“The Unified Authority is using nuclear-tipped missiles to defend its space. The Unifieds’ defense strategy involves flooding our path with these missiles. We can minimize the damage using defensive tactics, but we expect to take casualties.
“This mission will succeed or fail based on our ability to land our transports in strategic locations. That places a heavy burden on you fighter pilots. We are asking you to give this everything you’ve got. We need you to escort our transports to Earth. Do not return to the fleet until the Marines have landed.
“Good luck to you,” he said, and signed off.
If every transport landed, we would start our invasion with three hundred thousand Marines. That would be the first of four waves—three thousand transports, each carrying one hundred troops and equipment. The second wave would have fewer troops and bigger guns, two hundred thousand men plus tanks and artillery.
Maybe five hundred miles ahead of us, our fighter escort entered into the storm. These were small, agile ships, able to execute tight maneuvers and armed with decoy buoys, sonic shields that could detonate warheads and missiles. They had ghosting technology designed to scramble enemy targeting systems with false readings. They dropped phosphorous-burning target drones that distracted heat-seeking missiles and sent them off course.
Our defensive tactics were designed for dogfights in mostly empty skies. The wing escorting our transports included thousands of fighters wedged too tightly together to maneuver. The shields on our fighters would offer little protection against nuclear-tipped missiles. With our pilots flying so close together, fooling a missile into missing one fighter might well send it into another.
Missiles began to burst in flashes that, from our transports, looked no bigger than the flame of a candle, but those explosions burned bright in the darkness.
Off to the side, Earth revolved as smooth and round as a child’s dream. The sun shone down on the far side of the hemisphere, lighting the nearest edge of Europe and farthest shore of the Atlantic. And directly ahead of us, men in Harriers, Tomcats, and Phantoms did something that will forever color the way I think of fighter pilots. With missiles slamming into them from every side, they slowed their speed.
Had they bashed their way through at full speed, the vast majority of those fighters would have survived the attack. They would have left us behind, and the Unifieds would have renewed their attack on our unescorted transports. I doubt a single one of our slow-flying birds would have survived.
The fighters throttled back to a crawl. We caught up to them so gradually, I might not have noticed had it not been for Nobles. He muttered, “Specking hell, they’re almost at a dead stop.”
“What?” I asked.
“Thirty seconds, sir, and we’ll be in missile range.”
Then I saw it. We had nearly caught up to the fighters as they weaved around each other and waited for us. With the Earth turning peacefully in the background, I saw a Phantom take a direct hit. The missile struck it just behind the cockpit. The missile hit it “in the gills,” in the pilots’ vernacular.
The missile exploded outside the shields—an electrical layer that showed like a flat plane of glass, then vanished as the force of the blast tore, shredded, and melted the fighter all at the same time. Pieces of wing, and nose, and fuselage spun into space, scattering like buckshot from a shotgun.
A few hundred yards away, a Phantom banked, looped, and nose-dived toward Earth, then pulled into a corkscrew as it led multiple rockets away from our transports. I did not have a clear view of the fighter when the first of the missiles hit, I just saw the flare of the explosion.
Then we entered the pack and found ourselves as much a target as the fighters that protected us. Fighters darted in and out of view. The debris of broken fighters floated around us; and in the distance, Earth was ten or maybe twenty times the size of a full harvest moon.
I did not see the missile that shot toward our bow, but I caught a glimpse of the particle beam that disabled it and I saw the fighter that fired the beam as she passed. The fighter streaked by so quickly, I could not tell if she was a Tomcat, a Harrier, or a Phantom.
Nobles said, “That was close.”
I said, “That fighter almost hit us.”
Nobles said, “The missile came closer.”
Until he mentioned the missile, I had not understood. “Can you tell how many transports we’ve lost?” I asked. We were at the front of the wave. I had no idea what had happened behind us.
“Seventy-five so far,” he said. “The fighters are taking it worse than us. They’re down a few hundred.”
I barely heard what Nobles said about the fighters because I was already trying to raise Freeman on the interLink.
“Ray. Ray, are you there?” If we lost Freeman, the mission was over.
“Here,” he said.
“We’re losing transports,” I said.
Just ahead of us, three fighters formed a small wing to clear our path. They stayed in a tight formation for a minute or two, firing lasers and particle beams into the glowing atmosphere ahead of us.
A missile hit the fighter on the right. It happened so fast I did not see where it hit or if the bird survived. One moment there were three ships, then the tinting over in our windshield darkened. When the tint cleared, there were two fighters instead of three.
“Just making sure you’re okay,” I said.
Freeman didn’t answer.
“Better brace yourself,” Nobles said. “We’re coming in hard.”
Before I could react, we slammed into the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and glanced off, only to strike it again and break through. The impact of the entry slung me back in my seat, my arms flying to the sides, my head snapped back. The force of the drop held me pinned in my chair. I struggled to sit up, to breathe, to see through the windshield.
Our fighter escort did not lead us down to the planet. We dived through bright mist and empty sky with no ships leading our way. The sky around us was crisscrossed with slowly evaporating vapor trails.
The Unifieds would not fire their nuclear-tipped missiles at us now that we had entered the atmosphere, the radiation would have come back to fry them. As we flew through the paper white sky, thick beams of silver-red light slashed the air around us.
“Lasers,” Nobles mumbled. He said it dismissively. We could survive a direct hit from a laser. He studied his scopes for a moment, and said, “Whatever is left of us has already entered the atmosphere. The fighters are headed back to the fleet.”
“How many transports do we have?” I asked.
Nobles hesitated, swallowed, said, “Two hundred sixty-five.”
“What the speck do we do now?” I asked. That left us with twenty-six thousand men plus change. We weren’t going to conquer Washington with twenty-six thousand men.
“We’d better land. Sooner or later, those lasers are going to wear down our shields,” Nobles said. Either a particle beam or possibly a short-range missile hit us. I thought it might have been a particle beam by the way we dropped. A hundred feet …a thousand feet …One moment we were flying straight ahead and the next falling straight down.
We had reached the eastern seaboard of the territory once called the United States. This was the seat of power, the capital of the Unified Authority. The ground below us was trussed with roads and highways. We skirted cities and traversed forests as we traveled up the coast at three times the speed of sound.
It was a clear day. We might have been ten miles out of Washington, D.C., the city skyline rose out of the tree-covered landscape up ahead. Until that moment, the Unifieds had only fired ground weapons at us, and I finally understood why. They were herding us, guiding us toward the capital itself and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the largest military air base on Earth.
I shouted, “Put us down.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Nobles said. Then he saw fighters on his radar and the flashing amber warning light.
Nobles was a good pilot and a smart man. He knew we had a better chance of surviving a crash landing than an aerial assault. We had powerful shields but no weapons and limited maneuverability.
Nobles set off Klaxons to alert the Marines in the kettle about the upcoming crash. He hit the radio, and
