“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.