Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  “All Lima elements except third platoon, fire on bandits in the forest. Assault guns kill the armor quickly. Blaster squads, use volley fire on the infantry. Fire and move before they can get your range. Third platoon, resume fire when you are clear. Do it now.”

  Almost as one, the Marines of first and second platoon opened fire into the forest. The blaster squads used volley fire; the squad leaders selected aiming lines short of where the Coalition infantrymen were, so the plasma bolts would deflect off the ground and skitter deeper into the trees, increasing their chances of striking targets. Not all of the bolts were deflected by the ground; some ignited vegetation and started small fires. The four guns of the two platoons added their fire to that of the blaster squads, and the combined fire looked almost like a tightly woven fiery fence slicing through the trees. The three squads of second assault section began firing at the armored vehicles, and each gun killed its target within seconds of first striking it. Third platoon’s second squad, gun team, and the attached assault section reached their new positions and joined in the fire.

  But before Company L’s massed fire had time to do serious damage to the reinforced regiment in the trees, the remaining Coalition armored vehicles all began moving and plunged out of the trees—straight at third platoon.

  Captain Conorado didn’t need the UPUD display from the UAVs to see the armored assault on his right flank. “Lima three,” he snapped into the company circuit, “use everything you’ve got to stop that attack. Assault platoon, use all assets on the advancing armor. First and second platoons, shift your guns to help repel the armor—maintain blaster-squad fire into the trees.”

  In seconds, all the weapons of third platoon and the assault platoon, along with the guns of the other two platoons, were firing into the charging armored vehicles. Some of the armor stopped abruptly, dead in its tracks. Some died, but continued rolling forward from inertia. Many had to maneuver to avoid dead vehicles, yet on they came, too many for the Marines to kill them all before they closed the gap.

  “By fire teams,” Sergeant Kerr ordered as soon as he realized the guns and assault guns weren’t going to be able to stop the armored column, “concentrate your fire on the treads. Stop those fuckers before they reach us!”

  “You heard the man,” Corporal Claypoole shouted over the fire team circuit.

  “This one,” Lance Corporal Schultz growled, and fired at the treads of an approaching vehicle.

  Claypoole and Lance Corporal MacIlargie saw where he was firing and joined their fire to his. All three of the Marines fired as rapidly as they could, but the vehicle was moving too fast and the three of them couldn’t concentrate enough heat steadily on one spot to damage the treads.

  “Up!” Schultz barked, and shifted his aim to the gun mount on the front of the vehicle.

  Claypoole and MacIlargie followed Schultz’s example, and in an instant the three of them were pouring fire on the thin armor where the vehicle’s gun barrel protruded through the thicker front armor.

  “Got it!” Schultz yelled into the fire team circuit, and began firing at the gun mount on another vehicle bearing down on them.

  Claypoole and MacIlargie were a beat slow on following him, they hadn’t immediately seen what Schultz had—the metal holding the gun barrel in place weakened and gave way under the weight and jerking of the firing weapon.

  The heat of the plasma bolts that struck the faceplate also weakened the barrel so that it bent a couple of degrees off true, enough to jam fléchettes and shatter the barrel. Fragments of hot faceplate, barrel, and bits of plasma flew into the crew compartment, wounding the gunner and driver, and the vehicle slewed violently into the path of a charging mass of armor and weapons. The second vehicle slammed into the first, tipping it over. The second vehicle’s driver wasn’t able to reverse direction quickly enough, and his vehicle rolled up the side of the first at an angle. The two vehicles’ tracks hooked into each other, so when the driver of the second finally reversed the tracks, they bent and snapped; the second armored vehicle slid off and fell to its side with a bone-rattling crash!

  When the armored vehicles broke out of the trees, Corporal Dean realized that the greatest immediate danger they presented to the Marines was their cannon fire. He ordered his men to zero in on his aiming point and keep firing at it until he told them to stop. He picked a vehicle and aimed at its barrel, about halfway down from the muzzle. Dean, Lance Corporal Godenov, and PFC McGinty poured fire onto the middle of the barrel, and in seconds the barrel overheated and bent. When the gunner didn’t see the growing red spot in time and fired another burst, his fléchettes tore through the softening, bending metal and the forward half of the slagging barrel gave way. Streams of dripping metal solidified in the mouth of the remaining half of the barrel. The armored vehicle spun about and retreated back into the forest.

  Dean and his fire team turned their attention to another charging vehicle.

  Corporal Doyle had begun trembling when he first heard the orders for third platoon to attack the two companies crossing the fields. One platoon against two companies? That was severe odds, even if the platoon was Confederation Marines and the two companies were from no better than a second-rank army. There were just too many soldiers in two companies for a single platoon to take on.

  Well, third platoon had taken on the two companies and defeated them while suffering no casualties. I guess that’s the difference between Marines and a second-rank army, Doyle thought. He also conceded that the assault gun section made a major difference in favor of the Marines. But this was different: this was more than two companies of armored vehicles, and third platoon didn’t have any antiarmor weapons. Still, he was a Marine, and so were his men, and Marines are supposed to do more with less than anybody else—and do it on shorter notice. Marines were also supposed to win all their battles. Doyle had no notion of how third platoon was supposed to win this battle, not even with the assistance of the entire assault platoon and some of the guns from first and second platoons. Well, even if he didn’t know how to win this fight, Corporal Doyle was a Marine, and Marines do or d…belay that—Marines do, so even if he had no idea how, Corporal Doyle and his men were going to make their contribution to winning this battle.

  Doyle looked toward the forest as an armored vehicle emerged from the trees, the vehicle commander standing in a hatch. Doyle didn’t know whether that soldier was a brave man or simply stupid, but he did know that either way he was a dead man. He made sure of it by firing three rapid bolts. At least two hit, and the vehicle commander collapsed on top of the hatch.

  But Corporal Doyle wasn’t supposed to be searching out individual targets, he was supposed to be directing his fire team in ways that would kill the approaching armor. Now how the hell are three blaster-men without antiarmor weapons supposed to kill armored vehicles? He saw someone firing at the tracks of one of them, and realized that wasn’t going to work. Not unless…

  “Summers, Smedley,” Doyle said into his fire team circuit. “Over there.” He snapped off a shot that struck the idling wheel of a vehicle running to the side of the others. “Shoot that and keep shooting it until that thing stops.” All the while Doyle was telling his men what to do, he kept firing at the idling wheel. Smedley figured out what Doyle had in mind before his fire team leader even finished giving his orders and added his fire to Doyle’s a beat before Summers did.

  The idling wheel at the top front end of the tracks was thicker and harder than Doyle had realized, and heated more slowly. But eventually the hub gave way to the continuing assault, and smoking lubricants flowed out where the hubcap had been. After a few more turns, the idling wheel froze. The vehicle jerked when the track started to buckle, and the track broke.

  It had taken so long to fracture the idling wheel that Doyle and his men didn’t have enough time to disable another before the armored vehicles were among the Marines of third platoon. The big guns of the assault platoon and the lesser guns of first and second platoons had to cease fire
for fear of hitting their own men.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ensign Rynchus timed his dash precisely and dove to the ground in front of the strongpoint a heartbeat ahead of the returning stream of fléchettes that would have shredded him an instant later. He raised his helmet screens to show his face, looked back over his shoulder toward Lieutenant General Godalgonz, grinned broadly, and mouthed, “I always was faster than you.” He would have thrown his boss a thumbs-up, but would have had to remove a glove for the general to see it. He slipped his chameleon screen back into place and began crawling to the rear of the strongpoint. He was fairly certain the strongpoint was unoccupied, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t under observation by someone who could direct fire at him if he showed himself. Of course, if that hypothetical observer had infrared vision, nothing Rynchus did to conceal himself from view in the visual would do him a blessed bit of good.

  Occupied or not, the strongpoint had to have means of access for maintenance, and the access was most likely in the strongpoint’s rear, so that’s where Rynchus had to go if he was to disable the weapon and free Godalgonz to move out of his pinned-down position.

  He found the hatch exactly where he expected it to be; it was a plasteel panel large enough to admit a man, centered in the rear of the strongpoint. A cursory examination revealed the latch-plate protected behind a sliding panel on the right side of the hatch. Rynchus slid the panel aside and took a look inside. He didn’t like what he found: a keypad. He knew that soldiers could be lazy and the hatch might not be locked, so he tried the latch-plate. It was locked. He turned to the keypad and saw that four of the keys showed signs of wear. He pressed them in random order, then tried the latch-plate again. Still locked. Rapidly, he tried four more combinations, but the hatch remained locked. Before trying more combinations, he decided to check the hinges.

  The hatch didn’t have hinges; it had one hinge that ran the height of the hatch. The hinge was recessed, protected by an armored strip designed to slide out of the way when the hatch opened. The design of the slide was such that he couldn’t easily hold it out of the way if he attempted to break through the hinge strip. Using both his magnifier and light-gatherer screens, he went back to the keypad for a closer look. He thought that if someone used two or more fingers rather than one to open it, the keys might show different usage. They did, though the differences were subtle, and may have been a trick of the light. He watched carefully as he flexed his own fingers in a pattern that matched the keys that showed use. Each time he used his index or middle finger first, it seemed to strike the hardest. Between those two fingers, the last of the four to strike was the lightest—although his ring finger always made the lightest strike.

  Four keys made for almost ten thousand possible combinations, but knowing which keys came first and last reduced the possibilities to little more than one hundred. A hundred combinations was still too many to go through quickly, but far fewer than ten thousand. He started tapping keys.

  The twelfth combination resulted in a click from beneath the plate. Rynchus stopped tapping the keys and pressed the plate. The hatch swung aside.

  While it was very likely that none of the defenders had noticed the cover panel open, or the brief movement of the strip protecting the recessed hinge strip, nobody even glancing in the direction of the strongpoint from its rear could fail to miss seeing that the access hatch was open. Ensign Rynchus knew that time was of the essence. He had to disable the gun and move before somebody saw the open hatch and realized it had been breached.

  But Rynchus barked out a brief laugh when he looked inside the strongpoint. There wasn’t enough clear space for him to crawl all the way in and close it from inside, but everything he needed to disable it from the hatch was right at hand. The first thing he did was smack the ammunition hopper to knock it out of alignment—the gun stopped firing almost immediately. Then he used a few carefully placed bolts from his handblaster to melt strategic bits of electronics. He knew which elements to damage, because the interior of the strongpoint was almost an exact duplicate of an automatic defensive system the Confederation army had used twenty years earlier, a system on which he had trained when the Marine Corps was evaluating it for their own use.

  “Time to get out of Dodge, buckaroo,” Rynchus murmured when he finished. He drew himself out of the hatch and scooted to the side of the strongpoint before checking for covering fire from other defensive positions. When he didn’t see any, he began sprinting back to Lieutenant General Godalgonz. He didn’t make it all the way.

  The concussion wave from a massive explosion behind Rynchus slammed into him and sent him flying forward. He hit the ground hard on his shoulder, and rolled back to his feet to resume his sprint. He wasn’t as fast as he’d been before the explosion.

  “I guess some things are faster than you,” Godalgonz said when Rynchus joined him. Now that the automatic defensive system no longer had him under fire, the general was on one knee next to the debris pile he’d been hiding behind. “Are you all right? Looked like you landed pretty hard.”

  “I’ve landed harder,” Rynchus said with a grunt. He grimaced, and added, “I think maybe I broke something.” He tried to rotate his shoulder, but it hurt too much. “Something grinds in there when I move it.”

  “Then you better get yourself to the aid station.”

  “I’m not hurt badly enough to need the BAS.”

  “Ensign, I can do without my aide long enough for the surgeon to take a look at you and put a bandage on your boo-boo.”

  Rynchus shook his head. “I never should have let you talk me into taking a commission. You never used to order me around like this when I was a first sergeant.”

  “First sergeants can often get away with doing whatever they damn well please, but ensigns have to do what lieutenant generals tell them to…and I’m telling you to get some medical attention for that shoulder.”

  “So what happened to that place that it blew up?”

  “I was watching through my infra,” Godalgonz replied. “Someone fired what looked like an antipersonnel rocket at it, probably trying to get you. It set off a secondary explosion that sent you flying. Now go see the surgeon; I can take care of myself until you get back. I’ll be with either Boomer or Viper.”

  Unseen inside his helmet, Rynchus shook his head. Well, his shoulder did hurt like the blazes. “Aye aye, sir. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I get some medical attention.”

  “The surgeon,” Godalgonz said. But Rynchus was already gone, looking for a corpsman to secure his injured shoulder, or give him a painblocker.

  Lieutenant General Godalgonz looked at the display on his UPUD; at the moment it showed an overview of the battle area. The view wasn’t complete and steady, as it would have been had it shown a string-of-pearls download, but a fragmentary and jerky composite image made up of views transmitted from 17th FIST HQ Company’s three UAVs. The three unmanned aerial vehicles weren’t flying in synchronization, so there were gaps in their views, as well as jitters when they jinked and dodged to avoid antiaircraft fire. Seventeenth FIST’s Bravo Company had begun shifting position to go to the aid of Charlie Company, which was fully engaged with the regiment that attacked from the south; Alpha Company and 34th FIST’s Kilo Company had successfully flanked the defensive positions that had held Bravo in place and were rolling up the enemy’s line. But Godalgonz saw at a glance that even with Bravo’s aid, 17th FIST’s right flank was in danger of being turned. He checked on 29th FIST’s estimated time of arrival.

  “Pitbull,” Godalgonz radioed when he saw that 29th was close enough for his UPUD’s comm to reach it, “this is Killer. Over.”

  “Killer, Pitbull. Go.” Brigadier Devh answered so quickly he must have been listening for the call.

  “Can you get the feed from 17th Actual’s UAVs?”

  “Looking at it now, Killer.”

  “Divert one company to assist Charlie 17. Stand by for instructions on the deployment of your remaining forces.”


  “Aye aye, Killer.” Devh switched to his staff circuit and tersely told his chief of staff to send Echo company to the aid of Charlie 17, then reported, “Echo’s on its way.” Through the window of the hopper he rode in, he saw the hoppers carrying Echo company peel off and head on a tangent to the rest of his FIST.

  “Roger,” Godalgonz acknowledged as he switched his UPUD to pick up the composite feed from the UAVs of 34th FIST’s Headquarters Company…

  …And saw the situation there was worse than that faced by 17th FIST. Company L was fully engaged with an armored battalion that was overrunning it—not a battalion; a closer examination of the image showed that most of the vehicles between the Marines and the forest had been killed. Mike Company couldn’t move to Lima’s assistance because it was also being assaulted by a battalion or more of armored vehicles. Kilo 34 could be pulled back from assisting Alpha 17, but was too far away to reach Lima 34 in time.

  Godalgonz looked at the sky in the direction of the ocean and saw the hoppers with the rest of 29th FIST approaching their designated landing zone. Those Marines could reach Lima 34 in time to help. He called Brigadier Devh again.

  “Pitbull, Killer. Do you see 34’s situation?” Godalgonz asked.

  “That’s affirmative, Killer.”

  “Take your remaining companies to his aid. I’m putting you under his operational command. Understood?”

  “Aye aye, understood.”

  Godalgonz switched frequencies. “Viper, Killer. Pitbull is on his way, minus one company. He’s zero two out. You have operational command. Questions?”

  “Understood. No questions.” Brigadier Sturgeon looked to the east. “I see Pitbull,” he said.

  “I’m on my way. Out.” Godalgonz signed off and examined the landscape for a route to Sturgeon’s command post, one that would provide him cover from enemy fire while he was on his way. As he took his first steps, he looked toward the approaching hoppers and saw them already separated into two groups, one moving toward Mike Company, the other toward Company L.