Starfist: A World of Hurt (40 page)

"Tell me."

"In addition to the King-class dreadnought, there are two Mallorys and three Freemonts, along with three smaller starships we haven't identified yet."

"The Mallory cruisers are even older than Omahas, I know that, but what is the Freemont class?"

"Three-generation-old destroyers, sir. The last of them was retired before my parents even met." McPherson couldn't hold back a short bark of laughter.

"Have you ID'd the King yet?"

"We think she was the
Trefalgar
before she was retired."

"Let me guess, sold to We're Here!"

"Yessir. And our records show that We're Here! also bought two Mallorys and three Freemonts."

Boreland could hardly believe it. The
Grandar Bay
was being attacked by a task force of ships so old they'd all been retired before he joined the navy. The
Trefalgar,
or whatever she was called now, was the only one that stood a prayer against the
Grandar Bay's
weapons as they were now configured. The only threat the task force altogether posed was in strength of numbers. And that was only if their weapons and armor had been well maintained, which he seriously doubted. He knew that if he fought them, he was going to feel like a bully. But he couldn't simply let them regroup, cross his T, and fire broadside after broadside into his shields where he couldn't fire back. Could he?

Corporal Claypoole hadn't been the only member of third platoon's second squad to find out how the regurgitation tubes in the hoppers worked. The webbing sensed when a Marine's abdominal wall rippled in the pattern typical of pending regurgitation. When the regurge tube sensed it was being placed over the Marine's mouth, some of the web cocoon's straps shortened and others lengthened, turning the man facedown, allowing him to vomit without choking.

By the time the hoppers settled into level flight, Sergeant Linsman, Corporal Kerr, and Lance Corporal Schultz were the only members of the squad who hadn't vacated their stomachs, but far more of them lost it during the violent maneuvers after the hoppers were thrown out of the Essays than during the plunge down from the
Grandar Bay.
The interior of the hopper stank for a while, until the air scrubbers did their job, but the tubes managed to catch all the ejecta, so the aftermath was less unpleasant than it might have been.

All were relieved when the hoppers set down and they were able to scramble off into an open landscape that was broken up with treelines. Low mountains rose a couple of kilometers behind the company.

"Third platoon, squad leaders, check your you-are-here," Ensign Charlie Bass called on the platoon's command circuit. The squad leaders synchronized their HUD maps with their platoon commander's map; their you-are-here icons were all in the right place. "Put your people in the treeline here," Bass told them. He transmitted an overlay that he had already marked on his HUD map to the squad leaders. The squad leaders led their men to the trees and set them in place facing east.

"Wolfman, are you linked with second fire team?" Corporal Claypoole called.

"I'm in contact with Corporal Doyle," Lance Corporal MacIlargie answered.

"Good. Cover from ten o'clock to two o'clock," Claypoole said, assigning MacIlargie his primary field of fire. "Make sure you're overlapped with Doyle."

"Roger," MacIlargie said, and turned to his right to ask Doyle what his field of fire was.

"Hammer!" Claypoole turned to his left, then paused. He had to lower his infra screen to find his other man; Lance Corporal Schultz wasn't in the treeline area facing east. Claypoole finally found him just behind it facing south. "Ah, right," Claypoole said aloud to himself,

"watch the flank, good idea." Then to Schultz, "Hammer, watch the flank."

Schultz raised his helmet screens and languidly spat to his front. He was on the company's extreme left flank, where else was he going to watch?

"I'll cover to my nine. Does that overlap with your field of fire?" Claypoole asked, trying not to sound nervous. He took Schultz's grunt to be an affirmative. "Right. Now we wait." He silently groaned, hoping that didn't sound too dumb.

"Everybody linked here?" Sergeant Linsman asked as he dropped to a knee next to Claypoole.

"Sure are, Rat," Claypoole said. "Wolfman's overlapping with Doyle, I'm overlapping with him and Hammer. Hammer's watching the left flank."

"Good." Linsman clapped a hand on Claypoole's shoulder and started to rise.

"What's the situation out there?"

Linsman paused. "Don't know. The last I heard was when we were still on the hoppers and the rest of the battalion hadn't made contact yet. So we wait." He thought for a moment.

"There's no string-of-pearls, so we're pretty much blind beyond eyeball range. Tell you what.

Until I get other word, one-third alert." He patted Claypoole on the shoulder and left before the corporal could ask another question.

Claypoole swore about the lack of information, then realized nothing was developing fast, otherwise Linsman wouldn't have told him only one man at a time in the fire team had to keep watch.

"Hammer, Wolfman, one-third alert. Who wants first watch?"

There was a long moment's silence, then MacIlargie said, "I'll take it."

"You got it." Claypoole relaxed. If Schultz didn't want first watch, trouble must still be some distance off.

Corporal Doyle didn't think going off one hundred percent watch was such a good idea.

There was an unknown number of unknown enemy soldiers out there somewhere. He knew those enemy soldiers badly outnumbered Company L. Worse, he knew he was smack in the center of their advance. Who were they? Nobody had told him, all everybody said was, "We don't know." Were they Skinks? Thirty-fourth FIST came to Maugham's Station in the first place looking for Skinks. Instead of Skinks, they found acid-spitting vines and flesh-eating plants and wound up almost getting killed in a forest fire. But they were looking for Skinks--were the Skinks here now? Is that why everybody kept saying they didn't know who they were up against, so the troops who had to fight them wouldn't get too scared while they waited for the enemy to show up?

No, that didn't make any sense; if they were waiting to intercept Skinks, they could prepare, because they knew that's who was coming. He wasn't sure how they could prepare for the Skinks, but he knew they could do something. So what was really going on?

Worrying was tiring, and Doyle's guts were still unsettled from the ride down. He realized he was too tired and unsettled to keep worrying about it all. Corporal Kerr said he'd take the first watch. If Corporal Kerr was watching, Doyle knew, they were all right, he wouldn't let any bad guys sneak up on them. Corporal Kerr was just about the best Marine Doyle had ever seen. And he knew Lance Corporal MacIlargie was on watch to his left. MacIlargie wasn't as good as Kerr, but he was still pretty good.

Doyle relaxed and rolled onto his back to rest, maybe catch a quick nap. His eyes slipped slowly closed, then snapped open again.

Right in front of him, only a couple of kilometers away, were some low mountains. He sat up to take a better look at them. It wasn't a long range, only a few kilometers from end to end. But the ends weren't ends, they curved as if they formed an arc of a circle, or an oval.

They looked just like that circle of mountains where the company had run into the killer plants that shot streams of acid that were like the Skink acid guns.

Corporal Doyle whimpered.

The Dragons carrying Kilo and Mike Companies hit the beach at a densely forested estuary and sped upstream on the river until the forest thinned out enough to allow movement on land, where the long column split into three. One column remained on the river, the other two flanked it to either side on land. A hundred twenty-five kilometers inland the three columns made a quarter left turn and left the river behind. A few kilometers beyond, they spread out on line. Minutes later the Raptor section of FIST's composite squadron roared by low overhead in the same direction.

Commander van Winkle was the very image of calmness as he sat in his racing command-and-control Dragon. He had to project image; everybody was nervous about rushing blind into harm's way. He knew that as long as he appeared calm, his presence calmed his men--even those who thought his calmness was because he didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.

But van Winkle understood the seriousness of the situation better than any of his subordinates. They were blind, absolutely blind, beyond what they could see and hear with their own eyes and ears, and the limited organic equipment they could use on the move.

Just then, he couldn't even communicate with the
Grandar Bay;
the starship was over the horizon, dropping into a lower orbit that would allow her to communicate with the planetary government as well as the Marines.

At least, van Winkle hoped that's where the
Grandar Bay
had gone--she'd moved off and dropped out of sight without getting a message through to the Marines of the landing force.

She'd tried to, but a heavy burst of static broke up the message so much that it was unintelligible.

Where had that static burst come from? An unpredicted solar flare? That didn't seem likely. It reminded him more of the jamming he'd encountered when he was humping a radio as a young lance corporal on...on...It was so long ago he couldn't even remember what campaign it had been when the Marines went up against someone with jamming equipment strong enough to knock out even Force Recon communications.

He didn't know, but his best guess was that the unknown forces locked in combat ahead of the Marines had pretty good electronics.

He looked at his map. Without real-time satellite guidance from the string-of-pearls, his plot on it was inertial, as was the movement of the Raptors. He saw where the Raptors were; right where the intelligence he had before launch said the fighting was going on. But he didn't hear the weapons of the Raptors; he should have heard them since they weren't at all quiet when they attacked ground targets. But he heard nothing above the rumble of his Dragon. For that matter, the Dragons were close enough that he should have been able to hear the sounds of the ground combat. He turned up the volume on the Dragon's ears. All he heard was the line of Dragons crashing through the forest. What happened to the fighting?

"Sir." Captain Uhara, his executive officer, got van Winkle's attention. "Heaven's Hell One reports all ground combatants are in full flight to the west. He requests instructions."

Heaven's Hell was the call sign for the Raptors on this mission; Heaven's Hell One was the section commander.

Van Winkle calmly looked at his XO. "Thank you, Captain. My compliments to Heaven's Hell One. Request that they maintain contact but stay outside small-arms range, and keep me informed of what the ground contacts are doing. Ask if the ground forces are mounted or on foot. Then order the Dragon formation to slow down and keep pace with the forces ahead of us."

"Aye aye," Uhara said, and relayed the orders into his radio.

Van Winkle wasn't supposed to give those orders. He didn't have command over the squadron; Brigadier Sturgeon was responsible for coordinating the operations of the FIST's ground and air combat elements. Sturgeon was supposed to follow on planetside when the Raptors came down, but van Winkle hadn't heard from him yet--and evidently neither had Commander Wolfe, who was likely flying as Heaven's Hell One. Without Colonel Ramadan or Commander Usner, the FIST operations officer, on the air, joint command fell onto the ground combat element commander--Commander van Winkle.

Van Winkle turned up the gain on his FIST command circuit. All he got was faint static.

Either the FIST commander was still aboard the
Grandar Bay
or he was planetside with his comm knocked out. Or the enemy had better jamming equipment than any van Winkle was familiar with.

They paused briefly at a landing zone where a hundred or more shuttles sat, presumably abandoned by their crews after the troop transports that landed them fled orbit. A few kilometers farther, the Dragons passed through an area built up with industrial-looking structures and piles of debris that moments before had been the site of fierce fighting but now seemed abandoned. Van Winkle didn't want to waste time on it, and ordered Kilo Company to drop half a platoon and a Dragon to investigate the site.

"Vision by thirds," Staff Sergeant Nu ordered. Kilo Company's first platoon left him to inspect the industrial site, along with one squad and a gun team. "Ears up. Motion detectors and sniffers--if you got 'em, use 'em."

The Marines of first squad and the gun team adjusted their helmet screens so one man in each team was using his infra, one his magnifier, and one his light gatherer. They turned up the "ears" on their helmets so they could hear better. The few who had motion or scent detectors activated them.

"What are we supposed to be sniffing for?" PFC Bhophar asked as he turned on his scent detector.

"How the hell do I know?" snapped Corporal Juliete. "I'm only a fire team leader, nobody tells me anything."

Sergeant Oconor was close enough to hear the exchange. "Sniff for anything that isn't forest or Marine," he said. "Put the graph on the side of your HUD so you don't have to take your eyes away from what you're supposed to be looking at." Then he went to make sure his other man with a sniffer knew what he was supposed to be alert for.

Bhophar gave the sniffer the right command and tucked it into its pouch on his shoulder, where air could circulate through it, then gave the vertical graph on his HUD a quick glance to make sure he could read it easily, before returning his attention to the landscape.

"First fire team, check out that slag," Oconor ordered. He slid a sleeve up to expose his arm and pointed to where he wanted them to go.

"Right," Juliete replied. "First fire team, let's go." He used his infra to make sure his men were with him, then headed for a ten-meter-high pile of what he assumed was industrial leavings.