by Marko Kloos
“Motherfucker,” Sergeant Welch shouts. Next to me, the MARS gunners frantically reload their launchers, but I know they’ll never get them reloaded fast enough before the Shrike is off the ground. The AMR gunners are still shooting their rifles at the ship, hoping for a lucky hit. I aim at the Shrike with my rifle and add my fléchette fire to the barrage because it’s all I can do, even though the ship is at the outer range of my rifle’s effective range and armored like a Mule besides. On the runway, the nose of the Shrike lifts off the ground as the pilot starts his takeoff rotation.
Above and behind us, I hear the unmistakable deep, rolling thunder of large-caliber automatic cannons. I don’t even hear the Blackfly until the drop ship is almost overhead, its engines barely above a whispering rumble even at full throttle. A stream of tracers races out like laser beams from the old space war shows on the Networks. It peppers the Shrike’s fuselage and churns up concrete dust on the runway surface below. The attack ship lifts off the ground a few meters, now at two hundred knots or more, and yaws to the right. One cannon shell clips off half a meter of wingtip on the Shrike’s port wing. Two or three strike the nose and the cockpit area. Another blows off the front landing gear, which disintegrates and spews its parts wildly all over the runway below. The Blackfly pulls out of the attack run with a graceful turn to the right, away from the Shrike. The polychromatic armor reflects the night sky behind and above the ship, and it disappears into the darkness again like a ghost, its engines all but inaudible from a kilometer away.
The Shrike pilot makes a valiant effort to save his ship, but he’s too low and too fast to straighten out the Shrike’s lopsided attitude. The right wingtip strikes the ground and throws up a puff of dirt and gravel. Then the attack ship careens tail over nose and cartwheels along the right side of the runway, engines still screaming at full throttle. I wait for an ejection capsule to arc into the sky and deploy a triple-canopy chute, but none appears. Then something on the Shrike explodes and triggers a chain reaction—fuel, ammo, probably both—and the whole thing blows up in a giant, cataclysmic orange fireball. The thunderous explosion is so loud that it drowns out every other sound on the battlefield. It rolls over the hillside and across the town like the throat-clearing of a pissed-off god. A few seconds later, I can feel the heat from the fireball on the exposed skin of my face even from almost a kilometer away.
“Splash one,” Lieutenant Dorian sends, matter-of-factly. There’s no triumph in his voice.
An eerie silence settles over the battlefield when the echoes of the explosion have died down. We still hear the commotion from the settlement, but the rifle fire has ceased. The Shrike is a burning wreck in a fiery patch of ground a good fifty meters across, bright orange flames and billowing black smoke. Somewhere in that small inferno, a pilot is being reduced to ashes and charred bones.
“Second Squad, regroup and join up with First. Exfil to the pickup point. Let’s get out of this place before they send in reinforcements.” If they have any, I think. We just crippled a wing of Shrikes and killed the better part of a garrison platoon.
“Second Squad has casualties,” Sergeant Fallon sends back. “We’ll be a little slower on the exfil.”
I check the platoon biometrics with dread. One of the troopers has weak vital signs, Private Best. Another trooper has no vital signs at all.
“Private Gilroy is KIA,” Sergeant Fallon reports. “Took a cannon round to the armor from that fucking MAV.”
“Copy that,” I say. “Leave his kit and haul him out.”
Sergeant Fallon clicks back her acknowledgment.
“Time to leave, people. Blackfly One, expedite to pickup zone.”
“On the way,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “ETA three minutes.”
I’ve been around death many times in the military. I’ve lost people close to me, and came close to my own violent demise more than once. But I’ve never had a KIA in my unit who died doing what I ordered him to do. I know that I didn’t kill him personally because I didn’t pull the trigger on the gun that ended his life, but that knowledge doesn’t let me feel a great deal of absolution. I told him to be in that spot with the rest of the squad, and now he’s dead.
We watch over First and Second Squads as they join up and make their way down the steep riverbanks to reach the exile point where the drop ship will land in a few minutes. By all standards, we have dealt the local garrison a major ass-kicking. They lost at least two dozen troops and three armored vehicles. We disabled or destroyed all their offensive airpower because we caught them mostly unprepared, and we were ruthless about inflicting damage. It was a sucker punch, just as Sergeant Fallon predicted. But as I look over the carnage we are leaving behind as my two squads retreat from the airfield, I can’t shake the feeling that we are the bad guys for a change.
CHAPTER 24
Arcadia is easily the most beautiful of all the colony moons and planets I’ve seen in my entire career. It has an abundance of fresh water, rivers and streams and about a thousand lakes. Two mountain ranges crisscross the only continent on the moon, which takes up maybe a third of the planetary surface. The rest is ocean, dotted with many large and small islands. It’s a pretty big place, but you can see a lot of it when you are on the run and trying to hide from aerial patrols.
“Bogey at eleven o’clock high,” Lieutenant Dorian sends. It’s his fourth contact report in two hours, and I no longer feel crippling dread when he calls out a Shrike in our aerial neighborhood. “Fifty klicks out, reciprocal heading. I’m going to drop down another five hundred and hide us in the ground clutter.”
I check the outside view, which doesn’t look like we have another five hundred feet to drop. The Blackfly is flying up a narrow valley in one of Arcadia’s main mountain ridges. They’re not the Himalayas, but the peaks of these mountains are three thousand feet above sea level, and right now I have to look up to see those peaks. Since our raid on the airfield two days ago, we’ve had to relocate the drop ship four times already to avoid direct overflights by Shrikes. They don’t have active radar running, but Lieutenant Dorian is familiar with their passive surveillance gear, and he isn’t keen on the idea of letting one closer than ten kilometers, polychromatic armor or not.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say they know we are around now,” Sergeant Fallon says dryly from her jump seat to my left.
“Now, see, that’s pure speculation,” Gunny Philbrick replies. “Those explosions could have been equipment malfunctions.”
With the carnage of that raid two days behind us, the collective shell shock most of us suffered is slowly wearing off. For a bunch of garrison troops caught unprepared, the renegade troops we faced managed to get into action fast and cause us some hurt in exchange for the sound beating they received. There’s a sealed green body bag tied to the deck of the drop ship’s cargo hold between me and the crew chief. Judging by what I saw of his body when Second Squad brought him back from the airfield, Private Gilroy must have been dead before he hit the ground.
The MAV’s remote autocannon was only the light 25mm module, not the beastly 35mm they put onto the armored Mules, but that 25mm is the same gun we use at squad level for heavy fire support, and individual armor is no match for it. Gilroy took a single shell to his chest armor, slightly below and to the left of his sternum, and turned everything from his collarbone to his waistline into bloody mush. It was most likely a lucky hit—or supremely unlucky, from Gilroy’s perspective—but he’s just as dead as if it had been a deliberately aimed shot by a skilled gunner instead of a spray-fired round triggered by a panicking garrison trooper under fire.
“We need a data link to Company,” I tell our pilot. “Let’s pick the next place somewhere up high.”
“Copy that,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “We’ll see them coming from further away.”
“What’s the status on the go juice?”
“Not horrible. Yet. Aux tanks one and four are almost dry. Then we’ll be down to aux two and three, and th
e internal. But trucking around in the weeds burns it up fast.”
If we don’t keep moving, we greatly increase the chance of a Shrike patrol finding us on the ground. But moving burns up fuel we will miss later when we have to return to Portsmouth. I like the safety afforded by mobility under stealth—the polychromatic armor doesn’t work when the engines are off and not generating power—but we can’t stay on the run and relocate twice a day forever before we run the bird dry and become sitting ducks. At least the ship is lighter than it was when we entered the atmosphere. Not only did we burn through half of the external fuel tanks we brought, but we also used up a fair bit of ammunition and food. The pallet in the hold behind me has fifty boxes of field ration packs on it, a dozen meals per box, and it’s already almost halfway gone.
“What about the little plateau near the top of that ridge?” I ask, and mark the area in question on the TacLink map for Lieutenant Dorian.
“Let me check it on optical once I’m through this valley,” he replies.
A few minutes later, he sends me his own marked-up shot of the map via TacLink.
“Looks good. Just enough space to land the bird, and we’re shielded by that ridge. We can set up OPs on that crest. Anything comes, we should be able to see it from a long way out.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
“Copy that. ETA four minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says.
I relay the news to the platoon, who make relieved noises. The drop ship’s mobility and armor means safety, but bumping around at low level in a crowded hold is tiring and unpleasant, and when you are merely a passenger, you have no control over your own fate at all.
We set down on a small, rocky plateau high up near a craggy ridge that runs roughly southwest to northeast. The soil up here is ochre-colored, and so fine that it clings to our boots as we file out of the drop ship’s hold and onto the surface. We are sheltered by the nearby ridgeline, which is between us and the location of the airfield we raided. Anyone looking to spot us would have to fly directly overhead or come up the valley behind us.
Outside, the sun is shining. The Leonidas system star looks a lot like our own sun from Earth does. The only thing that makes it very obvious that we aren’t on Earth is the large, iridescent blue planet that takes up a quarter of the sky on the opposite horizon. When we are rotated toward it, Leonidas c is visible day and night because it is so close and bright.
The plateau where we landed is roughly two hundred meters long and a hundred wide, and Lieutenant Dorian rolled his Blackfly to the very northern edge, where the ridgelines meet at a sharp point that forms a narrow, craggy canyon that shelters and conceals most of the drop ship’s bulk. The platoon sets up the usual perimeter security while I discuss deployment locations with Sergeant Fallon and my squad leaders.
“Gunny, get First Squad up on that ridge and set up an OP,” I say to Philbrick and mark the map on TacLink for everyone to see. “Five hundred meters, out there, between that big peak and the little one. Looks like there’s a good flat spot up there.”
“Be a bit of a climb,” Philbrick says and eyes the steep walls of the ridge.
“We need to get a data link to Company, so take the big comms kit and relay back to the ship.”
“Copy that. Want to launch the drones from up there, too?”
“No, we’ll do that from here. No point having your guys drag up the extra weight. That’s a thirty-second flight for the drones.”
“Fine by me,” Philbrick replies.
“I suggest you send along a few MANPADS,” Sergeant Fallon says to me. “If we get bounced by a low-flying bogey, that might buy us the time to get our own bird back in the air.”
“Good idea. Gunny, add a pair of Tridents to the list. However many you think you can haul up there.”
“Half a dozen if I don’t take any MARS tubes. I don’t think we have to worry about pursuing armor too much in this landscape.” He nods over to the rocky ravine beyond our plateau, which drops forty degrees or more and would be utterly impassable for a Mule or even a lightweight MAV.
“Do it,” I say, and he nods.
“Sergeant Wilsey, you take Second Squad down the ravine and over to the other side of it. Go down a klick, see if you can find a good spot right about here.” I mark the location on the map for him. “That way you can see anyone who tries to make it up the valley toward us, and spot any aerial traffic to the south. Sergeant Welch, take Third Squad and climb that ridge to the east. Take at least a pair of Tridents. I want you to set up shop on the far side and to the north of our position so you can cover Second Squad’s blind spot in that direction. Any comments or questions, let’s hear them.”
The squad leaders have neither. I dismiss them, and they walk off to gather their fire teams and move out. Sergeant Fallon nods her approval.
“That’s as close to all-around coverage you’re going to get with three squads. I would have put them into the exact same spots.”
“I’ve been looking at TacLink screens for years now,” I reply. “Air defense coverage angles, defensive fire sectors, all that stuff. My brain just sort of does it on autopilot now.”
“A second lieutenant with a clue. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“It’s a brave new fucking world,” I say, and she grins.
While the three squads are climbing the ridges on either side of our hiding spot with hundreds of pounds of weapons and equipment between them, the crew chief and I set up the recon drones for deployment. When they are all out of their case and have their propulsion packages installed, I check their function over TacLink and program their little onboard computer brains with preset patrol patterns. Then I activate them, and, one by one, they buzz off into the cool mountain air and accelerate away to start their patrols. Almost immediately, the uplinks are feeding me data. I tap into the visual feed of drone 22, which is climbing the ridge right above where Philbrick and First Squad are struggling up the steep incline. They are loaded down with comms gear and several Trident air-defense missile launchers. Then the drone is past the squad and over the nearby ridge, gaining dozens of feet in altitude every second. I drop the window for the visual feed and go back to the TacLink map, where my sensor awareness bubble slowly expands again as the drones are zooming outward and away from the plateau and the drop ship.
Sergeant Fallon comes trotting down the drop ship’s ramp with a ration bag in her hand. She walks over to where I am standing, closes the lid of the service case for the drones, and sits down on it. Then she pulls open the ration pack and rifles through the contents.
“Ha. Beef and noodles.”
She pulls the main meal pouch out of the bag and pops the little capsule at the corner of the bag that heats up the contents chemically.
“Those boys bitch about the rations, but compared to the shit we have to dole out in the Clusters, this is manna from heaven. Kids these days don’t know what real shit food is.”
The pouch changes color to indicate that the heating process is finished. Sergeant Fallon pulls the opening tab and takes a plastic spork out of the ration bag. Then she begins shoveling the contents into her mouth.
“Remember the stuff we used to get?” I ask. “Back before the Lankies, when they still fed us all the good chow?”
“Do I ever,” she says with a full mouth. “I haven’t had a fresh cut of real beef in almost two years. Not even the vat-grown stuff.”
“I remember my first meal at Basic. We ate until it started coming out of our ears, and then we ate some more. And then the DIs made us run two miles, and everyone puked.”
She chuckles around her mouthful of imitation beef and noodles.
“Those were the good times. I think those are gone forever.”
“I’m not sure they were the good times,” I say. “Food was better. No Lankies to worry about. But look at the shit they had us do for that good chow.”
Sergeant Fallon shrugs and pokes around in the meal bag with her spork.
“I guess
you are right. I’m eating the same crap as everyone else in the Clusters, but I sleep better at night.”
I walk over to the drop ship and step into the cargo hold to get myself some food as well. One of the boxes on top of our dwindling stack of rations is open, and I rifle through it to check the variety. I pick the least objectionable one—chili with beans—and then go forward through the drop ship’s central passage to the cockpit to check on our pilot. The armored cockpit hatch is open, and Lieutenant Dorian is snoring in his pilot seat, helmet on the empty copilot seat next to him. I decide not to bother him and walk back to the cargo hold. To get past the half-finished pallet of rations, I have to step over the sealed green body bag we tied to the floor to prevent it from sliding all over the place. The plastic bag in my hand is the same olive-green shade as the body bag, which makes the meal look disturbingly like a miniature version. I never noticed the similarity until just now.
“OP Alpha is up and running,” Gunny Philbrick reports an hour later. “The relay is live. Tridents are in standby mode.”
“Copy that,” I send back. OP Alpha is set up on the ridge half a kilometer to our west, two fire teams spaced a hundred meters apart. Their TacLink updates don’t tell me anything the drones didn’t already see, but even with autonomous recon drones and all the other whiz-bang technology at our disposal, there’s still nothing that can fully substitute for ten sets of trained eyeballs and the experience of a few seasoned NCOs. And each of those fire teams has a Trident antiair missile launcher and two reloads. If a Shrike discovers our hiding spot and makes an attack run, we have a credible defense in place. Trident missiles have a warhead that deploys three laser-guided explosive tungsten darts. The little missiles leave the launcher tube and kick it up to Mach 10, and they have a ten-kilometer range, enough to intercept a Shrike and damage or destroy it before it gets into cannon range.