by Marko Kloos
The drones have reached the outer limit of their patrol range and are on the way back to us. We are seven hundred kilometers to the northeast of the airfield we raided two days ago. The cameras on the drones have spotted two of the strange, small-scale terraforming units to our west and north. One is inactive, but the other one is putting out heat, which means it’s in use and generating power. There’s no settlement nearby to receive the electricity from the station’s fusion plant, but the imagery from the drone cameras shows a cleared site that is under construction, maybe in preparation for putting up another town. Arcadia isn’t very large, but it’s very empty, like most colonies its size. Fifty or a hundred thousand people don’t even begin to fill up a place half the size of Earth.
With the comms relay up on the ridge, I use the drop ship’s systems to send out a low-power communications burst in the general direction of the other platoons. We don’t have any units in orbit, so we have to rely on whatever comms gear we brought, and all of it has limited range without an orbital relay to distribute the signal.
The first reply comes from Third Platoon, two hours later. It’s the first thing I’ve heard on the Company-level channel since we landed on Arcadia.
“Rogue One, this is Rogue Three Actual, do you copy, over?”
“Rogue Three Actual, this is Rogue One Actual. I hear you three by five. What’s your status, over?”
“One Actual, we are on the move. The place just got lousy with Shrike patrols about thirty-six hours ago. We did our initial recon run and are heading to an alternate deployment point.”
“Three Actual, send me a TacLink upload so we can see what you’re seeing. We may have had something to do with those Shrikes swarming all over the place.”
“We figured as much. Stand by for TacLink upload. Let’s evaluate and pick up comms again in five.”
“Copy that, Three Actual. One Actual out.”
The computer updates the TacLink map with the data from the uplink a few moments later. Just like that, our window on this world grows two-thirds in size as the data collected by Third Platoon is added to our own. In a regular combat drop, when the platoons are within a few miles of each other at the most, the TacLink sharing is instant, but this recon mission is anything but regular.
The “known world” recon data on my TacLink map forms a crescent that’s several hundred kilometers wide and almost a thousand kilometers long from its northern to southern limits. Third Platoon is four hundred kilometers to our southeast, and there’s a swath of spotted terraforming stations and settlements between us and them. The airfield we raided two nights ago is almost five hundred kilometers to our west-southwest. Faint red tracks mark the trajectories of the Shrikes we spotted over the last thirty-six hours, and it’s very clear they’re covering the continent in an overlapping patrol pattern.
“We destroyed or damaged every last ship at that airfield,” Sergeant Fallon says when she looks at the data I’m sharing via our local near-field TacLink. “Wherever those birds are coming from, it ain’t that place.”
“They have more than one airbase, then,” I say. “That Navigator class holds two full wings of Shrikes. They must have unloaded both onto the planet when they got here.”
“Plus whatever they stashed here before everything blew up back home.”
“That’s a cheery thought.” The idea of five or six prestaged Shrike wings patrolling this place does not fill me with a great deal of calmness.
The map shows five settlements on Arcadia’s only continent, or at least the part of it we’ve scouted via drop ships and drones so far. They are all arranged in a line that strings from north to south on the western part of the continent. The biggest of the colony towns is the one in the center of that line, with two smaller towns to the north and two to the south, each roughly two hundred kilometers from each other. The airbase we raided two days ago was next to the second northernmost settlement.
“All that space, and they cluster together within a thousand klicks,” Sergeant Fallon comments. “Makes no fucking sense.”
“Makes a lot of sense,” I say. I still feel weird correcting my old squad leader, whose military experience vastly exceeds mine. But she hasn’t been out in the Colonies much, and she doesn’t really have an idea of why they do what they do out here.
“How so?”
“Supply lines. Easier to share stuff and shuffle personnel if you don’t have to go halfway around the moon to deliver it. All the colonies work that way. They set up a central settlement and then expand out from there as the colony grows.”
“Three Actual, this is One Actual, do you read?” I send back to Third Platoon, four hundred klicks away and moving across the landscape in their Blackfly at just under the speed of sound.
“One Actual, loud and clear. Looks like you people kicked over the hornet’s nest the other night.”
“We did what we were told to do. What’s the word on Second and Fourth Platoons?” I ask.
“Second Platoon checked in eight hours ago. They took out an ammo depot near one of the settlements. Haven’t heard from Rogue Actual or anyone else from Fourth Platoon since shortly after planetfall.”
“Copy that, Three Actual. Keep us in the link once you set up shop at the alternate deployment point.”
“Will do. Three Actual out.”
I kill the comms link and frown. If I wasn’t wearing a helmet, I’d be scratching my head right about now.
“We were flying under the radar perfectly fine,” I say to Sergeant Fallon. “We could have scouted the whole continent without pegging their radar once. Why did he have to turn this into a combat mission and make us blow up that airbase? Now they know someone’s sneaking around in their backyard. And they’re fucking livid.”
Sergeant Fallon shrugs. “If I were the betting type,” she says, “I’d place good money on the possibility that this didn’t turn into a combat mission. I’m pretty sure it was one from the start.”
CHAPTER 25
“Rogue One, this is Rogue Three, come in. Over.”
The chirp of an incoming emergency transmission on the command console startles me awake. I try to check my chrono, but my eyes are so blurry that it takes a good five seconds for me to start making out the softly glowing numbers. I’ve been asleep for two hours, but it feels like I got no rest at all.
“Sarge,” I shout as I scramble to my feet. By the time I’m at the command console and reach for my helmet, Sergeant Fallon is already in the cargo bay.
“Rogue Three, this is Rogue One Actual. Go ahead,” I say once my helmet is on my head and I’ve toggled into the company channel.
“One Actual, we have a major problem here. We just had to put the bird down in the weeds with a mechanical problem. Repeat, our ride is down. And we are in a shitty spot.”
“Goddammit,” I say. “Give me a TacLink update.”
“TacLink coming your way. We are presently one-three-zero klicks to your southwest.”
The TacLink map updates—much too slowly, for my taste—and I see the icon for Rogue Three pop up on the display. It sits on a plain just a few kilometers from the foot of the low mountain chain where we are currently parked with Rogue One, on the other side of the mountains and over a hundred kilometers north.
“Three Actual, that is a really bad spot. You have no line-of-sight coverage for fifty klicks.”
“Tell me about it. The bird is fuel-starved. One engine quit on us at five thousand. We barely made it down before the other one turned off, too.”
“You’re on the ground with dead engines?” I shoot Sergeant Fallon a panicked look. Without the Blackfly’s engines running, the polychromatic armor is switched off, and without its active stealth technology, the drop ship is just a flat black spacecraft the size of a small building.
“Affirmative,” Rogue Three Actual replies. “We’re a sitting duck.”
Outside, the moon is shrouded in the darkness that comes with its lunar nightfall. It’s a short night, only six hou
rs, and it’s not nearly as dark as an Earth night because the nearby planet is so luminous that it’s as bright outside as the brightest full moon on Earth, only in shades of blue instead of silver. And this hemisphere of Arcadia will be back in the sunlight in less than an hour.
“Goddammit,” I say again. “Sarge, go and shake Lieutenant Dorian awake. We need to get ready for emergency dustoff.”
“Copy that,” Sergeant Fallon replies, and disappears into the passageway to the cockpit.
“Can you fix your fuel system in the next forty-five minutes?” I ask Rogue Three Actual. “Because you’ll be a glowing billboard in about an hour when the sun comes up.”
“The pilot and the chief are working on it. But if they can’t get it straightened out, we will need a quick evac. First Shrike that spots us is going to tear us to shreds.”
“Stand by,” I reply. “We’re heading your way ASAP.”
Behind me, Sergeant Fallon comes back into the cargo bay with Lieutenant Dorian in tow, who looks about as ragged and tired as I feel.
“Rogue Three’s bird is down with a fuel line issue,” I tell them. “They’re just sitting out on the prairie with no cover, and we’re going to have sunrise soon.”
I bring up the TacLink map on the command console’s screen to show them the location of Rogue Three. Lieutenant Dorian frowns and shakes his head.
“They’re still there when the sun comes up, they are dead meat.”
“So what are our options?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“We go get them with this ship,” our pilot says. Then he looks at me. “Do you agree?”
“Only thing we can do,” I say. “Other than leaving them to fend for themselves. The Shrikes can tear them up from BVR with standoff munitions. They’ll never even get to launch Tridents. Not sitting out in the open like that.”
“I concur,” Lieutenant Dorian says.
“We can’t get two platoons into this thing. Unless you want to stay here with the troops and let the ship go out empty,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“I don’t want to bring them all back here,” I say. The map doesn’t show me a whole lot of options, but I know that I don’t want to separate my platoon over a hundred klicks from their drop ship. But the topography isn’t completely unfavorable. The mountain range extends to twenty klicks from where Rogue Three is sitting on the ground, and there are always spots where a drop ship can hide for a bit. Even circling around with polychrome armor active and wasting fuel is better than leaving a Blackfly and forty men and women out in the open for the Shrikes to use as live target practice. After the airbase raid, I doubt they’d cut us any slack at all.
“Here’s what we’ll do.” I mark the map and zoom in on the area around the stranded Blackfly. “We’ll load up the platoon and switch deployment points. We’ll find a new spot right here, on the other side of the ridge, wherever we can find good cover. Then Lieutenant Dorian and the chief run out and fetch Rogue Three’s crew and Third Platoon and bring them back to us. That way neither platoon is more than twenty klicks from the working bird.”
“Did you raise Company?” Sergeant Fallon asks me. I shake my head.
“They’re out of comms. So’s Second Platoon. This one’s all us, and right now.”
“Then let’s go,” she says. “We don’t have time to wait for the squads to get off the OPs. Think you can do a nighttime pickup on a steep ridgeline?”
“Half dead or fully drunk,” Lieutenant Dorian replies, and Sergeant Fallon grins.
Fifteen minutes later, we are racing south at five hundred knots, burning precious fuel at a prodigious rate again. All three squads are back in the hold, and the floor between the seat rows is cluttered with hastily loaded gear, in flagrant violation of safety procedures. I’m back at the command console and monitoring our tactical display.
“Shrike flight at four o’clock,” Lieutenant Dorian warns. “Forty klicks out, on a parallel heading.”
“Is he running active radar?”
“Negative.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t look too closely to his left.” I check the icon for the enemy ground attack bird, a bright red inverted V keeping pace with us thirty kilometers to the west, and try to will its trajectory away from ours.
“Sixty klicks to target zone. ETA four minutes.”
Lieutenant Dorian dips the nose of our Blackfly, and we descend even lower, until the mountain ridge on our right side is roughly at the level of the drop ship’s wingtips. It’s easier to hide the ship in the ground clutter than in the open sky at twenty thousand feet, but the lower and faster we go, the quicker the fuel goes. Lieutenant Dorian already detached the two outboard auxiliary tanks at the deployment point we just left fifteen minutes ago, sacrificing the little puddle of fuel left in them in exchange for eliminating the risk of a Shrike spotting two drop tanks tumbling to the ground out of nowhere.
“Get ready,” I send to my squad leaders. “Out of the bird and perimeter security. Take all the Tridents in the hold. I don’t want the skids to be in the dirt for longer than fifteen seconds.”
Lieutenant Dorian threads our ship through the mountain valley between the two ridges, which is much narrower down here than up north where we set up camp earlier. The Blackfly banks from left to right and then to the left again at alarming pitch rates. Then the nose of the ship pulls upward, and we scrub speed as our pilot aims to hit the landing spot in a hurry. Without the adrenaline in my system, I’d probably be sick as a dog right now.
We hit the ground roughly. The tail ramp opens, and Sergeant Fallon and the squad leaders are out of their seats before the ramp is even halfway down.
“Platoon, haul ass,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. “First Squad to the left, Second to the right, Third down the center.”
The light above the ramp turns from red to green. I watch anxiously as thirty-eight troopers and their squad leaders un-ass the drop ship faster than I’ve ever seen an entire platoon disembark.
“You have the deck,” I send to Sergeant Fallon. “See you in a few minutes.”
She gives me a thumbs-up from outside and then turns to follow the squads out into the morning twilight.
“Ramp is clear,” the crew chief sends to the cockpit. “Go, go, go.”
The engines increase their pitch again, and the ground outside falls away as Lieutenant Dorian hauls the Blackfly around and toward the west. Then we are over the top of the nearby ridge and moving forward at full throttle again.
“Twenty klicks,” Lieutenant Dorian says. I know he’s as tired as I am, but whenever he’s behind the stick, he sounds as cool and collected as if he’s sitting in a RecFac lounge chair. I decide on the spot that I’ll suggest him for a Distinguished Flying Cross at the very least if we make it back to Earth after all this.
“Rogue Three, this is Rogue One Actual. We are almost on top of you. Coming from the east at two hundred feet AGL. ETA one minute, thirty seconds.”
“One Actual, Three Actual. Copy that.”
When we skim over the next row of low hills, Third Platoon’s stranded drop ship is plainly visible on low-light magnified optics even from over ten kilometers away. They’re on a gently sloping rolling plain, and there’s absolutely no cover of any kind to hide the very obvious shape of the Blackfly. As we get to within five kilometers, the passive infrared sensors show clusters of personnel, Third Platoon’s troopers prone on the ground in a circle around the ship for perimeter coverage.
“Shit,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “The Shrike is changing course.”
I look at the TacLink map again. The red V representing the patrolling Shrike has started a turn to the south, and the line marking his projected course is bending closer and closer to the spot where Third Platoon’s Blackfly is sitting on the ground, immobile and defenseless.
“Did he see them?”
“I don’t think so,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “But if he gets within ten klicks of that ship, he will, unless the pilot got his wings from a surplus store.”<
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“Three Actual, there’s a Shrike in the neighborhood, and he’s close. Do not waste any time boarding this ship, you understand?”
“One Actual, affirmative,” Third Platoon’s leader replies tersely.
When we are directly overhead, our pilot makes a low pass over the stranded Blackfly Three, then circles the site once before pulling the ship into a hover. We descend with the tail ramp opening in midair. Then the skids of Blackfly One hit the ground with a thump. I unbuckle my harness and thunder down the ramp at a run.
“Grayson, that Shrike is changing course again,” Lieutenant Dorian warns. “He’s making a big loop to the east. He’ll pass within five klicks of us in two minutes.”
“Tell me you have some Tridents up,” I yell into the platoon-level channel. “Incoming air from two-six-zero degrees, coming in fast.”
Half the platoon is lined up to board the ship, the other half spread out in a semicircle facing west. We are in the most vulnerable phase of the process, both ships on the ground next to each other and presenting fat targets to anyone overhead, and that Shrike picked the worst possible moment and the worst possible patrol route.
On my TacLink, I hear the sharp chirp of a radar warning receiver, and my blood runs cold.
“He saw us,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “He’s sweeping us with his active. Coming in straight now from two-six-five degrees, CBDR.”
“MANPADS, go hot,” Lieutenant Horner orders. “Shoot him down.”
I tuck my rifle under my arm and dash away from the drop ship to go prone, find some cover on the grassy slope we’re on. Half the platoon is in the ship, but we will never get the hold full and the Blackfly underway before the Shrike gets into firing range. If I’m going to eat it in the next thirty seconds, it won’t be while strapped into a chair and looking at a console. Ahead in the semidarkness, I hear the electronic whine of two Trident launchers firing up their guidance systems as their gunners scan the sky for targets. I’ve been on the receiving end of attack ship runs many times before, but I’ve never felt this helpless in my life, with a platoon of troops all around me and no way to avert what’s about to happen.