After a while, a group of civvie techs in firefighting suits run toward me, and I sit up to show them that I’m not a corpse.
“You okay, soldier?” one of them asks, and stops in front of me. The others continue to the burning wreckage of the fleet Wasp, fire suppressant hoses and tanks in hand.
I raise my visor and wave him off.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Got a little singed, that’s all.”
“What the hell didn’t,” he says. “Half the airfield’s on fire. What the fuck happened?”
“They thought we’d blink first, and we thought they would,” I say. “Looks like we were all wrong.”
CHAPTER 19
“Well, that didn’t go so great,” Sergeant Fallon says.
We’re in the hardened shelter underneath the massive civilian admin building. In the room with us are the battalion commanders of both mutinous HD battalions, their senior sergeants, and a half dozen civil administration people.
“That’s an understatement,” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp says. He’s the CO of the 330th, and nominally Sergeant Fallon’s superior, but even the brass clearly defer to her at the moment.
“We lost one drop ship and the refueling station,” she concedes. “They lost a drop ship, plus a Shrike and two dozen grunts. They got hurt worse, but they can replace their losses. We’ll miss that Dragonfly when they send the next raid in. Tactically, it was a draw. Strategically, we’re still holding the short end of the stick.”
“That’s an awfully clinical way to write off almost thirty lives,” the administrator says.
“That’s war,” Sergeant Fallon says flatly. When the civilian gives her an appalled glare, she snorts. “Look, what did you think was going to happen once they decided to fight us for your stuff, and we decided to fight back? Did you think they were going to pull up their drop ships, say ‘Well, darn,’ and head back to the carrier?”
The administrator shakes his head. “No, I guess not. But I’m not used to the military way of dealing with casualties. It’s not a mathematical equation.”
Sergeant Fallon takes her rifle off her shoulder and slams it onto the table in front of her. The administrator takes a step back.
“Last riot drop I did back on Earth, I lost twenty-seven of my troopers in fifteen minutes. I damn sure know the names of every single one of my troops who bought it that day. And the pilot of the Dragonfly we just lost? His name was Chief Warrant Officer Beckett Cunningham. Three Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars, three Distinguished Flying Crosses. We’ve been friends for eight years, he saved my life a few dozen times, and now he’s a smoking lump of carbon and jet fuel on your fucking airfield. You don’t have a clue about how I deal with that. So don’t run your mouth about our way of dealing with casualties.”
The administrator glances over to the rest of us and chews on his lower lip. Then he shrugs and turns to Sergeant Fallon again.
“Sorry. I guess it was a little presumptuous. I’m just a little shaken, that’s all. I’m new to this warfare business.”
“They’ll try again,” I say. “They won’t back down now. And without that radar, we won’t see them until they’re close enough for the Dragonflies to pick them up. Not a whole lot of warning for a raid.”
“We have a company at each of the critical sites,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Once the rest of the 309th gets in, we’ll have another three companies in reserve. They have the mobility, though. If they hit us hard enough at each site in turn they can defeat us in detail.”
The flight-ops supervisor, Chief Barnett, clears his throat. “Radar’s a bit chewed up, but that’s a big array, and those were small missiles. I have a bunch of guys working on it right now. We should be back online within an hour or two. Looks like they only took out one of the four transmitters.”
“That’s good news,” I say. “Still leaves us pretty myopic for a few hours, though. They could be dropping out of orbit with most of the regiment right now, and we wouldn’t know it until we saw the drop ships doing a combat descent.”
“What about the fuel pumps?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“They shredded the refueling probes, and I don’t want to start putting up new ones until we’ve had time to check the tanks underneath,” Chief Barnett says. “There’s other fuel tanks on the airfield, but those don’t have the right probes for your military birds. We could rig up a manual transfer with the handheld pumps for the time being. Take a while to fill up one of those monsters, though.”
“Let’s get something set up, then, before our birds fall out of the sky for lack of fuel.”
One of the civvie radio techs walks into the conference room and looks around, clearly unsure of the military hierarchy. Then he turns to Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s in charge wherever she goes.
“There’s an encrypted tight-beam comms request from orbit. They want to talk to Sergeant Fallon.”