Overhead, the noise from the drop ship’s engines increases as Two-Five’s pilot gooses the throttles to gain altitude. Behind us, the cacophony of small-arms fire and grenade explosions swells as the Chinese recover from the strafing run and give chase once more. They’re mistaking our sudden desire to clear the area for all-out flight, or maybe they know exactly what’s about to happen and they want to get under our belts to make life hard for our air support.
We’re almost back at the ruined admin center when Hammer flight’s ordnance hits the ground just a few hundred meters behind us. I’m in the middle of a sprint between covering positions when my audio feed cuts out, and the shock wave of the explosion kicks me in the back and sends me sprawling face-first into the dirt. When my hearing returns, the firing behind us has ceased completely. For a few moments, there is no sound except for the reverberating rumble of the detonations rolling over the town, as if the blasts have stunned everyone into silence.
I get back on my feet and turn around to the familiar sight of a huge smoke pillar rising into the sky. There’s debris raining down all around—bits of buildings, pavement, and people, all intermixed with the dusty red soil of the planet. Without my enhanced helmet sensors, I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face. Ten or fifteen blocks of the Chinese town have ceased to exist, and with them all the people within, civilians and SRA marines alike. There’s nothing left of the light colonial architecture but a burning field of strewn rubble and the occasional mangled wreckage of a light vehicle.
“Holy shit,” someone chimes in nearby. “Flyboys don’t fuck around, do they?”
“Hammer flight, this is Tailpipe Five,” I send to the pilot. “That’s a shack. I’d say you can paint about a hundred hash marks on your bird for that strike.”
“Tailpipe Five, copy that. We aim to please.”
We spread out and keep our guard up while the dust from the bombardment settles, but it’s clear that if there are any SRA marines still alive, they’ve vacated the area wisely. The ordnance from Hammer flight has cleared a quarter square kilometer of densely packed modular housing.
“Fall back to the admin center,” the lieutenant says. “Let’s dig out our guys and call down the bird.”
We head back to the center of town, where sixteen of our troopers are buried in the rubble of our target building. The Chinese civvies are once again coming out of their homes, but they quickly move out of the way when they see us, and none of them challenge our newly won ownership of the place. It feels like I’ve been dodging rifle fire and calling down airstrikes all day, but my suit’s computer shows that not even three hours have passed since we boarded our drop ship.
The Chinese town isn’t much of a prize. It’s just a square kilometer of basic housing modules, and it was unimportant even before we scraped a quarter of it off the map with high explosives. If we were to garrison this shithole, the locals would shoot us in the back at the earliest opportunity, and the SRA will be more than willing to blow up the rest of the town trying to reclaim it. We’re not going to garrison the place, of course. We lost twenty—almost two squads of our own—and killed hundreds of SRA marines and civvies, just to poke a sharp stick into the eye of the SRA high command—a job we could have completed just as well with a dozen warheads fired from orbit.
“What a pile of shit,” the platoon sergeant mutters next to me, and kicks a piece of debris out of his path. “Can’t afford too many more victories like this one.”
We dig through the rubble of the collapsed admin center carefully, but without heavy equipment it’s like trying to empty a bathtub with a spoon. All around us, the Chinese residents of the town are filling up the streets again. Now that the shooting has stopped, and we have shown that we won’t gun them down in the street on sight, the locals are getting bolder by the minute, yelling at us from an ever-shrinking distance.
“You see weapons pointing our way, you shoot,” the lieutenant tells us. “We’re not here to make friends. I’ve collected enough fucking dog tags for one day.”
I’m standing off to the side, eyeing the crowd milling around in the street near the admin building, when the tactical network comes alive with a burst of priority transmissions. I toggle into the fleet’s TacLink screen, but before I can make heads or tails of the incoming transmission codes, the network goes dark altogether.
“What the fuck?”
“Problem, Sarge?” Lieutenant Benning asks.
“Fleet started broadcasting priority code, and then I lost my uplink.”
The lieutenant walks over to where I’m standing and cycles through his own command links.