Starfist: Wings of Hell (21 page)

“I can, and I am doing just that. Go ahead and disagree all you want but obey my orders or I shall arrest you, sir. Now. Mr. Mullilee? As you are the Confederation’s Planetary Administrator, I wish to work through you to get things up and running here. I want to meet with your chief of security immediately. I have five hundred and one men—and one woman”—he nodded at Puella—“who will be responsible for keeping the thirty-five thousand citizens of—”

“I protest!” Miner shouted, rising to his feet.

“Mr. Miner, sit down, shut your trap, or Sergeant Queege here will place you under arrest. And for the remainder of the state of emergency, however long that lasts, you will be held in close confinement.” Miner blanched but sat back down. “As I was saying, we will work with you to keep things running smoothly in the city. Now, call up a map of your city on that screen. I want to show you where I’ve decided to set up my headquarters and where I’ll billet my men. I apologize for any inconvenience caused to the people currently occupying those facilities. You gentlemen are responsible for finding alternative accommodations for those displaced, but the Confederation will pay for any damages to their property and belongings. Come on, come on, let’s get to work!”

Colonel Raggel established joint patrols throughout the city, his men with the local security officers; he set up surveillance equipment and manned checkpoints and put guards on critical facilities. He ensured that his men were spliced into the communications net that kept all the military security forces around Sky City, the naval air station, and the spaceport in constant touch. Since there was little real crime in Sky City, he let the civilian courts continue to operate, under his jurisdiction. He seldom disagreed with their dispositions. He saw no reason to interfere with the civil authorities if they could keep drunken brawls and other misdemeanor infractions under control. His enforcement was strict but humane and, aside from the dusk-to-dawn curfew, affected very few of the citizens of Sky City.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

AC2 Jerri Wait had been on duty in the control tower at NAS George Gay since before midnight. There’d been little air traffic at the field since a flight of Raptors had returned some hours before from a short bombing mission at targets several hundred kilometers to the south of Sky City. She was almost dozing off at her console when a huge blip appeared on one screen. “Lieutenant!” She called out to Lieutenant (jg) Klinker, the control tower OIC, who’d been staring at her unobtrusively over the rim of his coffee cup as she bent over her console.

“Yeah, Jerri?” He liked the way she had gathered her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck. He also liked the way she fit into her pants.

“There’s a lot of aircraft approaching from the southwest.” She straightened up, fully awake now. “I mean a
lot
of them.”

“Don’t worry, honey, it’s probably the Eighth Air Wing’s birds. Come on, Jerri, wake up, you knew they were coming.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“They’re supposed to be joining us here at”—he glanced at his watch—“hmmmm. They’re early.” His brow furrowed. They weren’t supposed to be in until after he went off duty. “How long you been watching them?”

“Couple of minutes. Yeah, sir, I thought they were the Eighth, but, Lieutenant, they’re moving so
fast.
And there really are a
lot
of them.”

Klinker spun around slowly and opened his own screen. “Why the hell didn’t anyone tell us there’s been a change to the—goddamned typical military screwup.” He gasped when he saw the readouts. There were more blips than there were Raptors in the Eighth Wing and they were moving very
fast.
And they were moving in
two
waves. “Oh, shit! Call the ready room!” he shouted.

Julie Holcom, forty-two, had worked for the Inkydo Mining Conglomerate on Haulover for ten years. This seventh-day morning (no holidays for mining company employees on Haulover) she was walking to the Shamhat Building, the Inkydo office-residential complex for senior executives, and she was worried she’d be late. But it was such a beautiful morning she couldn’t drive herself to hurry. She was due in Mr. Miner’s office at eight o’clock sharp. She’d gotten a late start because her fiancé, Josh Hardinat, had just gotten off his shift in Mine No. 3 and she just couldn’t leave him without saying a long good-bye. She felt like whistling and there was a spring in her step that morning that wasn’t usually there as she trudged to work. She glanced at her watch. She wouldn’t be late. It was precisely 7:48.

She was startled by a sudden
popping
noise in the sky far above her. That was followed immediately by a whooshing roar as something, a hurtling black object, left her peripheral vision so fast she almost didn’t see it. The object, which could only be some type of aircraft, left in its wake a large green cloud that slowly descended. Julie smiled. Must be some kind of aerial demonstration put on by the recently arrived Confederation forces to surprise and amuse the civilians. Boy, she thought, did Mr. Miner
hate
the military! That was all right by Julie. If her boss didn’t like the military, she loved them! The green cloud began descending very fast as it neared the surface, coming down like a rainy mist. A drop plopped on her shoulder. Julie Holcom had just enough time left to emit a shriek of pain and terror before a mist of the greenish fluid settled on her, soaking her hair and clothes, melting the hair and flesh on her head, then liquefying her internal organs.

Smelt Miner and his wife, Shanna, occupied a penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Shamhat Building, as befitted the most senior executive. From their patio they had a 360-degree view of the countryside surrounding Sky City. On a clear day they could see for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Miner took his breakfast on the patio when the weather permitted. That morning the day was perfectly clear. He sat in his nightclothes, sipping his coffee and enjoying the view. Julie would be there shortly but she could wait. Shanna liked Julie. He’d let the girls gab while he finished his coffee. Yesterday he’d let Julie handle promulgating General Carano’s martial law orders while he sent screaming hot messages back to Earth via the company’s FTL drones. He’d burn the hide off that ridiculous Carano. He smiled. He liked a good fight, especially a one-sided fight.

Something on the horizon to the southwest suddenly caught his eye. Slowly he lowered his coffee cup. After a few moments the object, moving very fast, resolved into many black objects. “Goddamned flyboys,” he hissed. All day those jockeys from NAS George Gay flitted around in their toys. The approaching aircraft, he feared, were traveling faster than the speed of sound, so there’d be more of those thunderclaps as they passed over. “Goddamned adolescent tomfoolery,” he muttered. He’d sure complain to Carano about this display.

Miner suddenly stiffened and his mouth fell open in amazement. Something was seriously wrong with the picture unfolding before his eyes. There were dozens, no, hundreds of aircraft rushing at him, bright lights winking, and they seemed to be using the Shamhat Building as their focal point.

The blast that tore apart his apartment, his wife, and forty years of their marriage, hurled Smelt Miner to the floor and knocked him unconscious.

Sergeant Dowling Hamsum, gun chief of No. 3 gun in Thirty-fourth FIST’s antiaircraft platoon, knew he and the five men under him would have plenty of time to smoke and joke in their position on the north edge of NAS George Gay, where the engineers had built revetments for Thirty-fourth and Twenty-sixth FISTs’ Raptors. But Hamsum was the type of NCO who believed Marines never received enough training and on this seventh-day morning, as soon as his Bowman M3A1 mobile, independent rapid-fire-control plasma cannon had been sighted and activated, he put his men in a “relaxed alert status,” as he called it. The men were veterans, though, and knew their jobs. They’d all seen action on Ravenette and some had been on Kingdom and Diamunde before that. He’d never served with a better crew.

“This is bullshit, chief,” Corporal Jack Newman, Hamsum’s gunner, muttered as he lit a cigarillo. He offered the pack to Hamsum, who politely shook his head. “Best we can expect is a ground probe and I bet we don’t even see that,” he said, disgustedly. “Ol’ Betsy here”—he patted the M3A1 affectionately—“ain’t gonna get much action this deployment, is my bet.” It was well known that the Skinks did not have effective close-air-support capability. On Kingdom the M3s had been employed in ground support roles, at which they proved very effective, adding tremendous firepower to the FISTs’ artillery.

“You’re probably right, Jack, but one more time, I want a double-check of all systems.”

“Aw, Sarge!”

“Power module and umbilicals?”

“Firm contact, power up to max!” Corporal Renny Aldridge reported. As assistant gunner he was responsible for maintaining the Bowman’s two-hundred-ampere independent power module, or the “plug-in” function, as the gunners called it.

“Target acquisition module?”

“Horizontal visuals out to a thousand meters. I can see a kwangduk shit if he’s out there; radar, infras, all vectors and azimuths to the horizon. Vertical, all vectors, thirty thousand meters,” Corporal Newman reported.

“Good. Tracking?”

“Standstill to Mach two,” Aldridge replied. “Visual resolution, twenty/twenty.”

“Sighting?”

“Ready!” Corporal Frank Rushin, the assistant gunner replied. “All registrations to all horizons recorded and on the screens.”

“Vid recorders?”

“All recorders go,” Rushin replied. For AA gun crews, video recordings of hits in a fast-moving, target-rich environment with many batteries engaging the enemy were essential to confirm a gun’s accuracy. It was the vid record more than computerized scores that confirmed a gun’s accuracy and resolved conflicting claims with other gun crews. Each destroyed target earned a gun a white band around its muzzle and that’s how the team got its bragging rights. On Ravenette, Hamsum’s gun had earned ten white bands, the highest in the platoon but four short of “Ace” classification.

Sergeant Hamsum went down the prefiring checklist list item by item until he was sure his gun was ready to go into action. “Okay, people, stand down but keep your positions and keep an eye on those screens. We’ll rotate to chow beginning at eight hours.” His mission was to keep his gun manned and ready 24/7. In a pinch three well-trained men could fire the M3 and his men were well trained.

“Geez, Dowly,” Corporal Newman sighed. “You know the lieutenant told us we’re to monitor ground activity,
primarily.
You sure—”

“Jack, this here is an
antiaircraft
gun and as long as I’m gun chief she’ll be ready to perform in both modes, 24/7, 365. That’s what we’re paid to do when we’re in a combat zone, and that’s what we’re in right now. Remember those guys on Kingdom who didn’t give surveillance one hundred percent?”

“Um, yeah,” Newman said. The entire crew was found sprayed with acid by a Skink infiltrator. Not much was left of the men to send home.

Each Marine FIST’s squadron had its own antiaircraft gun platoon. Each platoon, commanded by a lieutenant, had a battery of three gun teams consisting of a rapid-fire M3A1 Bowman plasma gun capable of hitting any target within line of sight. The guns could be used mounted on special-purpose vehicles or in static positions, which was how Hamsum’s gun was mounted. Each gun with its ancillary equipment weighed 4,300 kilos.

The M3s could fire in bursts of ten, thirty, sixty, or one hundred “rounds,” as the bolts were called, or sometimes “shells,” harking back to the days of gunpowder weapons; or they could fire continuous bursts of one thousand rounds. Their fire control systems could be set up to operate independently or linked to a fire control center. Since the Bowmans were performing in a ground support role at NAS Gay, their fire control systems were rigged independently so the individual gunners could select targets of opportunity as they were identified. Men and vehicles move a lot slower than aircraft and are much easier to acquire. But in an antiaircraft role such as on Ravenette or in the war on Diamunde, the guns are linked to a central fire control module that is more effective in acquiring fast movers and coordinating fires of multiple weapons. In that mode, the gunners’ main responsibility is to keep the weapon firing smoothly or fixing malfunctions when they occur. But a really good gunner with excellent reflexes operating in the independent mode could, theoretically, track and shoot down an aircraft moving faster than the speed of sound.