Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  When the first bolt went off, Claypoole shouted, “Down to the right!” echoing the squad leaders all along the company column.

  Schultz was on the ground and firing before the last of Claypoole’s words were out.

  “Second squad,” Sergeant Kerr ordered into the squad circuit, “volley fire. Five meters below the top. Fire!”

  The ten blasters of second squad went off almost simultaneously, making a ragged crack-sizzle. The bolts didn’t hit in a straight line, but were closer when Kerr shouted “Fire!” the second time. The bolts hit the ground five meters below the top of the rise and broke apart to fan out across the top of the rise. Screams came faintly to the Marines as the spattering bits of starstuff from their blasters found men scrambling to the top of the rise to fire down on the Marines. Kerr ordered another volley, then ordered, “Move left!” The Marines of second squad rolled three or four meters to their left and tried to find faint ripples in the ground to give them some cover from the tiny darts buzzing their way. The Marines had to move; there was no mistaking exactly where blaster fire came from. Anybody who saw the light trail of a bolt could return fire to its point of origin and hit the shooter.

  All along the line, other squad leaders also had their men move. In many cases, fléchettes or fire from assault guns plunged into the ground a Marine had just vacated. The assault guns had a harder time moving; they were crew-served weapons mounted on tripods. Two Marines had to pick up the platoon-level guns to move them; the bigger guns of the assault platoon had to be dismounted from their tripods before they could be moved. The guns fired long bursts, spraying a wide swath of the rise just before they moved. Then they had to change overheated barrels before they could resume firing.

  Here and there along the line, a Marine screamed and a squad’s fire slackened slightly as fléchettes found their marks. But the fire from the top of the rise slackened more—the disciplined fire from the Marines sent many of the Coalition soldiers back down behind the top where they couldn’t return fire, and the spreading fans of the plasma bolts hitting just in front of the top hit those who dared rise high enough to fire down on the Marines.

  “On my flank,” Schultz growled into the squad circuit.

  Kerr poked his head up high enough to see over the grass and shrubs. “Claypoole, move your people,” he ordered—more than a platoon of Coalition soldiers were maneuvering from the far end of the ambush line toward the end of the Marine line.

  “Oh, shit,” Claypoole murmured when he looked to his left and saw the soldiers, now only a hundred meters away. “Ymenez, let’s move it!” He scuttled to the left of Schultz, who had turned to face the new threat. A glance to his own left told him Lance Corporal Ymenez was with him.

  Kerr reported the situation to the platoon command group, then ordered Corporal Chan to move his fire team to the left of second fire team.

  Ensign Bass reported the situation to Captain Conorado and made a suggestion, which the captain approved. Bass radioed Kerr. “Tim, move your entire squad into a blocking position and stop the flanking element.”

  “Will do, boss,” Kerr replied, then moved his third fire team onto line with the rest of the squad.

  At the back end of the ambush, where the first bolts had been fired, Staff Sergeant Chway requested permission to move his squad and gun forward, to get closer to the soldiers he was engaged with. Conorado checked his situation map, and ordered Ensign Molina to take the rest of his platoon to join with the Bravo element and begin rolling up that flank of the Coalition line. Little fire was coming now from the first five hundred meters of the ambushing battalion, so he ordered first platoon’s Ensign Antoni to move one of his squads so it could bring fire down the length of the rise.

  When all of second squad was on line, Kerr ordered his men to pick individual targets and take them out. A few of the advancing soldiers dropped, obviously hit, and the rest of them went down, taking advantage of the concealment of the grasses and shrubs.

  “Kneeling position, Marines,” Kerr ordered. “I’ll make a mark, then volley fire.” Kneeling, the Marines could see over the grass. Kerr aimed his blaster where he thought the bolt would strike about twenty meters in front of the hidden enemy soldiers, and said, “On my mark, fire!”

  Ten plasma bolts flashed out from the short line of Marines and struck in a line, burning swaths through the ground cover. Manic, undisciplined fléchette fire came back from the enemy, but all the darts missed.

  “Fire!” Kerr commanded, and ten more bolts flashed out, burning new tracks through the grass. “Fire!” Again and again, until an area of ground the width of a platoon was bare and seared, beginning seventy-five meters away and extending nearly forty meters deep. Some soldiers lay writhing on that ground, in agony from their wounds. Others lay motionless in death. The remainder of the flanking element was running away.

  Before Kerr could decide whether to pursue by fire, or turn the squad back to fight the soldiers on the rise, Ymenez yelped and fell over. “Back on line,” Kerr ordered. “Kill that son of a bitch!”

  “Already got him,” Schultz growled. “Get his friends.” In seconds, second squad was back on line, firing volleys at the rise.

  A cheer from his right drew Kerr’s attention. He looked and his infra screen showed second platoon advancing at a trot along the top of the rise, and most of first squad racing across the prairie at an angle to join up with first platoon. The enemy was on the run. The Marines had walked into an ambush and turned it back on the enemy. The battalion that had intended to hit Company L with a death blow instead joined in what was becoming a general rout.

  Lance Corporal Ymenez wasn’t badly injured; a single fléchette had torn a gouge along his shoulder. Doc Hough slathered the gouge with antiseptic and slapped some synthskin on it, and Ymenez continued in the hunt for stragglers.

  Hammer Schultz’s pains were long forgotten.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Doctor—now Colonel—Ezekiel Vance stood up wearily as General Lyons entered his tiny cubicle at the entrance to the long tunnel that housed the 24th Base Hospital facility. “Zeke, how you doin’?” Lyons asked, placing his hand on the doctor’s shoulder.

  “Shot at and missed, shit at and hit, Davis.” Vance smiled. “How’s Varina?” He meant the general’s wife. “We haven’t had a chance to talk much since…” He almost said since Tommy, General Lyons’s son, had died of the psittacine tuberculosis.

  “Since Tommy died,” Lyons finished the sentence for him. “I can’t let memories of Tommy worry me now, Zeke, not with all these men of mine…” He gestured helplessly at the long rows of cots along the walls, each with a seriously wounded or dying soldier lying on it. “I thought I’d come down and talk to some of them. Okay with you, Doctor?” Lyons had frequently visited the hospital when it was situated back at Ashburtonville but that marked his first visit since it had relocated to the Cumbers.

  “Talk’s about all I got for most of these boys, General.”

  Years before the war, the little town of Austen had prospered from the salt mines that had been burrowed into the heart of the Cumber foothills. Getting the tunnels ready for the Coalition’s forces had been a fairly easy job for Lyons’s engineers. They made an ideal fortification, so deep in the rock they were virtually immune to attack. For the most part, the engineers had only to restore the power and ventilation systems left behind when the mines shut down, but the job was done in such haste that often one or the other system failed. Then the long tunnels and chambers might be plunged temporarily into darkness or the air would gradually grow foul and the temperature would rise uncomfortably with all the men crammed into them. Disposal of waste was also a big problem, and each day it became worse.

  But nowhere in the mines did it smell worse than in the hospital tunnel. There the smell of blood, feces, vomit, and dead flesh hung over the place like a pall. The doctors, nurses, and corpsmen became inured to the odor, but to visitors it was like running into a wall. Soldiers in nearby tunnels and
chambers were also affected by the smell but they endured it well enough because, after all, they were safe and not themselves in the hospital. And besides, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the war would be over.

  A makeshift morgue had been set up in a huge chamber located in the far reaches of the mine, but there was no refrigeration and it was rapidly filling up with corpses.

  “General, we don’t have anything to treat these boys with. I don’t even have a working stasis unit, can you believe that? And what I need are dozens of the goddamned things. The medical supply depot where we stored them is in enemy hands now. Some asshole didn’t get the order to evacuate in time.” He shook his head. “That damned ten percent that never gets the word. Our casualties increased tenfold when we got hit coming out here, and what supplies we had were used up mighty quick. Half the other medical units in this army never made it here or are still out there somewhere. This”—he gestured at the cots—“is all this army has left. Goddamn, Davis, can’t you arrange a truce to get some of these men out of here?” Dr. Vance implored Lyons.

  “I’m going to do better than that, Doctor,” Lyons answered, but he said nothing further. He didn’t have to.

  Vance sighed, smiled, and straightened his shoulders as if a great burden had been lifted from them. He knew what the general meant. “If there is a God,” he whispered, “and he cares about us and can do anything to help us, then thank God. How soon?”

  Lyons glanced around, took a breath, coughed, and said, “Not soon enough for some of these guys, I’m afraid. But take me to see some of your more severely injured men, will you?”

  They stopped at a cot where a man lay swathed in dressings. “That lad’s under heavy sedation,” the chief nurse told Lyons. “He’s got full-thickness injuries to thirty percent of his body.”

  “That means third-degree burns, General,” Dr. Vance added. “In some spots the fire burned all the way into the poor man’s muscle tissue, what some call fourth-degree burns. They were so bad on his left leg, his inboard leg, he was sitting in the passenger’s side of a vehicle, we had to take it off. Burns as bad as this guy’s got heal more slowly than second-degree burns, they’re more difficult to treat, and they’re more likely to result in complications. Infection’s a killer in these cases and down here”—he grimaced—“I’m surprised we’re not all down with something.”

  “The seriousness of burn injuries depends on how deep they go, General,” the nurse added. “And how much of the body’s surface has been burned. This patient’s got first-and second-degree burns also, but if we had the technology we could treat those successfully in a matter of hours.”

  General Davis regarded the nurse, a Lieutenant Colonel probably in her mid-sixties. Her face was lined with weariness and her uniform soiled. From somewhere nearby a man screamed so loudly it penetrated the overlying hubbub of cries, curses, shouts, and conversation that never stopped in the hospital tunnel. The nurse snapped her head and half turned in the direction of the scream, but another nurse and a corpsman rushed to the soldier’s side.

  “What’s your name again, Colonel? Excuse me for forgetting, my mind is elsewhere, I suppose.”

  “Ginny Guks, General. That’s okay. We survive down here by focusing our minds elsewhere when we can.” She smiled weakly.

  “Ginny, is there anything you can do for this man?” He reached for the chart hanging at the foot of the cot and read the man’s name. Sergeant Wellford Brack.

  “If we had proper facilities we could put him back together again. It’d take a while but we could do it,” Dr. Vance answered for her. “For right now we’re using old-fashioned methods just to keep him alive—silicon and collagen dressings, thymus oil to retard the spread of nitrous oxide.”

  “Nitrous oxide is produced by the body in larger amounts than normal following burn injuries,” Colonel Guks explained. “It reduces the supply of blood and oxygen to the wounded area. Thymus oil is an ancient remedy for burns. It has antioxidant and antiseptic properties that help.”

  “We’re out of synthskin grafts and he doesn’t have enough skin of his own for the grafts we’d need to repair the burned areas.” Dr. Vance shrugged. “We’re also using polychromatic light-emitting diodes to stimulate the flow of blood. That’s primitive stuff too, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Suddenly Brack stirred on his cot. “Shit, he’s coming to. Medic!” Dr. Vance gestured to a corpsman nearby. “Put this man back under again!”

  “Unnnn,” Brack moaned. Then he opened his eyes. “I ain’t dead yet, goddammit, an’ doan tell me I am!” he shouted. “Anyone sez I am, he can kiss my ass!” The medic administered a sedative and Brack fell back on his cot, unconscious.

  Dr. Vance grinned and nodded. “General, I think that’s one patient who just might make it. Once these lads give up hope they’re gone, but those who still have spirit, I think they’ll make it despite what we’re doing to kill them.”

  “Aw, Zeke, Ginny, you’re doing as much as anybody can under these circumstances. Come on, let’s see some of the other men.” General Lyons saluted Brack before he left his bedside.

  Suddenly the lights went out, plunging the hospital into total darkness. “Who forgot to pay the fucking light bill?” someone shouted. A chorus of laughs echoed up and down the corridor. Men who had nothing to laugh about were laughing!

  “Looks like someone around here has a lot of that spirit you just mentioned, Doctor,” Lyons said with a grin. The emergency lights flashed on; weak, but generating enough illumination to see by.

  General Lyons walked up and down the long corridor, pausing to talk to patients who were conscious, asking questions about those who weren’t. Dr. Vance observed his old friend closely. The more Lyons talked to the men the paler and more haggard he seemed to grow, but he also noticed the effect their commander’s visit was having on the wounded. It was as if Lyons was transmitting his own energy to them at a great cost to himself. Men sat up or tried to when they recognized who he was. Others called out to him from their beds: “Have those bastards surrendered yet, Gen’ral?” “Kin I have a three-day pass when I git outta here, sir?” “Shit, Gen’ral, I don’t need two legs to kick ass!”

  The lights came back on as they neared a side tunnel. “What’s in there, Zeke?”

  Dr. Vance and Colonel Guks exchanged a nervous glance. “That’s our surgery, sir,” Guks responded.

  “Let’s take a look.” Lyons started down the side tunnel, Dr. Vance and head nurse Guks close behind him.

  “Sir, maybe we shouldn’t disturb the surgeons.”

  “I won’t.”

  The tunnel widened into a good-size circular chamber. Operating tables, at least a dozen of them, were arranged in a circle around the walls. Each was occupied while teams of surgeons plied their bloody work. One man had been hit by numerous fragments, one of which apparently had severed his left leg above the knee. He lay conscious on the table while doctors worked on his wounds. A medic held an oxygen mask over his face, which the wounded soldier was trying unsuccessfully to rip away. A nurse, her hands red with blood, cut the few tendons that were still holding the man’s leg on, pulled the leg to the foot of the table, and covered both legs with a sheet. A medic lifted the man’s torso so a surgeon could examine a wound in his back. The wound was deep and dark and ugly, and extended from just behind his left shoulder down his back where it disappeared somewhere above his pelvis, but it had stopped bleeding.

  The floor was covered with bloody dressings, body parts, and dropped instruments. Men were heaved off the tables onto gurneys when the surgeons finished, but before the blood on one table could be wiped away, another casualty was hefted up onto it and the doctors began their work all over again.

  “There’s been an attack somewhere; that’s why all these men are being brought in here,” Dr. Vance commented. “It’s like that. There’s a steady stream of wounded, sick, and injured that we can normally handle, but when an attack hits, they flood in on us. It was b
ad enough back at Ashburtonville when we had all our equipment and supplies, but now, hell, we’ve lost track. I don’t even know if anyone’s bothering to fill out morbidity reports anymore. I don’t even know what happened to our admissions and dispositions people. They left Ashburtonville after we did, but I guess they didn’t make it. Neither did some of our clinicians, like epidemiology.” He laughed bitterly. “Not that anyone’s worried now about insect vectors and water purification.”

  “I’ve seen enough,” Lyons muttered. “We’re only in the way here.”

  Back at Dr. Vance’s “office,” a partition set up in a corner across from the chief nurse’s station, Lieutenant Colonel Guks excused herself to return to her duty and the two old friends sat down. Dr. Vance lighted a Capricorn and sucked the bitter smoke deep into his lungs. He exhaled loudly. “Smoking these things is a bit of a dirty habit and they foul the air, Davis, but they sure help calm the nerves down here.”

  “Normally I’d warn you about cancer, Doctor, but this is a war zone, and we could all be dead in five minutes.”

  “Davis, are you going to end this misery?”

  “Yes. They’ve got a new man over there now, Cazombi or something like that. I understand he’s a fair man. He’s sure cleaned my clock.” Lyons smiled ruefully.

  “You did what you could. You did what you had to do, Davis.”

  “What I should have done, Zeke, is I should have arrested that whole bunch before this got started! What I should do now is bring every one of those goddamned politicians down here to visit these boys, see what their ‘secession movement’ has cost us in terms of lives.”

  “Preston Summers was here this morning. He’s the only one of those people who’s ever come down here, Davis. He went away looking like an old man.”