Chapter 348: S.H.E. Operation - I

High above Silverpeak, the Phantoms were crossing the central district in a loose line, and the dust from the bombardment had already risen high enough to hide most of the streets beneath them.

Fires had opened a while ago, and every few seconds another flash showed through the cloud as a salvo came down.

The first salvo hadn’t come from a handful of artillery vehicles.

Hundreds of MLRS launchers opened together from the firing grounds surrounding the central district. The initial ripple alone sent thousands of heavy rockets climbing into the sky, their exhaust trails crossing over the secured areas before turning toward the Hive.

Farther behind them, PSML launchers raised their four-cell assemblies and began releasing precision missiles against the largest underground structures.

The Vanguards, Guardian APCs and Hellhammers were present, but they were the supporting arms of this particular operation. The rocket and missile batteries were doing the actual dismantling.

Entire launch groups fired, lowered their assemblies and began cycling the reserve rockets held by their System magazines.

The ammunition was not endless, and the battery officers were keeping track of expenditure and refresh schedules, but the allowance available to these formations was already beyond what an ordinary army could have supplied for such a fight.

Inside the lead bomber, the weapons officer had the shared Radar picture open on his display.

It showed the entire underground network at once, every tunnel and junction and chamber below the district drawn in clean lines, with the infected moving through them as small markers.

The Army’s intelligence staff had spent days comparing those contacts with aerial recordings, biological mass estimates and the sizes of the underground chambers.

Their latest working estimate suggested that the central Hive and its connected brood network contained more than forty million infected organisms, including the enormous insect concentrations and the creatures still held inside biological sacs.

Nobody claimed to have counted them one by one. Some chambers were packed so tightly that the Radar contacts overlapped. But the estimate had been checked against the volume of the underground areas, and the staff responsible for it believed the actual population might be higher.

The weapons officer looked at the dense red covering the middle of the map. It was an almost ridiculous number of targets.

Fortunately, they had brought a ridiculous number of weapons.

The strike list had been built from the picture itself, junction by junction, and his job was to work down it.

Four areas near the center were shaded differently from the rest and carried a single note: reserved, no release.

"First release point in thirty seconds."

"Copy. Target group one is valid."

"Southern Air Control, Phantom Lead is entering the release corridor."

"Phantom Lead, corridor confirmed. Proceed."

The bay doors opened and the weapons officer sent the first string down.

The bombs fell for a long time, and he followed their tracks on the display until they reached the old industrial blocks above the junction.

The bombs punched through the roofs before their delayed fuzes detonated them inside the buildings. The explosions tore through the lower floors, bringing down the surrounding walls and supports.

Several buildings collapsed almost immediately, while others remained standing for a few seconds before their damaged foundations finally gave way.

Then the ground underneath them began sinking.

The explosions had destroyed several of the larger passages supporting the area, and the weight of the buildings above was more than the remaining ground could hold.

A section of the industrial road cracked open. One side dropped several meters, dragging abandoned vehicles, streetlights, and portions of the surrounding warehouses into the opening.

Farther down the street, another collapse swallowed an entire storage yard.

And underneath it all, thousands of infected were buried beneath concrete and twisted steel.

Some tried to escape through the adjoining tunnels, but the passages were collapsing around them. A group of larger infected barely made it through one junction before another section of the ceiling came down, crushing them beneath tons of debris.

On the Radar picture, the junction was immediately devastated, its lines broken in three places and the markers inside disappearing or scattering into the surviving passages.

"Impacts confirmed. Junction one is cut."

"Next group."

The pilot turned the bomber a few degrees east.

Elsewhere above the city, other Phantom groups were working on their own demolition sectors.

Bombs fell across separate industrial and commercial districts at the same time, and the release schedules were staggered so the aircraft could cycle their remaining loads without crowding one another’s corridors.

Several Phantoms had been assigned the heavy demolition load instead of a saturation package.

When those huge bombs struck the exposed structures above the deepest infected concentrations, the blast and collapse extended far beyond an individual room or passage.

The resulting holes were so huge that they swallowed entire industrial compounds. In the chambers below, countless infected disappeared under collapsing concrete and earth.

On the display, the markers from the broken junction were running along the nearest surviving passages toward the next chamber, but the next string was already assigned to that chamber, and nothing in the plan needed to change.

The second string landed on the old commercial complex.

Several buildings went down together, and then a long stretch of road sank into the space beneath it and left a wide, smoking depression in the middle of the district.

The collapse continued spreading outward.

A nearby intersection broke apart as its underground supports failed, and the pavement folded inward, taking several abandoned buses and cars with it.

The infected occupying the chambers below barely had time to move. The first explosions tore through the upper passages, and the collapsing foundations finished off whatever survived.

Some of the infected were crushed outright. Others found themselves buried beneath the rubble, trapped in passages that no longer led anywhere.

Even several heavily armored infected, which might have endured direct fire from ordinary infantry, disappeared when entire sections of the underground network collapsed on top of them.

There was little their bodies could do against that much weight.

"Secondary collapse confirmed. Southern Command has the updated readings."

"Anything change on our list?"

"No. Every marker that moved is still inside the next target."

The pilot nodded and held the heading. Somewhere to the east, another Phantom was working through its own sequence, and far below, the artillery kept walking its fire across the blocks that hadn’t been touched yet.

"Next group ready."

"Alright. Let’s keep going."