“Fucked if I know, Sarge. That’s above my pay grade.” He toggles his radio switch to check on the squad leaders.
“Third Squad, move up. Fourth Squad, keep up the perimeter. Stay sharp, people.”
We’re on the ground floor of the admin building. Above us, we hear an irregular staccato of rifle fire and grenade explosions, progress markers of the First and Second Squads sanitizing the upper floors. There isn’t a room on the ground floor that doesn’t have a dead Chinese marine or two in it, and our TacLink sensors show maybe fifteen defenders left in the building. Our suit sensors employ a complex voodoo of low-powered millimeter-wave radar, infrared, and half a dozen other technologies to spot enemy troops through walls and ceilings. It’s not infallible tech, especially not against opponents in battle armor of their own, but it’s accurate enough to keep our casualty count low. Our troops aren’t taking any chances. They shoot through walls with buckshot shells, and toss grenades through doorways in pairs and threes. However long the Chinese had to fortify this place, they weren’t expecting our attack when it came, and the defenders are disorganized and off their guard.
Room by room, we claw the admin building away from its owners, who die one by one in its defense. They must know that the battle is lost, but they fight us anyway, because that is what combat grunts do, and that’s what we would do in their place as well.
Finally, the gunfire ebbs, and our two squads meet up in the middle of the top floor, with no defender left between them.
“Building secure,” Lieutenant Benning calls out over the platoon channel. “Check for intel and enemy WIA, and watch your steps. Those little fuckers love their booby traps.”
Down in the basement, we walk into what must have been the command post for the Chinese garrison company. There are five or six dead SRA marines on the floor, plucked apart by shrapnel and fléchette bursts. Only two of them are in full battle rattle. The others are in various states of combat readiness, with partially donned armor. The highest-ranking dead SRA marine, a Chinese major, is dressed merely in battle dress fatigues, and armed only with a pistol. Lieutenant Benning walks over to the dead major, pulls the pistol from his grasp, clears the chamber, and sticks the gun into the webbing of his battle armor. The Commonwealth Defense Corps stopped issuing pistols to frontline infantry a while ago—even with fléchette ammo, a handgun is virtually useless against an opponent in battle armor—but the SRA officers wear them as badges of rank, and some of our guys collect them, a less messy form of taking scalps.
I pick up a mangled chair and sit down on the padded seat that has stuffing spilling through shrapnel wounds. On my tactical screen, I can see that our mission is a planetwide success. The second wave of NAC troops has landed, and the few remaining SRA defenders on Sirius Ad are fighting with their backs against the wall.
“Looks like something went according to plan for a change,” I say to Lieutenant Benning, who is sifting through the rubble on the floor with the toes of his armored boots.
“Don’t call it a win just yet,” he says. “Party ain’t over until our boots are back on that carrier deck.”
As if to make his point, the thunderclap of heavy ordnance exploding shakes the walls of the basement and almost tips me out of my chair.
“Enemy air,” Third Squad’s leader shouts into the platoon channel a few moments later. “Pair of attack birds, coming in from zero-zero-nine!”
“Warm up the missiles. First and Second Squads, get your heads down.”
“Incoming ordnance!” someone from Third Squad yells. On my tactical display, the red aircraft symbols have just cleared the edge of my current map overlay when four small inverted vees separate from the enemy attack birds and rush toward our position.
“Hit the deck,” I shout, and dive for the floor. Next to me, Lieutenant Benning and the platoon sergeant follow suit.
The four rockets hit our building simultaneously, with a cataclysmic bang that sounds like the Manitoba fell out of orbit and crashed onto the roof. My suit shuts down all sensor feeds automatically, turning me blind and deaf to protect me. When the video feed returns, it’s in the green-tinged shade of low-light magnification. All the lights in the basement have gone out, and the air is thick with concrete dust. My tactical screen comes to life again, just in time for me to see the symbols for the two enemy attack craft passing overhead. From Third Squad’s position, two MANPAD missiles rise in the wake of the SRA aircraft. One of the missiles catches up with its quarry and blots one of the red plane icons from my data screen. The other aircraft rushes out of range, its pursuing missile deflected by decoys.
“One down,” Third Squad’s leader announces over some general utterances of triumph. “Other one’s gonna come back around—you can bet your asses on that.”