Angles of Attack (2 page)

Our drop-ship designers don’t spend much thought on making the Wasps and Dragonflies pretty, but it seems like the Russians go out of their way to avoid any design touch that might be thought of as aesthetically pleasing. Our drop ships look like the utilitarian war machines they are. The Russian bird looks like a crude piece of heavy construction gear. I can’t help but marvel at the efficiency of the design, however. Our jump seats have single-point swivel mounts with shock absorbers. Theirs are just strong, free-swinging webbing—just as shock-absorbent as ours and probably twenty times cheaper. And whatever their looks, I know that these Russian drop ships can bring down a world of hurt on whoever is on the wrong end of their guns.

“How much longer to the drop zone?” I ask Dmitry. He checks his display and shrugs.

“Eighteen, nineteen minutes. You lean back, take nap.” Then he puts the back of his helmet against the bulkhead behind him, his expression one of mild boredom.

Dmitry is one of my SRA counterparts, a Russian combat controller. We’ve had a few days to get to know each other on the way to this hot and dusty moon around Fomalhaut b, and Dmitry is not at all like the stereotypical Russian grunt. He’s not the size of a battle tank, and he doesn’t swill vodka or talk lovingly to his heavy weaponry. He doesn’t even have a buzz cut. Instead, Dmitry is a rather short guy, just barely taller than Sergeant Fallon, and he has the square jaw and chiseled good looks of a fashion model. His hair is an unruly mop that would be over regulation length in the SI, and he is soft-spoken instead of loud and boisterous. In short, he’s pretty much the polar opposite of the stereotype I had in my head. In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to adjust my old preconceptions.

I toggle through my available comms circuits and select the top-level tactical channel.

“
Regulus
TacOps, this is Tailpipe One. Request final comms and telemetry check.”

“Tailpipe One, TacOps,” the reply comes. “You’re five by five on data and comms. Good luck, and good hunting.”

“TacOps, copy that.” I bring up the data feed from
Regulus
’s TacOps center, where the ground-pounder brass and the carrier’s air-group commander are coordinating the NAC assets about to drop onto a Lanky-controlled moon.

The data feed from
Regulus
shows the eight drop ships of the first-wave spearhead in a V-shaped formation, streaking into atmosphere from high orbit without any opposition.

I’m going with the first wave, which is made up of SRA drop ships, and I’m the ground liaison for the NAC strike force because I’m one of only two combat controllers in this system right now.

Our atmospheric entry is marked by the usual bumping and buffeting. The armored marines in the cargo hold sway in their seats a little in time with the shuddering of the drop ship. I do one last check of the tactical situation in orbit, still amazed to see some of our most valuable fleet units flying close formation with ships they would have tried to blow out of space a few weeks ago.

Three minutes before Dmitry’s predicted time-on-target, the drop ship banks sharply to the left. A few moments later, I can hear the thumping sound of ordnance leaving the external racks, and then the autocannons on the side of the hull start thundering. The SRA birds have bigger cannons than ours do, but they fire at a slower rate. I can feel the concussions from the muzzle blasts transmit through the hull, something I’ve never felt in our Wasps or Dragonflies. This is a month for new experiences, it seems.

“Kuzka’s mother!”

The shipboard comms blurt out a staccato burst of terse Russian from the pilot that my suit’s universal translator software helpfully translates for me. It doesn’t do well with idioms. I look at Dmitry and point to my ear.

“It means to teach someone hard lesson,” Dmitry says.

All around me, the SRA troopers ready their weapons, so I do likewise. In Bravo kit, I carry the big and heavy M-80 rifle, and twenty-five rounds in quick-release loops on my battle armor. I work the release latch for the M-80’s breech and verify that the brass bases of two armor-piercing rounds are capping the chambers. The computer keeps track of my weapon’s loading status, of course, but no combat grunt with any experience at all ever fully trusts a silicon brain when it comes to life-and-death matters.

The Russian ship changes course a few times, each turn punctuated by bursts of cannon fire or missile launches. The ordnance on a drop ship is for fire support, and it’s not good practice to use most of it up before the grunts hit the dirt, but then the ship tilts sharply upward into a hover, the tail ramp starts opening, and I see why we’re coming in shooting.

“
Yóbanny v rot!
” one of the Russian marines next to me says, and I have a good idea what it means even without my translator, which merely renders the statement as “Strong profanity.”

Outside, the landing strip for the SRA colony’s air base stretches out into the distance behind the drop ship’s tail boom, and scattered on and near the dirty gray asphalt are the massive bodies of several Lankies, some still smoldering from whatever hit them. I don’t have very much time to observe the scenery as the drop ship puts its skids on the ground and the deployment light over the tail ramp jumps from red to green. We unbuckle, I follow the SRA grunts out of the cargo hold and down the ramp at a run, and I’m back in combat.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” the SRA officer in the lead shouts as we thunder down the ramp. In reality, he’s saying something in Russian, of course, but my suit is giving me the closest approximate translation.

The SRA marines work like a well-oiled machine of which I am no part. They take up a standard covering formation as the drop ship dusts off again behind us, engines screaming their banshee wail, sixty tons of laminate steel and weaponry put together into a hulking shape that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly at all. The drop ship isn’t a hundred meters off the ground when it pivots around and opens fire with its cannon again. Blind without any TacLink information, I have to rely on my own suit’s sensors and my eyes and ears. I look downrange to see where the drop ship is firing, but I can’t see what they’re hitting. I do, however, hear the unearthly wail of a stricken Lanky, a sound that has followed me in many dreams over the last few years. Then I see the Lanky appearing behind a structure two hundred meters away, limbs flailing, trying to get out of the hail pouring from the drop ship’s heavy-caliber autocannons. As big and formidable as they are, their size makes them excellent targets for our air support. For the first time, we are fighting them with all the air and space power at our disposal, and that is making all the difference.

Overhead, I hear a missile coming off the ordnance rack of our ride. It streaks across the distance in a flash and tears into the Lanky’s midsection, blowing it off its feet in a tangle of spindly limbs. The SRA marines around me holler their approval.

The SRA architecture on the ground is almost as sturdy as the housing in New Longyearbyen, but for different reasons. The SRA moon is a hot, dusty, rocky place, much closer to Fomalhaut’s sun than our little ice moon. The squat bunker-like buildings here must be even sturdier than they look, because I can’t see much destruction in this settlement despite the fact that the place has been under Lanky management for a few weeks. They usually gas the settlements first and then dismantle the terraforming infrastructure before taking down our settlements. From the data my suit delivers, it looks like they’ve not even gotten around to step one yet. The atmosphere down here is perfectly normal. No biohazards, no ChemWar alerts. I could pop my helmet off and breathe fresh air if I wanted.

In the distance, on the other side of the settlement, tracers and missile-exhaust trails mark the arrival of the SRA attack birds that have been escorting us into the LZ. I hear the explosions from their ordnance rolling across town, followed by the unnerving wail of stricken Lankies.

The Russians set up a perimeter, guns and rocket launchers at the ready, calling out threat vectors and directions to each other. I fire up all the active stuff in my suit and check the situation. One drop ship overhead, three on the ground, four more about to land. The next NAC unit is claiming a patch of ground on the other side of the garrison town. Each of our SI platoons has at least one SRA marine as a liaison, to make sure that the local defenders don’t start blowing away the people that came to rescue them.

“Air-defense network is not active,” Dmitry tells me over our top-level comms circuit. “Is out of commission. They broke radar, lidar, everything that puts out radiation.”

Our scouting runs from orbit indicated as much, but the brass didn’t want to risk a bunch of drop ships getting blown out of the sky by automated defenses primed to shoot at anything without SRA friend-or-foe transponders, which is why the first wave consists solely of SRA drop ships, carrying mostly NAC infantry in their holds. Now that we’re on the ground, I can call in the NAC hardware.

“
Regulus
TacOps, Tailpipe One. Boots on the ground, landing zone is crawling with hostiles. Requesting close air support for a sweep north of the LZ.”

“Tailpipe One, TacOps. Copy that. Close air inbound, ETA ten minutes. Call sign is Hammer.”

“Hammer flight inbound, ETA one-zero minutes,” I confirm. The last word almost gets drowned out by the staccato of the machine cannon on the Akula drop ship overhead.

“Dmitry, tell those Akula pilots we have close air incoming. They’ll sweep that area over there. Let’s not have any incidents.”

Dmitry gives me a lazy thumbs-up without stopping his work on the control deck he has set up on a piece of rubble in front of him.

“Don’t worry, my man,” he says, in what sounds like a mock American surfer-dude accent. “Russian soldiers are trained professionals.”

Over by the north end of the airfield, beyond the runway, three Lankies appear, their eighty-foot forms towering over the rocky landscape. The drop ship overhead opens up with its cannons again. I can’t feel the concussions of the muzzle blasts through my bug suit, but the dust underneath my boots gets kicked up as the Russian drop ship rakes the incoming Lankies with armor-piercing explosive grenades. One of them falls, then another, both shrieking and wailing. Their vocalizations sound like nothing I’ve ever heard on Earth. They’re sharp and piercing and full of deep, rumbling intensity at the same time.

Above our heads, the drop ship pulls up and ascends away from the airfield. Dmitry shouts something to his troops, who form a double line on the tarmac in front of me. The SRA marines in the front row drop to one knee. All of them aim their rifles at the remaining Lanky, 150 meters away and closing in on us. The Russians have big, powerful anti-Lanky rifles, but theirs aren’t twin-barreled like ours. Instead, the SRA equivalents are single-shot breechloaders, with bores that look even bigger than those of the M-80 I carry. The kneeling row of SRA marines fire their rifles at the Lanky to a command I can’t hear, and six rifles pound out shots at the same instant, a deep thunderclap that sounds almost like a single report. The breeches on their guns fly open and eject the brass bases of their caseless rounds, and the second row of marines prepare their own guns. I watch as the SRA marines fire three, four, five volleys in rapid succession, each row shooting while the other reloads, like line infantry of the old colonial days on Earth. The advancing Lanky takes six, then twelve, then eighteen impacts to its head and chest, each marked by the small violent puff of a high-explosive armor-piercing round. By the fifth volley, the Lanky stumbles and falls. Then it crashes to the ground, its bulk shaking the earth underneath my boots. The marines’ five volleys took maybe eight or nine seconds. Their Lanky-engagement tactics are completely unlike ours, but I’ll be damned if they don’t work at least as well.

All over the SRA settlement, I hear gunfire, like a discordant martial symphony: the deep booms of our M-80s and SRA anti-Lanky rifles, the pop-whoosh of MARS rocket launchers, the thunderclaps of exploding grenades and rockets, all mixed in with the wailing of Lankies and the din from the cannons of the overhead drop ships. Every bit of aboveground infrastructure here in town is wrecked, and only some of the squat and sturdy settlement buildings are still standing amid the rubble. But there are no Lanky nerve-gas pods littering the ground here, no clusters of dead settlers anywhere. It’s like they’re fighting with their hands tied behind their backs. Whatever the reason, I’m perfectly happy with this change in our fortunes, however temporary it may be.

As the NAC troops on the ground spot and engage targets, contact icons pop up on my tactical display. I can’t see what the Russians are seeing because our tactical networks don’t talk to each other, but everything our own troops see and do gets transmitted to my bug suit’s computer and the control deck I’m carrying. The human troops are an enclave of blue icons, the Lankies a wide and irregular circle of orange symbols all around us, clustered in groups of three or four at the most.

The SRA base and town sit at the end of a rocky plateau. On one end of the town, there’s a gradual drop-off into a craggy valley. The other end of the town, where the SRA base and its military airfield sit, opens out onto the flat and wide plateau beyond. Out there, Lankies are milling about, some advancing in our direction, some going the other way, away from the fight. In every engagement I’ve had with them before now, they’ve shown more coordination and aggression than this group does. These seem slower, weaker, almost unsure. Even with all the troops on the ground, the Lankies on the plateau could probably overrun us if they all came our way at once. But they don’t, and I don’t intend to let them have enough breathing room to change their minds.

Close air support comes in a few minutes later, three flights of Shrikes loaded to design capacity with air-to-ground ordnance. They drop out of orbit and come rushing toward the LZ at full throttle, forming up into a six-abreast formation just a few dozen klicks from the target area. I fire up the comms suite and toggle into the TacAir channel.