Starfist - 14 - Double Jeopardy

by Dan Cragg

“Miss!” Sergeant Souavi shouted.

  “What?” Corporal Dornhofer twisted around to glare at the range master. “I haven’t fired. How could I miss a target that wasn’t even there?”

  “Sorry, Dorny,” Souavi replied. “Target four popped up. I guess you didn’t acquire it.”

  Dornhofer looked at Sergeant Ratliff, who nodded. “The target came up, Dorny. Gotta look sharp.”

  Dornhofer was growling to himself when Lieutenant Bass knelt by his side and leaned over to say softly into his ear, “You were watching through the sights. That limits your view. Watch over the sights until you see a target pop up. Then go to the sights and shoot the fucker.”

  Dornhofer looked up at his platoon commander, swallowed, and nodded. “Thanks, sir,” he said.

  “Ready on the firing line!” Souavi called out as soon as Bass rose and stepped back.

  Swearing at himself over his dumb mistake, Dornhofer looked over the scattergun’s sights with both eyes open, scanning side to side along the caldera’s rim, moving the aim of the weapon so it always pointed where his eyes looked.

  Movement! His eyes and the scattergun’s muzzle flicked to where he’d seen a target pop up, and his fingers closed on the firing lever. By the time his eyes and the muzzle were pointed at the target, he was looking through the sights. A slight adjustment had the target centered in the aiming box. He squeezed the trigger and the scattergun bucked gently against his shoulder as a hundred pellets flew down-range. He quickly brought the weapon back to bear on the target, reacquired his sight picture, and squeezed off another hundred-pellet burst just as the target started to drop.

  Souavi studied the display on his console, then called out, “One ding on the second shot.”

  Dornhofer rolled to look at him. “What about my first shot?”

  Souavi shook his head. “All pellets missed.”

  “Secure the firing line!” Captain Conorado called out. He strode toward Souavi; Dornhofer got up from behind his scattergun and stepped back from the firing line.

  “Can we put a spotter scope on it, see where the bursts are going?” Conorado asked the range master.

  “Not very well, sir,” Souavi answered. “The pellets are going too fast to register visually.”

  “Even along the line of sight?”

  Souavi hesitated, then said, “We can give it a try, sir.”

  “All right, try it. And while you’re at it, can we hook into the sights, to verify the sight picture?”

  Souavi looked at the firing line doubtfully. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Gunnery Sergeant Thatcher joined them. “I have an idea of how to do that,” he said, only loudly enough for Conorado and Souavi to hear.

  Conorado looked at him briefly, then said, “Do it, Gunnery Sergeant. I want to do some bench shooting, get that weapon properly zeroed. Range master, help him.” Walking away, toward the edge of the clearing, he called out, “Company, form on me!”

  In moments, Company L, minus Gunny Thatcher and Sergeant Souavi, was assembled at the side of the clearing away from the firing line.

  “At ease,” Conorado ordered. “Form a semicircle in front of me.” He waited while the first and assault platoons shuffled around and the second and third platoons bent toward him.

  “We’ve got a problem with the scatterguns,” he said when the Marines were in position. “I don’t know if it’s the way they’re engineered, if something was damaged in transit, or if it’s something else altogether. For all we know, the pellets are burning up from atmospheric friction before they reach the target. So we’re going to conduct some experiments to find exactly what is wrong. Corporal Dornhofer”—he nodded at Dornhofer—“is qualified as an Expert Blasterman. He put two hundred line-of-sight pellets downrange and only got one hit on a stationary, easily seen target. I have a hard time believing that Corporal Dornhofer’s aim is suddenly that bad.

  “When we return to the firing line, Lance Corporal Schultz will be on the scattergun.” He looked at Schultz. “Lance Corporal, I believe you’re the best shot in the company. Is that right?”

  Schultz let out a soft grunt and gave a shallow nod.

  “Such modesty,” Conorado said drily. “I believe the last time you fired for qualification you scored one point off a possible.” A possible was a perfect score on the range, a score rarely attained even by men who considered themselves the most accurate shots in all of Human Space.

  A low noise rumbled deep in Schultz’s chest—he didn’t like being reminded that he’d missed a possible, even if it was only by one shot.

  Before Conorado could go on, Gunny Thatcher called to him.

  “We’re ready, Skipper.”

  They returned to the firing line to find a scattergun set up on a stack of sandbags, braced to hold it securely in place when it was fired. A spotting scope was behind it, set where anyone looking through it would watch over the shooter’s shoulder and—with projectiles traveling a mere three or four kilometers per second—watch where the projectiles went. But whether the viewer could even detect a small swarm of tiny projectiles traveling at nearly 7,500 kilometers per second was anybody’s guess.

  Schultz spat when he saw the setup; he didn’t think he needed the bracing to hold a sight picture. He settled behind the scattergun without touching the firing lever and looked through the sights at a target that was fixed upright for the exercise. Satisfied that the weapon was aimed dead center, he looked at Sergeant Souavi and gave a shallow nod.

  “Corporal Claypoole,” Souavi said, looking at third platoon, “Schultz is your man, right?”

  Swallowing, Claypoole nodded. “That’s right, Sergeant.”

  “Good. You spot for him.”

  “Me spot for him,” Claypoole muttered. “Right.” He stepped behind Schultz and put his eye to the spotting scope.

  “All ready on the right, all ready on the left,” Souavi said in the ancient litany of the range. “All ready on the firing line. Fire when ready.”

  Schultz squeezed the lever almost before the words were out of Souavi’s mouth. A few meters away, Captain Conorado and Gunny Thatcher watched the jury-rigged display showing the scattergun’s sight picture. The lock-on didn’t waver until the slight recoil.

  “Corporal Claypoole?” Conorado called.

  “Sir?”

  “Where did his shot pattern go?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Claypoole said nervously.

  “Didn’t you see anything?”

  “I—I think I saw a blur, but it was too fast for me to be sure.”

  “Right, left, up, down? Where?”

  “High left, sir.”

  “Hits?” Conorado asked Souavi.

  “Two pellets, upper left, sir.”

  “Can that thing be adjusted to fire bursts of more than one hundred pellets?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Adjust it for maximum burst count.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Souavi went to Schultz’s firing position. Schultz moved out of the way while Souavi got an odd-shaped tool out of a pocket and made the adjustment. “Ready for a thousand-pellet burst, sir,” he said, stepping away for Schultz to resume the firing position.

  Schultz put his shoulder back into the buttstock of the scattergun and checked the sight picture. “Ready,” he said, hovering his fingers over the firing lever. He waited as Souavi went through the litany again, then fired.

  “I saw it!” Claypoole exclaimed. “It went to the right.”

  “Are you sure, Claypoole?” Thatcher demanded.

  “Well, yeah, Gunny. It was just a blur, and it disappeared fast, but I did see it!”

  “It disappeared fast? Do you mean the pellets burned out before they reached the target?”

  “Gunny,” Conorado said before Claypoole answered, “as fast as the pellets are going, they couldn’t have registered on his eyes before they reached the target.”

  Thatcher peered downrange, then nodded. “I believe you’re right, sir.”

&n
bsp; Conorado looked at Souavi.

  “Five hits, sir. Four on the right, one top center.”

  “Corporal,” Conorado said to Claypoole, “were the pellets spreading out, or did they stay together in a tight group?”

  Claypoole looked at his company commander, wondering how he was supposed to know that when he couldn’t make out the individual pellets. Then he realized how. “They spread out, sir. If they’d stayed in a tight group, the blur would have shrunk side to side, but it didn’t, it just faded out.”

  “Did you see any flashes, like the pellets burning out in the atmosphere?”

  “No, sir.” Then he wondered something for the first time: “Sir, what’s the absolute range on these things?”

  Conorado shook his head. “I’m not certain, but they should burn up from friction with the air before they leave the atmosphere.”

  “So they could hit innocent aircraft?”

  “If there were any in the pellets’ trajectory, yes they could. But we’re in a restricted flight zone; no military or civilian aircraft are allowed in line of sight of Sumpig Island without notifying us.”

  Claypoole didn’t say anything to Conorado’s assurance, but he thought that civilian aircraft might not honor the restricted flight zone. Fuck ’em if they go where they shouldn’t, and get shot down, he thought.

  While Claypoole was thinking that, Conorado did his own thinking. “I want to take a look,” he said, and got behind the spotter scope as Claypoole moved out of his way. “Range master, I want another thousand-pellet burst.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Souavi replied. He checked with Schultz to make sure the ammo box still held enough pellets, then repeated the firing line litany. Schultz fired.

  Conorado didn’t need the spotter scope to see where the clot of pellets went—a cloud of dirt and dust flew up, momentarily hiding the target; the pellets had struck the ground in a tight group thirty meters in front of the target. He checked the replay of the sight picture. Just as the other times Schultz had fired, the target was centered in the image.

  It was obvious that the trajectory of the scattergun pellets was unreliable. Was that because the weapon had been damaged in transit? Were the sights defective? Was it only this one weapon?

  “Gunny,” Conorado said to Thatcher, “I want to test every scattergun in the company. Two thousand-pellet bursts per gun. You spot, I’ll watch the sight picture. Lance Corporal Schultz, you fire the weapons.”

  It only took ten minutes for Schultz to fire two thousand-pellet bursts from each of Company L’s six scatterguns. In no case did a single weapon put both bursts of pellets in the same place, even though the sight picture for each of the weapons held tight, centered on the target.

  “Corporal Escarpo, get battalion on the horn for me. I need to speak to the F4.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Escarpo, Conorado’s communications man, radioed the battalion logistics officer, Captain Likou, and handed the UPUD Mark II to Conorado.

  “Every one of my company’s scatterguns is defective. I don’t know if it’s the sights or—”

  “I know,” Likou cut in. “I’ve been getting reports from the other companies about scatterguns that don’t shoot straight or consistently.”

  “So what happened, what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Likou said slowly. He didn’t want to say in the open at this stage that the research and development people had sent weapons to an operational unit without fully testing them, although he knew that sometimes happened. He knew about the UPUD (Universal Positionater Up-Downlink) Mark I fiasco that had very nearly cost the lives of an entire Marine company on Fiesta de Santiago. Many Marines still didn’t trust the UPUD because of that incident.

  Conorado also knew about the Fiesta de Santiago incident; then-Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass had been with the company that almost got wiped out. “So what are we going to do about it?” he asked.

  “I’m waiting for orders from Commander van Winkle to recall the battalion’s scatterguns. I think he’s waiting for orders from FIST to return the battalion to Camp Ellis.”

  “All right, we’ll stand by for further orders. In the meantime, I’m not wasting any more time or energy on the scattergun. Lima Six Actual out.” He handed the UPUD back to Escarpo and had the company form a semicircle around him again so he could explain what was going on.

  “So that’s everything I can tell you at this time,” Captain Conorado said when he finished updating his Marines. He noticed a hand lifted and waving at shoulder level. “Do you have something to say, Corporal Doyle?”

  “Y-yes, sir. Sir, has anybody th-thought of p-putting a choke on it?” Corporal Doyle asked.

  “A choke? Explain yourself, Corporal.”

  Doyle reddened. “Well, s-sir, the sc-scattergun looks like a shotgun. Sort of. A choke is something on the muzzle of a shotgun that can be adjusted to m-make the pellets spread out more, or hold a tighter p-pattern.” He swallowed. “Maybe if the p-pattern is t-tighter, the aim will b-be better.”

  Conorado looked at him speculatively for a moment before saying, “Corporal Doyle, your primary MOS is 08, administration. That’s why when you joined us it was as chief clerk. I don’t know if a ‘choke’ will work on the scattergun, but if it does—this isn’t the first time you’ve come up with an engineering solution to a problem. Why aren’t you an 04?” That was the designation for a combat engineer.

  Doyle turned an even deeper red. “I—I d-don’t know, s-sir.”

  “I’ll pass the word to the S4 and suggest that the armorer give it a try.”

  Within hours, the entire FIST was back at Camp Major Pete Ellis. All of the M247 antiaircraft man-pack scatterguns were collected and sent to the FIST armory.

  And the Marines were told to get ready for another deployment, possibly facing Skinks again. They had a week to put their affairs in order and have a final blowout.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bass sat with his head in his hands. Before him lay a flimsiplast transcript that had just been delivered: Comfort Brattle would be arriving at Mainside on the midnight shuttle from New Oslo. She was coming to collect on Bass’s promise to marry her. That promise had been made in the aftermath of the ordeal they had both endured on Kingdom. He’d made it with the full intention of honoring it, if Comfort would ever come to Thorsfinni’s World. But time and events had dulled its impact and as the years passed—what was it, four now?—Bass had moved on with his life.

  And now this bombshell, only a few days before another deployment!

  Oh, there was the small matter of his son, Charles. If only Comfort had told him about the boy when he was born or when she’d found out she was pregnant! But she hadn’t. She’d waited. Why? he wondered. He fingered the message and said aloud, “I guess now I’ll find out. The chicken’s coming back to roost.”

  Well, for any good Marine officer, his company commander was the first person to inform when things got out of control. He picked up his cover and stood. He’d see Captain Conorado, not to ask permission, not to seek advice (but he’d listen to any, if offered), but to keep his commander informed, let him know what was up and why things had come to this point. And let him know that his first priority, always, was to his fellow Marines; family came in second.

  Lewis Conorado listened silently and patiently as Lieutenant Charlie Bass explained his predicament. Owen the Woo crouched on the edge of the Captain’s desk, his bulbous eyes staring directly at Bass the whole time. It made him nervous, since Bass knew that Owen carefully evaluated everything he heard. But Bass couldn’t help smiling to himself. He winked at the creature. Maybe Owen had some advice he could use.

  At last Conorado leaned back and placed his hands behind his head. “You say she’s coming alone, left your son back on Kingdom?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Um, that’s probably a good thing. Have you told Katie about any of this?”

  “I told her I had a son back on Kingdom and had taken out an
allotment for his support but she’s a worldly girl, Skipper; she accepted that as just part of life. I never discussed Comfort with her and she never asked.”

  “Um, you gave her the ring?”

  Bass’s face reddened. “Yes, sir. But a promise is a promise—”

  “Charlie, you’ve done nothing wrong. Hell, do you think Marta was my first girl?” Marta was Conorado’s wife. “She wasn’t. So what do you plan to do about this ménage?”

  “Go straight at it, sir. Tell Katie, meet Comfort, marry her, if there’s no other way. Find out why the hell she never told me about Charles until after he was born and weaned.”

  Conorado nodded. “I don’t see any flanks here or any high ground. You gotta take this one head-on and deal with it as a monumental screw-up.” He sighed. “Well, we all screw up, Charlie. Remember that civilian contractor back on Fiesta del Fuego or wherever? The one you put in the hospital over the UPUD he tried to sell us? That was your first screw-up. Far as I know, this is your second, and if I know Charlie Bass, it’ll be your last.”

  “I’ve been to Personnel, had allotments made out, changed my will. If I don’t come back from this deployment, Comfort gets two-thirds of my unpaid pay and allowances and the money I’ve got in the bank, and Katie gets the rest. And once I’m married, there’ll be the Separation Allowance once we deploy, the Housing Allowance, and Cost of Living Allowance, so everyone’ll be taken care of. My goddamn personal possessions, such as they are, I’ll leave to my son if I don’t come back.”

  “And you leave him your name, Charlie. That’ll be worth a fortune to the lad when he gets older. Go ahead, Charlie, marry this Comfort, be a good father, as good a father as you’ve been a good Marine. Everyone in Thirty-fourth FIST knows that. Once they understand what’s happened here, all the men will support you. Don’t worry about your platoon. If you aren’t back here in the morning, Top will handle it. Look, I know how much you love Katie and what you’re giving up to do what’s right. I also know you won’t let this get in the way of your duty. I’d be concerned if you were a younger, less experienced Marine, but not you, Charlie. I’ve known you too long. I know I can count on you.”