Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 9} COMBAT DROP

“Combat stations, combat stations. All hands, combat stations. This is not a drill. I repeat…”

I’m already suited up and fully armed, and the announcement holds no added urgency to me, or to the rest of the regiment lined up on the hangar deck. We have been gearing up for our drop for the last two hours, and we’re ready for combat. In front of us, flight deck techs swarm all over the drop ships lined up to ferry us into battle, removing safety caps from ordnance fuses and autocannon muzzles. I check my kit for the thirtieth time—armor integrity, weapon status, comms gear function, oxygen levels, filter condition.

The flight deck is a cavernous hall that takes up the entire bottom half of the ship almost from bow to stern, and it’s packed end to end with drop ships and troops. Each drop ship can ferry a platoon, and we’re dropping with a full regiment today. Twenty-four drop ships are running up their engines on the other side of the flight deck, the most I’ve ever seen parked wingtip to wingtip in one spot. As scary as it is to be part of an operation that actually requires the deployment of this much brute force, it’s also sort of exhilarating. I’m a cog in a machine, but on days like this, I’m reminded just how large and powerful a machine it is.

“First Platoon, on your feet!”

The platoon sergeant, SFC Ferguson, walks down the line of battle-ready SI troopers, patting the polymer shell of his M-66 rifle for emphasis.

“Time to earn this month’s paychecks, boys and girls. I see any bolts cycling before I give the go-ahead, we will have the first casualties of the day.”

I’m embedded with the First Platoon of Alpha Company, Fourth Spaceborne Infantry Regiment. We’re in the first attack wave, and Alpha Company is tasked with pinning down and destroying the garrison company entrenched in the third-largest settlement on Sirius Ad. Alpha Company is the sharp point of the spear, and that’s why they get one of the fleet’s three combat controllers along for the drop. Macfee is going in with a company of the Forty-Second Regiment, and the third combat controller assigned to the Manitoba is dropping with the command element of the Forty-Fourth. The grunts carry rifles, rocket launchers, and antiarmor missiles. We combat controllers carry radio suites and integrated TacLink computers that can practically remote-control Shrike attack birds and orbital ordnance. On the whole, the grunts are almost as protective of their embedded combat controllers as they are of their medics.

The tail ramp of our drop ship opens with a soft hydraulic whine, and the ship’s crew chief steps out onto the ramp. He uses both his arms like signal sticks for taxiing aircraft, and waves us into the cargo hold of the waiting ship.

“Double-line, double-time. Take your seats, buckle in, and stop the yapping,” Sergeant Ferguson shouts over the din of the dozens of engines warming up on the flight deck.

We trot up the ramp and file into the cargo hold of the Wasp. There are two rows of seats, one on each side of the hold, so half the platoon sits facing the other half across the cargo bay. At this point, everyone’s helmet visors are lowered, in case the ship suffers a sudden hull breach. With the polarized filters of the visors, our faces are invisible to the others, and nobody has to pretend not to be nervous.

When I drop out of a ship in a bio-pod, I shut down my sensor input and go completely dark until I hit atmo. On drop-ship ingress, I do the opposite. As our ship gets picked up by the docking clamps to be lowered into the drop bay, I turn on my tactical network computer and tap into the Manitoba’s TacLink. By the time we have settled in the bay to wait for the drop signal, my three-dimensional display shows me exactly what the main tactical plot in CIC is projecting. A warship’s battle plot looks like a tapestry of abstract symbols and vector lines to the uninitiated, but I’ve worked with tactical plots for so long that I can interpret the data while half asleep or fully drunk. It’s a completely alien way to see the world, but once you know how to read it, you become almost omniscient.

When I bring up the main tactical plot on my helmet’s display, the attack is already under way. We are half a million kilometers from Sirius Ad, and the distance to the planet is shrinking rapidly as the Manitoba and her task force rush into drop position at top speed. In front of our force, the display shows only two enemy fleet units—one moving our way on an intercept course, the other running in the opposite direction. The Chinese supply ship is running for the Alcubierre chute, and the space control cruiser is going on the offensive to cover the retreat. It’s a valiant move, but one aging Chinese cruiser fighting it out with our supercarrier task force is merely a noble form of suicide. My fellow drop-ship passengers are unaware of the short and sharp clash of arms that is about to commence. Their world is limited to the windowless hull into which we are neatly packed like meal trays in a box of rations.

When the Chinese cruiser reaches the outer edge of our antiship weapons envelope, our own cruiser, the NACS Alaska, starts launching her missiles. I see first eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two blue missile symbols emerging from the Alaska and rushing toward the enemy ship. One or two of them would be enough to put the Chinese cruiser out of commission, but the SRA have pretty good point-defense systems on their ships, so fleet doctrine calls for saturating their defenses with the first strike. It’s a costly way of doing business, but even three dozen antiship missiles are a good trade for a space control cruiser.

The Chinese don’t intend to roll over without putting up a fight. When our missiles have covered half the distance to the lone Chinese ship, a swarm of missile symbols emerge from the enemy unit, crimson vees to meet our blue ones. They fan out from the Shenzhen and rush toward our incoming barrage. Then the Shenzhen fires her own antiship missiles, her commander’s attempt to make sure he won’t show up in Valhalla alone today. Our two Linebacker ships take up the challenge, and start pumping their interceptor missiles into the intervening space, until the tactical plot is littered with red and blue vee symbols rushing to annihilate each other.

The outcome of the battle is never in doubt. There are two or three blue missile symbols to every red one, and the Chinese cruiser has emptied her magazines, while our Linebackers are just getting warmed up. One by one, the red missile icons on the plot converge with blue ones and disappear along with them, until there are only blue vee shapes left. The Shenzhen dies silently and without drama on the sterile plot display. Six or eight of our cruiser’s volleyed antiship missiles converge on the red “CRUISER/HOSTILE” icon, and snuff it out of existence. Just like that, we have turned thirty thousand tons of starship and five hundred people into a cloud of orbital debris.

“The Chinese cruiser just bit the dust,” I inform the platoon in my drop ship.

There’s whooping and hollering, as if they have just heard the score in a sports event and their favored team is in the lead.

With the cruiser out of the way, the task force moves in to begin the ground bombardment. Sirius Ad is a small planet, but it’s still two-thirds the size of Earth, and even with all the ordnance we’ve brought along on half a dozen warships, we wouldn’t be able to subdue the entire planet from orbit, unless we used a whole mess of hundred-megaton metroplex busters. Since we want to seize the place, not turn it into a radioactive wasteland, we need to apply our firepower more judiciously. The size of the planet works against the defenders as well—they can’t put a missile battery on every square kilometer of ground down there, and our recon drones have had three weeks to map out the defensive grid on the surface.

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.