The target was either a sergeant or a lieutenant. He knew this for sure. For the past thirty minutes Rimmer, his observer, had been scanning the radio signals of the troops down on the ground classifying the radio signals that emitted constantly from their biosuit packs. Leaders were easy to identify even though they didn't put rank marking on their biosuits, even though the troops they commanded went to great pains to avoid saluting them or otherwise drawing attention to them with careless actions. Platoon and squad leaders were the only ones who broadcast radio signals on more than one frequency. Lieutenants talked to sergeants and to their commanders back on the landing ship. Sergeants talked to lieutenants and to their squads. The grunts of the operation only talked among themselves. Rimmer had identified more than twenty leaders down there and his combat computer had marked them by changing the color of their helmet to green in Goodbud's goggles. Of course this target locking only worked as long as the targets in question remained in view. When the air-to-air attack had come and the hover debris had started raining down all over the formations and the marines had started diving for cover and running around to attend to the wounded, more than half of his locked targets had disappeared. That was okay though. Once the fun really started, it would be easy for Rimmer to reacquire and re-mark them.
"Message from C Team," Rimmer's voice spoke in Goodbud's ear. "'All aircraft down. Friendly aircraft are egressing. Sniper and mortar teams are free to engage.'"
"Well suck my hairy ass," Goodbud said, making a minute adjustment of his rifle recentering his recticle on the target's face. "It's go time." He pushed the firing button. The weapon discharged with a slight kick, the flash channeled through a flash suppressor and cooled by a simultaneous release of liquid nitrogen as it emerged from the barrel. While it was impossible to completely suppress a gunshot flash, especially in the infrared spectrum, the M-64's suppressor technology did have the effect of making the signature less than one twentieth that of a standard M-24. The bullet hit exactly where it was aimed and the target dropped forward, blood boiling from a hole in the back of his head. Goodbud didn't pause to savor his success. He simply zoomed out until he saw another of the green helmets amid the rapidly expanding chaos. He picked one that was kneeling next to a marine wounded by aircraft debris, zoomed in, placed his recticle on the target's face, and then fired. Another one down. He would make one more shot and then they would pack up and move to the next hill to start all over again.
When Callahan was told later that the initial engagement had taken less than five minutes from start to finish, he thought he was being lied to. For him it seemed to take hours, days even, as he watched a cataclysm of horror and confusion he'd never even conceived of take place all around him.
It started with the hovers. They had been circling three or four hundred meters above, their presence comforting to the dismounted marines crawling up and down the hills (and finding absolutely nothing) and probing through the small gullies. The marine hover had always been considered the pillar of strength for extra-terrestrial operations, the factor that was supposed to insure victory and domination over any enemy fought far from the comfort of Earth. It was the factor that was supposed to guarantee air superiority over a battlefield, that could smash enemy forces long before the marines on the ground were close enough to even worry about them. The marines faith in these mighty flying tanks had begun to erode a bit over the past week as greenie troops proved themselves able to avoid detection by them and to take them down with their cursed anti-air lasers, but when the attack began on this morning, that faith was instantly and utterly destroyed for all time.
At first, Callahan didn't even know what was happening. He and his platoon had been approaching one of the hills, readying themselves to begin the clumsy climb to its peak. And then suddenly the hover directly over the top of them exploded without warning. Chunks of metal, circuit boards, control surfaces, and engine components came raining down atop them. One of his men was killed when an engine thruster crushed his head. Two others were wounded by smaller debris. The survivors of this hit the ground, their weapons trained outward out of instinct. Callahan wondered if the explosion had been a simple malfunction but then he looked behind and saw two other hovers spinning downward towards the ground, flipping end over end as half of their thrusters were put out and the others stayed lit. They hit the ground and exploded, one falling behind a hillside and out of sight, the other landing directly in the midst of third platoon, causing multiple casualties.
His radio channels began to squawk out overlapping exclamations, his men yelling on one channel, the other platoon leaders yelling on the other.
"What the fuck happened?"
"Where did it come from?"
"It was aircraft!" screamed someone else.
"No, there are greenies on the hillside, six o'clock!" shouted someone else.
Weapons began to fire at this last proclamation, popping from all around. Three marines standing atop one of the closer hills were peppered by it, falling in heaps.
"Cease fire!" someone else screamed. "Those are friendlies up there! They're fuckin' friendlies!"
"Shit!" said another voice.
The rifles stopped firing, gradually though, not all at once.
"It was aircraft!" one of the other lieutenants insisted. "Three or four of them! They passed right over the top of us!"
"Bullshit!" another lieutenant countered. "We would've fuckin' seen them."
"I did see them!" the first lieutenant countered. "They came out of the hills and then disappeared again in just a few seconds. They were moving fast."
"Nothing moves that fast out here, you idiot!" another voice proclaimed.
"Report!" said Captain Ayers' voice, overriding everything else. "Someone out there give me a goddamn report! Callahan, you there?"
"I'm here, cap," Callahan said, his eyes searching nervously through the skies and on the hillsides. "I don't know what the hell just happened but three of the hovers just went down."
"Four," the first lieutenant corrected. "They got another one just before they disappeared."
"Who got another one?" Ayers demanded.
"Aircraft," said the lieutenant. "They came out of the hillside, shot up the hovers, and then disappeared back in the hills."
"Did you see that, Callahan?" Ayers asked him.
"I didn't see shit, cap," he said. "We've got wounded down here though. Start bringing in the... oh shit! Get down!" In his excitement of seeing four greenie aircraft come shooting out of the gap between two hills, he forgot to change his transmission mode back to the tactical channel. As a result, it was only the other lieutenants who got down. The aircraft rushed over the top of him at a speed that seemed impossible in this environment, so fast that his eyes could barely register them. But his eyes did. They were ugly, flimsy looking boomerang-shaped aircraft flying in a line, their engines burning brightly in the infrared spectrum. They were close enough he could hear the muted roar of those engines through the thin air. Four more of the hovers suddenly fell from the sky and another went limping off towards the LZ, trailing smoke behind it. Of the four that went down, two of them landed amid the troops, smashing some, killing others with shrapnel when they exploded, wounding tens of others.