Chapter 8: Zeros On the Board

The first half hour of the operation went just as planned.

The landing was clinical. The scouts fanned out.

Coalition units assembled without incident, formed ranks under careful supervision, and departed along their assigned vectors.

By 0830, the first sectors were officially tagged as under control. The first half hour was a complete success. The rest of it was anything but

At 0833, the first deviation from the plan occurred.

If necessary, the other side’s strategist had slipped a surreptitious payment to a MACSlam pilot, that if the opportunity presented itself, that he was to “accidentally” target a Thunderdome pilot. It had been a decent sized payoff, with an additional bonus on completion, for something the pilot might have done anyway. It might cost him status in MACSlam if his role had been revealed, but as it turned out, he never needed to pull a trigger.

Because someone else did it for him. And it wasn’t even one of his teammates. It was one of those treacherous Thunderdome bastards,

MACSlam and Thunderdome forces were heading towards Sector 4’s factories, eager to claim their bounty and materials for themselves. They both had the same thought, which was an old offkey military maxim. “He who gets there firstest with the mostest wins”

A MACSlam skirmisher had pursued an enemy vehicle trying to escape. A team of Thunderdome missile boats had spotted the fleeing vehicle, but not the closely pursuing WarMAC. They triggered a full flight of missiles, which blazed through the air, obliterating the vehicle, but throwing the skirmisher chassis to the ground, as his brain tried to wrestle with what just happened.

Blue on Blue.

That was slang version of what just happened. Staff officers called it Friendly Fire. The people getting shot called it something else.

Those bastards blew me up. They tried to KILL ME.

The thought may have been irrational. A cooler head might have demanded an apology and an explanation. However, the skirmisher picking himself up from the ground did not have a cool head. He didn’t want an apology, and he sure didn’t want an explanation.

He wanted payback.

Watching those Thunderdome missile boats burn would be a good first payment.

His platoon officer saw it, and didn’t quite know whether to say “Oh shit.” Or “Stand down.” Maybe even “Blue on Blue!”

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered what words he chose. Events outran words.

The MACSlam pilot emptied his weapons into one of the missile boats. Someone on Thunderdome reacted, and before anyone had time to smother the spark, the whole situation exploded. What had been an organized, if competitve force had devolved into an internecine shootout with one core rule.

“If it ain’t us, it’s the enemy”.

Anyone attempting to restore order became a stationary target. The first casualties were often the people trying to stop the shooting.

Restoring order took twenty minutes. By then, coalition combat effectiveness had fallen to roughly thirty percent. The shooting stopped only because vehicles exhausted their ammunition and armor before their crews exhausted their anger.

The incident effectively ended the coalition’s planned flank advance. Units still capable of fighting were forced back to the landing zone to repair damage and replenish ammunition before they could resume the offensive.

Around that same time, as distrusting pilots controlling machines with empty ammo bins and armor that was ill suited for any further combat started to make their slow tortured way back to base, surviving leadership demanding to know what had just happened and whose fault was this and threatening all kinds of vague consequences that they never really meant to dish out, a lone vehicle shuddered to a stop some five klicks from the coalition landing zone.