The onboard computer “heard” the commands and followed orders. The copilot verified that the countermeasures had been launched and bit his lip. The transport was large and difficult to maneuver. The tone warbled as the pilot jinked right, left, and right again.
Harco started to speak, realized it wouldn’t do any good, and saw the world explode. At least one missile had penetrated the defensive measures and struck its target. The transport ceased to exist—as did an entire platoon of troops.
The officer swore a long series of oaths as the VR computer automatically dumped his virtual body into a second cockpit. The name “Jameson, Lt. j.g.” appeared at the bottom of the frame.
The pilot flew by wire, “thought” the plane where she wanted it to go, and used her hands to “play” the cockpit. The drumsticks clicked, banged, and thudded off the canopy, the instrument panel, and the seat she sat on. Was she aware of his presence, and determined to ignore him? Or simply out of her mind?
Though not a pilot himself, Harco knew there were rules about what pilots could and couldn’t do in the cockpit, and wondered where the sticks came in.
If
they came in.
Incensed by the pilot’s lack of professionalism, and prepared to give the youngster a piece of his mind, Harco opened his mouth. He never got to speak.
A tone warbled, Jameson gave a war whoop, and the plane flipped onto its back. There was no way to tell whether the officer had a reason for flying that way or simply wanted to.
Harco, still strapped into his chair, felt his feet flip over his head. A stylus fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor.
The infantry officer felt the chair jerk, knew air-to-surface missiles had been launched, and heard Jameson’s casual drawl. “Blue Six to Blue Leader. Feet dry ... enemy engaged. Over.”
“That’s a roger, Blue Six. You are green for target one-niner-four. Do your shit. Over.”
The Lance flipped right side up, shuddered in response to a near miss, and jerked as two additional flights of ASMs raced toward a preselected target. The sticks continued to pound out their rhythm.
Harco forced himself to think, to switch himself away, to “ride” someone else.
He was a platoon leader this time. The hard metal seat slammed into the base of his spine as the transport hit the bottom of an air pocket and lurched forward. The voice was calm and measured. “We are five to dirt. Passengers can collect their baggage on carousel six. Lock and load.”
Harco jumped again. The fort passed below. A two-thousand-pound bomb exploded on the northern scarp. Dirt and rock flew into the air. White paint turned black, but the heavily reinforced walls continued to hold.
The officer jumped, found himself aboard one of the Trooper IIIs and watched his heavily armed analogs fly, wriggle, and roll away. Something shoved from behind. The cyborg fell, hit, and rolled.
The borg climbed to his feet and turned toward the sound of another explosion. Flames belched from the recently emptied transport. A crew person staggered out through a hatch and collapsed on the ground. Her flight suit was on fire. She lay without moving.
The cyborg turned his back, spotted what looked like a mobile radar platform, and fired a shoulder mounted missile. The target exploded. Assault Team Victor was on the ground.
Booly would have preferred to be up on the walls, or out with the troops, but couldn’t afford the luxury. Not with half a brigade of still questionable troops under his command.
No, like it or not, the Sit Room was the right place to be. Thanks to the advance work carried out by Sergeant Ho and her staff, he had plenty of intel. Nearly
too
much.
It was difficult to keep up with the back and forth radio traffic, the video feeds provided by squad and platoon leaders, the eye-in-the-sky stuff
beamed from unmanned drones, tiny robocrawlers and remote sensor packages stationed up to fifty miles out.
That being the case, a technician named Motke had been assigned to assist Booly by switching appropriate images to the bank of three monitors located in front of his command-style chair. Not the same as a full-blown VR rig ... but good enough.
The initial stage of the attack had gone pretty much as Booly had expected it to. A wave of fighter-bombers came first, followed by the surviving transports, and landings in force at Hol Hol, Damerdjog, Ali-Sabieh, and Arta.
War involves tradeoffs, so while the assault team had multiple landing zones to defend, the strategy would allow them to deploy quickly and force the defenders into a complicated response.
The strategy seemed familiar somehow, as if Booly had seen it before. But where? The question continued to nag at Booly’s mind as the officer sorted his forces into response teams and struggled to stay on top of the incoming intelligence.
Then he had it... Harco! A younger version of whom had successfully split a frog offensive into six separate elements, thereby enabling the planet’s security detachment to fly from one fire base to the next and attack the phibs one pod at a time. “Divide and conquer” was one of the oldest military axioms around, and one of the best.
Not satisfied with running the Legion from North America, the traitorous sonofabitch was leading the raid himself! Talk about balls... Maybe they could nail the bastard and
really
deal the enemy a blow. Satisfied that he knew whom he was up against, Booly turned to the matter at hand.
Harco’s forces had broken out of three different landing zones, picked up the old Dire Dawa railroad bed, and were on the move.
Captain Hawkins had orders to cut them off while Major Judd brought Delta company into action. If the XO could manage to flank the enemy, Hawkins would have a chance. But how likely was that, given the officer in question?
Booly watched from Captain Ny’s point of view as her energy cannons burped coherent energy, converged on a Trooper II, and blew the cyborg in half. The camera shuddered as a missile hit the quadruped, then steadied. The muties hadn’t put any quads on the ground, not so far, and that was good.
“Look,” Motke said, momentarily forgetting to say “sir,” as he pointed toward monitor three. “They’re taking a run at battery one-sierra-echo.”
The AA battery, which consisted of four 133mm SAM launchers and a Gatling gun, opened fire. It was located near Loyada. Booly saw four contrails an
d listened to the operator cheer on channel two. “Did you see that? We nailed the bastard!”
It was the last transmission he ever made. Chunks of mutie aircraft still cartwheeled out of the sky as three enemy fighters rolled and dived toward the ground. The bombs knew where to go and went there. The monitor snapped to black.
Booly swore and activated his mike. “One-One to One-Three... Where the hell is that air cover? We need it now! Over.”
Given the fact that Winters had no control over the matter in question, she might have been angry or resentful. She sounded smug instead. “Roger that, One-One. Fast friendlies on the way—ETA one minute thirty seconds. Over.”
Booly was speechless. Winters smiled.
The flight of six Daggers entered the stratosphere, shed heat from their specially designed skins, and bumped through the quickly warming air.
Tyspin checked her heads-up display (HUD), saw more red deltas than she cared to look at, but was grateful for the fact that they were still below. That was an advantage she was happy to have. The naval officer had targets, plenty of them, which meant they had her as well. Why no response, then? Were they blind?
A voice sounded in her helmet. It was confident, verging on smug. “Victor One to incoming Daggers... Welcome to the party. Over.”
Tyspin marveled at her luck. The idiot assumed she was friendly! Not surprising, given the circle jerk up in orbit ... but not very smart either. Her pilots followed as the naval officer rolled to starboard and dived towards the aircraft below. “Blue One to Victor One... Thanks for the hospitality.”
Victor One watched the delta-shaped icons roll in behind his formation, heard a tone as the missile locked onto his plane, and realized his mistake. “Bandits at six o’clock! Break! Break! Break!”
Three pilots escaped, but two assimilated the order too slowly and paid with their lives. Their fighters exploded, tumbled out of the sky, and splashed into the Gulf of Aden.
Tyspin smiled grimly, switched to a secure frequency, and gave her orders. “Blue One to Blue flight... The muties have transports on the ground. Hit ’em hard.”
A chorus of “Roger” s echoed in her ears as the aerospace fighters started to make their runs. They came in over the Gulf of Tadjoura and went straight for the enemy.
Tyspin spotted one of the bulky aircraft, “thought” her ship to port, and removed the safeties from her guns.
“Watch your six, Blue Leader,” a voice cautioned as Tyspin focused on the target. She saw the delta and fought the urge to abort the run. “Roger, Two... Keep the bastard off my tail.”
The ground came up, blurred under the belly of the fighter, and disappeared to the rear. The transport had been warned of the danger and was four feet off the ground when Tyspin fired.
The 30mm cannon shells ripped through the transport’s relatively thin skin and hit the power plant. The ship shuddered, sideslipped, and struck a civilian radio mast. The transport fell like a rock.
Tyspin heard a tone, fought the weight of the gees, and checked the HUD. The delta was right on her tail. The fighter vanished as Lieutenant Alvarez blew it out of the sky. “Thanks, Two.”
“De nada, boss.”
“Blue Leader to Blue flight... Form on me. Over.”
Only three pilots answered the call. Her wingman brought her up to speed. “Blue Two to Blue One. Three went into the gulf ... and Six ejected. I saw her chute. Over.”
Tyspin swore under her breath. She had lost one, possibly two pilots, not to mention their planes. Maybe Pratt was right. Maybe she should have stayed in orbit. A new voice broke her train of thought. “Mosby Control to Blue One. Over.”
The fact that the transmission had been encrypted and transmitted on her command channel implied that the
Gladiator
was in contact with loyalist ground forces. The response was automatic. “This is Blue One... Go. Over.”
“We’re
real
glad to see you, Blue One. That transport is toast. We have three columns of borg-reinforced infantry approaching the fort along the road from Hol Hol. Anything you can do? Over.”
The voice didn’t belong to a com tech. Tyspin felt sure of that. The commanding officer? Maybe. The naval officer glanced at the HUD, saw three deltas straight at her, and snapped a response. “Roger that, Mosby Control. Can you smoke the target?”
The reply was instantaneous. “Roger that. Arty on the way. Willey Pete (WP) ten from now.”
Tyspin spoke as she nosed over. “Blue One to Four and Five. The bandits are yours. Over.”
“Roger, One,” Lieutenant Frank Norris answered grimly. “Over.”
Tyspin didn’t even have to look to know that Alvarez hung above and behind her starboard wing. The ground rushed to meet her, WP blossomed below, and she fired her rockets. Explosions winked red, tracers streaked past the canopy, and something hit the fuselage. Alarms sounded, fire blossomed, and the plane started to shake.
Harco had temporarily invested himself in a Trooper III. His chair lurched from side to side as the cyborg ran toward the fort. Blips appeared on the screen. The cyborg’s computer tagged the incoming aircraft as hostile. Two shoulder-launched missiles were prepped and launched. They wobbled, achieved lock, and started to track.
Three rounds of WP dropped near the troops, detonated, and marked their position. Rockets exploded all around, cannon fire blew divots out of the ground, and someone started to scream.
That’s when Major Vernon Judd, unarmed except for the pistol in his holster, scrambled up out of the concrete lined drainage ditch and waved his troops forward. “Vive la Legion!” He never looked back, never checked to see if his troops followed him, as he charged through the flying steel.
And Delta company
did
follow, screaming like banshees, firing from the hip. Some fell kicking in the dust, some spun as bullets turned them around, and the rest ran.
Already thinned by forces under the command of Captains Hawkins and Ny, and stunned by the attack from above, the muties broke and started to withdraw. They paused in and around a cluster of mud-brick shacks. Laundry flapped in surrender, a machine gun tore it to shreds, and muties fell back.
Alarmed now, and intent on preventing a full-scale rout, Harco searched for Lieutenant Colonel Lo, discovered that she’d been killed, and assumed command. The ability to jump from one officer to the next was a godsend. Harco gave a series of orders, called for air strikes, and monitored the withdrawal. Three LZs had been reduced to two, but both were secure, and sufficient for the number of people he had left.
Still, it took time to pull back, load the troops, and lift. Time and casualties, since the loyalist tube crews had coordinates for all of the remaining zones and fired mission after mission.
Harco swore as 155mm howitzer shells swept the second LZ, hit a pallet loaded with ammo, and marched out the other side. A transport, loaded with troops, wobbled but managed to lift.
There was one piece of good news, however, and that was the fact that the loyalist fighters had run low on fuel and had been forced into space. That left Harco’s aircraft in charge of the sky, which was an advantage they used to attack the quads, suppress Booly’s artillery fire, and protect the LZs.
Finally, after the last transport was safely out over the gulf, Harco pulled himself out.
His clothes were soaked with sweat, his jaw was clenched, and his fingers had a death grip on the chair.
The tech entered, started to say something, and Harco waved him off.