“Get me some counter-air down here,” Lieutenant Benning tells me. “Whatever’s close by. I’m not picky right now.”
“Already on it, boss,” I say.
I check my airspace for the nearest fleet air units. Our platoon’s drop ship is nearby, but a Wasp doesn’t have the armament or speed to take on a fast mover. The next closest fleet units are two Shrikes, circling in a CAP pattern thirty miles away and twenty thousand feet high. I check their ordnance racks remotely and see an air-to-ground mix supplemented by four air-to-air missiles each on the outer wing pylons of the Shrikes.
“Raptor flight, this is Tailpipe Five. Counter-air,” I call out on the tactical air channel.
“Tailpipe Five, Raptor One-Three. Go ahead.” The voice on the TacAir channel is chopped, curt, and professional, just the way I remember Halley’s voice on our squad channel in Basic.
“Data uplink commencing. Fast mover right above the deck near our datum. You are cleared to engage. Get him off our asses.”
“Copy that, Tailpipe Five. On the way.”
“Cavalry’s coming,” I tell the lieutenant. “Two Shrikes.”
“If they shoot that bastard down and he bails out, I’ll chase him down and string him up by his balls,” the platoon sergeant says darkly. “I’m not getting shit for vitals from First and Second Squads upstairs.”
“Third Squad, sitrep,” Lieutenant Benning sends on the platoon channel. “What’s the picture out there?”
“LT, where the fuck are you?”
“In the building, Sarge. Down in the basement.”
“Ain’t no building left, sir. Top floors are gone. So’s the south half of the first floor.”
“We’re coming out. Check on the ground level on the north side, see if it’s full of rubble. And see if you can raise anyone from First and Second Squads. We’re not getting zip down here.”
There’s a brief pause before the sergeant replies.
“They’re gone, LT. Building’s gone. Their vitals are off the network.”
“Goddammit,” our platoon sergeant curses next to me in the darkness. “And just when we had this son of a bitch in the bag.”
I just grunt my agreement, and follow the platoon’s two-man command section out of the tomb that used to be the SRA company headquarters.
Some troops have a thing about not wanting to be that last unlucky bastard to buy it in a battle, the one who catches a stray fléchette or laser tripwire when everyone else is already breaking out the beer, but that thought never bothered me in the least. Whether you’re the first one to die on the drop, or you stumble over something and break your neck just as you’re stepping back onto the carrier deck after the battle, you end up in the same body bag, active antiseptic green polymer, impervious to pathogens and body fluids. If they recover your meat, that is, and you didn’t get blown to bits by a Chinese fuel-air warhead, like the troopers from First and Second Squads who, to a man and woman, just died a few dozen feet above us. None of the dead are any less lucky than the others.
The staircases are all filled with rubble from the collapsed floors above us. The basement has two exits to the surface, so we pick the one that has less debris in front of it and start digging ourselves out. Outside, Third Squad tries to work their way inside. Finally, we emerge from the acrid darkness of the basement back into the sunlight of Sirius Ad.
“What now, Skipper?” Third Squad’s leader asks the lieutenant.
“Keep up the perimeter, call down the bird for evac, and let’s see if we can find our guys in that shit. Check for suit transponders.”
In the blink of an eye, our combat strength has been cut by half. We have the remaining eight troopers of Third Squad, and the seven members of Fourth Squad a few hundred yards away. We landed on Sirius Ad with thirty-nine troops, and we’re down to eighteen. We took our objective and accomplished our task, and we traded twenty-one lives for a smoldering pile of rubble and an understrength platoon’s worth of SRA corpses.
There’s a sudden cacophony of small-arms fire from the area where Fourth Squad has taken up covering positions by the main road through town. I only realize that some Chinese civvies had started to venture out into the open to observe the aftermath of the battle when they all dash away again, back to the dubious safety of their thin-walled houses. At the same moment, the platoon channel comes alive with frantic status reports from Fourth Squad.
“Where the fuck did they come from?”
“Incoming!”
“Street corner, one hundred, three guys with a rocket launcher!”
“Alpha One-Niner, we have a shitload of SRA coming in from the direction of the airfield. Make it fifteen, twenty—shit, looks like half a freakin’ company out there.”
“Copy that,” the lieutenant sends back. “Fall back and draw them our way. We’ll come up the road and set up a blocking position by that second intersection down from you, at Charlie Two.”