“Right you are, Cap’n,” Charlie Weeks said. “I’ll have the old girl ready for you.”

It would come as little news to anyone if Eric were to tell them that Detroit was a mess.

The city was one of those perennial boom and bust towns whose fortunes waxed and waned with world events, but most people only seemed to pay attention when it was on the waning side.

Now, though, the mess was from an external source and Eric was fixing to add to the poor benighted metropolis’ ill luck. He was standing on the turret of the lead tank in their column, eyes on the skyline of the city ahead, looking through the combined enhancements of his armor HUD and the detailed data being gathered by their remote scouts.

What he saw in that augmented view was a city literally crawling with inhabitants, even though it had long since been emptied of human beings. Estimates had climbed since he’d spoken to the President, now standing well over ten thousand strong, and it was clear that the Drasin were making themselves well and truly at home in Motor City.

“Strike points calculated and entered, Captain.”

Eric nodded quietly, thinking about what was about to happen, but not having a choice.

“Release the safeties,” he ordered.

“Safeties clear. Kilo Kilo is active,” Siobhan told him. “Ready to release on your order.”

“So ordered. Let slip the dogs, Siobhan,” he said, “and rain down hell upon our enemies.”

“Kilos away.”

A kinetic kill device is nothing particularly special in terms of mechanism. In its simplest form, it is one of the oldest weapon systems known to mankind. The sling, wielded by every burgeoning culture in recorded history, was such a device. Whip a stone around a central pivot to build up speed, then loose it on a target. The lethal power of the weapon is determined entirely by the velocity you can reach and the mass of the stone you choose.

For a Confederation Kilo Kilo the principles are entirely the same. The “stone” is a one-ton chunk of meteor steel harvested from the system’s asteroid belt, and the “sling” is the Earth itself. The satellite holding the weapons simply had to “drop” them in order to deploy.

From de-orbit drop to impact is just a few minutes, impact speed surpassing hypersonic levels. Accuracy was largely determined by simple ballistics and minor course adjustments using smart fins welded to the projectile.

The weapons Eric Weston ordered dropped on Detroit appeared in the pre-dawn sky a little less than three minutes after his order.

Thundering trails of fire lit across the sky, announcing the strikes to anyone with eyes or ears for a hundred miles around. Most of those in Weston’s company involuntarily ducked as the rolling thunder shook the ground around them, but he kept eyes open as the first of six slammed into the city of Detroit with a white flash.