“Get out of here,” I tell the civilian next to me. “There’s going to be gunfire in about thirty seconds.”
The civvie tech scurries off to safer parts. For a moment, I have to fight the urge to follow him. Then I check the loading status of my carbine and run to the edge of the hangar, for a clear view of the runway.
The fleet assault comes in right above the deck. When I see the drop ship, an old Wasp, it’s so low that it drags a rooster tail of ice and frozen dirt. When the ship is over the runway, the pilot pulls up the nose and fires the engines downward to scrub off speed. The second ship is nowhere in sight.
“Don’t let him open that tail ramp,” I tell Rogue Three. “He gets those grunts on the ground, we’ll have to pry ’em out from between the hangars.”
Rogue Three clicks his transmit button in acknowledgment, and paints the incoming Wasp with every active targeting system on his Dragonfly. For emphasis, he fires a burst of tracers that just barely miss the armored belly of the Wasp. The pilot of the other drop ship pulls away from the incoming fire and whips his bird around. When the nose of the Wasp points toward the hangars again, I can see the chin turret swiveling in search of a target.
“I have you locked up,” Rogue Three warns the pilot of the Wasp. “Turn off your radar, put her down, and keep that tail ramp closed.”
The Wasp’s pilot replies with a burst of fire from his ship’s chin turret. Rogue Three replies with his own gun—not the high-cadence chainsaw sound of his own chin turret, but the low, rolling boom-boom-boom of the large-caliber ground-attack cannon mounted on the underside of his hull. The Wasp’s starboard engine blows apart under the hammer blows of the autocannon, followed by the starboard ordnance pylon. Then another shell tears off the tail rudder assembly. I hear the engines of the Wasp howling as the pilot tries to compensate and get his bird on the ground in one piece, but his altitude is too low already. The Wasp banks sharply to port and rapidly plummets to the deck. At the last moment, the pilot manages to right his ship, and it almost looks like he’ll be able to pull off a hard emergency landing, but then one of his landing skids catches on the ground, and the ship flips over onto its side with a resounding crash.
Before I even have time to be horrified, there’s a loud boom coming from the other side of the airfield, followed by the thunderous roar of a Shrike’s multibarreled assault cannon. A hundred feet above and behind me, Rogue Three takes the burst of armor-piercing cannon shells head-on and falls out of the sky. When the Dragonfly hits the ground nearby, the explosion sends burning parts and aviation fuel everywhere. The attacking Shrike passes over the airfield at supersonic speed, trailing noise and destruction in its wake.
I sealed my helmet against the smoke of the refueling station fire a few moments ago, so the burning fuel showering me is merely alarming, not fatal. The battle armor, imbued with much faster reflexes than its owner, has already sealed itself tightly and activated my emergency oxygen supply. Out on the edge of the runway, a hundred meters from my position, the fleet’s Wasp is shuddering on its side with the engines at full thrust, digging a furrow into the concrete with the broken wing root of its portside pylon. I look on in horror as smoke starts rising from underneath the ship. Then the Wasp is on fire, smoldering in the middle of a small lake of burning fuel.
Somewhere over New Longyearbyen, I hear missile launches. On my TacLink screen, I see that the remaining Dragonflies have networked their fire-control systems and launched their antiair ordnance after the Shrike that just took out a quarter of our offensive air power. The computers ripple-fire all the missiles on the Dragonflies’ wingtips—one, two, four, eight, twelve. The Shrike is fleeing the area at full throttle, but the missiles can pull much higher acceleration. The attack ship’s automatic countermeasures lead some of them astray, but half a dozen missiles hurl themselves right up the Shrike’s engine nozzles, and the ship is swatted out of the sky. It careens to the frozen ground like a clumsily thrown piece of sheetrock, and plows into some civilian housing on the far side of town. A moment later I see the icon of the pilot’s eject capsule pop into existence on the TacLink screen. The remaining half dozen air-to-air missiles have nothing to spend themselves against, so their computers detonate them in midair.
I run to the cover of a nearby hangar and roll on the frozen ground to put out the burning fuel sticking to my battle armor. After the cacophony of heavy gunfire, supersonic booms, and explosions, the silence is surreal. I want to call for support, but find that my mouth is too dry to talk into the helmet mike. Instead, I smother the flames on my armor and lie on the ground to catch my breath.