Dmitry nods and talks on his comms again, presumably to let the SRA marines know that the Hand of God is about to touch down three klicks away. Kinetic strikes are almost as impressive as low-yield nukes, and having one occur nearby without warning can be a bit startling, to put it mildly.
Nearby, a squad of NAC Spaceborne Infantry bring down a pair of Lanky stragglers with a barrage of MARS rockets, assisted by a squad of SRA marines with their own rocket launchers. Theirs load from the front, ours from the back, but they both serve the same purpose and achieve the same results. One Lanky goes down, hit by several armor-piercing explosive warheads and dozens of rifle rounds. The other soaks up the hits and keeps coming, right into the defensive fire put out by the two squads. I take the M-80 from my shoulder, let the computer take aim for me, and fire both barrels at the approaching Lanky just as it bears down on the mixed squad of human troops. I’m still fifty meters away and in relative safety, but some of the other troopers are not so lucky. The Lanky flings them aside with a huge, spindly arm, and they get tossed through the air like debris in a hurricane. I open the breech of my rifle, pluck two more rounds from my harness, and reload the chambers. By the time I’ve raised the weapon again, the cumulative fire from the surrounding troopers has brought the Lanky to its knees. It wails its earsplitting cry as rifle rounds and rockets pelt it from all sides. Then it crashes onto the rubble-strewn ground, finally succumbing to the dozens of super-dense penetrators we shot through its hide. They are so large, so thick-skinned, so incredibly hard to kill that whenever we bring one down, it feels like we’ve felled a god.
The kinetic warheads from the Avenger announce their arrival with an unearthly ripping sound overhead. Then the first warhead strikes the ground three kilometers away, at the entrance of the ravine. There’s a blinding flash in the distance, and a few seconds later, an earth-shattering bang shakes the ground so violently that I have to regain my footing, and Dmitry’s control deck leaps off its makeshift pedestal and clatters to the ground. A plume of dust and rock shoots into the blue sky. Then a second round hits, and a third, and a fourth. The Avenger spaced her shots, put the first one into the mouth of the ravine to plug the Lankies’ ingress route, and then walked the other three into the ravine itself to do the killing work. Within thirty seconds, the cloud of rocks and dirt to our northwest towers a thousand feet above the plateau.
Dmitry looks at the fireworks in the distance for a few moments. Then he picks up his control deck, wipes off the dirt, and props it in front of himself again.
“You just committed treaty violation,” he says. “Svalbard Accords. We get home to Earth, I file complaint with United Nations war crimes tribunal.”
Nukes and kinetic weapons—and all other weapons of mass destruction—are banned for combat use by both sides when fighting each other. Technically, Dmitry is correct—the Avenger firing kinetic warheads at an SRA moon is probably a letter violation of that treaty—but I don’t think it counts in spirit, because we shot at Lankies and not SRA installations. In any case, I’m pretty sure Dmitry is joking, but I’m still getting used to the particular Russian sense of humor, or maybe just Dmitry’s.
“If we ever make it home to Earth, they can put that one on my tab,” I tell Dmitry. “I’m already looking at twenty years for mutiny anyway.”
Three more flights of drop ships arrive in five-minute intervals, all SRA boats with mostly NAC infantry on board. The mixed battalion of SRA and NAC troops mops up the remaining Lankies in the settlement one by one while the drop ships and Shrikes provide fire support from above. This is the first time I’ve been in action against the Lankies with a whole combined-arms combat team, with fire support from orbit and all the resources of a proper planetary-assault task force. And we are, for the first time, decisively winning against them on the ground. They’re not invincible after all. Too bad that we won’t be able to replicate this particular set of circumstances again any time soon.
I spend the next three hours coordinating the close air cover and the conga line of drop ships coming down from the task force to pick up troops and survivors, return to the carriers, refuel, and then make the trip again. Every drop ship in the combined task force, NAC and SRA alike, is in space or in the atmosphere of the moon at the same time, coming in or going out. It’s still bizarre to see Shrikes escorting a flight of SRA drop ships, or Wasps and Akulas flying in formation overhead, and no matter where this strange new arrangement is going to take us in the future, I’ve spent so much time shooting at these people that I doubt I’ll ever get fully used to the sight.
When the last drop ship full of SRA civvies and straggler garrison troops is in the air, the colony town is a deserted pile of rubble, littered with broken things and dead Lankies. The mixed platoon on the ground with me gathers our casualties and prepares for egress. Two drop ships are waiting for us on the edge of the old SRA military airfield, tail ramps down and engines running. There are still plenty of Lankies on this rock, but the ones that are spotted from the air by our recon flights are milling around singly or in small groups. After we blasted the approaching Lanky group in the nearby ravine with kinetic warheads, the Lankies have made no more attempts to retake the settlement and stop the evacuation. On the contrary, the ones that are still in the area seem to take pains to steer well clear of us. The Shrikes are still engaging targets of opportunity all over this part of the moon’s hemisphere, but there are still hundreds of Lankies scattered all over the moon, and it would take us another month to kill every last one of them from the air. We got what we came for, and now it’s time to hotfoot it away from this place before another seed ship shows up in orbit and ruins the party.
The waiting drop ships are a Wasp and an Akula. The Russian part of the platoon boards the Akula, while the NAC troops tromp up the loading ramp of the Wasp. We are returning to our respective bird farms, which don’t have docking clamps for the other side’s hardware.
“Good luck, Dmitry,” I tell my SRA counterpart as we walk over to our rides together.
“Same to you, Andrew,” he says. “Maybe we won’t kill each other for a while, eh? I see you on the battlefield, I try to wound you instead, maybe.”
I’m the last to walk up the Wasp’s ramp. When I glance back over the devastation that is the old SRA garrison, I see that Dmitry is over by the tail end of the Akula, watching me as I walk aboard. It’s only when my boots are on the steel of the Wasp’s ramp that he starts to board his own boat. I sketch a little salute, and he returns it precisely and by the book.