Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 18} HE WHO BLINKS FIRST

For the next two hours, I coordinate the shuttle flights between the base and the atmospheric-processor stations. The civvie shuttles are slow and ponderous compared to our stolen drop ships, but we can’t spare any of our sparse airmobile firepower for taxi duties. The civvie shuttles start bringing back the exiled HD battalions, one platoon at a time. On my fleet comms, the urgent traffic from our old command goes unanswered. Sergeant Fallon has instructed us to ignore fleet messages until she can make her broadcast to the rest of the NAC units on New Svalbard. Outside, the new Dragonfly jocks are killing time by practicing dry attack runs at the end of the runway between puddle-jumper arrivals.

Finally, the people in charge over at Camp Frostbite are tired of leaving messages. One of the ground sensors at the outskirts of town picks up vehicle traffic coming down the road from the camp. I paint it with active ground radar, and use the optical sensors on the array to get a fix on what’s coming our way. A pair of the camp’s armored personnel carriers come down the gravel road at a cautious pace. Their modular weapon mounts are fitted with autocannons.

“Fallon, this is Grayson,” I send on our encrypted command circuit.

“Go ahead.”

“We have incoming, ground. Two mules with cannons. They’re coming down the road from Frostbite. Figure ten minutes to contact at their current pace.”

“Understood.” She pauses for a few moments. “Send one of the Dragonflies to intercept. Shots across the bow first. Give ’em fair warning.”

“Copy that. Grayson out.”

I relay Sergeant Fallon’s instructions to the flight of Dragonflies currently swarming the far end of the airfield.

“Rogue One, move to grid Delta Seven and play goalie. When they get in range, sweep them with the fire-control radar. Let’s hope they get the message before we have to trade shots.”

“Rogue One copies,” the pilot sends back. “We’re on our way.”

The Dragonfly breaks off its mock attack run, pulls up, and accelerates across the airfield at full throttle. When the seventy-ton war machine passes overhead, the sealed windows of the control tower rattle in their reinforced frames.

“Time to go public, I suppose,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Andrew, patch me into the fleet channel. Make sure they can pick me up down at Frostbite, too.”

I fire up the civvie comms, which have about a hundred times more output than the radio suite in my armor. Then I open a link to the fleet emergency channel, and route Sergeant Fallon’s comlink through it.

“You’re on,” I tell her. “Until they jam us.”

There’s a moment of static on the channel, and then Sergeant Fallon’s voice comes on again, this time in her Squad Leader Lecture cadence.

“All Commonwealth units, all Commonwealth units. This is Master Sergeant Briana Fallon, 330th Autonomous Infantry Battalion, Homeworld Defense.

“I have taken charge of all Commonwealth units in the city of New Longyearbyen. Three hours ago, we received an order to seize the civilian food storage and production facilities in the city. I refuse to execute that order. I will not be part of a military dictatorship on this moon. The troops under my command are now under control of the civilian administration.

“All Commonwealth units outside of the city: Do not approach the town under arms, or you will be fired upon. We may be outgunned, but we are not defenseless. Any assault on the civilian assets we’re defending will be considered a military coup attempt, and answered accordingly.

“All fleet units in orbit: We’re sitting on most of the food, fuel, and water in the system. If you attempt an orbital assault or bombardment, you will endanger thousands of civilians and destroy vital supplies. All you grunts and space jockeys: The choice is yours now. You can choose to follow orders without question, or you can choose to follow the law. Keep in mind that without the law, we’re not a military, just an armed gang that dresses alike.

“Make your choice wisely, but don’t think for a second that we won’t shoot back. Fallon out.”

There’s a brief and total silence on the emergency channel. Then my comms suite starts lighting up with dozens of incoming comms requests from all levels of our command hierarchy. I block all requests for now and shut down the open link.

“Well, I’d say that got their attention,” I tell Sergeant Fallon.

“They think we’re bluffing,” Rogue One says on the combat-control channel. “Dumb SI fucks.”

I check the display to see that the two armored personnel carriers from Frostbite have resumed their slow and cautious course toward New Longyearbyen. I tap into the ground comms, but they have switched to their own encrypted private network, taking a page out of our playbook.

“Rogue One, they’re not talking. Paint ’em with the fire-control radar. See if they get the message.”

Rogue One fires up his radar dome and zaps the two mules coming down the road with short sweeps of focused millimeter-wave radar. If their threat detectors are working, the tactical consoles of those vehicle commanders are lighting up like pachinko parlors right about now. I check the video feed from the Dragonfly’s forward sensor array to get a view of the drop ship’s quarry.

The two mules stop by the side of the road, halfway between Camp Frostbite and New Longyearbyen. Then one of them activates its remote weapons mount. The autocannon on top of the mule turns toward the drop ship’s targeting camera. I see the muzzle flashes before I can hear the rumbling staccato of the cannon all the way from the other side of town. The targeting image skews as the pilot takes evasive action.

“I’d say they got the message loud and clear,” the pilot sends.

“Weapons free,” I reply. “Try for mobility kills. Don’t want to shed blood unless we have to.”

“Copy that.”

The view from the targeting camera flashes, and the bottom of the display shows “MANUAL OVERRIDE.” Then the reticle slews to cover the ground just in front of the belligerent mule.

The drop ship’s nose turret hammers out a short, rasping burst. A second later, the view from the targeting camera is obscured as the chin cannon’s high-velocity rounds kick up the frozen dirt and gravel in front of the mule. From half a mile away, the cannon sounds like the distant thunder of a far-off summer storm. I watch the camera feed from the drop ship’s turret as the two mules come to a stop. The lead mule swivels its weapons mount as the gunner looks for a target. Over the audio feed, I can hear the threat detectors in the cockpit of our drop ship warbling a harsh alert.

“What a dipshit,” the pilot says almost conversationally. The chin turret thunders again. This time, the grenades hit even closer to the mule. The pilot walks his reticle from the front of the vehicle over to a corner. One shell strikes the bow armor at a sharp angle and glances off in a shower of sparks and laminate armor shards. Another hits the front-left road wheel of the mule dead-on and blows it into tiny little pieces. The mule heaves to one side as the combined force of the grenade and the exploding tire rock the vehicle.

“Slave your cannon to the rear and turn off your targeting radar, or I’ll put the next burst right down your centerline,” the pilot instructs the mule’s crew over the emergency channel. “I’m not in the mood to play tag here.”

The chirping from the threat receiver stops as the gunner in the mule turns off the active targeting aids for the autocannon. Then the weapons mount swivels backwards until the gun is pointed away from the drop ship. The other mule has popped a burst of polychromatic smoke, and the Dragonfly’s radar says he’s retreating at a fair clip.

“The other one’s pulling out. Let him go. This turkey makes a shifty move, blow off the other tires, too,” I tell the Dragonfly crew.

“No worries,” the pilot says. “They try to use that gun again, I’ll shoot it right off their ride.”

Well, at least they fired the first shot, I think.

The main situational display on the holotable next to me chimes to announce new data. I shift my attention in time to see four red inverted vee symbols enter the sensor sphere from above, almost five hundred miles from the airfield. They drop down into the atmosphere at high speed, drop ships or ground-attack birds on a tactical mission profile. Their course is away from New Longyearbyen, but I don’t take any solace in that information. I know the tactical handbook for this type of scenario, and I know exactly what I’m looking at.

“Raid warning, raid warning,” I announce over the tactical channel. “Two flights of two entering atmo from orbit. They’re going to hit the weeds outside of sensor range and come in as close to the deck as they can. Likely approach vectors are two-twenty through two-forty degrees. I repeat, raid warning, air threat red.”

The Dragonflies break off their practice runs and take up their designated patrol patterns overhead. Being armed for light air-to-ground action, they aren’t terribly useful for fending off an air assault, especially if the strike package contains Shrikes. But I want our valuable Dragonflies in the air and moving around, not sitting ducks on the landing pads.

“All shuttle flights, stay out of the weeds and watch your EMCON. Snowbird One-Four, expedite your approach and descend to four thousand as soon as practical. You want to get out of that airspace pronto.”

Snowbird One-Four is one of the colonial puddle jumpers, slow and unarmed cargo aircraft. We still have half of our HD troopers in transit or awaiting pickup from their terraforming stations. If only one of the fleet jocks has an itchy trigger finger, we have the setup for a quick and thorough bloodbath.

“I’m stretching us thin everywhere else, but I’m sending most of a company over to you,” Sergeant Fallon sends. “They’ll hit you first—bet on it.”

“I know. I’d do the same. They don’t need to get the drop ships back if they can park a squad or two on the refueling station.”

“So keep your head low. And don’t let them have that airfield, or our little mutiny is over.”

“I’ll do my best, Sarge.”

“If they blow you up, I want you to know that I think you’re a pretty able grunt for a fleet puke. Must be that superior TA influence you got before you had to get all snobby and run off into space.”

I smile at the holographic display in front of me. “Too bad we didn’t get to spend more time catching up and drinking without getting shot at.”

“Stare down the fleet and get rid of that SI regiment for me, and I’ll take you out for all the fucking coffee you can drink, Andrew.”

“Piece of cake,” I laugh. “Be easier if we had some nukes of our own to aim skyward, though.”

On my holotable, the display shows a brief red blip at a bearing of 230 degrees. Somewhere out there, one of the land-based sensor arrays picked up a brief return from a drop ship or Shrike that popped up out of the mountain valleys for just a moment too long.

“Incoming, vector two-three-zero, distance one-five-zero.”

If that raid package includes Shrikes, we’re completely outmatched. With our heaviest antiair ordnance being the shoulder-launched MANPADs from the drop-ship armories, there’s not much we can do if there’s a pair of ground-attack craft out there intent on blowing our infrastructure into rubble. The best defense we have is the fact that we’re embedded among ten thousand civilians.

At the front of the holotable, there’s a console with a set of red hardware buttons. I smack one of them with my palm, and a moment later the harsh trill of air-raid sirens comes from every corner of New Longyearbyen.

“Air raid, air raid. All personnel, seek shelter.”

As new and sophisticated as the civvie air-traffic control system is, it has a major shortcoming. On a military system, I would be able to let the network tie together all the assets and control every last bit of hardware automatically. The grunts on the ground would just have to aim their missile launchers in the general direction of the threat, switch their fire control to TacLink, and the computer would scan for threats and fire whatever missile is within intercept range. The civilian system has no such amenities. All I can do is to direct all my assets manually and hope I make the right calls.

“Rogue Three, Tailpipe One. Reverse course, point yourself to two-three-zero, and take up station at Delta Two. Keep EMCON, but I may need you to play radar picket on short notice.”

“Copy that, Tailpipe One. Wilco.”

Rogue Three swings his ship around and moves up to cover the likely threat axis.

The plot chirps again as two contacts materialize on the plot, right along the bearing where I saw the echo a little while ago. They’re rushing in at low altitude, six hundred knots, which means they’re either drop ships at full throttle, or Shrikes on economy cruising speed. For our sakes, I am hoping for the former. Their transponders are turned off, their contact icons a hostile crimson. Then two more icons detach from each of the incoming craft and streak toward the center of my plot at hypersonic speed.

“Vampire, vampire. Incoming missiles,” I call out on our emergency channel. “Threat axis two-three-zero. All units, defensive. Jammers hot.”

My plot projects the course of the incoming missiles, and the time to impact. The first pair is aimed right at the center of my holographic hemisphere, where the radar and lidar transmitters of the main sensor station pump out energy and radiation.

“Rogue Three, drop down to one hundred and go goalkeeper on your turret. They’re shooting HARMs at the radar.”

“Copy, wilco.”

Rogue Three’s millimeter-wave radar takes command of the gun turret on the Dragonfly’s chin. The fire-control system can shoot down missile threats all by itself if the missile crosses its engagement range. On the holotable, the missile icons streak in toward the center of the display. The numbers next to them rapidly count down: twelve, ten, eight, six. The turret gun of the Dragonfly hovering above the far end of the airfield rasps three short and exact bursts with the precision of a computer pulling the trigger. Just beyond the runway, there’s a flash and a rather unspectacular crack as one of the anti-radar missiles disintegrates at three times the speed of sound. My heart pounds as I see one of the icons on my display snuffed out just before it reaches the center of the hologram. The drop ship’s turret gun barks again, but the other missile is only a blink away from the radome now. A moment later, there’s a sharp, tinny-sounding explosion over at the sensor array, and my holotable blinks. When the hologram returns, it’s devoid of missile icons.

Where did the other pair go? I think.

There’s a blinding flash of light outside, and then I’m on the floor on the other side of the control room, ears ringing and breath squeezed from my lungs. The tower heaves like a welfare tenement in an earthquake. When I sit up, half the windows in the control tower are blown out, and the smell of burning fuel fills the room. There’s squawking on my earpiece, but I can’t make sense of it. The lights in the control tower are all out, and the holographic display has died.

By the time I make it to my feet, acrid smoke is wafting in through the broken windows. I stagger across the debris-strewn floor of the control room to take a look outside. Below, on the other side of the drop-ship landing pad, the refueling station is a mess of twisted, burning debris. The concrete walls of the hangar behind the refueler are charred and pockmarked by shrapnel. Whatever hit the refueling point was just big enough to blow the surface structure to bits without so much as cracking the concrete below.

My armor’s tactical computer didn’t even miss a beat. I put my helmet back on my head and turn on the visor display.

“All units, this is Tailpipe One. They took out the main radar and blew the refueling probes at the airfield all to shit. Control tower took a beating, too.”

“You okay, Andrew?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“Yeah. Just a bit rattled. Those fuel pumps blew up fifty yards from me.”

“I heard it. That was kind of rude, wasn’t it?”

“At least now we know they’re doing this the hard way. Watch for incoming. There are two pairs of drop ships out there, and my radar’s holed.”

“Don’t you worry,” she says. “They want to play rough, we’ll play rough.”

With the radar gone and the holotable offline, there’s no reason for me to stay up in the control tower. I pick up my carbine and make my way down the stairs to the bottom level of the control center. The two civvies who had been on duty when I walked in a while ago have disappeared.

Outside, the smoke from the burning fuel bites my throat, so I seal my helmet and check the tactical display again. Rogue Three is hovering nearby, scanning the area beyond the airfield for more incoming threats.

“Get the hell out of there!” a voice behind me calls. I turn around to see one of the civvie air-traffic controllers waving me over from behind the corner of a hangar fifty meters away. “There’s a hundred thousand liters of fuel under that landing pad, fella.”

I run over to the hangar to join the civilian tech, who has a thirty-meter head start by the time I round the corner.

“Fucking assholes,” he pants when we come to a stop between two hangars. “The fuel tanks have safety seals, but if those fail, half the airfield’s history.”

“They just blew up the refueling probes,” I say. “Keep us from juicing up our birds. Any way we can repair those?”

“Probably. We got spare parts. Ask the boss about that. I’m just one of the peons.”

“Incoming,” Rogue Three’s pilot calls out on comms. “Drop ship, two-three-zero degrees, five klicks out. Coming in at full throttle, headed right for the airfield.”

“They’re going to drop a platoon right on top of us,” I say. “Where’s that short company, Sarge? Things are about to get interesting over here.”

“They’ll be there any minute,” Sergeant Fallon replies.

I check my TacLink screen for data. The drop ship spotted by Rogue Three is already entering my short-range tactical map, barreling toward the airfield at top speed. On the other side of my map, the symbols for friendly infantry start populating the display. It doesn’t take a tactical wizard to realize that the red and blue icons are about to converge in the middle of the map, right at my current position.

“Get out of here,” I tell the civilian next to me. “There’s going to be gunfire in about thirty seconds.”

The civvie tech scurries off to safer parts. For a moment, I have to fight the urge to follow him. Then I check the loading status of my carbine and run to the edge of the hangar, for a clear view of the runway.

The fleet assault comes in right above the deck. When I see the drop ship, an old Wasp, it’s so low that it drags a rooster tail of ice and frozen dirt. When the ship is over the runway, the pilot pulls up the nose and fires the engines downward to scrub off speed. The second ship is nowhere in sight.

“Don’t let him open that tail ramp,” I tell Rogue Three. “He gets those grunts on the ground, we’ll have to pry ’em out from between the hangars.”

Rogue Three clicks his transmit button in acknowledgment, and paints the incoming Wasp with every active targeting system on his Dragonfly. For emphasis, he fires a burst of tracers that just barely miss the armored belly of the Wasp. The pilot of the other drop ship pulls away from the incoming fire and whips his bird around. When the nose of the Wasp points toward the hangars again, I can see the chin turret swiveling in search of a target.

“I have you locked up,” Rogue Three warns the pilot of the Wasp. “Turn off your radar, put her down, and keep that tail ramp closed.”

The Wasp’s pilot replies with a burst of fire from his ship’s chin turret. Rogue Three replies with his own gun—not the high-cadence chainsaw sound of his own chin turret, but the low, rolling boom-boom-boom of the large-caliber ground-attack cannon mounted on the underside of his hull. The Wasp’s starboard engine blows apart under the hammer blows of the autocannon, followed by the starboard ordnance pylon. Then another shell tears off the tail rudder assembly. I hear the engines of the Wasp howling as the pilot tries to compensate and get his bird on the ground in one piece, but his altitude is too low already. The Wasp banks sharply to port and rapidly plummets to the deck. At the last moment, the pilot manages to right his ship, and it almost looks like he’ll be able to pull off a hard emergency landing, but then one of his landing skids catches on the ground, and the ship flips over onto its side with a resounding crash.

Before I even have time to be horrified, there’s a loud boom coming from the other side of the airfield, followed by the thunderous roar of a Shrike’s multibarreled assault cannon. A hundred feet above and behind me, Rogue Three takes the burst of armor-piercing cannon shells head-on and falls out of the sky. When the Dragonfly hits the ground nearby, the explosion sends burning parts and aviation fuel everywhere. The attacking Shrike passes over the airfield at supersonic speed, trailing noise and destruction in its wake.

I sealed my helmet against the smoke of the refueling station fire a few moments ago, so the burning fuel showering me is merely alarming, not fatal. The battle armor, imbued with much faster reflexes than its owner, has already sealed itself tightly and activated my emergency oxygen supply. Out on the edge of the runway, a hundred meters from my position, the fleet’s Wasp is shuddering on its side with the engines at full thrust, digging a furrow into the concrete with the broken wing root of its portside pylon. I look on in horror as smoke starts rising from underneath the ship. Then the Wasp is on fire, smoldering in the middle of a small lake of burning fuel.

Somewhere over New Longyearbyen, I hear missile launches. On my TacLink screen, I see that the remaining Dragonflies have networked their fire-control systems and launched their antiair ordnance after the Shrike that just took out a quarter of our offensive air power. The computers ripple-fire all the missiles on the Dragonflies’ wingtips—one, two, four, eight, twelve. The Shrike is fleeing the area at full throttle, but the missiles can pull much higher acceleration. The attack ship’s automatic countermeasures lead some of them astray, but half a dozen missiles hurl themselves right up the Shrike’s engine nozzles, and the ship is swatted out of the sky. It careens to the frozen ground like a clumsily thrown piece of sheetrock, and plows into some civilian housing on the far side of town. A moment later I see the icon of the pilot’s eject capsule pop into existence on the TacLink screen. The remaining half dozen air-to-air missiles have nothing to spend themselves against, so their computers detonate them in midair.

I run to the cover of a nearby hangar and roll on the frozen ground to put out the burning fuel sticking to my battle armor. After the cacophony of heavy gunfire, supersonic booms, and explosions, the silence is surreal. I want to call for support, but find that my mouth is too dry to talk into the helmet mike. Instead, I smother the flames on my armor and lie on the ground to catch my breath.

After a while, a group of civvie techs in firefighting suits run toward me, and I sit up to show them that I’m not a corpse.

“You okay, soldier?” one of them asks, and stops in front of me. The others continue to the burning wreckage of the fleet Wasp, fire suppressant hoses and tanks in hand.

I raise my visor and wave him off.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Got a little singed, that’s all.”

“What the hell didn’t,” he says. “Half the airfield’s on fire. What the fuck happened?”

“They thought we’d blink first, and we thought they would,” I say. “Looks like we were all wrong.”