by John Lumpkin
“Contact B squad; have them mount their truck and pick us up on their way to the airfield,” Li ordered.
“We could go on foot,” the lieutenant said. “We have some extra armor and can suit you up to accompany us.”
Li hesitated. He had only worn power armor once before in his life, and it had not been a pleasant experience. The exoskeletal legs were supposed to enhance endurance and speed, but Li found himself tripping with every step. The demonstrator had assured him that, with training, using the gear would become second nature. But Li had had neither the need nor the inclination to try it again, and now, he did not want risk embarrassment in front of these soldiers by appearing unskilled with the armor.
“No,” he said. “The trucks will be faster. The Americans overhead may see us, but they cannot communicate with their people on the ground. And they won’t fire on us; they would have done so already.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. B squad’s truck was five minutes away.
“Captain, I think we’ve got a firefight around the second dropship,” Davis said.
Oh no. Thorne called up an image on her console; it updated every half-second. It was hard to tell anything; she added an overlay of infrared information, which showed where the people were. She saw three groups … one by the dropship, another in the foliage nearby, and a third at the far end of the airfield.
“Lasers, I want firing solutions on the three groups of people in the vicinity of the airfield,” Thorne said.
“Aye aye,” Garcia said.
“And Sensors, see if there are other Han targets in the area you can positively identify.”
“Active radar?”
“Do it.”
San Jacinto’s powerful radar sent several pulses down to the surface around the guerrilla camp. In a few minutes, the sensor tech had found the two Chinese dropships. She also noted a skytruck racing toward the airfield.
The data from the various sensors – infrared, visual and radar – were plotted on one of CIC’s primary screens, and Thorne and her officers finally had a picture of the situation below.
But who is who? Comms was frantically trying to reach Ellis’ dropship, but no one was responding.
They approached the edge of the foliage, Sanchez and Harkins at the fore, and surveyed the airfield. Three bodies were in view. Those of Ellis and Blaney were by the dropship, and a Chinese trooper had fallen near the cabin.
“Neil, you may have to fly us out of here,” Sanchez whispered.
Neil nodded, his mind working on the problem. Short takeoff in a combat situation … precisely the stuff he hadn’t yet learned.
“I see movement at the north end of the airfield,” a Marine called.
Something buzzed low overhead. A recon drone was hunting them.
“Dirty, want me to take it out?” Morales asked.
“Nail it,” Sanchez responded.
Morales loaded another missile into the bulky attachment under his rifle. He would have rather used one of the shoulder-fired missiles the squad would have normally carried, but those were back on the ship. At least the drone was moving low and slow; his small heatseeker didn’t pack a lot of warhead, but it should be enough to bring down the hostile.
He angled his rifle up, got a laser dot on the drone. The missile’s seeker beeped that it was also tracking the drone’s heat signature. Morales fired; the missile shot away. The drone, which had detected the laser, jumped and released a salvo of flares, alternating from each wing over three seconds. The magnesium in them burned bright white, like miniature stars twinkling above the airstrip, and Morales blinked. His laser dot fell off the ship, and his missile was confused. It flew close to a flare and detonated.
Morales swore, brought his rifle down, and reloaded another heatseeker.
Sanchez barked, “Morales, move your ass before you fire again.”
Her order came too late; Morales fired from the same spot. His missile was true this time; it ignored the drone’s second round of flares and bore straight in, exploding less than a foot from its starboard nacelle. The craft dropped like a burning stone.
It was the second rocket flash the Chinese sharpshooter at the end of the runway was waiting for. He pointed his rifle, saw what had to be a person, and fired a three-shot burst.
One of the bullets smashed Lance Corporal Morales’ gun and ricocheted away; another struck him his chest. It was a hit his regular battle armor might have stopped; his utility vest didn’t even slow it down. He fell with a gurgling cry.
“Cover fire!” Sanchez shouted, forgetting to use the comm channel. Her machinegunner opened up in the direction of the airfield; he had no target, but hopefully would keep some heads down. Doc crawled over to Morales, who was bleeding badly.
“Captain, these have to be Hans,” Mendoza said. She pointed to a cluster of people near the end of the airfield and traced a line with her finger to another group at the edge of the foliage. “And these are our people. I recognize Staff Sergeant Harkins. Not a lot of redheads in the PLA. And that’s probably Mister Donovan. Hey, I think one of our guys just tagged a drone.”
The XO had a tech call up a second map on another screen. “Now this is about ten klicks distant. These are the Chinese dropships. They’ve got some mobile consoles set up … probably drone control, and their jammer. And this looks like a mortar. And finally, we’ve got a skytruck and two combat drones inbound toward the landing field.”
Alarms sounded as a blast of radio waves bounced off the ship. “Captain, Victor-9 just painted us with active radar. They are turning to bring their nose to bear on us,” a sensor operator said.
Anjian had twice tried to move to bring bombardment lasers to bear on the planet, but San Jacinto had interdicted its firing solution each time, staying a mere 30 kilometers distant. The turn, however, signified a clear threat to the ship, not the surface.
“If she fires her main cannon at this range, we won’t be able to dodge or have time to shoot it down,” Davis warned.
With a visible effort, Thorne said, “Turn to bring our laser cannon to bear on the surface. Prepare firing solutions on these targets: the ground force at the airfield, the ground force at the dropships, then the drones and the truck.”
Davis shook his head in disbelief. He was reasonably sure nothing like this had happened before. He pictured the standoff in his head: both ships orbiting in the same direction around Commonwealth, a mere 30 kilometers apart. San Jacinto was facing backward relative to its orbit, a product of its deceleration when it arrived, and was now turning to point its forward laser cannon toward the surface. Above her was Victor-9, her own nose pointed directly at San Jacinto.
“Firing solutions plotted,” Ensign Garcia announced.
“Fire mission!” Thorne ordered.
They had no warning at all. One minute, the PLA troopers were taking fire from the edge of the airfield; the next, a bright column of greenish light rastered across them, leaving only burned corpses behind.
“Hot damn,” Neil said, shielding his eyes. It had to be San Jacinto. The beam suddenly vanished; a few seconds later, Neil heard a distant explosion.
His handheld beeped. “Tango, this is Sierra Juliet. Do you copy?” Sierra Juliet was San Jacinto. Tango was the ground party’s identifier.
“Sierra Juliet, this is Tango Six-Four,” Neil said. They must have tagged the jammer. “We read you. Thank you for the assist.”
“Tango, you’ve got more Hans inbound. We’ll try to get them. Can you get the dropship flying?”
“I think so.”
“Then get moving.”
Neil turned. “Everyone, to the dropship, now!”
Shouts in CIC, all at once.
“Zombie, zombie! Victor-9 firing!”
“Point defenses tracking inbound target!”
“Collision warning!”
Anjian fired a 36-kilogram shell from her spinal gun at nearly 13 kilometers per second. It covered the distance to San Jacinto in an eyeblink.
When San Jacinto detected the inbound mass, two computer-run systems yanked control from their human operators, who lacked the reaction time to deal with the threat.
First, point defense lasers rotated to lash out at the inbound, but only one was able to turn quickly enough to get a bead. It fired, hit, and started to burn through the target. The hurtling shell was far too large to be evaporated by the laser beam so quickly; the laser’s only hope of a kill was to hit the shell’s small reservoir of maneuvering fuel and cause an explosion that knocked it off course.
Simultaneously, San Jacinto’s piloting computer fired two pulses: First, thrusters on the right side of the ship’s nose angled the ship slightly. Then the main drive cut in at three-quarters gee, throwing crew members who were not strapped to something against the nearest bulkhead.
The emergency maneuver worked where the point defenses failed. Had Anjian’s master intended this to be a killing shot, the shell would have maneuvered to strike San Jacinto and probably destroyed her. Instead, the shell was in dumb-fire mode; it narrowly missed the American destroyer and went on its way to burn up in Commonwealth’s atmosphere.
The maneuver also threw off the firing solution for San Jacinto’s forward laser cannon; it shut off to avoid spraying a beam across a swath of the planet below. Its optics automatically corrected to again point at its previous target, and its control computer waited for a human to tell it to resume firing.
It didn’t come. Thorne, her voice low with anger, immediately ordered San Jacinto to turn to face Anjian; if shooting started in earnest, she wanted her forward guns pointed in the right direction. A direct threat to San Jacinto couldn’t be ignored; anyway, she reasoned, most of the ground targets were destroyed; her people on the surface would have to handle the rest themselves.
“Guns, let’s bracket them with four rounds in a box around their nose. Miss by about 50 meters,” Thorne growled. “Give or take.”
It was too noisy in the skytruck’s crammed rear cabin for voice comms. But when his feed of tactical information from the soldiers at the airfield abruptly ceased, Li Xiao had little doubt they were dead.
Li knew a long moment of fear when the two attack drones, flying in close formation ahead of the truck, went offline. They would have reverted to self-control if the drone control stations went down; the loss of contact could only mean they were destroyed. San Jacinto was bombarding the surface.
He had considered, but declined, having Anjian attack San Jacinto; for one, Li wondered whether it was within his authority to order the destruction of an American warship and 140 or so people on board; moreover, Anjian’s captain wasn’t certain he could win. Li had ordered a message sent to Second Bureau to seek clarity on just how far he could go. He idly wondered if the last thought of his life would be to regret his hesitation.
But no laser came for him. Anjian’s political officer was keeping him apprised of events in orbit via text messages; a message came through that Anjian had fired a warning shot, and San Jacinto had responded by firing several rounds close to the ship’s nose. The two vessels were now facing off, slowly separating but still less than 100 kilometers apart, each daring the other to fire.
Inside the cabin, a red light changed to yellow, and the truck descended rapidly. “Everybody out!” A sergeant yelled, and a door opened to reveal bright sunlight outside. Li picked up a long, slender rifle. The private it belonged to didn’t have the courage to protest.
Neil sat in the cockpit, spooling up the dropship. His motions for preflight were mostly on automatic … flip this switch, check this reading. Tom was beside him, working the comms system and arranging for a rendezvous point with the ship in low orbit.
They had already loaded Ellis’ and Blaney’s bodies; the dropship’s crew chief, Deekins, had survived but had taken a bullet through his hand. A Marine wrapped it and gave him a painkiller.
Outside, Maria Sanchez and Rafe Sato were carrying the badly wounded Morales on a stretcher they had found on the dropship. Doc Avery limped alongside, monitoring the wounded Marine’s vitals.
“Vehicle landing in the plants about 300 meters down range!” Staff Sergeant Harkins announced over a comm channel.
“Hold them off for two minutes,” Neil said. He suppressed an urge to run to the door. He heard a clatter of gunfire outside.
The Chinese troopers split into two groups, hoping to direct fire at the Americans from multiple directions. Li Xiao ran behind a chevron of riflemen charging forward. They emerged into the cleared space at the edge of the runway and hit the dirt. The dropship was in full view; Li could see people scurrying toward its entry hatch.
An American Marine was blasting away with an automatic rifle at Li’s other group; they were suppressed, unable to return targeted fire. But no one shot at Li and the men near him, and Li barked an order they hold fire so he could surprise them.
Li peered through his rifle scope. He targeted the kneeling Marine firing at his comrades. He was about to drop him when a flicker of motion behind him drew his attention. He moved the rifle up and right and saw a face he recognized.
They didn’t hear the shot above the din of the Marine’s automatic rifle; one second, Rafe Sato was standing in the hatchway of the dropship, trying to pull Lance Corporal Morales and the stretcher inside; the next, he was stumbling backward into the passenger cabin, his arms flailing for something to hold onto. He crashed into the bulkhead behind him and collapsed.
Donovan ran to him, tried to staunch the blood flowing from his chest, shouting for help. Sanchez and Doc Avery pushed Morales into the dropship, where he lay moaning.
The medical officer moved swiftly over to Sato, edging Donovan aside. He threw some powder on the wound and held a small device over it.
He looked into Sato’s eyes, wide with fear and pain.
“I’m sorry,” Avery said to Rafe Sato.
Donovan said, “Is there anything …?”
“No,” Avery cut him off. “His heart’s blown apart.” He returned to Morales. “Now keep clear. I can save this one.”
The Marines’ gunfire stopped, and the last of the troopers piled in, closing the door tight behind her. A few rounds plinked off the dropship’s armor.
Sanchez turned toward Neil and Tom, looking back from the cockpit.
“We’re all in,” she shouted.
Neil rolled the dropship a short way, then lifted off.
The three bodies – Ellis, Blaney and Rafe Sato – had to be tied to stretchers so they didn’t float away. They would be ejected from San Jacinto within a day. It was not healthy to keep decaying corpses within the ship’s closed air circulation system.
Neil remained on the flight deck, well beyond his usefulness there, until Lieutenant Commander Mendoza summoned him to debrief.
He pushed himself through the ship in a fog. The crew was still at General Quarters, although the immediate threat from Victor-9 had passed. San Jacinto had altered its orbit to pluck the dropship from Commonwealth’s upper atmosphere, and Victor-9 was now one-third of an orbit ahead of the American vessel.
Six dead in total … the three whose bodies they brought back, plus Rodgers and the others from the first dropship, whose bodies had been burned beyond hope of quick recovery. One more critically wounded, though Doc had Morales stabilized.
My mission. My responsibility. At least I got the rest of us off safely.
But could I have done it better?
Neil tried to think of things he could have done differently.
He came up with one.
Neil entered Mendoza’s office. She was seated; he attached his feet to the floor.
“Are you all right, Neil?” she asked. Her eyes were red.
“Yes, ma’am. Just … sorry about our losses.”
“Thank you for bringing our people off. I know the captain was relieved we had a trained pilot on the surface after what happened to the flight crews. Now, can you take me through what happened down there? This won’t be your formal r
eport; you’ll have plenty of time to write it up later.”
Neil started going over the events on the planet, then stopped.
“Ma’am, I ... before the attacks, I was working on the analysis on Victor-9.”
“It was pretty good,” Mendoza said. “I showed it to the captain.”
“Well, thanks,” Neil said. He hadn’t known that. “But I kept working on it after I filed my report.” He described buttonholing the ship as possibly Chinese.
“Why didn’t you transmit those findings?” Mendoza asked.
“I didn’t think they were worth the comms traffic, given this was just an exercise.”
The XO regarded him for a long second.
“Neil, you picked out the threat far better than the rest of us,” she said. “From now on, if you come up with something we might not know, don’t hesitate to tell us.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As he was leaving Mendoza’s office, he found Astronaut Rodriguez waiting to go inside. She still had a streak of dirt across her face from hiding in the culvert during the bombardment.
“Sir, I just wanted to thank you for coming back for Doctor Avery and me in the camp,” she said.
Neil nodded and felt guilty. He’d returned to the camp at Donovan’s urging to salvage the mission, not rescue Doc and Rodriguez. I guess I did something right, even if I didn’t mean to. The thought didn’t comfort him much.
Neil had long ago picked up two recurring themes in his nightmares … fleeing and futility. This one had a measure of both … running up stairs, getting more and more tired, chased by something that could jump four steps for every one he took.
Its claws were at his back when the buzz of his handheld woke him. He tried to focus, his mind still half in the dream, then detached himself from his hammock and grabbed his handheld.
