Casting Shadows: Unsung Battle
May 22, 2047
Major Ionela Stoica
Nellis Air Base, near Las Vegas, Yellow Zone Y-6
To Ionela Stoica, visiting a cemetery required a certain gravitas, an uncommon respect for those no longer in this world. While funerals in her native Romania were more celebratory than mournful, the moment after always left a bitter taste in her heart. For all the celebration one could have for the departed, there was no bringing them back. And not even two months into the Third Tiberium War, there were many departed. Her colleagues, classmates, and friends deserved more than a fiery and bloody death, but who really got what they deserved in war? At least they deserved more than this: a single ashen wing, with dozens of names etched in the malleable aluminum.
But she took a deep breath and departed the temporary memorial and headed towards the briefing room. Hundreds of miles north, Malmstrom Base was under siege by a division of Black Hand elite, and its fall would let Nod steal potentially dozens of GDI nukes. However, an aerial blockade prevented any air support to the remote base, and a ground convoy would take far too long to navigate through the imposing, Tiberium-stricken mountains of Western America.
It would come down to GDI's combat aircraft to break the line and give Malmstrom a chance. Stoica had received the final details of her mission less than an hour ago, and needed to relay the essentials to the waiting pilots of the two squadrons under her temporary command.
Walking inside, stalling for a moment enjoy the blast of cold air from their permanent air conditioning, she made her way to the front. Every pilot was patiently waiting for her in their cushioned seats, and she started the briefing without further dithering.
"Welcome, squadrons. Recon has confirmed that enemy aircraft are patrolling a nearly one-thousand kilometer long line stretching from southeast Washington to northern Colorado. Severe Ion Storms to the north and south are effectively stretching the blockade another two hundred kilometers. Punching through is our only option."
She clicked to the next slide. Would GDI ever switch to better forms of presentation? Probably not.
"The 15th Fighter Wing's mission site is here: the former Yellowstone National Park."
Once a stellar landscape and pride of the United States, Yellowstone had become a terrible Tiberium wasteland, blurring the line between Red and Yellow Zone in terms of contamination. The slides on Stoica's briefing told as much, revealing the eighty percent coverage of Tiberium in the region and rampant mutant wildlife.
"We will be operating here: at this barren lake and the red Tiberium fields that predominate the area. The lake was harvested shortly before the outbreak of war and thus is clear of Tiberium, unlike the rest of the environment. We're counting on this."
Extremely dense Tiberium, especially the red variety, could disrupt missile targeting from background ion radiation, so a Tiberium-absent area would serve as an optimal ambush point. The phenomenon was just another reason Stoica was certain Tiberium meant to transform their planet into something much worse.
"Saturn Squadron will engage first and draw in the enemy fighters into the barren lake, whereupon Lotus Squadron, in reserve, will launch a stratospheric attack and destroy the remainder of the enemy."
Her presentation showed her squadron engaging a Nod formation, scattering them and forcing them into the lake, whereupon Lotus swooped down upon the clustered enemy and wiped them out in one fell swoop.
"Enemy ground units are assumed to be minimal due to the restrictive terrain, but cannot be discounted. Do you have questions?"
One of the Lotus pilots raised his hand. "What about Venoms and other Nod craft?" he asked.
"Venoms are a low priority. Don't engage unless necessary," Stoica explained. "We're after big game, not small fry."
A few short questions later, the pilots set out to their aircraft. The air base was already a buzz of massive activity, the whine of Orca turbofans, thunder of Hammerhead rotors, and roar of Firehawk jets mixed together into a raging din of power. Ground crews were entirely limited to hand signals and radios, as even the loudest shouts were a comparative whisper. Stoica hurried to her fighter, though she spared a moment to admire the golden Saturn painted on its back, surrounded by a dense ring of thirty seven stars – her kill count. With any luck, a few more stars would be added today, and she'd come a little closer to GDI's current ace of aces count of fifty-nine.
Strapped in and ready, she was first to take off, pulling her Firehawk into the sky it ruled. The remainder of Saturn quickly followed, then Lotus, the sixteen-plane formation rapidly assembling as the next GDI strike groups formed up for their own missions. Only minutes after departure, her battlescape monitor could already track more than ninety other aircraft in the air and heading northeast, one of the largest single deployments of GDI air power since Las Vegas, though they quickly dispersed to their mission areas.
Soon, only faint blips in the breaking sky and radar reassured Stoica that she wasn't alone, though their arrival at Yellowstone erased most of that comfort. At lower altitudes, she had seen a few remnants of civilization – strips of road here, a cluster of foundations there – but now, it was just awful, constant green. About fifty klicks away and closing, the telltale particle flares of an ion storm began forming.
"I thought we were well clear of the storm," Riggs, Saturn Four, noted.
"Surprise, the forecast is wrong," grumbled Hartmann, the new Saturn Two. Her previous second-in-command had been transferred to Albania to lead a new squadron there. She often missed Voychek, but at least Hartmann had a cool head on his shoulders.
"We have a global satellite network that can find anyone in the world in ninety seconds, and they still can't predict the weather?" Riggs let out a very loud sigh. "What are all my taxes used for, anyways?"
"Riggs, the Philadelphia probably had all the meteorological instruments," another pilot suggested. A chorus of groans and admonishments followed. "Too soon? Sorry."
Stoica, ignoring the conversation, tipped over her jet aircraft to get a better look at the limitless waves of Tiberium-covered hills, glittering madly in the nascent storm that divided the land as Moses divided the sea. With each ion bolt, a sheen of light swept over the hills, highlighting every little malformation and giving her the impression that something even more terrible was incubating within. Steadily rocked by hail-laced winds, she tried to imagine the rich forests that once painted this land a thousand natural shades of green, with snow-capped mountains that stretched a thousand meters into the sky rather than these eroded tufts of land, helpless against the encroaching, consuming crystal. The fact that she couldn't worried her more than anything else this miserable place had to offer.
Once they were twenty kilometers away from the mission site, the first drops of crimson began to bleed around the landscape, frozen drops spread at the base of mountains like dried tears.
"Blood Tiberium," Hartmann muttered the colloquial nickname.
"No one's tried to harvest this?" Riggs asked. "This must be worth a fortune."
"You ever try driving a harvester through mountains? It isn't easy."
Stoica kept her eyes on her radar. "Squadron, we're entering the mission area now. Stay on alert," she ordered, bringing her squadron to ten thousand meters altitude. As predicted, it didn't take long for Nod to respond to the breach of airspace.
"Contact northeast, heading zero-seven-five!" Hartmann called out first. "Two groups of Phantoms, four each. Designating enemy forces Zulu and Yankee."
"Confirmed," Stoica answered, the 'ZULU' and 'YANKEE' groups appearing on her overlay before Hartmann was done speaking. "Saturn Five through Eight, draw Zulu into the killzone," she ordered. The four Firehawks split off from her main group, daring the Nod fighters to engage at low altitude. "Saturn One through Four, engage Yankee at medium altitude, and prepare to herd them too. Is there anything else?"
"Yes. I'm tracking a formation of seven Venoms. They're patrolling another valley, seventy klicks north, heading zero-two-four."
"They're not a problem." Stoica acquired the first of her target locks easily – the Phantoms were probably fully loaded, ditching any possibility of stealth in order to carry as many munitions as possible. It could serve them well in a long engagement, but Stoica had no intention of staying here for long. "Saturn Squadron, engage."
Every Firehawk loosed one or two missiles, forming a supersonic barrage lanced at the incoming Nod formations. The Phantoms replied in kind and scattered instantly, successfully evading every GDI missile. One Firehawk, Saturn Seven, took a serious hit and immediately turned back to base.
Stoica fired a second missile and managed to down a Phantom right before they closed into visual range. As GDI pilots had learned from bloody experience, the Nod jet fighters possessed a notable advantage in visual range combat, with even greater maneuverability and G-resistance than the Firehawk. But with Lotus covering their backs, Stoica felt confident in their plan – and as five Phantoms were steadily forced towards the killzone, Stoica quickly notified the allied unit.
Lotus Squadron, waiting over two hundred kilometers away, were forwarded the data and initiated their plan.
"Going up!" Lotus One called. As reverse meteors ascended the sky, Stoica estimated they would be re-engage in under one minute.
"Saturn Two, Leader, Venoms are inbound," Hartmann warned. "It's the squadron from the northeast!"
"They'll won't get here in time. Continue operation."
"Affirmative."
Diving onto one Phantom, she followed it straight into the valley that would be its grave, passing by the silent green sheets of Tiberium covering the hills. The Phantom was a respectable opponent, neatly avoiding her brief bursts of cannon fire, but she wasn't really intending to kill it herself. Instead, she stopped her chase right as the Lotus Firehawks began to dive in, creating bright rends in the sky with their hypersonic reentry. At such high speed, their missiles were propelled even faster. The Phantom that Stoica had been chasing tried to escape, but it was simply crushed by three missiles that hit not a second apart, completely destroying it.
As she watched more Firehawks dive and Phantoms fall, an urgent radar tone sounded – one of the Venoms was locking onto her. How, though? Venoms rarely packed air-to-air missiles, and certainly none with the current range of fifty kilometers. At that, Stoica's radar suddenly switched its ID of "V-21 VENOM" to "UNKNOWN", her eyes widening at the change in identification.
"Squadron, those are NOT Venoms!" she warned. "I repeat, those are not Venoms!"
"Then what are they, Major?!" Riggs demanded, panicked.
"I don't know!" she cried out, zipping towards the nearest red Tiberium field, aiming to use her flares and the Tiberium both to throw off the lock-on. Shouts of alarm cascaded across the squadron comms channels – and Stoica realized too late the Lotus Firehawks, still recovering from their dive, were terrifically vulnerable to the incoming volley.
In a moment, seven Lotus Firehawks went down, destroyed in the same killzone as the Phantoms not a moment ago. Now thirteen fighter wrecks littered the empty reservoir, instantly turned into a shared graveyard for the most elite of the GDI and Nod air forces. The sole survivor barely escaped, a few trailing missiles exploding shortly behind and damaging enough to make it useless. When Stoica was out of immediate danger, she boosted away from the Tiberium field and turned to face the new threats.
"Major, are those Phantoms?" Riggs asked. "They have to be!"
"Negative, they're not matching the Phantom profile," Stoica replied.
"That's impossible."
"They've got to be something we know about," Hartmann opined.
The UNKNOWN contacts suddenly switched back to something Stoica did recognize, but never expected: "YF-22 RAPTOR".
"What the fuck?" Riggs gasped.
Nevermind the oddity of seeing a fifty year old warplane, Stoica suddenly understood their little trick. The Raptors had imitated Venoms, flying slow and low, avoiding the main battle until Lotus approached and made themselves vulnerable in turn. After all, there was no way a Raptor's stealth held up against modern radar, or that its agility could match a Firehawk's. But it could carry a full rack of air-to-air missiles and the avionics to support them. Even now, the Raptor unit were burning away at high speed, too fast for any conventional aircraft to catch them into a straight race.
"Should we pursue?" Hartmann asked.
"Of course," Stoica replied, overcharging her afterburners. For all of the YF-22's power, its makers could have never anticipated a sixth-generation fighter's full capabilities. "Prepare for stratospheric attack."
Plotting the likely path of the Raptors, Stoica quickly assigned her squadron several lanes to intercept, reserving the lead spot for herself. Back in the First Tiberium War, Stoica's grandfather, serving in the then-named United Nations Air Task Force, shot down two with his MiG over the skies of Egypt. It was time to match his achievement.
Supercharging her engines to maximum power, she turned her Firehawk into a space-bound booster rocket, crossing forty kilometers of altitude and one hundred kilometers of distance in heartbeats. The moment she closed the gap, she began her long dive onto the hapless Raptors. Their antiquated radars probably couldn't track Stoica cutting through the stratosphere, and even if they could, they were powerless to stop her.
Once she got locks on two, she fired a missile each, the missiles retaining her insane momentum and practically ramming into the thin-skinned aircraft, before exploding and totally destroying the Raptors. Barely a second later, she fired her 25mm cannon into a third, sending a salvo of rounds directly into the nose and cockpit. The rest of the Raptor quickly broke apart, as she gained incredible momentum from the dive, effortlessly speeding away from the survivors' ineffectual gunfire.
Not bad, she thought. Grandpa would be proud.
Then the missile warning blared again – but how? There was no way a Raptor, of all aircraft, could track her Firehawk. Except, as her radar resolved the threat contact, that wasn't a Raptor locking on. It was a Phantom. And as Hartmann completed his attack run, another Phantom split off from the doomed Raptor it'd been hiding behind.
Stoica wanted to scream. She'd been tricked again.
The Phantoms must have flown close to the Raptors, staying right behind to prevent GDI radars from distinguishing the two. Her stomach dropped at the realization that those extraordinarily skilled and creative Nod pilots were now unleashed in the middle of her squadron.
"Saturn, abort attack!" she cried out, hoping to stop the remainder of her squadron. "There are Phantoms here!"
But all of them had already begun their fatal dives, and Stoica could no longer afford to worry about anyone save herself. Practically breathing on her back, the Phantom closed in fast; rapidly incoming at her front, the unbending earth. Ultimately, her enemy made the choice for her.
"Warning! Missile!" EVA blurted.
Rather than try to escape upwards and risk a gun run by the Phantom, she kept diving, pointed straight to a Tiberium field. She could tell apart each patch of Tiberium and the pitiful remains of blossom trees by the time she chose to pull up, half expecting the engines to burn out and keep her momentum straight into the green.
They didn't, and her Firehawk sailed over the field, two inbound missiles smashing into the ground a moment later and mixing bright explosions with the glistening Tiberium. The Phantom remained at her back, relentless and utterly confident in its ability to run down the GDI aircraft at close range. But maybe it didn't realize it was chasing one of the greatest aces in the world.
It's not that easy, Stoica thought, and pulled a flip that would've killed her in training. She still almost blacked out, her vision fading to the point where she could see nothing but the red circle of a target in her gunsights. Even then, some peripheral sense suggested the enemy fighter was already reacting, with less than a second left to take advantage. Thankfully, she had a weapon whose rate of fire was 4000 rounds per minute.
She landed at least thirty hits with her 25mm before the Phantom's engines burst into flames, a mixture of green and orange that emitted a hailstorm of black ash, coating the nose of her Firehawk. Not that she immediately appreciated the new decoration – her breaths were slow, labored, and she felt some blood dribbling down her nose, seeping into her helmet.
"Saturn, report!" she ordered – only to realize her squadron was down to only herself, Hartmann, and Riggs. Every other Firehawk had been destroyed.
"They're disengaging, Major," Hartmann told her.
She could guess why. The tandem ambush had pushed the kill count in favor of Nod – twelve Firehawks for nine Phantoms, and the Nod pilots probably were more than happy to take their victory and run with it. The Raptors were practically irrelevant, probably flown by rookie pilots and not expected to survive. The veterans of her squadron and Lotus would be a far more serious loss in the days to come.
With the sky clear of aircraft and the Ion Storm rolling in, there was only one order left to issue.
"All fighters, return to base," she groaned. Looking back upon the hell of Yellowstone, little smoke trails marking where her aircraft had fallen, Stoica could only hope this was the last time she fell victim to a Nod trick.
InOps ECAP Report "Know Your Enemy"
Nod Deployment of Obsolete Fighters Poses a Novel Threat
One of the major incidents preceding the First Tiberium War was the 1996 "Pentagon Christmas" procurement debacle, which concluded with the Brotherhood of Nod acquiring over one hundred modern fighter aircraft from U.S. stockpiles, including F/A-18 Hornets and YF-22 Raptors. Combined with additional Nod acquisitions of high-end materiel such as attack helicopters and main battle tanks, the scandal virtually destroyed the reputation of the U.S. Armed Forces.* As for the stolen fighters, once in the hands of mercenary pilots, they proved deadly to GDI and allied aircraft, though their number had shrunk considerably by the war's end.
More than fifty years later, some of these ancient aircraft have been sighted again, serving as second-line interceptors. In line with Nod tactical doctrine to confuse, envelop, and ultimately destroy the enemy at a time of their choosing, these fighters tend to imitate patrol or transport craft by flying at low speed and altitude, before making a sudden attack and fleeing. In practical terms, they are deployed as airborne guerillas, with a similar emphasis on ambush and rapid withdrawal.
To counter these repurposed interceptors, Firehawks and ground fire of all types should be employed, as the old jets' maneuverability and defenses are completely outclassed by modern aeronautics and radar. Even A-15 Orcas, if appropriately armed, should not hesitate to engage at range.
Commanders and pilots are advised to treat all hostile or unknown air contacts as potentially dangerous until positive identification can be made.
*For further reading, see InOps report "Bialystok Revisited: How Nod Nearly Won the Media War", for an explanation of how media supporting the Nod agenda nearly inflicted a similar disaster upon GDI through the Bialystok incident.
Author's Note: Welcome back to Casting Shadows! I know it took a little longer than forever to get this chapter out, and I swear I don't intend to publish a chapter for this once a year, but here we are.
This chapter is also an official accompaniment to the latest chapter of Under the Shadow, as Connor Liang's ZOCOM regiment defends Malmstrom under siege. As you've read here, the operation to relieve him doesn't go entirely smoothly.
And lastly, in case it wasn't obvious, I watched Top Gun Maverick, which gave me most of the inspiration to finish this chapter. You might be interesting to know there's also some historical inspiration, too: the tactic of Nod Raptors disguising themselves as Venoms was heavily inspired by Operation Bolo in the Vietnam War, where American F-4Cs successfully pretended to be slow, bomb-laden F-105s to lure Vietnamese MiGs into an ambush. I hope this 2047 interpretation made sense and proved enjoyable for all of you.