Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  “Let me know what’s happening, Hammer,” Kerr said as soon as the squad was formed and in motion.

  Schultz’s answering grunt conveyed “No shit.”

  In moments, the company was outside the narrow confines of Gilbert’s Corners, on a line of squad columns, and headed across fields of low-growing legumes. Soon the rumble and whir of military vehicles became audible ahead of them.

  Minutes later, Schultz spoke for the first time. “Bad guys, foot, five hundred, crossing.” Enemy infantry, five hundred meters distant, moving across the squad’s front. Schultz didn’t bother mentioning that the enemy soldiers hadn’t noticed the Marines approaching from their flank; he wasn’t one to use unnecessary words. Kerr immediately passed the word to Ensign Bass on the off chance Bass hadn’t heard Schultz’s report; Bass had and was already relaying it to Captain Conorado.

  “Company L, all elements hold in place,” Conorado ordered the company as soon as he got Bass’s report. Then, on the third platoon command circuit, “Give me some numbers and disposition.”

  Bass was examining the enemy force through his light-gatherer and magnifier screens. “Looks like two companies, moving in columns abreast. Their lead elements are already out of the forest. I hear vehicles, but don’t see any yet. They sound like they’re much deeper in the woods.”

  Conorado glanced at his UPUD, wishing that the string-of-pearls was still functioning, but he didn’t waste time on it. “Are you in a position to pin them?” he asked.

  Bass snorted. “We’re in position to do anything we want to them.”

  “Wait one.” Conorado transferred to the battalion command circuit.

  Commander van Winkle had been listening in and didn’t need to be filled in on the situation. “Have that platoon take them out,” he said. “Reinforce them with half of your assault platoon to make it go down faster. I don’t need to tell you how to deploy the rest of your company to block reinforcements or a counterattack. Now do it.”

  “Aye aye,” Conorado said, then switched back to the company command circuit and began giving orders to his platoon commanders. Then he ordered his UAV team to put their birds in the air, to recon the vehicles he could hear in the trees. He needed to know how far away they were, and how many of what types in case he had to defend against them.

  The company was in a line of squads in column, with third platoon on the right, a section of the assault platoon between it and second platoon, to third platoon’s left. So it only took a moment for the assault section to position itself with third platoon.

  Charlie Bass, using his infra screen, looked side to side at the Marines lying in the field, awaiting his command to open fire on the enemy soldiers crossing the Marine front five hundred meters distant, oblivious to the immediate and deadly danger they were in. He raised his infra and looked at the distant men and felt a fleeting sorrow that so many of them would so soon be dead. But when men go to war, men die. His job wasn’t to feel sorry for the soldiers in the sights of his Marines, but rather to make sure that more of the enemy soldiers died than of his own men; try to see to it that enough of the soldiers on the other side died quickly enough that none of his own men paid with their lives.

  Bass quickly checked with Staff Sergeant Hyakowa to make sure the squads and guns had their targets and fields of fire, then said on the platoon circuit, “You know what to do. On my mark, kill them. One. Two. Fire!”

  As one, the blasters, guns, and assault guns of third platoon and the attached assault section opened fire on the moving column of Coalition soldiers. The targets—at five hundred meters they appeared less like walking, breathing human beings than animated targets—began falling, many with holes burned through limbs, torsos, or heads, some dropping to find cover from the horrible balls and streams of plasma that sizzled past at waist height. Gut-wrenching, soul-rending screams came from men in agony from the instantly cauterized wounds bored through limbs and guts by the crackling, sizzling plasma bolts that burned through bone, flesh, and gristle; but the CRACK-sizzle was all the Marines could hear from the world outside their helmets.

  Less than ten seconds from when Charlie Bass gave the command to open fire, more than a quarter of the two-hundred-plus Coalition soldiers that third platoon shot at were dead or wounded. The rest were squeezing themselves against the ground, scraping hollows in the dirt to get even farther below the plasma bolts that streamed above them. Many of them fired wildly, paying no attention to the direction the bolts pinning them down came from. Only a few raised their heads above the vegetation to locate targets. Those few were hit if they didn’t duck back down fast enough; even when they did, fire quickly blasted through the concealing vegetation in quest for them.

  Charlie Bass saw that the enemy soldiers had gone to ground, that there were only briefly visible targets for his Marines to shoot at, and ordered a change in their firing pattern. “Third platoon,” he ordered on the platoon circuit, “on my command, volley fire, four-seven-five.” Everyone fire at a line on the ground, four hundred and seventy-five meters distant. “Three, two, one, fire!”

  The blasters and guns of third platoon stopped their individual, questing fire and sent their bolts downrange to strike the ground on a line short of where the enemy soldiers lay. The bolts hit the ground and glanced off it. Some of the bolts ricocheted high into the air, but most of them skimmed the ground, as close to the dirt as a prone man.

  “Left five, fire!” Bass ordered, and all the weapons fired again, each Marine aiming along the same line but five meters to the left of his previous shot. “Left five, fire!” Again, the aiming point shifted to the left. “Right ten, fire!” The Marines fired again, close to their original aiming points. “Right five, fire!” Once more, the plasma bolts shifted their strikes to the right.

  The two companies of Coalition soldiers had to be suffering such heavy casualties that it was only a matter of time before the survivors would have to surrender. But where were the vehicles the Marines had heard deeper in the forest?

  Sergeant Flett and Corporal MacLeash wasted no time getting their unmanned aerial vehicles aloft, even though Flett grimaced at not camouflaging them before launch. All living planets had fliers; giant insectoids, avians, reptilians, mammalian, something. The Marine UAVs could be disguised as almost any flier of the right size—and almost always were. The camouflage mimicked not only the outer appearance of the selected fliers, but aped their movements as well, and even their infrared signatures. Flett didn’t know why Company L’s UAV team hadn’t been issued camouflage kits for the raid, possibly because higher-higher didn’t think the FISTs on the raid would be on location long enough to need them. Whatever the reason, the kits hadn’t been issued. So he and MacLeash launched their UAVs without camouflage.

  The UAVs were battle cruiser gray, about half a meter nose to tail, with slightly mobile wings a few centimeters longer than their fuselages. The two UAVs lifted on command and headed toward the forest along divergent paths until they were a hundred meters apart. When they reached the trees, UAV 2, guided by MacLeash, flew a hundred meters above the canopy, high enough to look down into the trees in both visual and infrared, to see through all breaks in the overhead. Flett flew UAV 1 low over the canopy. The UAV team leader watched not only his own monitors, but those for UAV 2 as well, looking for places where UAV 1 could duck beneath the canopy to investigate more closely and then come back up. Less than a minute after launch, the two UAVs were over the forest, moving in the direction of the vehicle noise. Seen from above, the canopy was dense, but spottily broken. Flett ordered MacLeash into a search pattern to the right of the midline of the sounds and raised his own altitude by fifty meters to run a search pattern left of the center line.

  Half a kilometer in, they began to see fleeting images of camouflaged vehicles moving toward the fields. Flett sent MacLeash to orbit his dive area, then dipped below the canopy. UAV 1 had to go lower than Flett anticipated; seen from the top, the canopy looked like it spread horizontally with plen
ty of air between the leaves and the ground. But that wasn’t the case below; the foliage was thick and bushy halfway to the ground, so Flett had to drop his UAV down to less than ten-meters’ altitude to see more than directly below the airborne vehicle.

  And had to dart right back up bare seconds later when fire from multiple crew-served weapons began to converge on the UAV. Flett had to maneuver the UAV violently to avoid crashing into branches, and to keep from being hit by the streams of fléchettes that pursued it.

  UAV 1 might have been below the canopy only seconds, but it was long enough for the bird to scan an arc of almost 120 degrees of the land under the trees in visible light and transmit its findings. Flett made sure the data stream was saved as he climbed to five hundred meters and ordered MacLeash to do the same. As soon as the two UAVs were at that altitude and circling with their infrared detectors trained on the forest below, Flett transmitted his brief view of what was on the forest floor to Captain Conorado. He took a few seconds to scan the images himself, then went through it again in slo-mo, comparing it with what he saw in his and MacLeash’s infrared views. What he found made him swear softly: more than a hundred vehicles were heading toward Company L’s position. Half of them were troop-carrying lorries. The other half were armored combat vehicles. The infrared views from the orbiting UAVs showed even more vehicles behind them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Captain Conorado glanced at the brief visual UAV 1 had acquired under the canopy, and at the infrared feeds from the orbiting UAVs, juddering as the UAVs maneuvered to avoid the streams of fléchettes that speared out of the canopy. The armored vehicles he saw were smaller than the Teufelpanzers 34th FIST had faced on Diamunde, and had no main gun turrets. Instead, their fronts sloped sharply backward to a flat top; their sides also sloped, though less sharply. Three weapons poked out of the front glasis: a small-bore cannon and two fléchette guns, all on flexible mounts that allowed them a great range of fire. Another fléchette gun was gimbal-mounted on the top; most of the vehicles had a soldier standing in a hatch on top, manning the gimbal-mounted fléchette guns. Conorado almost instantaneously saw the implications of the display.

  “Lima One, Lima Two, this is Lima Six Actual,” he said into the company command circuit. “Look alive. Bad guys, six hundred meters into the trees. Lima Three, the bad guys are headed toward your flank, shift squads as necessary to repel. All Lima Actuals, patch into UAV feed.” Then he reported the vehicular movement to battalion headquarters.

  “It looks like you’ve done everything you can to prepare with what you’ve got,” Commander van Winkle said when he got Conorado’s report. “If I decide you need it, I’ll try to divert a platoon from either Kilo or Mike to reinforce you. In the meanwhile, I’ll contact FIST and request air support.” He didn’t mention that he wished the three FISTs had brought along their artillery batteries and Dragons. But then, nobody had expected the amount of force the Coalition was bringing against the Marine raid-in-force. What he did say was, “The prisoners are being boarded on hoppers for transit to the landing beach. As soon as the hoppers return, we’ll be able to begin withdrawal.” He signed off.

  Commander van Winkle hadn’t had to mention the lack of artillery or Dragons to Captain Conorado; the Company L commander was fully aware of the lack, and the sound reason for leaving the heavy equipment behind. The raid was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, and artillery—even towed by the Dragons—would have slowed things down. Conorado also knew that Kilo Company was helping 17th FIST, and thought Mike Company was fully involved with evacuating the captured members of the Coalition government and other prisoners. So, unless some of the Raptors of the FISTs’ air squadrons could be diverted from their current operations, Company L was on its own against the rapidly approaching vehicles and the infantry half of them carried. He wished he knew what kind of armor the fighting vehicles had; his company didn’t have any armor-killer weapons. If the armor wasn’t too heavy, the guns of the company’s assault platoon, even the guns of the blaster platoons, should be able to kill them. If the armor was light enough, the blasters could do the job—not quickly and cleanly, but they’d kill the beasts nonetheless.

  Lance Corporal Schultz listened intently on the platoon circuit when Ensign Charlie Bass gave orders for the platoon to redeploy to meet the new threat. Schultz didn’t bother to nod or give any other sign that he agreed with Bass’s repositioning of the squads and the attached assault gun section; he knew Bass would shift second squad to meet the threat—just as he knew that Sergeant Kerr would arrange second squad so that he, Schultz, would be on the end of the squad’s line. As far as Schultz was concerned, that was the natural order of things—only a fool would think otherwise, and Charlie Bass wasn’t a fool.

  First squad and one gun team remained in place to make sure the Coalition soldiers that third platoon had pinned down stayed pinned during the coming action. The other gun team and the entire assault-gun section shifted to face the threat from the forest along with second squad. The threat wasn’t long in coming.

  The forest facing third platoon suddenly erupted with massed cannon, fléchette streams, and small-arms fire all aimed in the platoon’s direction. Charlie Bass hunkered as low as he could to stay below the incoming fire, and examined the download from the circling UAVs displayed on his UPUD. The infrared images weren’t smooth, as the UAVs were still jinking to evade the sporadic fire aimed at them, but they were clear enough to show the Coalition vehicles forming two lines inside the forest, infantry interspersed among them. The pattern of movement along the second line told him those were the troop-carrier lorries, unloading troops for deployment into assault formations. That left the front row as the armored vehicles.

  The pattern of fire coming at the Marines told Bass that the enemy knew approximately where third platoon was, but not exactly, which was why none of the Marines had been hit yet. Still, with the amount of fire coming their way, casualties were going to happen—and sooner rather than later.

  “Kerr, Kelly, DaCruz,” Bass said on the platoon circuit, “stand by for a HUD transmission.” He pressed the appropriate code into his UPUD and transmitted the current UPUD image to the comps of the squad leader, the gun squad leader, and the assault section leader; three adjacent vehicles in the front row were marked. “Can you see where they are?”

  The three leaders looked at the image on their Heads-Up Displays and correlated them with what they saw of the fire coming from the forest.

  “I’ve got mark three,” Kerr reported. He couldn’t actually see the vehicle, it was too far back under the trees, but his infra screen showed its location.

  “I see mark two,” Sergeant Kelly said. He also used his infra to locate his target.

  Staff Sergeant DaCruz, the assault section leader, was the last to reply. “I’ve got all three spotted,” he said. Again, the infra screen showed the precise location of the targets.

  “Second squad,” Bass ordered, “kill target three. Guns, kill target two. Assault, kill target one, then shift fire as needed to assist guns and second squad. Questions?”

  All three leaders understood their orders.

  Kerr said into his squad circuit, “Second squad, on my mark, concentrated fire on my spot. Use your infras.” He sighted his blaster on the infra glow of target three and pressed its firing lever. Before his bolt had time to reach the enemy vehicle, nine more bolts were on their way. “Fire,” Kerr whispered to himself as he squeezed the firing lever again. “Fire, fire, fire.” To his flanks, the nine Marines under his command were doing the same, sending hundreds of plasma bolts downrange at their designated target.

  The target vehicle didn’t cease its firing, but within seconds after the deluge commenced it began to move in an attempt to get out of the concentrated fire. But the Marines were looking at it through their infras and saw it move; they moved their aiming points to keep hitting the vehicle.

  At the same time Kerr gave second squad his orders, Kelly told Corporal Kindrachuck, “Watch m
y spot, then kill that bastard.” He aimed his blaster at the vehicle he saw through his infra and fired. First gun team, with Lance Corporal Tischler on the trigger, sent a lengthy stream of plasma bolts at the armored vehicle Kelly had marked. The target’s cannon stopped firing almost immediately, but it wasn’t dead; it went into reverse and tried to run from the gun’s fire.

  DaCruz gave his orders and sent his spotting round at target one. A second later, all three assault guns under his command struck the armored vehicle with plasma streams, each much heavier than the stream from the gun of third platoon’s gun team. The target bucked and split at its seams from internal explosions. Satisfied that his initial target was killed, DaCruz shifted his attention to the other two targets. “First squad,” he ordered, “add your fire to the gun team’s fire. Second and third squads, add your fire to the blaster squads’.”

  The three assault squad leaders didn’t reply with words; they saw where the gun and the blasters were firing and shifted their aim to assist. In seconds, all three targets Charlie Bass had designated were killed, and there was a gap in the line of enemy armor.

  But the Coalition officers and sergeants had seen the Marine fire and began adjusting the fire of their own men, bringing them to bear on the Marines’ locations. Bass wasted no time ordering his men to change position, and the weapons of the Marines of third platoon and the attached assault section fell silent while they moved out of what was rapidly turning into a killing ground.

  Captain Conorado listened in on third platoon’s orders, and saw the results of the fire on his UPUD. Good, he thought, the assault guns can kill the armor. As soon as Charlie Bass’s men stopped firing and began to move away from the incoming fire, he got on the company circuit.