“Copy, wilco.”
Rogue Three’s millimeter-wave radar takes command of the gun turret on the Dragonfly’s chin. The fire-control system can shoot down missile threats all by itself if the missile crosses its engagement range. On the holotable, the missile icons streak in toward the center of the display. The numbers next to them rapidly count down: twelve, ten, eight, six. The turret gun of the Dragonfly hovering above the far end of the airfield rasps three short and exact bursts with the precision of a computer pulling the trigger. Just beyond the runway, there’s a flash and a rather unspectacular crack as one of the anti-radar missiles disintegrates at three times the speed of sound. My heart pounds as I see one of the icons on my display snuffed out just before it reaches the center of the hologram. The drop ship’s turret gun barks again, but the other missile is only a blink away from the radome now. A moment later, there’s a sharp, tinny-sounding explosion over at the sensor array, and my holotable blinks. When the hologram returns, it’s devoid of missile icons.
Where did the other pair go? I think.
There’s a blinding flash of light outside, and then I’m on the floor on the other side of the control room, ears ringing and breath squeezed from my lungs. The tower heaves like a welfare tenement in an earthquake. When I sit up, half the windows in the control tower are blown out, and the smell of burning fuel fills the room. There’s squawking on my earpiece, but I can’t make sense of it. The lights in the control tower are all out, and the holographic display has died.
By the time I make it to my feet, acrid smoke is wafting in through the broken windows. I stagger across the debris-strewn floor of the control room to take a look outside. Below, on the other side of the drop-ship landing pad, the refueling station is a mess of twisted, burning debris. The concrete walls of the hangar behind the refueler are charred and pockmarked by shrapnel. Whatever hit the refueling point was just big enough to blow the surface structure to bits without so much as cracking the concrete below.
My armor’s tactical computer didn’t even miss a beat. I put my helmet back on my head and turn on the visor display.
“All units, this is Tailpipe One. They took out the main radar and blew the refueling probes at the airfield all to shit. Control tower took a beating, too.”
“You okay, Andrew?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Yeah. Just a bit rattled. Those fuel pumps blew up fifty yards from me.”
“I heard it. That was kind of rude, wasn’t it?”
“At least now we know they’re doing this the hard way. Watch for incoming. There are two pairs of drop ships out there, and my radar’s holed.”
“Don’t you worry,” she says. “They want to play rough, we’ll play rough.”
With the radar gone and the holotable offline, there’s no reason for me to stay up in the control tower. I pick up my carbine and make my way down the stairs to the bottom level of the control center. The two civvies who had been on duty when I walked in a while ago have disappeared.
Outside, the smoke from the burning fuel bites my throat, so I seal my helmet and check the tactical display again. Rogue Three is hovering nearby, scanning the area beyond the airfield for more incoming threats.
“Get the hell out of there!” a voice behind me calls. I turn around to see one of the civvie air-traffic controllers waving me over from behind the corner of a hangar fifty meters away. “There’s a hundred thousand liters of fuel under that landing pad, fella.”
I run over to the hangar to join the civilian tech, who has a thirty-meter head start by the time I round the corner.
“Fucking assholes,” he pants when we come to a stop between two hangars. “The fuel tanks have safety seals, but if those fail, half the airfield’s history.”
“They just blew up the refueling probes,” I say. “Keep us from juicing up our birds. Any way we can repair those?”
“Probably. We got spare parts. Ask the boss about that. I’m just one of the peons.”
“Incoming,” Rogue Three’s pilot calls out on comms. “Drop ship, two-three-zero degrees, five klicks out. Coming in at full throttle, headed right for the airfield.”
“They’re going to drop a platoon right on top of us,” I say. “Where’s that short company, Sarge? Things are about to get interesting over here.”
“They’ll be there any minute,” Sergeant Fallon replies.
I check my TacLink screen for data. The drop ship spotted by Rogue Three is already entering my short-range tactical map, barreling toward the airfield at top speed. On the other side of my map, the symbols for friendly infantry start populating the display. It doesn’t take a tactical wizard to realize that the red and blue icons are about to converge in the middle of the map, right at my current position.