Eric anchored himself, knowing what was to come, the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound actually being nearly as deadly as the impact itself. It took seven seconds for the clap of thunder to shake the world around him, knocking several to the ground and blowing out the glass in every building for miles, and by that time three more Kilo Kilos had slammed into Detroit.

The impact weapons were designed as bunker busters, and that was how they’d targeted them, aiming to take out nests that were forming through the city more than the drones crawling around the surface. Collateral shock waves should eliminate most of those as well, but the rest would be left to Eric and his team.

“Roll out!” he ordered over the tactical network as he climbed into the cockpit of the mechanical armor the military had supplied him. “Time to go work.”

They were rolling before the last Kilo Kilo impacted, face into the fires as the shock waves rumbled over them. Eric took the vanguard position, using the advanced instrumentation in his armor to scout out the range ahead of them as they headed into Motor City amidst secondary explosions and thunderclaps from the fallout of the orbital strikes.

He led the column north into Detroit along the I-75, though they were more paralleling the freeway than actually driving on it. It wasn’t quite as irredeemably blocked as the city streets in New York had been, but there were still more than enough abandoned cars to make it effectively impassable if they wanted to maintain their pace.

“Squad Two, break left and secure the manufacturing centers. Three, go right. I want the raw materials in those warehouses under our control within the hour,” he ordered.

While manufacturing had largely decentralized in the Confederation over the last few decades, there were always exceptions. Munitions and the like were among those few, mostly by design. Mobile and personal manufacturing machines were quite capable of building small arms and munitions (though many required aftermarket hacking to do so), but they were most emphatically not up to building high explosives and the complex mechanisms inherent in modern battlefield weaponry.

So when the munitions manufacturing had moved into Detroit, retooling the failed auto industry’s abandoned factories, it made a lot of sense to consolidate many parts of the process for efficiency’s sake, though not entirely, of course. The Detroit area was home to five separate defense industry “campuses,” and Eric was well aware that he and his company would have to secure as many of them as possible in advance of the arrival of the National Guard and the volunteer workforce.

“Captain, we’ve been spotted.”