Chains of Command (33 page)

The cannon shells explode to my right in an earsplitting cacophony. They carve a meter-wide trench into the ground and rake across the nearby bulk of Blackfly Three, which shudders and rocks on its skids under the hammer blows from the cannon shells. Shards of armor fly off the drop ship’s hull and sail through the air. A few seconds later, I hear the unmistakable ripping roar of the Shrike’s multibarreled cannon in the distance, the sound arriving after the supersonic armor-piercing shells. I try to make myself meld with the ground, knowing full well that my battle armor has no chance of stopping a shell of that caliber. To my right, some rounds explode on the ground right next to Lieutenant Dorian’s Blackfly One, and I can hear the shrapnel pinging off the cockpit and the portside armor like angry hail.

Thirty or forty meters in front of me and to my left, a single Trident launcher belches out a missile, which ignites its main motor a second later. The slender missile shoots off into the sky, too fast to follow with the naked eye. The incoming Shrike banks hard to the left and starts ejecting countermeasures, but a few seconds later, there’s a muted flash in the sky, followed by a much brighter one. Then the sharp report of the warhead detonations reaches my helmet microphones. My augmented vision shows the Shrike in the distance, trailing a plume of fire, banking hard and then leveling out again. It flies off to the south, clearly damaged by the Trident, but still in the air.

“We have got to go,” Lieutenant Dorian shouts. “We’re going to have every Shrike above this hemisphere on our heads in a few minutes.”

I get up on shaky legs and look around. Blackfly Three is burning ahead and to my right. The cannon shells pierced the side armor on the port side and ignited both auxiliary tanks on the port wing. The bulk of Third Platoon’s drop ship managed to shield Blackfly One, so our ship is merely scuffed a little by shrapnel, but the other ship is a complete write-off. I see troopers running up Blackfly Three’s tail ramp to check for casualties. A few seconds later, they emerge from the hold again.

“Lieutenant Wood and the chief are dead,” someone reports. “Can’t get them out. Whole front section’s on fire.”

“Get out of there before the internal fuel goes,” Lieutenant Horner shouts.

“Board the fucking ship,” I yell. “Do it now. Leave the dead.”

We took more casualties in the Shrike’s attack run than just Blackfly Three’s pilot and crew chief. Three SI troopers are on the ground, unmoving. Half a dozen of their comrades rush over and drag the unconscious or dead troopers over to the ramp of Blackfly One, where others help hoist them into the cargo hold. It’s costing us precious seconds, but I can’t tell these men to leave their fellow troopers behind. I run up the ramp and past the rows of troopers who have thrown themselves into sling seats haphazardly.

“All aboard,” the crew chief sends as soon as my boots are off the dirt. Lieutenant Dorian throttles up and yanks the Blackfly off the ground.

“More active radar from the west,” he reports. “We won’t be able to hide from that, polychrome or not.”

I don’t bother to reply. He knows his business far better than I do, so I leave him to it. To my left, the cargo hold is chaos as the SI troopers are tending to their wounded or dead squad mates. All I can do is plug myself into the console in front of me and see what’s coming our way.

To the west, I see the detection cones from two separate sets of search radar. Whatever strange reluctance the renegade force has had to employ active radiation, it seems to have gotten over it. The electronic warfare suite built into the Blackfly identifies the transmitters as air-to-ground dynamic phased array radar from Shrike attack aircraft. The radar coverage cones are overlapping, suggesting a formation in close proximity.

“Two more from two-seven-zero, closing fast,” I send to our pilot.

“I saw,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “That’s not good. I’m taking us south.”

The ship banks to the right and drops a few hundred feet to try to hide in the return radar clutter from the ground. I briefly wonder what Lieutenant Dorian is doing—turning south and giving the Shrikes a broadside scan of our ship instead of ducking behind the nearest mountain ridge—but then I realize that he’s playing fox to their hounds, leading them away from the spot where we have an entire platoon sitting on the ground.

Now that they know where we are, I figure that I can’t do much more damage with a high-powered burst transmission. I send a TacLink update as an electronic plea for help out into the dawning morning, all the sensor data from First and Second Squads bundled in a half-second burst transmission that goes out from the Blackfly’s transmitter at thousands of watts. If Second and Fourth Platoons are within five hundred kilometers with their comms turned on, they’ll probably hear us. Even if we die in the next five minutes, they may be able to use our recon data to extract some payback from the colonists.

On the plot, the two incoming Shrikes track south, following our movement. As stealthy as the Blackfly is, the polychromatic armor is no good against high-energy radar at close range. We need to get away from those Shrikes and disappear in the background noise again, but we are running out of time and space. They are faster, and they are closing in. We’re more hare than fox right now, and the hounds are running us down. But despite it all, underneath the fear, I feel eerily calm.

The Shrikes are now within thirty kilometers, well within the range of the Fleet’s standard air-to-air missiles. I keep my eyes on the TacLink map, which is constantly updated with the data from the drop ship’s sensors. Any second, there will be two or three little red V shapes coming from those Shrike icons, and then we’ll be falling out of the sky in a fireball a few seconds later.

But the missiles don’t come. Instead, the Shrikes keep tracking our course and pulling closer, their fire-control radars making our threat receiver go ballistic with warning yelps.

Twenty kilometers. Eighteen. Sixteen. They either want to make absolutely sure we have no time to evade their missiles, or they intend to hose us out of the sky with gunfire. And if they do that—

Fourteen kilometers. Thirteen.

“They’re not geared for air-to-air,” I send to Lieutenant Dorian. “They’re closing in for cannon kills. They have no AA on the wings.”

“Well, neither do we,” he replies. “Can’t stop and turn around to shoot back, can I? Not that I’d come out ahead in that pissing match.”

“Hey, Lieutenants,” the platoon sergeant sends. “We have some AA back here. Anyone ever try to shoot Tridents off a cargo ramp in flight?”

Lieutenant Dorian barks a laugh. “Not to my knowledge, Sarge.”

“They use an expeller charge,” I say. “No back blast. I don’t see why you couldn’t.”

Eleven kilometers.

“Do it,” I say. “Chief, can you pop open the ramp just a meter and a half? Just enough for a Trident launcher to clear a shot?”

“Holy shit,” the crew chief replies. “In flight?” Then he laughs as well. “We’ll be violating safety regs that haven’t even been written yet.”

“We have two loaded launchers back here,” the platoon sergeant says. “Crack that ramp open and hold her steady for ten seconds so the gunners can track. Santiago, Keenan, grab those Tridents,” he sends to the platoon. “We’re going to play mobile AA battery. Everyone else, clear the back of the ramp. Move it if you don’t want to die today.”

Ten kilometers. The two red icons behind us are closing the distance steadily. I’m now convinced they have no missiles on the wings and intend to shoot us down with their cannons, otherwise we’d be a flaming wreck on the ground already.

To my left, the ramp opens, and the sudden rushing wind noise in the hold is louder than the subdued roar from our engines. The platoon sergeant is at the back of the hold with Corporal Santiago and Private Keenan. Each of them has a Trident launcher tube on his shoulder. They aim them out of the meter-wide crack in the tail ramp and turn on their targeting modules.

“Eight klicks out,” I yell. “Moving from four to five o’clock high.”

“Got it,” Santiago says. “Tracking target. Target acquired and locked.”

“Target acquired and locked,” Private Keenan shouts.

“Their guns have a three-kilometer range,” I say. “Let them get to five so they have less time to evade.”

The Tridents are mean little missiles. One warhead is generally not enough to bring down a Shrike, which is heavily armored and stuffed with redundant systems, but we can at least screw up their gun run and maybe even break something mission-critical.

“Six kilometers,” I announce to everyone. We are thundering across the surface of Arcadia at seven hundred knots and three hundred feet of altitude, faster and lower than I’ve ever flown in a drop ship, not even with Halley on the stick.

“Five kilometers,” I shout. “Weapons free, weapons free.”

The two Trident launchers bellow almost simultaneously. The expeller charges kick the meter-and-a-half-long missiles out of their tubes and into the semidarkness outside. A second later, their motors kick in, and they streak off into the night, faster than fleeting thoughts.

The Shrikes are lining up for their gun run in our wake when the missiles take them completely by surprise. Tridents have a homing warhead that reads the laser beams emitted from the launcher’s targeting module, and they don’t set off threat-warning systems until they are already in their terminal intercept phase. In this case, that’s half a second before the submunitions hit their targets.

Above and behind us, there’s a bright flash, and then a fiery bloom as the left Shrike completely disintegrates. We are racing away from the sound and can’t hear the explosion, but there’s no doubt that the Shrike is gone. It falls out of the sky with no control or coordination, a flaming comet of wreckage that starts losing cohesion in midair right before the whole burning mess plows into the ground six kilometers behind us and makes another fireball billow into the sky. One of the submunitions must have pierced the armor right over a fuel tank or ammo cassette.

The second Shrike shudders from a hit as well, but that one isn’t nearly as spectacular. There’s a brief streak of smoke coming from one of the engine nozzles, but it stops almost immediately, no doubt put out by the Shrike’s fire-suppressant system. But the attack craft breaks off its run abruptly. The pilot flings his bird into a sharp wing-over turn to starboard and races away from us at a ninety-degree angle.

“Splash one,” I announce to cheers. “Second one got winged, but he’s still in the air. He killed his run.”

“He’s coming around to our right,” Lieutenant Dorian warns. “He’s going to go wide to avoid our six. We won’t be able to pull that trick off again.”

“Reload those launchers,” I tell the gunners. “Dorian, turn the bird and show him our ass end again.”

“On it. But he won’t come close to our six again, I can guarantee you that.”

Our ship smoothly banks to the left and makes a sweeping turn to the east until our nose is pointed at the nearby mountain ridge. The drop ship’s threat detector yowls again to alert us of the fire-control radar that is painting our ship. At this range, there is no stealth tech for us to hide behind, and the Shrike has more speed and maneuverability than we do.

“He’s coming around high for a deflecting shot,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Now at eight o’clock high.”

For the next minute or two, Lieutenant Dorian keeps changing course to present our tail to the Shrike and give the gunners in the cargo hold another shot with their Tridents, but the Shrike pilot is too aware and skilled to take the same punch on the nose twice. Inexorably, he closes the distance to our drop ship, always keeping above and to the side, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If we climb, he has us in his sights right away, and there’s nowhere else we can run or hide behind.

“Incoming,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Hold on back there.”

The Shrike is three kilometers out when he sends the first burst of cannon fire our way. At the last second, our pilot jerks the Blackfly violently to the left. A bright stream of large-caliber tracers streaks past the drop ship on our port side, missing the ship by less than two meters. Then the Shrike thunders by above us, already starting his turn for the next attack run.

“I can’t keep this up forever,” Lieutenant Dorian sends. It’s the first time I’ve heard stress in his voice since we left
Portsmouth
.

My TacLink display lets out a bleep to alert me of a new contact. I look at the map and see two missiles coming in from the outer edge of the scale, beyond visual range. Their little V shapes are blue, not red. A second or two later, there’s a new targeting radar lighting up our threat receivers. Something is coming in from the south and shooting missiles—but not at us.

“Blackfly One, this is Blackfly Two,” a familiar female voice comes over the company channel. “Keep up evasive. I’ll get the bastard off your back.”

“Affirmative,” Lieutenant Dorian sends back. I let out a joyful whoop that makes heads turn toward me in the cargo hold. I’ve never been so relieved to hear Halley’s voice.

The Shrike breaks off its attack run to evade the missiles that are coming at it at five times the speed of sound. The pilot kicks out countermeasures and banks his ship hard right and then left, still mindful to stay out of the firing cone from our tail end. The two missiles streak across the plot and whip around sharply to pursue the Shrike, too fast to see with the naked eye. I watch the plot as one of the blue missile icons disappears. The other one follows the Shrike for a second or two before it, too, blinks out of existence. A few seconds later, I hear the faint little crack of a warhead explosion. The Shrike soars back into the sky, unmolested. Halley must have fired her missiles at maximum range to draw the Shrike’s attention, and now she has it. The explosive joy I felt at hearing my wife’s voice dissipates as the attack craft turns toward the new threat.