Lines of Departure

CHAPTER 10





The Chinese marines are understrength, outnumbered, cut off from the rest of their regiment, and without air support, but they put up a good fight anyway. We push into town slowly and carefully, but the Chinese troops are well entrenched, and they’ve had years to prepare for this defense. By the time we have most of the town under control, my platoon has suffered eight casualties, a fifth of our combat strength. Chinese marines don’t surrender, and they rarely retreat.

“If I ever find the bastard who designed those new autonomous cannons, I’ll skin him with a salted pocketknife,” our platoon sergeant says. Ahead of us, the civil administration building has been turned into a strongpoint by the Chinese, and every other window on the top floor seems to have a crew-served weapon behind it.

“Alpha One-Niner, watch the emplacement on the top floor, northwest corner. They got one of them new cannons, the ones that fire duplex ammo,” the platoon sergeant warns.

“Alpha One-Niner, copy. I’m all out of MARS rockets. Send Third Squad around to that—what is that thing at Bravo Seven, a water tank? They should be able to get a clear shot at that corner from there,” First Squad’s leader replies.

“Charlie One-Niner, you listening in?” the platoon leader sends.

“Affirmative,” Third Squad’s leader sends. “I got two thermobarics left. We’re on our way.”

The Chinese civil administration building doesn’t look very civil at all. It’s a reinforced three-story structure that looks like it could survive a near miss from a five-kiloton nuke. I’m hunkered down with the platoon’s command section in an alley a few hundred meters away. The Chinese autocannons fire sporadic bursts at buildings and intersections in our vicinity. The defenders don’t know where we are precisely, but they have a good idea, and trying to leapfrog across the intervening distance would get us killed. Their autocannons are remote-controlled via a data link that’s impossible to hack and very difficult to jam. The Chinese gunners can sit anywhere within a quarter mile of their gun, and hammer us from the air-conditioned safety of a command bunker. The new models can be switched to fully autonomous firing mode, where the gun’s computer selects its own targets. The Commonwealth Defense Corps had its own version, but erased the autonomous capabilities from the software after combat use showed that the computer had a 1.3 percent error rate when telling hostiles from friendlies. The Sino-Russians have a more lenient acceptable-friendly-fire ratio, so they left their guns capable of running themselves without humans behind the trigger.

I watch Third Squad’s little cluster of blue icons make its way to the water tank at nav grid B-7. They leapfrog across intersections and hug the walls of the modular Chinese colony housing. The heavy automatic cannon on the top floor of the admin building keeps hammering out short bursts of fire, but the gunners are not tracking the progress of our squad. Finally, Third Squad is in position to get a clear shot at the gun emplacement with their MARS launchers.

“Fire in the hole,” their MARS gunner calls. In the distance, I hear the muffled pop of a launching missile, and a second later we see the white-hot exhaust of a MARS rocket streaking over the low rooftops toward its target. Then there’s an earthshaking boom, the familiar low thunderclap of a thermobaric warhead explosion, and the enemy gun stops firing.

“Bull’s-eye,” Third Squad’s leader says. “Put in another one for good measure.”

“First and Second Squads, up and at ’em,” Lieutenant Benning orders. “First Squad on the northwest corner, Fourth on the southeast one. Third Squad, move up for overwatch. Let’s get this shit over with.”

Back in NCO school, I had to read a ton of papers by mostly clueless theoreticians, prattling on about the “changing nature of modern warfare,” and the need for the modern, post–Terran Commonwealth Defense Corps to be tooled and trained for “low-intensity colonial actions.” In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.


There’s nothing “low-intensity” about our final assault on the Chinese admin building in this colony town on Sirius Ad. We pop smoke and charge in, and the remaining Chinese marines open up with everything they have left. We dash from cover to cover, and plaster the building ahead with rifle grenades and MARS rockets as we advance across the last few hundred meters of narrow streets and uniform colonial box architecture. I summon down Third Platoon’s drop ship for close air support, and the Wasp comes shrieking out of the blue sky a minute or two later, gun pods blazing. The north face of the building ahead erupts in a shower of sparks and concrete dust as the Wasp rakes the structure with a stream of armor-piercing thirty-millimeter cannon shells. The Chinese admin building is designed to be an emergency shelter, and it has thick walls and a nearly bombproof structure, but the drop ship’s cannons pour out two thousand rounds per minute each, and most of the windows on the north side end up taking a cannon shell or two. When we make our final dash across the road right in front of the building, the fire from the defenders has stopped.

Even with their defeat obvious, the Chinese marines don’t hand over the keys to the place voluntarily.



“Holy shit,” Lieutenant Benning remarks. “Take us three weeks to patch the place up again.”

The interior of the admin building is a mess. The thick walls kept out most of our ordnance, but most of the windows on the north-facing side ate a MARS or a cannon shell, and the interior walls didn’t do much to stop those. We’re in the middle of what looks like a squad berth, and the rubble in here is almost knee-deep. Near the windows, we see what’s left of three Chinese marines who probably stood in the way of a few thirty-millimeter rounds.

“You think we’ll be here that long, LT?” I ask. “They’ll send half their fleet through the chute once they get the word that we’re here.”

“F*cked if I know, Sarge. That’s above my pay grade.” He toggles his radio switch to check on the squad leaders.

“Third Squad, move up. Fourth Squad, keep up the perimeter. Stay sharp, people.”

We’re on the ground floor of the admin building. Above us, we hear an irregular staccato of rifle fire and grenade explosions, progress markers of the First and Second Squads sanitizing the upper floors. There isn’t a room on the ground floor that doesn’t have a dead Chinese marine or two in it, and our TacLink sensors show maybe fifteen defenders left in the building. Our suit sensors employ a complex voodoo of low-powered millimeter-wave radar, infrared, and half a dozen other technologies to spot enemy troops through walls and ceilings. It’s not infallible tech, especially not against opponents in battle armor of their own, but it’s accurate enough to keep our casualty count low. Our troops aren’t taking any chances. They shoot through walls with buckshot shells, and toss grenades through doorways in pairs and threes. However long the Chinese had to fortify this place, they weren’t expecting our attack when it came, and the defenders are disorganized and off their guard.

Room by room, we claw the admin building away from its owners, who die one by one in its defense. They must know that the battle is lost, but they fight us anyway, because that is what combat grunts do, and that’s what we would do in their place as well.

Finally, the gunfire ebbs, and our two squads meet up in the middle of the top floor, with no defender left between them.

“Building secure,” Lieutenant Benning calls out over the platoon channel. “Check for intel and enemy WIA, and watch your steps. Those little f*ckers love their booby traps.”

Down in the basement, we walk into what must have been the command post for the Chinese garrison company. There are five or six dead SRA marines on the floor, plucked apart by shrapnel and fléchette bursts. Only two of them are in full battle rattle. The others are in various states of combat readiness, with partially donned armor. The highest-ranking dead SRA marine, a Chinese major, is dressed merely in battle dress fatigues, and armed only with a pistol. Lieutenant Benning walks over to the dead major, pulls the pistol from his grasp, clears the chamber, and sticks the gun into the webbing of his battle armor. The Commonwealth Defense Corps stopped issuing pistols to frontline infantry a while ago—even with fléchette ammo, a handgun is virtually useless against an opponent in battle armor—but the SRA officers wear them as badges of rank, and some of our guys collect them, a less messy form of taking scalps.

I pick up a mangled chair and sit down on the padded seat that has stuffing spilling through shrapnel wounds. On my tactical screen, I can see that our mission is a planetwide success. The second wave of NAC troops has landed, and the few remaining SRA defenders on Sirius Ad are fighting with their backs against the wall.

“Looks like something went according to plan for a change,” I say to Lieutenant Benning, who is sifting through the rubble on the floor with the toes of his armored boots.

“Don’t call it a win just yet,” he says. “Party ain’t over until our boots are back on that carrier deck.”

As if to make his point, the thunderclap of heavy ordnance exploding shakes the walls of the basement and almost tips me out of my chair.

“Enemy air,” Third Squad’s leader shouts into the platoon channel a few moments later. “Pair of attack birds, coming in from zero-zero-nine!”

“Warm up the missiles. First and Second Squads, get your heads down.”

“Incoming ordnance!” someone from Third Squad yells. On my tactical display, the red aircraft symbols have just cleared the edge of my current map overlay when four small inverted vees separate from the enemy attack birds and rush toward our position.

“Hit the deck,” I shout, and dive for the floor. Next to me, Lieutenant Benning and the platoon sergeant follow suit.

The four rockets hit our building simultaneously, with a cataclysmic bang that sounds like the Manitoba fell out of orbit and crashed onto the roof. My suit shuts down all sensor feeds automatically, turning me blind and deaf to protect me. When the video feed returns, it’s in the green-tinged shade of low-light magnification. All the lights in the basement have gone out, and the air is thick with concrete dust. My tactical screen comes to life again, just in time for me to see the symbols for the two enemy attack craft passing overhead. From Third Squad’s position, two MANPAD missiles rise in the wake of the SRA aircraft. One of the missiles catches up with its quarry and blots one of the red plane icons from my data screen. The other aircraft rushes out of range, its pursuing missile deflected by decoys.

“One down,” Third Squad’s leader announces over some general utterances of triumph. “Other one’s gonna come back around—you can bet your asses on that.”

“Get me some counter-air down here,” Lieutenant Benning tells me. “Whatever’s close by. I’m not picky right now.”

“Already on it, boss,” I say.

I check my airspace for the nearest fleet air units. Our platoon’s drop ship is nearby, but a Wasp doesn’t have the armament or speed to take on a fast mover. The next closest fleet units are two Shrikes, circling in a CAP pattern thirty miles away and twenty thousand feet high. I check their ordnance racks remotely and see an air-to-ground mix supplemented by four air-to-air missiles each on the outer wing pylons of the Shrikes.


“Raptor flight, this is Tailpipe Five. Counter-air,” I call out on the tactical air channel.

“Tailpipe Five, Raptor One-Three. Go ahead.” The voice on the TacAir channel is chopped, curt, and professional, just the way I remember Halley’s voice on our squad channel in Basic.

“Data uplink commencing. Fast mover right above the deck near our datum. You are cleared to engage. Get him off our asses.”

“Copy that, Tailpipe Five. On the way.”

“Cavalry’s coming,” I tell the lieutenant. “Two Shrikes.”

“If they shoot that bastard down and he bails out, I’ll chase him down and string him up by his balls,” the platoon sergeant says darkly. “I’m not getting shit for vitals from First and Second Squads upstairs.”

“Third Squad, sitrep,” Lieutenant Benning sends on the platoon channel. “What’s the picture out there?”

“LT, where the f*ck are you?”

“In the building, Sarge. Down in the basement.”

“Ain’t no building left, sir. Top floors are gone. So’s the south half of the first floor.”

“We’re coming out. Check on the ground level on the north side, see if it’s full of rubble. And see if you can raise anyone from First and Second Squads. We’re not getting zip down here.”

There’s a brief pause before the sergeant replies.

“They’re gone, LT. Building’s gone. Their vitals are off the network.”

“Goddammit,” our platoon sergeant curses next to me in the darkness. “And just when we had this son of a bitch in the bag.”

I just grunt my agreement, and follow the platoon’s two-man command section out of the tomb that used to be the SRA company headquarters.

Some troops have a thing about not wanting to be that last unlucky bastard to buy it in a battle, the one who catches a stray fléchette or laser tripwire when everyone else is already breaking out the beer, but that thought never bothered me in the least. Whether you’re the first one to die on the drop, or you stumble over something and break your neck just as you’re stepping back onto the carrier deck after the battle, you end up in the same body bag, active antiseptic green polymer, impervious to pathogens and body fluids. If they recover your meat, that is, and you didn’t get blown to bits by a Chinese fuel-air warhead, like the troopers from First and Second Squads who, to a man and woman, just died a few dozen feet above us. None of the dead are any less lucky than the others.



The staircases are all filled with rubble from the collapsed floors above us. The basement has two exits to the surface, so we pick the one that has less debris in front of it and start digging ourselves out. Outside, Third Squad tries to work their way inside. Finally, we emerge from the acrid darkness of the basement back into the sunlight of Sirius Ad.

“What now, Skipper?” Third Squad’s leader asks the lieutenant.

“Keep up the perimeter, call down the bird for evac, and let’s see if we can find our guys in that shit. Check for suit transponders.”

In the blink of an eye, our combat strength has been cut by half. We have the remaining eight troopers of Third Squad, and the seven members of Fourth Squad a few hundred yards away. We landed on Sirius Ad with thirty-nine troops, and we’re down to eighteen. We took our objective and accomplished our task, and we traded twenty-one lives for a smoldering pile of rubble and an understrength platoon’s worth of SRA corpses.

There’s a sudden cacophony of small-arms fire from the area where Fourth Squad has taken up covering positions by the main road through town. I only realize that some Chinese civvies had started to venture out into the open to observe the aftermath of the battle when they all dash away again, back to the dubious safety of their thin-walled houses. At the same moment, the platoon channel comes alive with frantic status reports from Fourth Squad.

“Where the f*ck did they come from?”

“Incoming!”

“Street corner, one hundred, three guys with a rocket launcher!”

“Alpha One-Niner, we have a shitload of SRA coming in from the direction of the airfield. Make it fifteen, twenty—shit, looks like half a freakin’ company out there.”

“Copy that,” the lieutenant sends back. “Fall back and draw them our way. We’ll come up the road and set up a blocking position by that second intersection down from you, at Charlie Two.”

“Affirmative. Fall back and draw the enemy to blocking position at second intersection. Bugging out.”

We check our weapons on the run. With most of a company bearing down on us, only some air support is going to keep us from ending up in a Chinese POW camp or a mass grave. I fire up my TacAir screen as I’m dashing from corner to corner, and once more check for air assets.

“Banshee Two-Five, this is Tailpipe Five. We have a counterattack coming our way, one platoon plus. Dust off and cover us from above, if you can.”

“Tailpipe Five, that’s a roger. We’re on the way. ETA two minutes.”

Our drop ship has used up most of its air-to-ground ordnance in the initial assault, and strafing runs with the guns are dangerous business, but without Banshee Two-Five’s automatic cannons, there may not be anyone left for them to ferry back to the carrier. On my helmet display, red “HOSTILE” symbols are popping up with increasing frequency as the troopers from Fourth Squad are spotting enemy troops, and the red symbols outnumber our blue ones at least four to one.

Fourth Squad is doing an orderly retreat, leapfrogging across intersections ahead of us. The main street going through the settlement is barely twenty yards wide and flanked by tight rows of prefabricated one- and two-story structures. We reach our target intersection just ahead of Fourth Squad and hastily set up firing positions to cover their retreat.

“Make ’em count,” the platoon sergeant says. “We cover Fourth Squad, let them pass through us, and leapfrog back to the town center if we have to.”

I check the seals of my armor, make sure for the twentieth time that my rifle has a round chambered, and kneel down behind a climate unit parked in front of what looks like a tea joint. The buildings out here are thin-walled, standard colonial living modules, just like our own colony settlements. The walls don’t stop fléchette rounds or shrapnel, but using them as cover is mentally more satisfying than duking it out in the open.

“Here they come. Watch your sectors,” the platoon sergeant says.

In front of us, three troopers from Fourth Squad come dashing around a corner not fifty yards away. I can’t see the squad of Chinese marines in pursuit, but my helmet display continuously updates with enemies spotted by other troops in my platoon, and the alley around that corner is lousy with red symbols. I switch the fire mode selector of my rifle to computer-controlled mode, and draw a bead on the intersection ahead.

“Grenades,” the lieutenant orders. “Air burst, twenty meters. Give me a volley over those rooftops to the right.”

With my extra comms gear, I don’t carry rifle grenades on my harness, but most of the platoon’s regular members do. Behind me, half a dozen grenade launchers belch out computer-fused forty-millimeter grenades that arc over the rooftops to our right. They explode above the adjacent alley in a series of low, muffled cracks. We hear shouts and screams as the Chinese marines fifty yards away get peppered with high-velocity shrapnel. In front of us, the second half of Fourth Squad comes sprinting around the corner, legs pumping to a soundtrack of automatic rifle fire from the unseen SRA marines. With our presence announced, only an idiot or a green recruit would come around the corner to shoot after our retreating squad, but a pair of Chinese marines does just that, and promptly gets drilled by fléchette bursts from ten different rifles. To our right, there’s a sound like someone throwing a bucket of nails onto a metal roof, as the remaining Chinese marines start firing at us through the thin walls of the houses.


“Fall back, in order,” the platoon sergeant shouts.

Half our number leave cover and follow the Fourth Squad troopers back up the road to take up new firing positions, away from our now compromised position. The rest of us stay put to cover their movement. In the alley just to my right, a door opens, and the muzzle of a rifle pokes out. The SRA marine fires a burst in my direction, and I duck behind my cover as the fléchettes scream past my corner and through the walls of the house across the alley. At the ranges dictated by these narrow streets, infantry combat turns into a shoot-out in a toilet stall.

“They’re cutting through the back walls,” I shout into the platoon channel, and return fire. My tactical computer switches the rifle to fully automatic suppression fire, and my ammo count is revised downward rapidly as my M-66 burps out twelve hundred fléchettes per minute, spraying the doorway and adjacent walls with tungsten penetrators.

“First section, haul ass,” the call comes over the radio. “Watch the side alleys!”

Behind me, the second section has taken up position to cover our retreat. A bounding overwatch movement is always a leap of faith—you trust your squad mates not to shoot you by accident, and to keep the enemy from shooting you in the back while you’re running away. I raise my rifle, rake the alley with another burst for good measure, and get up from my crouch to beat a retreat. All around me, dozens of rifles are chattering their reports—ours high-pitched and hoarse, theirs low and slow, like hydraulic hammers. As we pull back from the contested intersection, the Chinese marines return our earlier favor—behind me, half a dozen grenades go off in the road, a chain of large and angry firecrackers.

“Tailpipe Five, this is Banshee Two-Five. I got line of sight, but you’re awfully close together down there.”

I dash into a doorway where a tall garbage recycler is offering some minimal shelter, and toggle into the TacAir channel. “Banshee Two-Five, hit that corner I’m designating, and walk your fire down the alley that goes north from there. Hurry up, they’re getting pissed down here.”

“Tailpipe Five, copy that. Hit the designated corner and work north from there. Starting our gun run now.”

The rounds from the drop ship’s autocannons smack into the intersection before I can hear the guns rattling in the distance. Large-caliber autocannon fire is shockingly sudden and violent when you’re only seventy yards from the spot where the shells hit. The building I just raked with rifle fire simply blows apart. Pieces of laminate rain down onto the surrounding buildings. Then Banshee Two-Five’s pilot shifts his fire as instructed, and the alley beyond turns into noise, fire, and smoke.

“Banshee Two-Five, that’s a bull’s-eye. We have bad guys swarming all over those alleys to the left of your TRP. Bring it down close.”

“Shifting fire. Y’all keep your heads low.”

With the SRA marines dodging cannon fire, our half-strength platoon disengages and leapfrogs back toward the center of town. Overhead, no more than a hundred feet above the deck, Banshee Two-Five closes in, cannons hammering out a steady stream of noise and death. The roar from the Wasp’s multibarreled chin turret mixes with the dull claps of the exploding shells. If there are any civvies hiding in the buildings around us, they are now in a very bad spot, but their plight is nobody’s concern right now—not ours, and not that of the Chinese marines that are supposed to be their defenders. All that matters right now is that only one group is going to walk off this rock in their own boots, and both teams are doing their level best to be it.

“Tailpipe Five, you have some hostiles advancing on you through the alleys on your left. I’ll make another pass, but it’s getting awfully tight down there.”

“Copy that, Two-Five,” I reply. “Do what you can. We’re hauling ass back to the admin center at Bravo Three. Anything to my east and west is hostile.”

Two-Five’s cannons bellow again, much closer than before. It sounds like our drop ship is almost directly overhead. This time, the cannon rounds rake a stretch of alley no more than twenty yards to my right, just on the other side of the squat, ugly building container I’m passing at a run. I hear the shouts and screams from the SRA marines and the rattling of their rifles as they return fire at the Wasp.

“Tailpipe Five, this is Hammer Seven-Six. We are overhead with air-to-ground. Got a use for us?”

In all the excitement, I haven’t checked my TacAir screen in a while. Hammer flight, our two-ship escort of Shrike attack craft, is circling high above the battle, far removed from the noise and chaos, but aware of our status through the integrated tactical network we all feed.

“Hammer Seven-Six, you bet. We have a company of infantry on our asses. Use Banshee Two-Five’s TRP, and drop all the antipersonnel stuff you have left on your racks. Danger close, you are cleared hot.”

“Tailpipe Five, copy that. Take over TRP from Banshee Two-Five, and clear the grid. Rolling in hot. Cover your ears, gentlemen.”

“Banshee Two-Five, break off CAS and return to station. Thanks for the assist.”

“Copy that,” Two-Five’s pilot replies. “Hauling ass.”

Overhead, the noise from the drop ship’s engines increases as Two-Five’s pilot gooses the throttles to gain altitude. Behind us, the cacophony of small-arms fire and grenade explosions swells as the Chinese recover from the strafing run and give chase once more. They’re mistaking our sudden desire to clear the area for all-out flight, or maybe they know exactly what’s about to happen and they want to get under our belts to make life hard for our air support.

We’re almost back at the ruined admin center when Hammer flight’s ordnance hits the ground just a few hundred meters behind us. I’m in the middle of a sprint between covering positions when my audio feed cuts out, and the shock wave of the explosion kicks me in the back and sends me sprawling face-first into the dirt. When my hearing returns, the firing behind us has ceased completely. For a few moments, there is no sound except for the reverberating rumble of the detonations rolling over the town, as if the blasts have stunned everyone into silence.

I get back on my feet and turn around to the familiar sight of a huge smoke pillar rising into the sky. There’s debris raining down all around—bits of buildings, pavement, and people, all intermixed with the dusty red soil of the planet. Without my enhanced helmet sensors, I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face. Ten or fifteen blocks of the Chinese town have ceased to exist, and with them all the people within, civilians and SRA marines alike. There’s nothing left of the light colonial architecture but a burning field of strewn rubble and the occasional mangled wreckage of a light vehicle.

“Holy shit,” someone chimes in nearby. “Flyboys don’t f*ck around, do they?”

“Hammer flight, this is Tailpipe Five,” I send to the pilot. “That’s a shack. I’d say you can paint about a hundred hash marks on your bird for that strike.”

“Tailpipe Five, copy that. We aim to please.”

We spread out and keep our guard up while the dust from the bombardment settles, but it’s clear that if there are any SRA marines still alive, they’ve vacated the area wisely. The ordnance from Hammer flight has cleared a quarter square kilometer of densely packed modular housing.


“Fall back to the admin center,” the lieutenant says. “Let’s dig out our guys and call down the bird.”

We head back to the center of town, where sixteen of our troopers are buried in the rubble of our target building. The Chinese civvies are once again coming out of their homes, but they quickly move out of the way when they see us, and none of them challenge our newly won ownership of the place. It feels like I’ve been dodging rifle fire and calling down airstrikes all day, but my suit’s computer shows that not even three hours have passed since we boarded our drop ship.

The Chinese town isn’t much of a prize. It’s just a square kilometer of basic housing modules, and it was unimportant even before we scraped a quarter of it off the map with high explosives. If we were to garrison this shithole, the locals would shoot us in the back at the earliest opportunity, and the SRA will be more than willing to blow up the rest of the town trying to reclaim it. We’re not going to garrison the place, of course. We lost twenty—almost two squads of our own—and killed hundreds of SRA marines and civvies, just to poke a sharp stick into the eye of the SRA high command—a job we could have completed just as well with a dozen warheads fired from orbit.

“What a pile of shit,” the platoon sergeant mutters next to me, and kicks a piece of debris out of his path. “Can’t afford too many more victories like this one.”

We dig through the rubble of the collapsed admin center carefully, but without heavy equipment it’s like trying to empty a bathtub with a spoon. All around us, the Chinese residents of the town are filling up the streets again. Now that the shooting has stopped, and we have shown that we won’t gun them down in the street on sight, the locals are getting bolder by the minute, yelling at us from an ever-shrinking distance.

“You see weapons pointing our way, you shoot,” the lieutenant tells us. “We’re not here to make friends. I’ve collected enough f*cking dog tags for one day.”

I’m standing off to the side, eyeing the crowd milling around in the street near the admin building, when the tactical network comes alive with a burst of priority transmissions. I toggle into the fleet’s TacLink screen, but before I can make heads or tails of the incoming transmission codes, the network goes dark altogether.

“What the f*ck?”

“Problem, Sarge?” Lieutenant Benning asks.

“Fleet started broadcasting priority code, and then I lost my uplink.”

The lieutenant walks over to where I’m standing and cycles through his own command links.

“I got a link to our ground units back to Company level, but that’s it,” he says. “Battalion HQ dropped off.”

Some of the Chinese civvies shout in surprise, and look up into the darkening sky. I look up and follow their gaze. Up in the purplish blue of the late afternoon sky, there’s a rapidly expanding sphere of brilliant white—the signature of a nuclear explosion in high orbit. Lieutenant Benning looks up as well, just in time to see a second fireball flash up some distance from the first one. Even at this range, our helmet visors kick in the polarizing filters to protect our retinas from the blinding pinprick flares of the nuclear fireballs. I feel a sudden and overwhelming weakness in my knees.

“Oh, shit,” the lieutenant says.

I scroll through the incoming messages my tactical computer buffered before the link went down. It’s a mess of burst transmissions on the priority fleet channel, encrypted ship-to-ship comms that are illegible to my tactical computer and its limited access level.

“Try to raise Company,” I tell the lieutenant. “I’ll check in with Fleet over voice.”

I open a channel on the fleet emergency band, override the EMCON protocols of my comms suite, and crank my transmitter up to full power.

“Manitoba, this is Tailpipe Five. Do you read, over?”

For a moment, all I get in return is static. Then the reply comes down from the Manitoba, and going by the barely restrained panic in the voice of the comms operator in CIC, things have gone very wrong indeed.

“Tailpipe Five, kindly keep out of the ship-to-ship emergency comms. We are under attack. Manitoba out.”

I hear a crescendo of overlapping alarm klaxons in the background before the transmission ends.

“The fleet is under attack, sir,” I tell the lieutenant. “I have no clue what’s going on up there, but it sounds like they’re in deep shit.”

Then the fleet TacLink comes back to life, and another burst transmission scrolls across my screen, colored in the crimson red of high-priority TacLink updates.

“ALL GROUND UNITS ABORT CURRENT OBJECTIVES AND ASSUME DEFENSIVE POSTURES. TASK FORCE IS ENGAGED. ABORT RPT. ABORT ALL INBOUND TRAFFIC TO MANITOBA.”

I tap into the newly established link to our carrier and call up the CIC’s situation display. It takes much longer than usual—all the data nodes between the task force units are exchanging massive bursts of data, and there’s no bandwidth left for non-priority data traffic. Fifteen seconds after I send my request, the tactical plot on the Manitoba’s main CIC screen unfolds on my helmet display, and I feel myself getting nauseous with fear.

The task force is scattering before a new arrival in orbit, but the newcomer’s tactical icon is not the red symbol of an SRA capital ship. Instead, it’s blaze orange.

High up in the sky, more nuclear explosions are blooming, like short-lived new suns. By now, NAC troopers and Chinese civvies alike are looking up at the fireworks, none of them aware of the magnitude of the new threat.

Finally, I find my voice again.

“Lankies,” I say over the platoon channel. “It’s a f*cking Lanky seed ship.”