It turned out that the efforts of our thrown-together squad weren't needed, that all the Ruhar aboard the two Whales we shot down had died for nothing. It wasn't even an hour later that a Kristang task force came back, and the Ruhar ships jumped back away, abandoning their forces on Paradise. By that time, I'd retreated my squad to the plasma generator, holing up in a place I figured the Ruhar wouldn't risk damaging. After the two Whales crashed and burned and the surviving Ruhar on the ground got over the initial shock, a pair of Vultures buzzed around like angry hornets, weapons pods exposed and occasionally strafing something on the ground with laser fire. They knew where we were, I could imagine the Vulture drivers shouting for clearance to blow my squad to hell, and being told not to risk damaging the vital Launcher machinery. I figured our best chance for survival was to take cover someplace defensible that the Ruhar couldn't blast with heavy weapons, and buy time. The plasma generator complex seemed a good bet. All we had left was rifle ammo, AT4s, a couple Zingers, some grenades and a sense that we'd done the best we could to avenge our dead. We found an auxiliary control room that was underground and it didn't have any windows, so we had to use cameras that the Ruhar oddly had forgotten to disable. From one camera, we had a view of the still steaming crater where the DFAC had been. I wondered whether the people in the DFAC had any idea of trouble before the railgun round vaporized them, had they known, a few seconds before impact, that Ruhar warships had jumped into orbit? I hoped not. Better, in this case, for the blissful ignorance of listening to a UNEF general drone on in a boring speech, daydreaming pleasant thoughts and not realizing you'd been killed until you woke up in the afterlife. No such luck for people at the airfield and motor pool, they'd had time to see the DFAC disappear and have debris raining down on them before smart missiles dropped clusters of submunitions on them and destroyed everything that could drive or fly. The Vulture gunships that had ignored us had strafed scattered survivors, while there was a lot of confusion, UNEF estimated six hundred seventy dead, of the roughly nine hundred humans stationed at Fort Arrow that day. That was a stark lesson in future combat; if you didn't control the high ground you were as good as dead, and the high ground in this case was orbit and above. Digging in didn't help much when a railgun round could penetrate up to three hundred meters into the ground, if the launching ship seriously cranked up the muzzle velocity. The Ruhar had ships dedicated to orbital bombardment, the briefing packet I'd seen depicted a long, thin railgun barrel with fusion reactors at the far end and nothing much else to it. Who needed dirty nukes when a railgun dart could provide ten kilotons of hurt on a target, and ships could pump one dart after another until even the hardest target was a cloud of atoms?