The kinetic warheads from the task force arrive right on time, down to the second. The rounds from the first salvo, a dozen warheads or more, smack into the advancing Lankies simultaneously. Five kilometers north of the spaceport, a square kilometer of Martian soil erupts into dirt and rock geysers a thousand feet high. Then the next salvo hits, and the next, so many individual warheads that I lose count of the impacts. I’ve seen nuclear detonations, and they’re terrifying to see from close range, but this strike somehow seems more cataclysmic than even a nuke. The kinetic rounds keep smashing into the plain, one after the other, like blows from a giant sledgehammer, a pissed-off god working the planetary surface over with a vengeance. I’ve never felt any pity for the Lankies we’ve killed over the years, but witnessing this barrage, I come closer than ever before to working up a tiny bit of it. Fifteen seconds after we see the first impacts, the sound of the barrage pulverizing Mars rock reaches our position and rolls over us, and it’s the scariest, most ominous thunder I’ve ever heard.
“Bozhe moi,” Sergeant Dragomirova says next to me.
“Rods from the gods,” I say.
There’s a reason why the treaty that prohibits the use of weapons of mass destruction against each other’s territory in space explicitly includes kinetic weapons, and why we fight out our colonial battles with small-scale infantry actions instead of pelting each other with tungsten warheads from orbit. Once you start unleashing this much cheap and easy-to-deploy destructive power, it’s hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle. Against the Lankies, however, anything goes. We have no treaties with them, and they have no reservations about gassing our colonies like nuisance ant hives, so we’re free to give it back to them in spades whenever we can.
Without their seed ships keeping our cruisers away, the Lankies out in the open have no way to escape this death and destruction raining down on their heads. This is payback time, vengeance for all the fellow soldiers and sailors they’ve killed, for five years of hardship and fear and uncertainty. Still, it’s hard not to feel just the slightest bit of sorrow at the sight of this utter devastation. These are living, sentient beings, and if they have emotions at all, they must feel fear at getting killed from the sky by something they can neither see nor fight back against.
When the steady drumroll of impacts ceases a few minutes later, there’s a dust-and-debris cloud ten kilometers across on the plains north of the base. Five minutes pass, then ten, but I don’t see any movement other than billowing dirt.
“Phalanx, Tailpipe Red One. On target. Stand by for poststrike assessment and follow-ups.”
“Standing by for poststrike and follow-up,” Phalanx’s tactical officer confirms.
“That was something else,” Lieutenant Perkins says on the squad channel. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Neither have I,” I reply.
Fifteen minutes later, the dust from the kinetic strikes has settled enough for a visual poststrike assessment of the target area. I scan the plains for signs of Lankies, and my professional evaluation is that ten map grids of the Martian surface just got fucked all to hell several times over. There are Lankies on the very edge of my optics range, beyond the patch of ground the fleet just plowed with millions of joules of kinetic energy, but the closest one is ten klicks to the north and moving away from the spaceport instead of toward it, and none of the Lankies I see in the distance seem to be interested in coming any closer. Now the closest threats are the few Lankies remaining in the streets of Olympus City, but they’re out of sight of Dmitry’s team and moving away from the base as well. If there’s a window for a large-scale landing, it’s right now, while the neighborhood is freshly swept and the shock from the bombardment is still keeping the rest of the Lankies away from this place.
“Task Force Red, Tailpipe Red One,” I send up to the units waiting in high orbit. “Red Beach is open. I repeat, Red Beach is open.”
I can’t see anything from my position in a dark control tower on a world with a low cloud ceiling, but I know that up in high orbit, my announcement has just kicked off Phase Three for the waiting ships of Task Force Red. The battle plan has the cruisers use their rail guns and missile batteries to make holes in the Lanky minefield large enough for the drop ships to pass through unmolested, and then keep them open as the Lanky minefield tries to reconfigure and heal itself over time. And right now, the carriers are moving their drop ships into launch positions. I also know from experience that those first-wave drop ships are filled with scared and anxious troopers who want the trip down to the landing zone to be fast and take forever both at the same time.
The drop ships and the attack birds take a lot longer than kinetic rounds to make it down from orbit. Twenty minutes after I declare the drop zone safe, the first friendly air-support units show up overhead—not drop ships, but Shrike attack craft, wing pylons heavy with ordnance. Two pairs of Shrikes drop below the cloud ceiling and make a low pass along the runway of Olympus Spaceport, engines warbling the banshee wail that was probably partly responsible for the class name of the ship. It feels good to see close-air support overhead, to know that we have heavy ordnance on standby that doesn’t require a trip down from orbit. The Shrikes split up into pairs when they reach the end of the runway, with one pair breaking to the east and one to the west. Their sensors and cameras immediately expand our TacLink awareness bubble by kilometers.