by Marko Kloos
I find myself wondering how many Eurocorps ships have a few of these babies armed with warheads in their tubes as insurance policies. Ottawa has electric reactive armor and a state-of-the-art active defense system, but anything else in the Fleet would be a rapidly expanding cloud of debris if you floated a dozen of these stealth birds into it. The Euros may only have corvettes and frigates for their in-system patrols, but I find that I don’t want to see how well our bigger ships would stand up against them in a fight.
For the next few hours, we coast toward the inner system while the recon drones speed out to their maximum range. Their scan hemisphere soon covers Arcadia and the planet it orbits, Leonidas c. One of the drones passes within five hundred kilometers of the planet’s fleet yard and diligently transmits back the force composition of the docked ships. I’m amazed to see that even though the transmitters on the docked ships are cold, the drone identifies each ship not just by type but also by hull number and name. There are six ships docked at Arcadia at the moment—the frigates Lethe and Acheron, the space-control cruisers Gladius and Olympia, the fleet support tender Manchester, and the carrier Pollux. Together, that system garrison fleet represents the Fleet’s biggest offensive punch outside the solar system. But even though they’re modern warships and undoubtedly stuffed to the gills with nuclear ordnance, they’d be cannon fodder against a seed ship or two without the Orion missile batteries in orbit around Arcadia.
The drones are almost at the end of their run when another blue icon pops up on the screen, ten million kilometers away from Arcadia. The drone identifies the contact as the frigate Styx, out on a patrol in the inner part of the system between Leonidas c and b.
“That’s the whole board,” the electronic intelligence officer announces. “Recon birds are at the end of their leashes.”
“Bring ’em back in and hold them at Arcadia,” Colonel Yamin orders. “We’ll pick them up once we get there. No point wasting the fuel if we’re going to meet them halfway anyway. Helm, lay in the shortest-time course to Arcadia and hit the burners. Full military power.”
“Aye, ma’am. Going to full military power.”
With our fusion engines running at full power, Ottawa leaps out of her holding position like a runner out of the starting blocks. Before super-efficient fusion reactors made artificial gravity systems possible, spaceship crews had to weather the acceleration of their ships strapped into crash couches, which limited the effective acceleration of a ship to whatever its human crew could endure. There’s still a limit to what the arti-grav deck plates can compensate without sucking all the power from the fusion reactor, but it’s considerably higher than stone-age space-travel physics allowed.
“Accelerating at twenty-one g’s. Time to turnaround burn for Arcadia is one hour, eleven minutes.”
“Steady as she goes,” Colonel Yamin says. “Now let’s get ready for this war-gaming business and pretend like we have an enemy to fight.”
When I was on a similar approach to Arcadia in a stealth drop ship three years ago, we were coasting in to save fuel and avoid detection, and the run took a tedious twenty-three hours. Ottawa at full throttle makes the same trip in less than a tenth of the time. An hour and eleven minutes into the burn, the ship turns to point the engines at our destination and slow down again for the second half of the trip.
We’re in extrasolar space, so we don’t simulate a full attack run on Arcadia with shipboard weapons, keeping the eyes in CIC on actual space and not computer-generated enemies. For the sake of the exercise, we assume a starting scenario that already had Ottawa successful at defeating the seed ship or ships in orbit and skip straight to the spaceborne landing. Thirty minutes before we reach our geosynchronous parking spot in orbit above Arcadia City, the XO kicks off the action for the attack squadrons and Spaceborne Infantry.
“Now hear this,” he says into the 1MC. “T-minus thirty to drop. All ground units, board your assigned transports. I repeat, all ground units, board your assigned transports. Stand by to launch the first strike wings.”
The sequence is generally the same on every large-scale assault, but I usually observe it from the flight deck level as I get ready to drop with the lead elements, or in the pod launch bay if I take the express elevator. Thirty minutes before the drop, the SI platoons assembled on the deck board their drop ships, and the first squadron of Shrikes goes into the launching clamps. As soon as we reach our push-off spot in orbit, the first two Shrike wings will launch and fly ahead of the drop ships to sanitize the LZ ahead of them. Then the first wave of drop ships will follow, sixteen ships with one platoon each. Depending on the ground situation after the first wave, we will either follow up with the same force composition for the second wave or launch the second flight of sixteen drop ships right away without Shrike escorts.
After months of nothing but simulator training and maintenance, I know the pilots are itching to put their birds to work and clock some real flight time, even if the rounds in the guns are all exercise ammunition. Under normal circumstances, I would prefer to ride in the first wave and get some fresh air instead of staring at console screens in CIC. But this is Arcadia City we’re using as an exercise ground. They abandoned it when we blew up the fusion plant with a nuke, and almost all the buildings are undamaged, so it makes for a big and realistic urban-combat training center. But when I do prestrike recon with the superpowered optics of the ship’s sensor suite, I can still see the scorch marks on the concrete of the admin plaza where missiles and cannon shells crisscrossed flight paths during our quick and furious battle down there. I’m sure they didn’t bother patching up the admin building after the prisoners were secured and the casualties evacuated. The building’s dome-shaped concrete roof is mostly undamaged, but I can still picture the main hallway the way it looked at the end of the battle, and I know the cannon shell holes in the corridor walls have not been filled in.
My platoon lost eight troopers in those corridors and six more on the plaza. Sometimes my nightmares still feature the private from Second Squad, Kowalewski, who got blown to bits by a cannon shell right in front of me. I have no desire to go back there and do a sightseeing tour of the battle scars we took and inflicted. I lost over a third of my platoon to see the mission through, only to see the new administration pardon almost all military personnel involved in the mutiny. The president and his cabinet—at least the ones who ran to Arcadia—were put on trial and convicted of treason, and they’re serving lifetime sentences in one of the NAC’s maximum-security prisons, which in my mind doesn’t constitute much of a punishment. They should have just dropped the whole lot in the middle of a PRC.
I tap into the camera feeds from the hangar and watch as the launch clamps pick up the Shrikes of the first attack wave, twelve ships in total. One after another, the clamps lower the attack ships into the launch bays, orange warning lights flashing overhead. The control I have from this CIC station is amazingly fine-grained. I can move my field of view seamlessly through the hangar while the computer switches me automatically from one optical array to another. I can even check the feeds on the powered-up Shrikes and their pilots’ helmet-camera feeds. There are almost too many data points for me to pick from, and after a while, I rearrange my screens to my usual feeds. I know the tech is designed to make my job easier, but this much information could be overwhelming to someone right out of Combat Controller School and turn them into micromanagers when they need to see the big picture most of the time.
“Attack ships are in the clamps. Fifteen minutes to launch,” the XO announces.
The shot clock superimposed on the large situational display on the forward CIC bulkhead keeps counting down the time. I watch Arcadia stretching out underneath the exhaust nozzles of our fusion engines, more Earthlike than Earth, green and blue with wispy white cloud fields. The weather is clear in our LZ, and the temperature on the surface is a perfect twenty-one degrees Celsius, a balmy late-spring day.
“Strike Squadron Two, you are locked for drop in T-
minus fifteen,” I send to the attack birds. “Weather over the LZ is clear, two-one degrees, wind three knots from local south-southwest.” I mark the LZ on my screen and send the information to the computers of the waiting Shrikes. “Your target area is LZ Alpha Charlie. Secure LZ and engage hostiles if present. Let’s give the grunts a ten-klick safe zone.”
The pilots send back their acknowledgments one by one. I know that down in the hangar bay, the outer hatches of the drop bays are opening, the last step before the launch. The burn maneuver was perfectly timed—we coast into orbit well within the safe speed margin for a combat drop.
Fifteen minutes later, the shot clock on the CIC display goes to 00:00:00 and blinks red. Ottawa is right in the middle of the orbital launch window.
Easy to nail the mark when you’re not floating into a minefield, I think.
“Light is green,” Colonel Yamin says. “TacOps, initiate the drop.”
“Aye, ma’am,” I reply and switch to the flight-ops channel.
“Light is green,” I relay to the Shrike pilots. “I repeat, light is green. Manual drops at pilot discretion. Drop when ready. Good hunting.”
For the drop, I watch the composite feed from the optical arrays on the planet-facing side of the hull. This is the sort of footage the Fleet would use in recruiting videos if they did any. A dozen hatches have opened on the smooth armor belly of Ottawa, and one by one, a dozen mean-looking attack craft drop out of those hatches and turn their noses toward the orbital insertion path before lighting up their engines. I share the feed in a window on the bulkhead screen and chuckle as more than a few heads in CIC swivel around to watch the brief show.
“Shrikes away,” I announce when the last attack craft is out of the clamps and shooting toward the surface of Arcadia. “Time to target is nine minutes, thirty seconds.”
The optical gear on this ship is unbelievably powerful, and the new high-visibility white-and-orange paint scheme on the Shrikes makes them easy to track accurately without a single watt of active radiation. I have no problem keeping twelve different lens arrays on twelve individual Shrikes, so I get to monitor a dozen fiery entries into Arcadia’s atmosphere. The Shrikes trail bright tracks of hot plasma on their brief trip toward the surface until they are in denser air and slow enough for atmospheric operations. Even from this far away, I can still zoom in on each individual ship closely enough to read the wing markings.
“Simulation is running on all off-ship systems,” the tactical officer says.
With the networking and the processing power possible in modern battle armor and ships, we can turn twenty-five square kilometers of ground down there into a massive simulator environment. It’s the same technology I used with my boot camp platoons in training back at Orem, only at a much larger scale. In simulator mode, the drop ship and Shrike sensor suites show the pilots targets that aren’t there, so they can fire rounds that don’t leave the barrels. The battle suits and shipboard computers do all the processing work, and everything links together via TacLink in a big distributed network with many contributing nodes. Much like in boot camp battle sims, the troops going down to Arcadia will see whatever it is we want them to see on their helmet visors and targeting screens. It’s cheaper and less dangerous than live-fire training, and I know from experience that the virtual enemies look very believable, with sights and sounds all rendered impeccably lifelike. The shock absorbers in the boot soles of the SI grunts even try to duplicate the ground tremors you feel when a Lanky is taking a step within a quarter kilometer. The recruits in boot camp usually love sim exercises because it’s exciting and makes you feel like you’re in combat. Those of us who have seen real battles know better. It’s still a big improvement over running around and firing blanks at nothing. But without the fear of death, it makes combat and war almost fun, and that’s the simulator’s biggest departure from reality.
The first wave of drop ships leaves the clamps a few minutes later and follows the Shrikes into the landing zone.
“Tallyho,” the lead pilot of the Shrike squadron says into the TacAir channel when the Shrikes are ten kilometers out, five thousand feet above the ground and barreling along at six hundred knots. “Ten-plus LHOs in the open. All ships, mind your intervals and follow me in.”
“Sierra flight, you are cleared to engage,” I send. “Weapons free.”
The Shrikes form up into a wedge-shaped formation that brings all the ordnance racks to bear on the LZ at the same time. Then they ripple-fire the exercise ordnance on their rails. The blue-painted air-to-ground missiles never leave the ordnance rails in reality, but the pilots’ visors and TacLink screens show two dozen missiles streaking toward their targets. More than half the simulated Lankies milling around in Arcadia City are hard kills instantly as they fall to the Shrikes’ guided missiles. The simulation put two dozen Lankies on the ground, and eleven of them survive the first wave of incoming ordnance through sheer luck or improbable evasion skills. In reality, almost all of them would be dead, but there’s no point making an already easy simulated environment even easier.
The Shrikes pair up and take turns making strafing runs on the surviving Lankies with their heavy autocannons. Three more Lankies fall in the first wave, four more in the second, and the rest eat it in the third. When the last flight of Shrikes thunders overhead and kicks up the radioactive dust in the streets of Arcadia City, all simulated targets are down, and the LZ is clear for the drop ships. The Shrikes climb to fifteen thousand feet and start a racetrack-shaped loitering pattern, ready to be called down again if the need for close-air support arises.
The drop ships come in fifteen minutes behind the Shrikes. The sixteen ships split into groups of four to form company-size units and deposit their infantry passengers in four different spots spread around the periphery of Arcadia City. The SI troopers leave their drop ships at a run and start taking covering positions.
I don’t know what the sim has in store for them, but I know that this can’t be the extent of their tasks for the day, and I’m not disappointed. A few minutes after the drop ships unload their troops, the computer shows two large groups of Lankies converging on Arcadia City from the north and south. They pop up on the Shrikes’ screens at the limit of our ten-kilometer exercise bubble.
“Hostile contacts, incoming from zero-one-zero and one-eight-three,” the squadron leader sends, and a few hundred TacLink screens down on Arcadia update with the target data from his Shrike. “Sierra flight, pair up and intercept.”
The Shrike squadron immediately reacts and splits into two groups of three pairs each. They race north and south to stop the Lankies before they can reach the city, but the simulation has thrown a lot of Lankies at our landed SI company, at least fifty in each group. The Shrikes engage with their external ordnance and cannons. For the next ten minutes, they make attack runs on the Lanky groups and whittle them down slowly, but I can tell from their rate of advance and the frequency with which individual target icons disappear that it won’t be enough. To make things worse, the sim decides to make things even harder and send smaller groups of Lankies following the first wave. The company’s drop ships join the fray when the Shrikes have spent all their ammunition, taking down Lankies one by one with cannon fire, but the distance between the Lankies and the closest SI troops on the edge of the city shrinks rapidly.
“Sierra flight is Winchester,” the Shrike squadron leader announces. “Heading back to the barn for rearming.”
To save fuel, the flight of Shrikes will not actually climb back into orbit and do the entire docking and rearming procedure. They do have to disengage and fly out to three hundred kilometers away and thirty thousand feet high before the simulated weapons on their racks will reset to fully rearmed status. Shrike flight Sierra will be out of the battle for a good fifty minutes, and the troops on the ground will lose the scenario in the meantime.
“TacOps, this is Alpha Charlie Ground Actual,” the lieutenant colonel in charge of the SI battalion sends. “Requesting follow
-up close air ASAP.”
“Oscar flight is in the clamps and on the way,” I reply.
Things are going topsy-turvy for the ground force even before the Second Battalion is safely on the ground. Whoever programmed this exercise into the simulator doesn’t believe in easy mode. The Lankies advance to within a kilometer of the first line of defense ten minutes before the second wave of Shrikes is due over the LZ, and even with the repositioned companies, there are only eight platoons on the ground in front of each Lanky approach. When the Lankies cross the eight-hundred-meter line, the platoons’ MARS gunners open up with simulated silver bullets. Even without the feed from the Shrikes or drop ships, I have a perfect top-down view of the battle from my chair high up in orbit. The Lankies in the two attack waves start dropping again in the face of well-aimed fire from dozens of MARS launchers, but not every shot is connecting, and I can see from the kill ratio that the SI platoons will be overwhelmed even if they score a 100 percent hit rate with every round. The second wave of Lankies has caught up with the first wave and reinforced their numbers, and there are still close to a hundred in each attacking group. The distance between the SI lines and the advancing Lankies shrinks to six hundred meters, then to five hundred, then four hundred.
“Tailpipe Four, Tailpipe Seven, you have incoming close air,” I send to the combat controllers embedded with the companies on the northern and southern defensive lines. “Call sign is Oscar flight.”
My two combat controllers, Sergeants Taggart and Graff, send back their terse acknowledgments and check in with the inbound Shrikes. They split the incoming squadron between the northern and southern perimeters and mark target reference points right in front of their defensive lines, then clear the Shrikes for their attack runs. I watch the aerial ballet from my high vantage point and in air-conditioned comfort, but if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m looking at Arcadia City right now, I would rather be pretend-battling on the ground than sitting up here in front of a console.