by Marko Kloos
“Raptor flight, this is Tailpipe Five. Counter-air,” I call out on the tactical air channel.
“Tailpipe Five, Raptor One-Three. Go ahead.” The voice on the TacAir channel is chopped, curt, and professional, just the way I remember Halley’s voice on our squad channel in Basic.
“Data uplink commencing. Fast mover right above the deck near our datum. You are cleared to engage. Get him off our asses.”
“Copy that, Tailpipe Five. On the way.”
“Cavalry’s coming,” I tell the lieutenant. “Two Shrikes.”
“If they shoot that bastard down and he bails out, I’ll chase him down and string him up by his balls,” the platoon sergeant says darkly. “I’m not getting shit for vitals from First and Second Squads upstairs.”
“Third Squad, sitrep,” Lieutenant Benning sends on the platoon channel. “What’s the picture out there?”
“LT, where the fuck are you?”
“In the building, Sarge. Down in the basement.”
“Ain’t no building left, sir. Top floors are gone. So’s the south half of the first floor.”
“We’re coming out. Check on the ground level on the north side, see if it’s full of rubble. And see if you can raise anyone from First and Second Squads. We’re not getting zip down here.”
There’s a brief pause before the sergeant replies.
“They’re gone, LT. Building’s gone. Their vitals are off the network.”
“Goddammit,” our platoon sergeant curses next to me in the darkness. “And just when we had this son of a bitch in the bag.”
I just grunt my agreement, and follow the platoon’s two-man command section out of the tomb that used to be the SRA company headquarters.
Some troops have a thing about not wanting to be that last unlucky bastard to buy it in a battle, the one who catches a stray fléchette or laser tripwire when everyone else is already breaking out the beer, but that thought never bothered me in the least. Whether you’re the first one to die on the drop, or you stumble over something and break your neck just as you’re stepping back onto the carrier deck after the battle, you end up in the same body bag, active antiseptic green polymer, impervious to pathogens and body fluids. If they recover your meat, that is, and you didn’t get blown to bits by a Chinese fuel-air warhead, like the troopers from First and Second Squads who, to a man and woman, just died a few dozen feet above us. None of the dead are any less lucky than the others.
The staircases are all filled with rubble from the collapsed floors above us. The basement has two exits to the surface, so we pick the one that has less debris in front of it and start digging ourselves out. Outside, Third Squad tries to work their way inside. Finally, we emerge from the acrid darkness of the basement back into the sunlight of Sirius Ad.
“What now, Skipper?” Third Squad’s leader asks the lieutenant.
“Keep up the perimeter, call down the bird for evac, and let’s see if we can find our guys in that shit. Check for suit transponders.”
In the blink of an eye, our combat strength has been cut by half. We have the remaining eight troopers of Third Squad, and the seven members of Fourth Squad a few hundred yards away. We landed on Sirius Ad with thirty-nine troops, and we’re down to eighteen. We took our objective and accomplished our task, and we traded twenty-one lives for a smoldering pile of rubble and an understrength platoon’s worth of SRA corpses.
There’s a sudden cacophony of small-arms fire from the area where Fourth Squad has taken up covering positions by the main road through town. I only realize that some Chinese civvies had started to venture out into the open to observe the aftermath of the battle when they all dash away again, back to the dubious safety of their thin-walled houses. At the same moment, the platoon channel comes alive with frantic status reports from Fourth Squad.
“Where the fuck did they come from?”
“Incoming!”
“Street corner, one hundred, three guys with a rocket launcher!”
“Alpha One-Niner, we have a shitload of SRA coming in from the direction of the airfield. Make it fifteen, twenty—shit, looks like half a freakin’ company out there.”
“Copy that,” the lieutenant sends back. “Fall back and draw them our way. We’ll come up the road and set up a blocking position by that second intersection down from you, at Charlie Two.”
“Affirmative. Fall back and draw the enemy to blocking position at second intersection. Bugging out.”
We check our weapons on the run. With most of a company bearing down on us, only some air support is going to keep us from ending up in a Chinese POW camp or a mass grave. I fire up my TacAir screen as I’m dashing from corner to corner, and once more check for air assets.
“Banshee Two-Five, this is Tailpipe Five. We have a counterattack coming our way, one platoon plus. Dust off and cover us from above, if you can.”
“Tailpipe Five, that’s a roger. We’re on the way. ETA two minutes.”
Our drop ship has used up most of its air-to-ground ordnance in the initial assault, and strafing runs with the guns are dangerous business, but without Banshee Two-Five’s automatic cannons, there may not be anyone left for them to ferry back to the carrier. On my helmet display, red “HOSTILE” symbols are popping up with increasing frequency as the troopers from Fourth Squad are spotting enemy troops, and the red symbols outnumber our blue ones at least four to one.
Fourth Squad is doing an orderly retreat, leapfrogging across intersections ahead of us. The main street going through the settlement is barely twenty yards wide and flanked by tight rows of prefabricated one- and two-story structures. We reach our target intersection just ahead of Fourth Squad and hastily set up firing positions to cover their retreat.
“Make ’em count,” the platoon sergeant says. “We cover Fourth Squad, let them pass through us, and leapfrog back to the town center if we have to.”
I check the seals of my armor, make sure for the twentieth time that my rifle has a round chambered, and kneel down behind a climate unit parked in front of what looks like a tea joint. The buildings out here are thin-walled, standard colonial living modules, just like our own colony settlements. The walls don’t stop fléchette rounds or shrapnel, but using them as cover is mentally more satisfying than duking it out in the open.
“Here they come. Watch your sectors,” the platoon sergeant says.
In front of us, three troopers from Fourth Squad come dashing around a corner not fifty yards away. I can’t see the squad of Chinese marines in pursuit, but my helmet display continuously updates with enemies spotted by other troops in my platoon, and the alley around that corner is lousy with red symbols. I switch the fire mode selector of my rifle to computer-controlled mode, and draw a bead on the intersection ahead.
“Grenades,” the lieutenant orders. “Air burst, twenty meters. Give me a volley over those rooftops to the right.”
With my extra comms gear, I don’t carry rifle grenades on my harness, but most of the platoon’s regular members do. Behind me, half a dozen grenade launchers belch out computer-fused forty-millimeter grenades that arc over the rooftops to our right. They explode above the adjacent alley in a series of low, muffled cracks. We hear shouts and screams as the Chinese marines fifty yards away get peppered with high-velocity shrapnel. In front of us, the second half of Fourth Squad comes sprinting around the corner, legs pumping to a soundtrack of automatic rifle fire from the unseen SRA marines. With our presence announced, only an idiot or a green recruit would come around the corner to shoot after our retreating squad, but a pair of Chinese marines does just that, and promptly gets drilled by fléchette bursts from ten different rifles. To our right, there’s a sound like someone throwing a bucket of nails onto a metal roof, as the remaining Chinese marines start firing at us through the thin walls of the houses.
“Fall back, in order,” the platoon sergeant shouts.
Half our number leave cover and follow the Fourth Squad troopers back up the road to take up new firing
positions, away from our now compromised position. The rest of us stay put to cover their movement. In the alley just to my right, a door opens, and the muzzle of a rifle pokes out. The SRA marine fires a burst in my direction, and I duck behind my cover as the fléchettes scream past my corner and through the walls of the house across the alley. At the ranges dictated by these narrow streets, infantry combat turns into a shoot-out in a toilet stall.
“They’re cutting through the back walls,” I shout into the platoon channel, and return fire. My tactical computer switches the rifle to fully automatic suppression fire, and my ammo count is revised downward rapidly as my M-66 burps out twelve hundred fléchettes per minute, spraying the doorway and adjacent walls with tungsten penetrators.
“First section, haul ass,” the call comes over the radio. “Watch the side alleys!”
Behind me, the second section has taken up position to cover our retreat. A bounding overwatch movement is always a leap of faith—you trust your squad mates not to shoot you by accident, and to keep the enemy from shooting you in the back while you’re running away. I raise my rifle, rake the alley with another burst for good measure, and get up from my crouch to beat a retreat. All around me, dozens of rifles are chattering their reports—ours high-pitched and hoarse, theirs low and slow, like hydraulic hammers. As we pull back from the contested intersection, the Chinese marines return our earlier favor—behind me, half a dozen grenades go off in the road, a chain of large and angry firecrackers.
“Tailpipe Five, this is Banshee Two-Five. I got line of sight, but you’re awfully close together down there.”
I dash into a doorway where a tall garbage recycler is offering some minimal shelter, and toggle into the TacAir channel. “Banshee Two-Five, hit that corner I’m designating, and walk your fire down the alley that goes north from there. Hurry up, they’re getting pissed down here.”
“Tailpipe Five, copy that. Hit the designated corner and work north from there. Starting our gun run now.”
The rounds from the drop ship’s autocannons smack into the intersection before I can hear the guns rattling in the distance. Large-caliber autocannon fire is shockingly sudden and violent when you’re only seventy yards from the spot where the shells hit. The building I just raked with rifle fire simply blows apart. Pieces of laminate rain down onto the surrounding buildings. Then Banshee Two-Five’s pilot shifts his fire as instructed, and the alley beyond turns into noise, fire, and smoke.
“Banshee Two-Five, that’s a bull’s-eye. We have bad guys swarming all over those alleys to the left of your TRP. Bring it down close.”
“Shifting fire. Y’all keep your heads low.”
With the SRA marines dodging cannon fire, our half-strength platoon disengages and leapfrogs back toward the center of town. Overhead, no more than a hundred feet above the deck, Banshee Two-Five closes in, cannons hammering out a steady stream of noise and death. The roar from the Wasp’s multibarreled chin turret mixes with the dull claps of the exploding shells. If there are any civvies hiding in the buildings around us, they are now in a very bad spot, but their plight is nobody’s concern right now—not ours, and not that of the Chinese marines that are supposed to be their defenders. All that matters right now is that only one group is going to walk off this rock in their own boots, and both teams are doing their level best to be it.
“Tailpipe Five, you have some hostiles advancing on you through the alleys on your left. I’ll make another pass, but it’s getting awfully tight down there.”
“Copy that, Two-Five,” I reply. “Do what you can. We’re hauling ass back to the admin center at Bravo Three. Anything to my east and west is hostile.”
Two-Five’s cannons bellow again, much closer than before. It sounds like our drop ship is almost directly overhead. This time, the cannon rounds rake a stretch of alley no more than twenty yards to my right, just on the other side of the squat, ugly building container I’m passing at a run. I hear the shouts and screams from the SRA marines and the rattling of their rifles as they return fire at the Wasp.
“Tailpipe Five, this is Hammer Seven-Six. We are overhead with air-to-ground. Got a use for us?”
In all the excitement, I haven’t checked my TacAir screen in a while. Hammer flight, our two-ship escort of Shrike attack craft, is circling high above the battle, far removed from the noise and chaos, but aware of our status through the integrated tactical network we all feed.
“Hammer Seven-Six, you bet. We have a company of infantry on our asses. Use Banshee Two-Five’s TRP, and drop all the antipersonnel stuff you have left on your racks. Danger close, you are cleared hot.”
“Tailpipe Five, copy that. Take over TRP from Banshee Two-Five, and clear the grid. Rolling in hot. Cover your ears, gentlemen.”
“Banshee Two-Five, break off CAS and return to station. Thanks for the assist.”
“Copy that,” Two-Five’s pilot replies. “Hauling ass.”
Overhead, the noise from the drop ship’s engines increases as Two-Five’s pilot gooses the throttles to gain altitude. Behind us, the cacophony of small-arms fire and grenade explosions swells as the Chinese recover from the strafing run and give chase once more. They’re mistaking our sudden desire to clear the area for all-out flight, or maybe they know exactly what’s about to happen and they want to get under our belts to make life hard for our air support.
We’re almost back at the ruined admin center when Hammer flight’s ordnance hits the ground just a few hundred meters behind us. I’m in the middle of a sprint between covering positions when my audio feed cuts out, and the shock wave of the explosion kicks me in the back and sends me sprawling face-first into the dirt. When my hearing returns, the firing behind us has ceased completely. For a few moments, there is no sound except for the reverberating rumble of the detonations rolling over the town, as if the blasts have stunned everyone into silence.
I get back on my feet and turn around to the familiar sight of a huge smoke pillar rising into the sky. There’s debris raining down all around—bits of buildings, pavement, and people, all intermixed with the dusty red soil of the planet. Without my enhanced helmet sensors, I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face. Ten or fifteen blocks of the Chinese town have ceased to exist, and with them all the people within, civilians and SRA marines alike. There’s nothing left of the light colonial architecture but a burning field of strewn rubble and the occasional mangled wreckage of a light vehicle.
“Holy shit,” someone chimes in nearby. “Flyboys don’t fuck around, do they?”
“Hammer flight, this is Tailpipe Five,” I send to the pilot. “That’s a shack. I’d say you can paint about a hundred hash marks on your bird for that strike.”
“Tailpipe Five, copy that. We aim to please.”
We spread out and keep our guard up while the dust from the bombardment settles, but it’s clear that if there are any SRA marines still alive, they’ve vacated the area wisely. The ordnance from Hammer flight has cleared a quarter square kilometer of densely packed modular housing.
“Fall back to the admin center,” the lieutenant says. “Let’s dig out our guys and call down the bird.”
We head back to the center of town, where sixteen of our troopers are buried in the rubble of our target building. The Chinese civvies are once again coming out of their homes, but they quickly move out of the way when they see us, and none of them challenge our newly won ownership of the place. It feels like I’ve been dodging rifle fire and calling down airstrikes all day, but my suit’s computer shows that not even three hours have passed since we boarded our drop ship.
The Chinese town isn’t much of a prize. It’s just a square kilometer of basic housing modules, and it was unimportant even before we scraped a quarter of it off the map with high explosives. If we were to garrison this shithole, the locals would shoot us in the back at the earliest opportunity, and the SRA will be more than willing to blow up the rest of the town trying to reclaim it. We’re not going to garrison the pl
ace, of course. We lost twenty—almost two squads of our own—and killed hundreds of SRA marines and civvies, just to poke a sharp stick into the eye of the SRA high command—a job we could have completed just as well with a dozen warheads fired from orbit.
“What a pile of shit,” the platoon sergeant mutters next to me, and kicks a piece of debris out of his path. “Can’t afford too many more victories like this one.”
We dig through the rubble of the collapsed admin center carefully, but without heavy equipment it’s like trying to empty a bathtub with a spoon. All around us, the Chinese residents of the town are filling up the streets again. Now that the shooting has stopped, and we have shown that we won’t gun them down in the street on sight, the locals are getting bolder by the minute, yelling at us from an ever-shrinking distance.
“You see weapons pointing our way, you shoot,” the lieutenant tells us. “We’re not here to make friends. I’ve collected enough fucking dog tags for one day.”
I’m standing off to the side, eyeing the crowd milling around in the street near the admin building, when the tactical network comes alive with a burst of priority transmissions. I toggle into the fleet’s TacLink screen, but before I can make heads or tails of the incoming transmission codes, the network goes dark altogether.
“What the fuck?”
“Problem, Sarge?” Lieutenant Benning asks.
“Fleet started broadcasting priority code, and then I lost my uplink.”
The lieutenant walks over to where I’m standing and cycles through his own command links.
“I got a link to our ground units back to Company level, but that’s it,” he says. “Battalion HQ dropped off.”
Some of the Chinese civvies shout in surprise, and look up into the darkening sky. I look up and follow their gaze. Up in the purplish blue of the late afternoon sky, there’s a rapidly expanding sphere of brilliant white—the signature of a nuclear explosion in high orbit. Lieutenant Benning looks up as well, just in time to see a second fireball flash up some distance from the first one. Even at this range, our helmet visors kick in the polarizing filters to protect our retinas from the blinding pinprick flares of the nuclear fireballs. I feel a sudden and overwhelming weakness in my knees.