I Guess This Is Speculative Military Fiction

The truck driver looked up. He was in the middle of a long line of trucks, trundling along a mountain road on the way to a military base. It was slow work, and boring, and occasionally dangerous; but it paid. At this moment, he was not thinking about his work. Instead, he was watching the contrails form overhead; and, moments later, covering his ears as multiple sonic booms blasted him. Glass shattered; one truck swerved, nearly going off the edge. Looking at the jet trails, the truck driver guessed that they were less than three hundred feet overhead. Military planes, for certain; no-one else would or could dare fly that low. The only reason even they'd fly so low is to avoid ground-based radar; every dip and rise would block it until they were right on top of the target. And that meant they were enemy planes.

Realizing how close he'd just come to death - death that would have struck in pyrotechnic grandeur before he could have even heard it - the truck driver began to shiver helplessly.

-

Three hundred feet overhead and five miles west, the squadron leader toggled his mike. "Repeat, we are not hitting targets of opportunity. All munitions reserved for main strike." He ignored the view from the cockpit, as hills and plains and valleys shot by at dizzying speeds. The AI dealt with them, jetting up and down as necessary. Instead, he focused on the overlaid HUD, showing speed, component status, and distance to target. 75 miles left. Less than two minutes to prepare, then.


It still came as a bit of a shock when, at 10 seconds to arrival, the plane flipped completely around (lower aft and upper forward maneuvering jets firing) under AI control and fired, full thrust, in the opposite direction of travel. The squadron leader, along with the rest of the pilots, was pressed back into his seat; his chest compressed, and darkness crept into the edges of his vision. The plane dipped dramatically, coming within yards of the ground. Then, as the target came into sight, the AI finished its scripted entry routine, flipping the plane back again and simultaneously pushing it upwards, jumping it, along with the other dozen planes into the squadron, above the enemy base. Three thousand military personnel were exposed to the attack crafts' weapons, not to mention the five squadrons of jets stuck in the hangars, the fuel tanks in the east of the base, and the anti-air installations - which, fully automated, swung toward the attacking planes even in the half-second it took them to pop over the last rise and the enemy base.

The squadron opened fire.

Priorities were already defined - anti-air-guns, then runways, then the roads out, then whatever looked good - but it was up to the pilots to choose within those strictures. There was a reason that the jets weren't fully automated yet, after all. Before the base's defenses fired a single shot, twenty-six missiles were already in flight, each launched toward a different gun. Coloured circles appeared on the squadron leader's HUD, indicating the other pilots' targets, and he launched his missiles toward others - specifically, two of the runways, damaging them to prevent enemy jets from launching. Within five seconds of the jets' appearance on radar, every anti-air gun in the base was smoldering rubble, and both radar and communications were utterly annihilated.

It was too late. The attackers continued firing for the next ten seconds, expending most of their ground-targeting munitions and destroying all key targets within the base. In that time, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in an underground silo five miles away, alerted by automated alarms in the targeted base, were fueled, armed, and launched. Five seconds later, the squadron leader gave the order: "Pull back! All targets destroyed." The jets lifted up momentarily in preparation for departure.

The UAVs were already firing.

The jets had, undetected, traveled across over 300 miles of enemy territory and utterly leveled a fortified base within 20 seconds. Now, as jets exploded in billowing flames and more UAVs launched from distant hangars, the trick would be to get out again.