“Hate it for ya,” Rogue One says, with what sounds like genuine regret in his voice. Then the chin turrets and hull-mounted heavy autocannons of the Dragonflies open up at the same time. The Wasps and their infantry passengers are sitting ducks, caught in the most vulnerable phase of an assault landing. My stomach clenches as I watch.
The Wasps are armored against small arms and light cannon fire, but even their laminate hull plating isn’t designed to withstand the beating of large-caliber heavy antiarmor cannons at point-blank range. The first bursts from the Dragonflies tear into the flanks of the fleet drop ships like sledgehammers into sheetrock. The Wasps are in the middle of troop deployment, and the soldiers rushing to get clear are caught in a storm of exploding grenades and flying armor shards. Even though Rogue flight is selectively targeting control surfaces and engines, the carnage on the screen is shocking. In less than ten seconds of short cannon bursts, all four fleet Wasps are smoking wrecks, their vital parts blown to bits all over the runway. Around the immobilized gaggle of drop ships, there are at least a dozen fallen SI troopers who didn’t get out of the line of fire fast enough. The rest are rushing the hangars and heading for cover, but they’re clearly shell-shocked.
When our HD troopers open fire from their positions between the hangars, a short and violent firefight erupts. The SI troopers are caught out in the open, trapped between their burning drop ships and prepared defensive positions, and it doesn’t take long for them to realize the hopelessness of their situation. Then our Dragonflies move in behind them. As quickly as it started, the shootout ends, and the remaining SI troops put their weapons on the ground and raise their hands.
“Cease fire,” someone orders. “They’re packing it in.”
“First smart thing they’ve done today,” Rogue One replies. He has steered his ship away from whatever shelter he had used to hide from the Shrikes, and moves over to the burning Wasps, chin turret trained on the surrendering troops. “You know, these new fleet birds are all right. I think I’m gonna keep this one.”
“Casualties at the airfield,” I tell Sergeant Fallon. “Theirs, not ours.”
“Send some medics over there ASAP,” she tells the platoon leaders. “And for fuck’s sake, disarm those jarheads first. I don’t want them to change their minds about their winning odds.”
“We’ll find a quiet corner for them somewhere,” the airfield company’s CO replies.
“Andrew, where’s the other flight?”
I check the tactical display.
“Coming around and back in from the east. They’re still at five thousand. Hard to tell what they have in mind, but they sure as shit blew their chance for a surprise attack.”
“I’m tracking them optically,” Rogue Four says.
“Keep your active sensors cold,” I tell him, and tap into his camera feed.
“Yeah, roger that. I’m not interested in getting a HARM up my ass today.”
“They really ought to either piss or get off the damn pot,” Rogue One says.
When they’re right above the center of town, still high up and out of range of our infantry’s shoulder-launched MANPADs, Raid Two finally breaks cruise formation. The Shrikes take up close air support positions overhead, and the Wasps start their combat descents, spiraling groundward like a handful of overeager autumn leaves hurling themselves off a tree branch. My tactical computer shows their projected trajectory, and the dotted red line of their predicted flight path ends right on top of the spot where Sergeant Fallon and I are standing.
“Raid Two is dropping on the admin center,” I announce, much more calmly than I feel.
The Wasps swarm in from all cardinal directions of the compass rose. They pull up into position on all four of the intersections around the admin center, each only two blocks from where I am. They put their craft into a hover above the intersections and deploy assault lines out of their open tail ramps. A moment later, SI infantry start rappelling down the lines from fifty feet up. This time, there are no surprise Dragonflies breaking up the deployment with point-blank cannon fire, and the HD troops on the ground hold their missiles, for fear of sending a Wasp crashing down into the densely packed civilian housing. Then all four of their platoons are on the ground, and the Wasps streak skyward again with screaming engines, ejecting clouds of countermeasures along the way.
“We have a company on the dirt at the admin center,” I announce, even though my tactical computer has already shared the data with every battle armor and vehicle on our TacLink network.
“Admin center platoon, heads up,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’ll hold ’em by the nose for the ass-kicking.”
The SI platoons break up into squads and start their rush toward the admin center. I run around the corner and join Sergeant Fallon and the squad that’s dug in by the corner of the building. There’s no actual digging on the permanently frozen ground, so the fighting positions are made from intermeshing parts of modular ferroconcrete barriers.