“Go ahead,” she replies.
“I’m plugged in. Nothing at all in the air between us and the task force. Looks like they haven’t caught on yet.”
“Oh, they’re getting a good idea. The base has been pinging me with comms for the last fifteen minutes. Something about the whole drop-ship flight being off the air.”
I grin and look outside. On the drop-ship pad below the ATC tower, all four of Camp Frostbite’s Dragonflies are lined up on the concrete, with running engines and hot-refueling probes in their fuel ports. Without any air mobility, the two SI companies back at Frostbite don’t have a prayer at getting their main airborne firepower back, and if the task force in orbit sends a strike team down to the airfield, the Dragonflies can be in the air and on the move before the carrier’s Wasps are within five hundred miles.
“See if you can get me a comlink to the fleet units upstairs. I want to have a private tight-beam chat with those ship captains individually without any noise from our esteemed leadership.”
“I’ll see what I can do with the local gear,” I say.
“Good enough. Let me know right away if we get any visitors, air or ground. Fallon out.”
The hardware in the civvie ATC center is so good that keeping tabs on everything is ludicrously easy. The main ATC console is a three-dimensional projection that makes the holotables in our warships look like outdated junk. It presents unified sensor data from dozens of different sources—ground, air, and weather radar, environmental data from all the terraforming stations, satellite sensors. Everything is cross-linked with the comms network. It takes me just a few moments to tie the Dragonflies outside into my list of available assets, check the status of the airfield’s puddle jumpers, and assign them into separate flights to start ferrying HD troops from the terraforming stations. I assign the Dragonflies their own encrypted data and comlinks, and upload the mission data to their onboard computers.
“Gentlemen, this is Tailpipe One. I will be your combat controller today. Comms check, please.”
“Copy, Tailpipe One,” one of the pilots sends back. “Are we recycling call signs, or what?”
“Check your TacLink screens. You gentlemen are henceforth Rogue One through Four.”
“Copy that,” another pilot says with an audible chuckle. “Rogue Two copies five by five.”
“TacLink complete. So far, the coast is clear. I’ll call out inbound traffic once we get company from above, so keep your birds ready for immediate dustoff.”
“Understood,” Rogue One sends. The other pilots append their acknowledgments.
If the units up in orbit were Chinese or Russian, we’d be in a lousy tactical position. The civvie sensor network covers the entire moon, so sneak attacks with drop ships won’t be easy to pull off against us, but all that shiny sensor gear sits right out in the open, vulnerable to kinetic or guided munitions attack from orbit. Still, we’re holed up in a settlement of ten thousand, and even the clueless reservist at the stick up there probably won’t be eager to order an orbital bombardment of one of our own colony towns. If they decide to squash our little mutiny with a regiment-strength assault from orbit, we’ll see them coming from a long way out.
“Grayson, this is Fallon.”
“Go ahead, Sarge.”
“The civvie admin is gathering all the pilots for those puddle jumpers. Send them out as they get ready, please, and have them start picking up our guys. I want to have as many troops as I can back here before I get on the comms with the fleet.”
“Understood. I’ll send them out to the closest terraformers first.”
“You do that. Also, the constable is sending a bunch of his guys over to the airfield. I want you to have someone issue them some guns from the drop-ship armories. None of the heavy weapons, but something with a little more pop than those antiques they carry around right now.”
“Copy that. I’ll let them draw some rifles and armor.”