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.”