick walls and a nearly bombproof structure, but the drop ship’s cannons pour out two thousand rounds per minute each, and most of the windows on the north side end up taking a cannon shell or two. When we make our final dash across the road right in front of the building, the fire from the defenders has stopped.
Even with their defeat obvious, the Chinese marines don’t hand over the keys to the place voluntarily.
“Holy shit,” Lieutenant Benning remarks. “Take us three weeks to patch the place up again.”
The interior of the admin building is a mess. The thick walls kept out most of our ordnance, but most of the windows on the north-facing side ate a MARS or a cannon shell, and the interior walls didn’t do much to stop those. We’re in the middle of what looks like a squad berth, and the rubble in here is almost knee-deep. Near the windows, we see what’s left of three Chinese marines who probably stood in the way of a few thirty-millimeter rounds.
“You think we’ll be here that long, LT?” I ask. “They’ll send half their fleet through the chute once they get the word that we’re here.”
“Fucked if I know, Sarge. That’s above my pay grade.” He toggles his radio switch to check on the squad leaders.
“Third Squad, move up. Fourth Squad, keep up the perimeter. Stay sharp, people.”
We’re on the ground floor of the admin building. Above us, we hear an irregular staccato of rifle fire and grenade explosions, progress markers of the First and Second Squads sanitizing the upper floors. There isn’t a room on the ground floor that doesn’t have a dead Chinese marine or two in it, and our TacLink sensors show maybe fifteen defenders left in the building. Our suit sensors employ a complex voodoo of low-powered millimeter-wave radar, infrared, and half a dozen other technologies to spot enemy troops through walls and ceilings. It’s not infallible tech, especially not against opponents in battle armor of their own, but it’s accurate enough to keep our casualty count low. Our troops aren’t taking any chances. They shoot through walls with buckshot shells, and toss grenades through doorways in pairs and threes. However long the Chinese had to fortify this place, they weren’t expecting our attack when it came, and the defenders are disorganized and off their guard.
Room by room, we claw the admin building away from its owners, who die one by one in its defense. They must know that the battle is lost, but they fight us anyway, because that is what combat grunts do, and that’s what we would do in their place as well.
Finally, the gunfire ebbs, and our two squads meet up in the middle of the top floor, with no defender left between them.
“Building secure,” Lieutenant Benning calls out over the platoon channel. “Check for intel and enemy WIA, and watch your steps. Those little fuckers love their booby traps.”
Down in the basement, we walk into what must have been the command post for the Chinese garrison company. There are five or six dead SRA marines on the floor, plucked apart by shrapnel and fléchette bursts. Only two of them are in full battle rattle. The others are in various states of combat readiness, with partially donned armor. The highest-ranking dead SRA marine, a Chinese major, is dressed merely in battle dress fatigues, and armed only with a pistol. Lieutenant Benning walks over to the dead major, pulls the pistol from his grasp, clears the chamber, and sticks the gun into the webbing of his battle armor. The Commonwealth Defense Corps stopped issuing pistols to frontline infantry a while ago—even with fléchette ammo, a handgun is virtually useless against an opponent in battle armor—but the SRA officers wear them as badges of rank, and some of our guys collect them, a less messy form of taking scalps.
I pick up a mangled chair and sit down on the padded seat that has stuffing spilling through shrapnel wounds. On my tactical screen, I can see that our mission is a planetwide success. The second wave of NAC troops has landed, and the few remaining SRA defenders on Sirius Ad are fighting with their backs against the wall.
“Looks like something went according to plan for a change,” I say to Lieutenant Benning, who is sifting through the rubble on the floor with the toes of his armored boots.
“Don’t call it a win just yet,” he says. “Party ain’t over until our boots are back on that carrier deck.”
As if to make his point, the thunderclap of heavy ordnance exploding shakes the walls of the basement and almost tips me out of my chair.
“Enemy air,” Third Squad’s leader shouts into the platoon channel a few moments later. “Pair of attack birds, coming in from zero-zero-nine!”
“Warm up the missiles. First and Second Squads, get your heads down.”
“Incoming ordnance!” someone from Third Squad yells. On my tactical display, the red aircraft symbols have just cleared the edge of my current map overlay when four small inve
rted vees separate from the enemy attack birds and rush toward our position.
“Hit the deck,” I shout, and dive for the floor. Next to me, Lieutenant Benning and the platoon sergeant follow suit.
The four rockets hit our building simultaneously, with a cataclysmic bang that sounds like the Manitoba fell out of orbit and crashed onto the roof. My suit shuts down all sensor feeds automatically, turning me blind and deaf to protect me. When the video feed returns, it’s in the green-tinged shade of low-light magnification. All the lights in the basement have gone out, and the air is thick with concrete dust. My tactical screen comes to life again, just in time for me to see the symbols for the two enemy attack craft passing overhead. From Third Squad’s position, two MANPAD missiles rise in the wake of the SRA aircraft. One of the missiles catches up with its quarry and blots one of the red plane icons from my data screen. The other aircraft rushes out of range, its pursuing missile deflected by decoys.
“One down,” Third Squad’s leader announces over some general utterances of triumph. “Other one’s gonna come back around—you can bet your asses on that.”
“Get me some counter-air down here,” Lieutenant Benning tells me. “Whatever’s close by. I’m not picky right now.”
“Already on it, boss,” I say.
I check my airspace for the nearest fleet air units. Our platoon’s drop ship is nearby, but a Wasp doesn’t have the armament or speed to take on a fast mover. The next closest fleet units are two Shrikes, circling in a CAP pattern thirty miles away and twenty thousand feet high. I check their ordnance racks remotely and see an air-to-ground mix supplemented by four air-to-air missiles each on the outer wing pylons of the Shrikes.