Still grinning, Fox peered left and right and behind. The remaining turrets, Beta through Delta, natch, were lit; he saw dim outlines of heads and arms. Then he turned right again, brought a pair of digital binoculars to his eyes, focused on the ground far below. Infantry in battlearmor boiled out of the air locks, fanning out through the plains before the mountains to take up defensive positions around the dome. Not many of them either, maybe a company, but no more.

Then he looked up into the soup of Al Na’ir’s atmosphere. And then his stomach bottomed out.

“God,” he heard one of the gunners say. “Aw, God.”

Dimly, Fox heard a crackle on comm, something about incoming, but as the black hulk of a DropShip barreled through the clouds, he thought: Shit, man. Old news.

Delta Company

Triarii Protectors, Al Na’ir

Dumb idea, ducking into a couloir, hoping all that iron ore would mess up the Dracs’ sensors. What the hell was the lieutenant thinking, his guys all jammed up… Sergeant Mike Brautigan dodged left as another PPC bolt punched rock twenty meters away and fifty meters overhead, close enough so the shower of debris spewing from the mountains pattered on Brautigan’s battlearmor with a sound like hard rain spiking a tin roof. A second later the ground twitched, vibrations jagging through rust-colored rock. A slag of mixed iron ore and shale fell away from the mountain and sluiced a river of splintered boulders and pulverized rock.

Another blast, and this time Brautigan lost his balance and pitched forward. A spike of rock rushed up to meet his face. “HUNH!” He threw himself right, felt the bone-jarring crunch of rock against his shoulder instead of his faceplate, felt the freeze of terror that maybe he’d breached his suit. He waited for an alarm or the hiss of escaping air, but there was neither, and after a few more seconds Brautigan rolled onto his hands and knees like a dog. Ho, boy, that was close.

Staggering upright, Brautigan hugged the mountain because, shit, it was the only thing he could do at the moment. Another blast, further away this time; the DropShip moving off, or maybe losing him finally, or not caring because Brautigan was target practice. In the distance, across a plain of craters and rubble, he could just make out the neon orange sputter of tracer fire spitting from the dome defense turrets, and the smaller, almost comical ruby darts of lasers from infantry—like they made a difference. Phoenix Dome was dark, probably to cut down on glare. Hugging rock, he waited for what seemed like a fraccing year but was probably closer to twenty seconds.

Men began to coalesce out of the haze—the atmosphere was already mustard yellow, and now it was choked with red dust churned up by pulverized rock—jogging silhouettes that resolved into arms and legs and rifles. He counted heads, thought that wasn’t right, counted again, understood that what was left amounted to little more than a platoon, and then asked the nearest soldier, a scrawny corporal with ears like car doors, “Where’s the lieutenant?”

“LIEUTENANT’S DEAD!” The corporal was screaming, like he was shouting down a long tunnel. He was crying, too. “HE… HE GOT HIT… FIRST THING, PPC… CUT HIM IN TWO… AND… AND…!”

They didn’t have time for this. Brautigan didn’t blame the kid; he was ready to piss his pants, too, but there was no time. “Stop that!” Brautigan rapped. “Stop that shit, shut up, shut up!”

That shook the corporal and everyone else, the rest of the men flinching back like they’d been slapped. But the kid stopped crying, and Brautigan said, “Okay, listen up. Near as I can make out, those seven, eight MiningMechs, the ones they got refitted with autocannon, got junked the first five, maybe ten minutes. But I think a DropShip’s trying to touch down on the other side of the dome, and that’s where they’ve screwed up because the secondary air lock’s on this side.” He punched up a SatNav receiver on his wrist, waited until the positioning satellites in orbit got a lock (thanking Christ there were satellites left to ping), and then said, “Okay. The secondary air lock is maybe three klicks away, give or take. That puts the Dracs, what, fifteen, sixteen klicks distant. Once they figure they blew it, though, they’ll be on their way, and fast.”

“Then we got to get there first,” said a PFC. His armored hands clutched his rifle like a club. “Once they breach the air lock, man, it’s over. Access to the city, anywhere they want to go. We got to get there first, get inside, disable the maglevs from inside and seal it up tight.”

Good idea, but it wouldn’t work. “It wouldn’t work,” said Brautigan. “We abandon the surface, no one’s left to keep the Dracs back. Only a matter of time before they get through, and then they pick us off, one by one.”

“Or the other way around,” said the PFC, but another soldier was shaking his head and said, “Naw, Sarge is right. You got to figure the Dracs could tunnel their way in, cut into the side, and then they bottle us up on both ends, like moles. ’Sides, there’s way more of them than there are of us.”

“Okay, so we’re fucked no matter what,” said Brautigan, “but I figure we can take it standing on the surface, or we can maybe jury-rig the air lock somehow, maybe blow it up tight, seal off the dome. They ain’t gonna torch the dome to get at us, no way.” He didn’t know if he really believed this, then thought there was a pretty good chance he was right. Dracs weren’t Blakists, and there were the Ares Conventions and a kind of code in war besides, like that unwritten rule that said no blowing up JumpShips, stuff like that.

“Sarge.” The scrawny corporal still sounded piss-your-pants scared. “Sarge, we do that, we’re stuck out here.”

But the PFC answered. “The prefect does it first, we’re just as stuck. Come on, man.”

“No choice,” said Brautigan, his voice flat, the period at the end of a sentence, and he saw from the way the guys looked first at each other and then back at him that they got it. He nodded once. “Right. Okay. Let’s go.”

They jogged over rocks, going almost by feel because Brautigan didn’t want to chance their helmet headlamps and tip off the Dracs. No one spoke. The only sounds Brautigan heard were his own harsh grunts as he huffed over broken earth and around jagged rock. Not hearing anything else, on band or through feed, was bad. He switched over to the general comm channel, got the hiss of dead air, and kept fiddling with frequencies, hoping to catch hold of something. He didn’t, and he tried hard not to think about what that meant.

Suddenly he heard a shout, sharp as an ice pick in his ear, and he flinched, clapping a free hand in a reflex to his ear and thunking against his helmet instead. For a wild second he thought that he’d got hold of some command frequency, but he looked around and saw the PFC pointing. Brautigan looked back toward the dome. They were close. He was startled to see how much ground they’d covered; the wall of ferroglass shot through with titanium rose out of the valley floor so high he had to crane his neck all the way up just to catch a glimpse of that crazy, orange peashooter tracer fire, pfft-pfft-pfft.

The massive bulwark of a DropShip splintered the clouds, and then Brautigan saw the DropShip change course, and it was… oh, God, no, it wasn’t possible… But it was.

The DropShip opened fire. At the dome.

“Here they come!” screamed Fox, but the gunners were already firing off round after round from their autocannons. The roar was deafening, like being caught in the middle of an echo chamber with cannons booming all around. With each shot the turret jumped and shimmied, so violently Fox was sure the thing would shake itself loose of its moorings and spill them, screaming, to shatter against the rocks hundreds of meters below. But the sensation had to be from the inner plastic monomer layer; sure, that had to be it; the thing jiggled the way gelatin did in a bowl; it was built to be that way, absorb seismic activity and crap like that; so, yeah, they were safe, they were perfectly safe…