“How much longer to the drop zone?” I ask Dmitry. He checks his display and shrugs.
“Eighteen, nineteen minutes. You lean back, take nap.” Then he puts the back of his helmet against the bulkhead behind him, his expression one of mild boredom.
Dmitry is one of my SRA counterparts, a Russian combat controller. We’ve had a few days to get to know each other on the way to this hot and dusty moon around Fomalhaut b, and Dmitry is not at all like the stereotypical Russian grunt. He’s not the size of a battle tank, and he doesn’t swill vodka or talk lovingly to his heavy weaponry. He doesn’t even have a buzz cut. Instead, Dmitry is a rather short guy, just barely taller than Sergeant Fallon, and he has the square jaw and chiseled good looks of a fashion model. His hair is an unruly mop that would be over regulation length in the SI, and he is soft-spoken instead of loud and boisterous. In short, he’s pretty much the polar opposite of the stereotype I had in my head. In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to adjust my old preconceptions.
I toggle through my available comms circuits and select the top-level tactical channel.
“Regulus TacOps, this is Tailpipe One. Request final comms and telemetry check.”
“Tailpipe One, TacOps,” the reply comes. “You’re five by five on data and comms. Good luck, and good hunting.”
“TacOps, copy that.” I bring up the data feed from Regulus’s TacOps center, where the ground-pounder brass and the carrier’s air-group commander are coordinating the NAC assets about to drop onto a Lanky-controlled moon.
The data feed from Regulus shows the eight drop ships of the first-wave spearhead in a V-shaped formation, streaking into atmosphere from high orbit without any opposition.
I’m going with the first wave, which is made up of SRA drop ships, and I’m the ground liaison for the NAC strike force because I’m one of only two combat controllers in this system right now.
Our atmospheric entry is marked by the usual bumping and buffeting. The armored marines in the cargo hold sway in their seats a little in time with the shuddering of the drop ship. I do one last check of the tactical situation in orbit, still amazed to see some of our most valuable fleet units flying close formation with ships they would have tried to blow out of space a few weeks ago.
Three minutes before Dmitry’s predicted time-on-target, the drop ship banks sharply to the left. A few moments later, I can hear the thumping sound of ordnance leaving the external racks, and then the autocannons on the side of the hull start thundering. The SRA birds have bigger cannons than ours do, but they fire at a slower rate. I can feel the concussions from the muzzle blasts transmit through the hull, something I’ve never felt in our Wasps or Dragonflies. This is a month for new experiences, it seems.
“Kuzka’s mother!”
The shipboard comms blurt out a staccato burst of terse Russian from the pilot that my suit’s universal translator software helpfully translates for me. It doesn’t do well with idioms. I look at Dmitry and point to my ear.
“It means to teach someone hard lesson,” Dmitry says.
All around me, the SRA troopers ready their weapons, so I do likewise. In Bravo kit, I carry the big and heavy M-80 rifle, and twenty-five rounds in quick-release loops on my battle armor. I work the release latch for the M-80’s breech and verify that the brass bases of two armor-piercing rounds are capping the chambers. The computer keeps track of my weapon’s loading status, of course, but no combat grunt with any experience at all ever fully trusts a silicon brain when it comes to life-and-death matters.
The Russian ship changes course a few times, each turn punctuated by bursts of cannon fire or missile launches. The ordnance on a drop ship is for fire support, and it’s not good practice to use most of it up before the grunts hit the dirt, but then the ship tilts sharply upward into a hover, the tail ramp starts opening, and I see why we’re coming in shooting.
“Yóbanny v rot!” one of the Russian marines next to me says, and I have a good idea what it means even without my translator, which merely renders the statement as “Strong profanity.”
Outside, the landing strip for the SRA colony’s air base stretches out into the distance behind the drop ship’s tail boom, and scattered on and near the dirty gray asphalt are the massive bodies of several Lankies, some still smoldering from whatever hit them. I don’t have very much time to observe the scenery as the drop ship puts its skids on the ground and the deployment light over the tail ramp jumps from red to green. We unbuckle, I follow the SRA grunts out of the cargo hold and down the ramp at a run, and I’m back in combat.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” the SRA officer in the lead shouts as we thunder down the ramp. In reality, he’s saying something in Russian, of course, but my suit is giving me the closest approximate translation.
The SRA marines work like a well-oiled machine of which I am no part. They take up a standard covering formation as the drop ship dusts off again behind us, engines screaming their banshee wail, sixty tons of laminate steel and weaponry put together into a hulking shape that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly at all. The drop ship isn’t a hundred meters off the ground when it pivots around and opens fire with its cannon again. Blind without any TacLink information, I have to rely on my own suit’s sensors and my eyes and ears. I look downrange to see where the drop ship is firing, but I can’t see what they’re hitting. I do, however, hear the unearthly wail of a stricken Lanky, a sound that has followed me in many dreams over the last few years. Then I see the Lanky appearing behind a structure two hundred meters away, limbs flailing, trying to get out of the hail pouring from the drop ship’s heavy-caliber autocannons. As big and formidable as they are, their size makes them excellent targets for our air support. For the first time, we are fighting them with all the air and space power at our disposal, and that is making all the difference.