The remaining Dragonflies send their acknowledgments. All the assets are on the board, and now it’s a matter of playing out the first moves to see who had the better hand at planning the match.
“Get your ass into the ops center,” Sergeant Fallon sends from around the corner, where she is checking the deployment of the platoon tasked with defense of the building. “You’re our whole C3 section now. Nobody else can use that slick computer of yours.”
“I’m touched by your concern, Master Sergeant,” I reply.
“Just trying to preserve our limited stock of knuckleheads.”
I watch the red icons on the plot. They’re steadily advancing toward the town. Each of those icons represents thirty or more troops, people I’ve shared a mess hall with, men and women who wear the same flag we do. The universe is falling apart around us, and we still have nothing smarter to do than to try and kill each other. I don’t have any love for the Lankies, those strange, planet-stealing, casually genocidal creatures, but in four years of constant combat against them, I’ve never seen two of their kind fight each other.
Overhead, the formation of drop ships and attack craft splits into two groups. One turns to the east and stays at altitude. The other turns to the east and rapidly descends toward the expanse of the airfield and its acres of open space.
“Airfield, incoming,” I announce. “Four Wasps, two Shrikes, heading right for you.”
The Shrikes zoom ahead and take up stations on both ends of the airfield as the drop ships do a textbook combat descent, a high-speed corkscrew maneuver to deny enemy antiaircraft gunners a predictable trajectory for their cannons. The air is practically crackling with radio energy as the Shrikes support their charges with electronic jamming to mess with the targeting radars we don’t have.
The Wasps descending on the airfield have barely leveled out just above the ground when two blue inverted vee shapes pop up on my tactical display right in the center of the airfield.
“Goalkeeper, execute,” Rogue One sends.
The two Dragonflies that just popped into existence on the plot do a synchronized turn to the south and ripple-fire three short-range air-to-air missiles at the Shrike that took up station at the south end of the airfield. At such a short distance, the pilot doesn’t even have time for any evasive action. He has barely begun to pull his bird up and goose his engines when all three missiles hit him amidships, and his red icon disappears from my display in a blink. I can feel the shock of the resulting explosion through the soles of my boots from over half a klick away.
“Rogue flight, splash one,” I narrate automatically. “Second Shrike is breaking off toward zero-two-zero.”
The other Shrike goes supersonic and rapidly zooms skyward to get out of MANPAD range. Then he does a wing-over and comes barreling back toward the airfield on a reciprocal heading. At this distance, the multibarreled heavy assault cannon of the Shrike sounds like a Lanky with flatulence, if the Lankies had digestive systems like we do. Over by the airfield, the heavy armor-piercing grenades from the Shrike’s big gun carve a hundred-foot trench into the runway concrete.
As soon as the Shrike pulls up from its strafing run, half a dozen handheld MANPAD launchers disgorge their missiles after it. The pilot kicks out countermeasure pods like parade confetti and once again pushes his bird through the sound barrier. Then I hear more cannon fire even before I see the two blue aircraft icons for the pair of Dragonflies popping up on my display again. The drop ships have linked their fire-control computers to use their radars and gun turrets as a makeshift antiaircraft cannon battery, and their bursts perfectly anticipate the turn rate and vector of the fleeing Shrike. I bring up the video feed from their targeting cameras just in time to see a cannon shell chew into the left engine pylon of the Shrike, sending bits of armor flying. For a moment it looks like the Dragonflies just scored another air-to-air kill, but then the pilot of the Shrike rights his wounded craft and runs away at full throttle, trailing smoke.
“Fuck, those things are tough,” Rogue Two says. “Can’t believe the son of a bitch is still flying.”
“I’ve seen one make it back to the carrier with half its port wing gone and one engine shot off the airframe,” I say. “They’re built to take a beating. You guys did good.”
There are four hostile red carets left on my tactical screen. The image from the Dragonflies’ targeting cameras slews to show the quartet of Wasp drop ships disgorging troops by the side of the runway, only a few hundred feet from the control tower.