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.
CHAPTER 10
The Chinese marines are understrength, outnumbered, cut off from the rest of their regiment, and without air support, but they put up a good fight anyway. We push into town slowly and carefully, but the Chinese troops are well entrenched, and they’ve had years to prepare for this defense. By the time we have most of the town under control, my platoon has suffered eight casualties, a fifth of our combat strength. Chinese marines don’t surrender, and they rarely retreat.
“If I ever find the bastard who designed those new autonomous cannons, I’ll skin him with a salted pocketknife,” our platoon sergeant says. Ahead of us, the civil administration building has been turned into a strongpoint by the Chinese, and every other window on the top floor seems to have a crew-served weapon behind it.
“Alpha One-Niner, watch the emplacement on the top floor, northwest corner. They got one of them new cannons, the ones that fire duplex ammo,” the platoon sergeant warns.
“Alpha One-Niner, copy. I’m all out of MARS rockets. Send Third Squad around to that—what is that thing at Bravo Seven, a water tank? They should be able to get a clear shot at that corner from there,” First Squad’s leader replies.
“Charlie One-Niner, you listening in?” the platoon leader sends.