First to Fight (10 page)

“We’re grunts, he’s a pogue. With any luck, we’ll never see him again.” Chan paused in thought for a moment, then added, “I don’t know how he got his second stripe. The man is in serious need of an attitude adjustment.”

“Attention on deck,” someone shouted moments later.

“As you were,” Major Longaway said before the Marines in the troop hold could scramble to their feet.

“How’s it going, PFC Chan, you ready to land?”

“You know it, sir.”

Longaway stifled a smile.

“How about you, PFC Dean, ready for your first duty station?”

“Gonna get me some, sir.”

“Sir!” Corporal Doyle scrambled out of the NCO comer and snapped to attention in front of Longaway. “The landing force is ready to land. I inspected the men myself.”

“I knew you would, Doyle.”

Doyle frowned when his rank was omitted. Some of the other Marines exchanged quick glances. Someone let out a quickly cut-off guffaw.

“We’ll be heading for the well deck any minute now. Get everything ready and stand by for further orders.” Longaway started to turn to leave the troop hold, then turned back. “For those of you who haven’t done this before except in Boot Camp, get ready for the ride of a lifetime. It’s a little more exciting the way we do it here.”

As soon as the officer was gone, Doyle spun and stared each man in the eye, looking for any sign that would tell him who had laughed. They all looked innocent. He started to turn back to the NCO comer when the klaxons again rang and blared throughout the ship, followed by the melodious voice saying, “landing Force, prepare to land.”

“Fall in, people!” Corporal Doyle shouted. “Line ’em up, line ’em up, line ’em up!” He scurried along the line of Marines who scrambled to shrug into their packs, shoulder their seabags, and hoist their blasters. He snorted angrily when he couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have everything ready to move out. Then he took his place facing the middle of the line.

“Platoon, a-ten-hut!” he shouted.

The Marines shuffled their feet, but nobody made a serious attempt to come to attention; they couldn’t in that narrow space with the loads they were carrying.

“Right HACE! Fo-art, HARCH!” Doyle had to duck back as a shouldered seabag nearly hit him in the head. He stutter-stepped in place for a moment, then realized there wasn’t enough space in the narrow aisle for him to squeeze along the line of moving Marines to take his place near the head of the column.

“You forgot something,” someone said softly as he walked past. Doyle couldn’t see who it was because the man’s seabag blocked his view of his face.

Doyle started to snap out when he realized what it was he had forgotten. Red-faced, he scrambled back to the NCO corner to get his own pack, seabag, and weapon.

The “well deck” was at the bottom of a ladder at the opposite end of the short passageway outside the troop hold. Like its namesake in seagoing amphibious landing ships of ancient Earth-bound navies, the well deck was located in the lower, forward part of the ship’s hull—though the designations “lower” and “forward” were arbitrary in starships. Unlike its predecessors, the well deck didn’t open to the seas to let water in so amphibious landing craft could float out. Confederation Navy starships never settled in water seas—not on purpose anyway. Neither did the well deck contain numerous landing craft. Six “Essays,” “Entry Shuttles, Atmospheric,” were suspended from the well deck’s overhead. Each shuttle could deliver three Marine Dragons to a planetary surface. In one drop, most of a FIST’s infantry battalion could be delivered to the surface to make an amphibious assault. After off-loading their Dragons, the shuttles returned to orbit to pick up the next wave in the FIST’s remaining Dragons and the ship’s own landing craft, which weren’t as heavily armed or armored as the Dragons, but were faster on the water. If necessary, the three Dragons in the ship’s own complement would join in a landing. A single SAT could deliver an entire FIST to the surface in two waves.

Nobody waited for orders when they reached the well deck, and nobody listened to the orders Corporal Doyle shouted; they all headed directly to the one shuttle that would land them on Thorsfinni’s World. Preparing to land was something the Marines had drilled on many times; everyone knew exactly where to go and what to do when he got there. Major Longaway led one contingent onto one Dragon, and Corporal Doyle shepherded the other onto the second. The other five shuttles in the well deck were loaded with supplies and equipment destined for the Confederation’s military forces planetside and would follow the Marines’ shuttle.

Dean grimaced at the thought of being on the Dragon with Doyle.

There were only two Dragons on the shuttle; there weren’t enough men making the landing to need three—and hardly enough to justify using two. The Marines went directly to their assigned stations on the Dragons and stowed their packs and seabags in the locker spaces below the vehicle’s seats. Then they made sure the seats that normally faced the center line of the vehicle were secure in the acceleration webbing that hung from the overhead and held them in a front-facing position. Other straps anchored the webbing to the deck. Satisfied, they climbed into the seats and buckled themselves in. As each man secured himself in his webbing he shouted out that his position was ready, and punched a button in the webbing to tell the computer he was ready to drop. When the buttons on all deployed webbings were punched and its own sensors in the buckles verified the messages, the computer’s voice intoned to the coxswain—a navy petty officer, because these Dragons belonged to the navy and not the Marines—“All personnel secured. Vehicle ready for drop.”

“Shuttle One ready to drop,” the shuttle’s coxswain reported to the ship, and his computer verified the message.

“Well deck, stand by for zero atmosphere,” the computer voice said. Even through the walls of the Dragon and the shuttle outside it, the Marines could hear the whisper of the well deck’s air being sucked out.

“Open drop hatch,” the voice said.

Inside the Dragon the opening of the bay hatches beneath the shuttle was felt rather than heard by the Marines.

“Stand by for null-g,” the ship’s voice intoned.

The Marines tensed themselves for a sudden loss of weight.

“Null-g,” intoned the ship’s voice. “Three, two, one, mark.”

The ship’s gravity generators shut off. Everywhere in the ship and on its surface, people and objects slowly drifted upward from whatever direction had been “down” for them—anyone or anything that wasn’t secured to a surface would drift away. In the Dragons there was a slight shifting of webbing as weight went away from the overhead support straps and newly floating mass was pulled into equilibrium by the deck straps. Dust particles that had been held to the ship’s hull by gravitation drifted away.

“Whooh!” Clearly one of the Marines hadn’t done this often enough to become accustomed to free fall.

“Belay that,” snapped Corporal Doyle. He was secretly glad he hadn’t been the one to make the noise—in eight years, it was only his third time in null-g.

The klaxons rang and blared throughout the ship and through the speakers on the Dragons. The computer-generated female voice said, “Land the landing force.”

Waiting in nervous anticipation of his first real orbital drop, Dean told himself it was only his imagination that lent a note of sarcastic humor to the voice. But he didn’t have time to dwell on the thought.

The shuttle was attached to a launch-plunger in the overhead of the well deck. On the command to land the landing force, a 100-psi blast of air ejected the shuttle away from the ship.

Dean knew he was supposed to yell when the acceleration cut in, but the sudden four-g force that slammed him toward the overhead turned his planned yell into a scream of near terror. Somehow, this didn’t seem quite the way he remembered it from the practice landing they’d made from the Turd. The deck straps on the webbing straightened and went taut with the sudden movement, and made the fine adjustments needed to stop the webbing from slamming its human cargo into the overhead.

One second and three hundred meters from the closing bay doors, the shuttle’s engines fired up and added three g’s of forward momentum to the four vertical. The roar of the shuttle’s engines, soundless in the space outside it, was loud enough inside to drown out the yells and screams of the men in the Dragons. Small rockets on the bottom of the shuttle ignited to cancel the downward motion of the entry vehicle, the aft retros firing more strongly than the forward ones to aid the main rockets in giving it a slight downward thrust. Less than ten seconds after launch, the shuttle was already past the one-and-a-half-kilometer-long SAT. Only the downward thrust from its main engines kept it from being flung into a higher orbit.

“The shuttle is clear of the ship,” the shuttle’s coxswain reported. “Request permission to commence atmospheric entry.”

“Permission granted” was the reply. “On my mark, commence atmospheric entry. Four, three, two, one, mark.”

The coxswain punched the button that controlled the topside attitude rockets. The shuttle’s computer got confirmation from the ship’s launch control computer and executed the command. Small vernier rockets above the shuttle’s nose fired briefly to angle the shuttle downward sharply and convert its orbital velocity of more than 32,000 kilometers per hour into downward speed. Five seconds later the main engines shut off and the shuttle went into an unpowered plunge. If its path had been straight down, it would have catastrophically impacted the planetary surface in under two minutes, but its glide angle was calculated to take five minutes to reach 50,000 meters above the surface, where the wings would deploy and forward thrusters would fire to drop the shuttle’s speed to something that could be controlled by powered flight.

Dean’s digestive system reacted violently to the sudden drop from multi-g thrust to weightlessness. His intestines abruptly bloated, his stomach twisted and churned, his body tried to gag; he fought to keep from vomiting. He forced himself to swallow and twisted from side to side. Then he remembered to relax, concentrated on relaxing. First his legs, then his lower abdomen, his upper; next his chest, his arms, his throat; finally his head. The bloating in his intestines decreased, the twisting and churning of his stomach eased. He felt no more need to gag. He sighed. Then somebody else lost it a few feet away and Dean had to fight his digestion again.

“Clean that up yourself, Marine,” the coxswain bellowed. “I’m not here to nursemaid puking buzzards.”

“What the fuck’s a ‘buzzard’?” the man asked as he wiped vomitus from his chin.

The Marines cursed at the coxswain, but no one moved to get out of his webbing and teach the sailor his place. The man closest to the Marine who had lost it grabbed the nearest suction tube from the overhead and started cleaning up before the vomitus could settle on anything.

“Sound off,” Corporal Doyle croaked from his webbing as soon as he had control of his voice.

“Aabenheld.”

“Chan.”

“Dean.”

“Fitzhugh . . .” and so forth through the alphabet, just like Boot Camp, until each of the thirteen Marines aboard was accounted for as present and conscious.

“High speed on a bad road” was how Marines described the fall from the top of the atmosphere to the beginning of powered flight fifty kilometers above the surface. It was an apt description. By the time the braking rockets fired and the wings began to deploy, the shaking and rattling were so hard the Dragon felt as if it was coming apart, and someone screamed in fear.

Someone called out something about “cherries,” and another Marine laughed.

The braking rockets and deploying wings quickly cut the angle of the shuttle’s dive, cutting its speed in half by the time it reached the top of the troposphere. When the wings were fully extended, huge flaps extended from them to further brake the Essay’s speed. When the wings finally bit into air hard enough for controlled flight, the coxswain turned off the braking rockets, fired up the jets, and maneuvered the craft into a velocity-eating spiral that slowed their descent as well as the shuttle’s forward speed. At a thousand meters altitude, the coxswain pulled out of the spiral and popped the drogue chute. At two hundred, he angled the jets’ vernier nozzles downward. Seconds later the shuttle rested on the surface of the Western Ocean, a hundred kilometers offshore from Thorsfinni’s World’s largest inhabited landmass.

“Ready landing craft to hit the beach,” the coxswain ordered.

“Landing Craft One, ready to hit the beach,” said the first Dragon’s coxswain.

“Landing Craft Two, ready to hit the beach,” said the second Dragon’s coxswain.

They revved up their engines. The curtains fluttered, then rose stiffly around the air cushion that lifted the Dragons off the deck. The shuttle’s coxswain opened the aft hatches and lowered the ramp, and the two Dragons drove out to splash onto the surface. In seconds they were zipping at top speed, across the wave tops toward the distant shore.

Aboard the
Lopez,
as soon as the shuttle was forcibly ejected from the well deck, the ship began the routine to launch the supply shuttles. Gentle puffs of air eased the shuttles out of the well deck. Gentle blasts of the shuttles’ rockets pushed them into glide paths that would bring them to the planet’s surface in three revolutions around it. There was no great rush. No enemy was attacking the ship, no foe threatened to shoot down the shuttles as they made planetfall. There was no need for the shuttles or their cargo to suffer the strains of an assault landing.