The 18th Race: Book 02 - In All Directions

by David Sherman

  “Don’t know.”

  Martin removed a glove and bent over to feel the middle of a nest. “If they are, it’s been long enough for the bedding to drop to room temperature. If not. . .” His camouflaged shrug went mostly unseen.

  “Has anybody seen anything of interest in here,” Commiskey asked, “other than these nest-things? No hidden doors? Nothing?”

  Nobody spoke up.

  “All right then, let’s move out. We need to go through this whole complex until we find the Dusters. Time’s wasting.”

  “Mackie, you know so damn much about the Dusters,” Martin said, “third fire team has point. Lead the way.”

  “Got it,” Mackie said. “Orndoff, point.”

  Orndoff grunted, and led the way out of the apparent squadbay and turned deeper into the tunnel.

  An hour into the tunnel complex

  The tunnel had long since stopped being straight lines and ninety-degree turns, with a ceiling constantly low enough that a man had to stoop to avoid banging his head. Neither were the walls and floor as uniform as they had been for the first few hundred meters. The floors and walls of the rooms became more uneven, and showed signs of having been worked to even them out a bit. And it always went down. Sometimes the slope was barely perceptible, occasionally it was acute.

  “It looks like they cut a tunnel into an existing cave network,” Corporal Mackie observed over the squad freq.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Sergeant Martin said sardonically. “Just keep looking for bad guys.”

  There were more empty rooms, and chambers that showed signs of occupancy. There was no way the Marines could tell how recently the chambers had been occupied; perhaps their denizens had all been killed during the earlier fights. That was something everyone could hope for. It wasn’t something that many believed.

  “Got a big one here,” Mackie said when he followed PFC Orndoff into a huge, oval-shaped chamber, maybe two hundred meters deep and nearly as wide at its widest point. Its back wall sloped away from the entrance in two terraces. Very little of the chamber had been worked; a few stalagmites jutted up from rubble on the floor, which looked as though it was in the process of being cleared. Stalactites hung from overhead. The walls were drapperied with flowstone. It was more properly called a cavern.

  “Damn, I wish tunnel vision let us see colors,” Corporal Vittori said when he entered the chamber. “I’ll bet this place is gor—”

  A bullet hit him square in the chest, knocking him backward.

  “Down!” Mackie shouted at the same time as Martin. The eight Marines other than Vittori who were in the chamber dove for the floor and took cover behind stalagmites, some stubs, some still standing. They threw their rifles into their shoulders and began blasting into the depths of the cavern.

  Martin didn’t shoot, he looked for where the fire was coming from. He couldn’t see the Dusters themselves because they were too well hidden, but he could see their muzzle flashes above the upper terrace.

  “First fire team,” he shouted, his voice rising over the cacophony of echoing gunfire; the cracks of bullets zinging past, the pings of ricocheting and shattering slugs. “Upper terrace, ten o’clock high to twelve. I think there are four in that area. Second fire team, noon to two. Third fire team, some of them are below the upper terrace. Look for their muzzle flashes.”

  The Marines’ fire evened out, became more regular and more disciplined. Sparks thrown by bullets impacting stone showed where bullets were striking, hitting ever closer to the muzzle flashes of the Dusters’ weapons.

  Only once he saw that his men were hitting near where he knew the enemy had positions did Martin finally call, “Vittori, sound off!”

  “Here,” Vittori croaked.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Hurts, but—” Vittori paused while a cough blasted through his body. “—but I’ll live.” He gasped, but his body armor had stopped the bullet.

  “See to it that you do, Marine.” Martin looked to see where his men’s rounds were hitting. He didn’t need to adjust anybody’s fire.

  During the few seconds Martin took to give his men orders and check on Vittori, Lieutenant Commiskey darted into the cavern and dove for cover behind a thick stalagmite stump. He quickly assessed the situation, and ordered over the platoon freq, “Adriance, get your squad in here! Intersperse with first squad! First gun, let third squad get in, then move in to lay down covering fire, right to left. The bad guys’re mostly high.”

  “Third squad, move!” Sergeant Adriance shouted. “Keep low. Move, move, move! Spread out, spread out!”

  There was more shouting and crashing of pounding boots as second squad scrambled into the chamber, and thuds as diving bodies hit the room’s floor.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Adriance said when he hit the deck next to Mackie. “Where are they?”

  “They’re on the upper terrace. Watch my tracers, they’ll guide you.” Mackie switched his rifle to short bursts and cranked off a couple.

  “Got it,” Adriance said. “Glowen,” he shouted at his first fire team leader, who was to his right, “See where my bullets are going?”

  “That’s an affirmative,” Corporal Glowen shouted back. “First fire team, put them where I’m hitting.” He started pouring short bursts into the same area.

  Mackie snorted. “We gotta stop meeting like this, Harry,” he said between trigger pulls. “It could get dangerous.”

  Adriance’s response was drowned out by the sudden staccato of the machine gun firing over their heads.

  A few meters to Mackie’s left, Commiskey got out his infrared scope and began scanning above the terrace—he had to ignore flashes from the speeding projectiles. There! He saw a greenish glow, the heat thrown off by bodies. “Gun, look for my mark! Five meters to the right of where you’re hitting now.”

  “Ready,” Corporal Andrew Tomlin called back.

  Commiskey sighted on the infrared glow and pressed the button on the side of his scope that sent a brief pulse of laser light at the green. He saw red through the scope; the gun saw white in tunnel vision. Almost instantly, a long burst of machine gun fire blanketed the marked area. Fire from there ceased.

  Martin had followed the verbal exchanges and the shifting of fire. “Third fire team,” he said on his squad freq, “shift your fire to your right.”

  Mackie repeated the order to his men, even though they’d already heard it. “We’re shifting right,” he told Adriance.

  “Got it.” Adriance told his first fire team to also shift their aim to the right. Then he looked to see what the rest of his squad was doing.

  The fire of two squads and a machine gun reverberating and echoing off the walls of the cavern was deafening, so much so that the Marines couldn’t hear the Dusters’ return fire. The sparks and flashes of ricocheting bullets added to a sense of visual confusion, as did bits of stone chipped off the flowstone and other rocky structures.

  Suddenly, with a crash so loud it stunned the Marines in the cavern, a large section of ceiling above the rear wall collapsed onto the top terrace and avalanched down the rear wall. Dust billowed out, obscuring everything in its path. All shooting stopped.

  Mackie gasped for breath; he felt like he’d been kicked in the chest and his lungs needed to be restarted. His ears rang so loudly he didn’t think he could hear anything. He shook his head to clear it, blinked rapidly and repeatedly. He fish-mouthed, trying to squeak out sounds that might be words. His eyes finally focused on the mountain of dust and debris coming toward him, and he knew in a flash the danger the Marines were in.

  “Pull back!” he croaked into his comm. He hawked to clear his throat and managed more clarity, “Pull back!” He slapped Adriance on the shoulder and jerked a thumb back, giving him the same message.

  Adriance nodded, he was already on his comm odering his squad out of the cavern.

  Dimly, Mackie heard indistinct sounds coming over his helmet comm; he thought it was Commiskey and Martin ordering everybody
out. Looking to his flanks, he could barely make out the forms of Marines withdrawing. He scuttled to his right, then to his left to make sure his men were getting out. He was turning to exit himself when he bumped into Martin, who was checking that his squad was moving out.

  “Third fire team, on the move,” he managed to say. He used hand signals to repeat the message in case Martin’s ears were still too numb to hear him.

  Back in the tunnel, Commiskey moved third squad back the way they’d come, where it would be out of the way of the Marines coming out of the cavern. He quickly considered what to do next.

  Captain Sitter came forward to see what was happening. He thought the only viable option was a withdrawal. It was likely the tunnel would get blocked here, and he didn’t know of any way out other than the way they’d come in—or farther forward.

  “Pull back,” Commiskey ordered, both over his comm and with hand signals. The Marines reversed their order of march and began heading out.

  Corporal Vittori was the only casualty—unless loss of hearing and a few nicks and scrapes from flying rock chips counted—but was able to walk unaided.

  Rumbles and crashes of more roof collapses followed the Marines as they withdrew. A few well-placed explosive charges collapsed tunnel sections and chamber entrances behind them. Pausing only to cover the sappers as they set off the charges they’d earlier set in rooms off the tunnel, it took less time for the platoon to reach open air than it had to reach the cavern where they’d had the fight.

  Outside, the Marines gathered at a safe distance and watched dust and tiny rock chips billowing out of the tunnel, while constantly looking at their surroundings, watching for Dusters.

  Outside

  The sappers with second platoon had blown the rear entrances as soon as they felt through the rocks the fire fight in the unfinished cavern. As soon as the Marines who had gone in were all out, Sitter had the sappers blow the main entrance.

  The company stayed in place until the next day, in case any Dusters managed to get out. None did. Neither did other Dusters come to investigate. After twenty-four hours of waiting, a squadron of Eagles came to carry India Company back to its roost.

  Chapter 10

  Advance Firebase One, under construction

  The day after Alpha Company’s second platoon showed up, the firebase was even more active than when the mobile infantrymen arrived. The soldiers immediately took over all security duties, and all of the engineers of the CB company set to on the base’s construction.

  First Lieutenant Miller, nominally subordinate to Second Lieutenant Greig, simply said he was taking his platoon out for a longer range patrol than the infantrymen could go on. The Mobile Intel platoon boarded their P-43 Eagles and took off.

  Greig put two of his squads on perimeter duty.

  “Sergeant O’Connor,” he said to his third squad leader, looking beyond the wire at the landscape rather than at the sergeant, “I want you to take your squad out a klick and a half, and do a circumnavigation of the firebase. Take a GPS, a map, and a motion detector. Go out the south gate and come back the same way.”

  Staff Sergeant Albert O’Connor looked to the south gate and the three hundred meters of scorched ground from it to the surrounding forest. “I sure wish we had our Growlers,” he said. Growler, the M-117 armored vehicle used primarily by Mobile Infantry units.

  “So do I, Sergeant. But we don’t. That’s why I only want you to go a klick and a half.”

  O’Connor nodded. He didn’t like it, but he understood.

  “Go slow and easy. I don’t want you blundering into a Duster unit.”

  “You and me both, LT.”

  “Keep your eyes open for any sign of Duster activity. The Marines are still conducting mop-up operations and making kills, so we know they’re still out there.” Greig chewed on his lip for a moment. “We just don’t know where. Try to avoid contact if you do see any Dusters. But I want you to be fully armed, five hundred rounds per man, so in case you can’t avoid contact you can properly defend yourselves.”

  “Right, LT. Avoid if possible, kill the sonsabitches if we have to.” He shook his head. “I wish we had body armor.”

  Greig hung his head and didn’t answer that. Then, “Equip every man with a medkit and four liters of water. No rations, you won’t be gone that long. Be back in three and a half, four hours.

  “Run a comm check now. Run another when you reach the trees, and another at a klick and a half. Your call sign is Rover one.”

  “Wilco.” O’Connor turned away and put on his helmet. “Third squad, comm check. Sound off.” In two minutes all three of his fire team leaders responded, and he’d heard the men answering the fire team leaders call for a comm check.

  While he was doing that, Greig walked off a hundred meters. “Rover one, Two Actual. Comm check. Over.”

  “Two Actual, Rover one. I hear you five-by. Three’s comm check is successful. Over.”

  “Two Actual out.”

  The two looked at each other across the length of a football pitch, satisfied that they had communications at this distance. O’Connor headed for his platoon commander to get the extra equipment he would need for the patrol.

  “Third squad, on me,” O’Connor called when he reached his squad area, laden with ammunition and other gear.

  In a moment his nine men stood before him in a tight group. Briefly, he told them what they were going to do, and dismissed them to get their weapons. When they reassembled, he had them fill their camelbacks with four liters of water. He gave their rifles a quick check and issued each of them what they needed to get up to the required five hundred rounds.

  Satisfied, he gave the order to move out. “Sergeant Gasson, you’ve got point. South gate. Move fifty meters into the trees, stop, and set in a semicircle defense.”

  “Allen, move out,” Sergeant Richard Gasson ordered his most experienced pointman.

  Corporal Abner Allen spat to the side and headed for the south gate.

  In the forest

  Three hundred meters later, the squad moved under the trees. The ground at the edge of the forest was speckled with fast growing weeds and tiny saplings, growing in profusion now that more light was reaching the ground after the destruction of the trees in the burned area. Fifty meters in, half a dozen or more different varieties of tree were fairly close to each other and the cover was much thicker, dimming the light. Some of them grew arrow-straight with thinnish trunks, others were gnarly with thicker boles. Some lacked branches until they were close to ten meters tall, others began branching as close as a meter above the ground. At least one variety had buttress roots. The canopy gave almost total cover, nearly blanking out direct sunlight. Less undergrowth grew under the trees.

  “Hold up,” O’Connor ordered. “Positions.”

  The nine soldiers quickly moved into a semicircle and lowered themselves to the ground, facing outward with their rifles at their shoulders, ready to fight.

  O’Connor looked around, and his lips twisted in something that wasn’t quite a grimace. The forest was denser than he’d expected, and he wasn’t comfortable in all these trees—it was entirely too possible for a foe to come close without being detected. If there’d been avians flitting about, sounding their cries and singing their songs, they could present an advantage to the soldiers. They’d likely go quiet if a large group of animals, think aliens or human, began moving through. Even the insectoids made precious little noise scrambling over and through the detritus. The flying insectoids left them alone; O’Connor suspected they’d already tried to dine off the Sea Bees and decided humans weren’t to their taste.

  Well, they’d really have to pussyfoot to walk quietly—there was too much detritus cruching and crackling under foot. He’d been disappointed by how much noise his men made moving through the forest. Still, it could be worse. After all, he had the motion detector. When he swept it in a circle it didn’t show anything larger than a squirrel moving in the trees. He wondered what kind of anima
l was the Troy analog of squirrels. Or if the colonists had imported squirrels. Nonetheless, it felt spooky.

  Time for the comm check.

  “Two Actual, this is Rover one,” he said into his helmet comm. “Comm check. How do you hear me? Over.”

  It was only a few seconds before Lieutenant Greig’s voice came back. “Rover one, this is Two Actual. I hear you five by. You me? Over.”

  “Two Actual, Rover one. Five by. Over.”

  “Sitrep. Over.”

  O’Connor took a deep breath. How could he describe how the forest felt? He decided on just the basic facts. “Two Actual, Rover one. The trees are dense, less than ten meters between trunks, mostly about five meters, often closer. There’s a lot of noisy ground cover that makes silent movement difficult if not impossible. Motion detector shows nothing bigger than a mid-size rodent nearby. Over.”

  “Rover one, continue your mission. Two Actual out.”

  O’Connor kept his face blank. It didn’t sound like he’d gotten any of his misgivings across to the LT. Not that he’d made any real attempt to do so.

  “Third squad, get up. Move out, same order as before.” He checked his GPS and pointed the direction for Allen.

  Allen spat to the side and started walking. His eyes pierced every shadow, looked at every possible hiding place, checked for booby-trap triggers. The muzzle of his rifle was in constant motion, always pointing where his eyes looked.

  O’Connor called for another halt twelve hundred meters deeper into the forest and made his second comm check. He was surprised that, despite the trees between his current location and the firebase, that Greig’s voice came through as clearly as it had when he made his first check. He finished his sitrep with, “We’re going widershins.”

  After signing off, he called to the pointman. “Allen, go left.”

  Allen spat to the side and did as he was instructed.

  “Widershins?” Sergeant Gasson asked.

  O’Connor shrugged. “It’s remotely possible that the Dusters are listening to our comm and able to break our encryption. If they understand English, maybe they know that counter-clockwise means go to the left. Widershins is archaic enough that they’ll probably have no idea what it means. And, you’ll note, I didn’t say we were turning. A listener might think it’s a code name for a location.”