“Affirmative,” Third Squad’s leader sends. “I got two thermobarics left. We’re on our way.”
The Chinese civil administration building doesn’t look very civil at all. It’s a reinforced three-story structure that looks like it could survive a near miss from a five-kiloton nuke. I’m hunkered down with the platoon’s command section in an alley a few hundred meters away. The Chinese autocannons fire sporadic bursts at buildings and intersections in our vicinity. The defenders don’t know where we are precisely, but they have a good idea, and trying to leapfrog across the intervening distance would get us killed. Their autocannons are remote-controlled via a data link that’s impossible to hack and very difficult to jam. The Chinese gunners can sit anywhere within a quarter mile of their gun, and hammer us from the air-conditioned safety of a command bunker. The new models can be switched to fully autonomous firing mode, where the gun’s computer selects its own targets. The Commonwealth Defense Corps had its own version, but erased the autonomous capabilities from the software after combat use showed that the computer had a 1.3 percent error rate when telling hostiles from friendlies. The Sino-Russians have a more lenient acceptable-friendly-fire ratio, so they left their guns capable of running themselves without humans behind the trigger.
I watch Third Squad’s little cluster of blue icons make its way to the water tank at nav grid B-7. They leapfrog across intersections and hug the walls of the modular Chinese colony housing. The heavy automatic cannon on the top floor of the admin building keeps hammering out short bursts of fire, but the gunners are not tracking the progress of our squad. Finally, Third Squad is in position to get a clear shot at the gun emplacement with their MARS launchers.
“Fire in the hole,” their MARS gunner calls. In the distance, I hear the muffled pop of a launching missile, and a second later we see the white-hot exhaust of a MARS rocket streaking over the low rooftops toward its target. Then there’s an earthshaking boom, the familiar low thunderclap of a thermobaric warhead explosion, and the enemy gun stops firing.
“Bull’s-eye,” Third Squad’s leader says. “Put in another one for good measure.”
“First and Second Squads, up and at ’em,” Lieutenant Benning orders. “First Squad on the northwest corner, Fourth on the southeast one. Third Squad, move up for overwatch. Let’s get this shit over with.”
Back in NCO school, I had to read a ton of papers by mostly clueless theoreticians, prattling on about the “changing nature of modern warfare,” and the need for the modern, post–Terran Commonwealth Defense Corps to be tooled and trained for “low-intensity colonial actions.” In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.
There’s nothing “low-intensity” about our final assault on the Chinese admin building in this colony town on Sirius Ad. We pop smoke and charge in, and the remaining Chinese marines open up with everything they have left. We dash from cover to cover, and plaster the building ahead with rifle grenades and MARS rockets as we advance across the last few hundred meters of narrow streets and uniform colonial box architecture. I summon down Third Platoon’s drop ship for close air support, and the Wasp comes shrieking out of the blue sky a minute or two later, gun pods blazing. The north face of the building ahead erupts in a shower of sparks and concrete dust as the Wasp rakes the structure with a stream of armor-piercing thirty-millimeter cannon shells. The Chinese admin building is designed to be an emergency shelter, and it has thick walls and a nearly bombproof structure, but the drop ship’s cannons pour out two thousand rounds per minute each, and most of the windows on the north side end up taking a cannon shell or two. When we make our final dash across the road right in front of the building, the fire from the defenders has stopped.
Even with their defeat obvious, the Chinese marines don’t hand over the keys to the place voluntarily.
“Holy shit,” Lieutenant Benning remarks. “Take us three weeks to patch the place up again.”
The interior of the admin building is a mess. The thick walls kept out most of our ordnance, but most of the windows on the north-facing side ate a MARS or a cannon shell, and the interior walls didn’t do much to stop those. We’re in the middle of what looks like a squad berth, and the rubble in here is almost knee-deep. Near the windows, we see what’s left of three Chinese marines who probably stood in the way of a few thirty-millimeter rounds.
“You think we’ll be here that long, LT?” I ask. “They’ll send half their fleet through the chute once they get the word that we’re here.”