Starfist - 14 - Double Jeopardy

by Dan Cragg

  “Secure the prisoners,” Jhomin told Sergeant Hamas and his gun squad after the dead and badly wounded had been collected. All but two of the able-bodied mercenaries were laying on their bellies in two long lines, with their arms stretched out above their heads; the lightly wounded were lined up with them. The two who weren’t facedown were busy tending to the rest of the wounded, Fuzzies included.

  Hamas and his men went along the ranks of prisoners, making each man put his hands in the small of his back. They bound their wrists together with self-adhering strips that would hold until they were cut off by something very sharp. Sergeant Kerstman and second squad covered the prisoners while they were being secured.

  Only then did Jhomin finally get on the radio to company headquarters to report what had happened.

  The thirty Marines of Kilo Company’s second platoon had suffered one dead and nine wounded, four badly enough to require evacuation to the Grandar Bay’s hospital. The sixty Sharp Edge mercenaries at Mining Camp No. 3 had forty-one men dead or severely wounded. Plasma bolts didn’t cause minor wounds.

  * * *

  As projected two days earlier, the SS Dayzee Mae reached orbit around Ishtar when the CNSS Grandar Bay was on the opposite side of the planet. But Commodore Borland and Brigadier Sturgeon had no intention of allowing a starship loaded with a couple of thousand reinforcements for the Sharp Edge forces planetside to make orbit and go about her business without intervention. An Essay loaded with the seventeen Marines of one of Thirty-fourth FIST’s composite squadron’s antiaircraft platoons, not needed for anything else on this operation, was in position to board her as soon as she reached orbit. If necessary, seventeen Marines could hold the lifeboat deck of a tramp liner against three thousand mercenaries indefinitely.

  What the Marines and navy hadn’t counted on was that the Sharp Edge reinforcements were already loaded into lifeboats and other landing craft and began launching even before the Dayzee Mae settled into orbit.

  Brigadier Sturgeon was furious. Commodore Borland admired Herb Trundle’s imaginative launching of the Sharp Edge reinforcements, and said so.

  “Come on, Ted, give the devil his due,” Borland said, and took a sip of coffee. He’d had a kilo from his personal supply of Blue Mountain beans brought planetside so that he wouldn’t have to suffer with the caff that the Marines were stuck with. “That was a brilliant maneuver, launching everything he had before he even reached orbit.”

  “We should have stopped him,” Sturgeon snapped.

  Borland nodded. “And if I’d had any inkling that Trundle was good enough a starship captain to even attempt that maneuver, I’d have found a way to intercept the Dayzee Mae before she reached orbit.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I could have altered my orbit so that the Grandar Bay was waiting for the Dayzee Mae when she arrived. My starship isn’t a fighter, but she does have weapons. A shot across her bow probably would have given Trundle second thoughts about launching his lifeboats.”

  Sturgeon grunted. “Shoulda, coulda, woulda. The most worthless words in the language.” He shook his head. “Now I have to convince Cukayla to hold his mercs back, to stand down, before a lot of people get killed.”

  “The mercs already had your Marines outnumbered, and their size just more than doubled.” He refreshed his coffee mug and checked Sturgeon’s, only to find that the Marine had hardly touched his. He moved his head side to side, not quite in a shake; such a waste of good coffee.

  Sturgeon abruptly nodded. “I’ve got one AA platoon aboard the Dayzee Mae, holding her,” he said. “Sharp Edge has three more starships in orbit. Can you put boarding parties on them?”

  A grin slowly spread across Borland’s face. “I can indeed. Sharp Edge initiated hostilities, so both Confederation and interstellar law allow me to take their starships. Get your Marines ready to head aloft, and I’ll get them on board Sharp Edge’s flotilla. Starting with the Pointy End. Imagine, an amphibious landing ship force, taking prizes! Including a Bomarc V39!” He reached across the desk to shake hands with Sturgeon. “This is the best idea I’ve heard since the Grandar Bay was released from being lost in Beam Space.’”

  “All right, Marines,” Lieutenant Brewer of the first antiaircraft platoon said, “we’re about to perform one of the oldest functions of Marines. Going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, Marines have conducted ship-to-ship boarding operations, usually against hostile forces.” He grinned at the members of his platoon. They were gathered in the passageway just outside the Grandar Bay’s well deck, ready to go in and board the Tweed Hull Breacher they would use to cut through the hull of the Pointy End, the nominal flagship of the Sharp Edge flotilla. The Marines were visible only through the open faceplates of their helmets; the rest of them were hidden in their chameleoned armored vacuum suits.

  “We may be in the squadron, but we aren’t wing wipers, we’re cannon cockers!” Brewer continued. “Cannon cockers are trigger pullers, just like the grunts. So let’s go over to that Bomarc and have some fun!”

  “And show the grunts that cannon cockers can fight with blasters, too!” Staff Sergeant del Valley roared out.

  The fifteen Marines of the antiaircraft gun teams roared back their readiness for close combat.

  Brewer led the platoon at a trot to the Tweed Hull Breacher, which was mounted on top of an Essay for the trip to the Pointy End. The lone Dragon inside the Essay was there to hold the crew of the Sharp Edge starship once the Bomarc was secured. The Marines would remain aboard the Pointy End, while the crew was returned to the Grandar Bay and locked in the brig.

  The CNSS Grandar Bay floated ten kilometers from the SS Pointy End, a brief trip for the Essay carrying the THB. During the Essay’s transit, the Grandar Bay hailed the Pointy End, demanding that the smaller starship open her hatches to receive the boarding party. The Pointy End didn’t answer the hail. The Marines in the THB laughed with eager delight when the word was passed to them that the Bomarc wasn’t going to simply open up and let them take her over.

  Two hundred meters from the Pointy End, the THB was released from the Essay. Navy crewmen used its jets to maneuver it into position against the target’s hull near the bottom end of the conical starship. In moments, the cutting jets sliced a hole in the hull. The Marines held tight for the seconds it took for the air in the hold that the THB cut into to evacuate, then Lieutenant Brewer raced inside, followed closely by the rest of his platoon.

  They were met by a single burst from a flechette rifle, which spattered harmlessly into the overhead. The half-dozen Marines who had already spread out to flank him fired their blasters toward the hatch the needles had come from. A rifle came spinning out of the hatch to skid across the hold’s deck.

  “Don’t shoot!” someone shouted from beyond the hatch. “We surrender.” A pair of open hands eased through the hatch.

  “Cease fire!” Brewer called to his Marines. Two more of the Marines, who had just reached the line forming on the platoon commander, each fired a single bolt into the hatch’s combing.

  Brewer waited a few seconds to make sure nobody else was going to fire, then called out, “Step into the open with your hands above your head.”

  A wide-eyed man in a Sharp Edge uniform edged into the hold. His hands were held open, high above his head. “Cukayla ain’t paying me enough to get killed fighting a bunch of Marines who’re going to take his hot rod no matter what I do,” he said, nervously looking around the apparently empty hold.

  “Is that so? Then why’d you shoot at us?”

  The man looked in the direction the voice had come from and licked his lips. “I didn’t shoot at you. I shot at the overhead. Hell, I didn’t want to piss off the Marines by hitting one of you. That’s why I shot high.”

  “Are you saying you just put up token resistance?” Brewer asked.

  “Yes, sir, that’s exactly what I did.”

  “How many more are aboard?”

  “There’s just four of us.”

  “Where are t
hey?”

  The man swallowed. “In the passageway, making sure you don’t kill me, before they show themselves.”

  Brewer raised his voice. “We aren’t going to kill anybody who doesn’t try to hurt us. So if you’re surrendering, toss your weapons away and come into the hold with your hands in the air.”

  Another flechette rifle skittered across the deck, and three more people entered the hold with their open hands held high above their heads. They all looked frightened, except for one who looked absolutely terrified. One was a uniformed Sharp Edge mercenary; the terrified one was a woman in a sleeveless blouse and short skirt. The third was a middle-aged man in a coverall.

  The two mercs were guards. The one in the coverall was an engineer, assigned to keep the Pointy End in trim. The woman? “A joy girl. Cukayla wanted to keep the men taking care of his baby happy,” the engineer explained. The woman’s face turned red at hearing that description of her function on the Bomarc.

  The ease with which they’d taken the Bomarc V39 was quite a letdown for the AA Marines. But they were very pleasantly distracted by the woman, the first any of them had seen since they left Thorsfinni’s World—and likely the last they’d see until they returned.

  The Marines put the two guards and the woman on the Essay for transit back to the Grandar Bay. The first antiaircraft platoon stayed on the Pointy End, along with the engineer. The engineer’s first job after the Essay left was to seal the hole the Marines had made in the hull.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The antiaircraft battery’s second platoon was picked up by the Essay with the Tweed Hull Breacher mounted on it as soon as the Essay returned to the Grandar Bay and debarked its prisoners. The Essay launched into a higher orbit to allow the Interstellar Tramps’ freighter the SS Tidal Surge to catch up with it. Like the Pointy End, the Tidal Surge ignored the Grandar Bay’s hail to open its hatches and surrender to the Marines then en route.

  The second AA platoon had also received a rah-rah speech from its commander, Ensign Marston, similar to the one Lieutenant Brewer had given first platoon, with the added proviso that they shouldn’t expect as easy a job as first platoon had in taking the Pointy End. The proviso was prophetic.

  “Go!” Ensign Marston shouted as soon as the cut panel fell inside the tween hulls of the Tidal Surge.

  “Let’s go!” Sergeant Dowling shouted as he charged into the tight space and twisted to move to his left. The other four Marines of his gun team followed, alternating right and left.

  The bosuns operating the THB’s cutter moved it forward the meter-plus to the inner hull and began cutting another hole. The hold beyond didn’t have an atmosphere but was packed bulkhead to bulkhead, deck to overhead with pallets, loaded with supplies needed to support the Sharp Edge operations planetside—needed even more now that they had close to an additional three thousand men. There were aisles every second pallet and a narrow crawl space next to the outer bulkhead, with less than a meter clearance at the top. Unfortunately for the second AA platoon, the crawl space next to the bulkhead was too narrow for a Marine in an armored vacuum suit to squeeze into, and the nearest aisle was more than two meters away from the opening cut by the THB.

  The petty officer in charge of the burner detail looked into the hold using the lamp on his vacuum suit’s helmet, and swore. He arranged his detail to manhandle the burner and got it moving into position to burn a hole where the aisle was.

  Ensign Marston fretted; every extra minute it took his platoon to enter the cargo hold was another minute the Tidal Surge’s crew and guards had to prepare for the fight to come. And vibrations he felt in the decking of the tween space told him they were probably readying an unwelcoming party in the hold. In the darkness of the tween hull space, he couldn’t even see the faceplates of his men’s helmets, much less through them to their faces, not even using his infra screen. He suspected they were as nervous as he was.

  The seconds took their time ticking off while the sailors got the burner ring into position, but the cutting went fast and soon a sheet of plate dropped into the hold, its vibrations felt by the feet of the waiting Marines.

  “Go!” Marston shouted into his comm as soon as the large disk was out of the way.

  Marines shouldered their way past the burner crew, bumping them into the bulkheads. Inside, their infras and light-gatherers allowed them to see faintly. Nothing showed up in the infrared but the plate cut from the bulkhead, and its heat signature blocked out everything else until the Marines were past it.

  Corporal Jack Newman led the charge; his gun chief Sergeant Hamsum Dowling was hot on his heels. Hot was an appropriate word to use for the first steps into the hold; the sheet of plate cut from the bulkhead was still glowing from the heat it had absorbed during the cutting. The first Marines into the hold had to move across the cut plate fast in order to prevent its heat from demagnetizing the soles of their boots, which would be disastrous if the Tidal Surge lost its artificial gravity. The heat rapidly dissipated into the vacuum and was mostly gone by the time the first gun team had passed it.

  But by then there was other heat for the Marines to be concerned about.

  As soon as the Sharp Edge mercenaries aboard the Tidal Surge realized that the starships in orbit were being boarded, they and the crew began preparing hasty ambush positions in the holds. The minute they could tell which hold the Tweed Hull Breacher would cut into, they knew where to concentrate their efforts. The need to cut a second hole through the inner hull gave the mercenaries more time to prepare their positions, designed to conceal the heat signatures of the men hidden in them. Instead of flechettes, which would smack harmlessly into the Marines’ armored vacuum suits, the mercenaries were armed with explosive-slug throwers, which could catastrophically penetrate the armor.

  Corporal Newman was the first Marine to be hit. He’d barely gotten more than five meters into the hold when a slug slammed into his chest and exploded, blasting a five-centimeter-wide hole through the armor. Tiny fragments from the explosion ripped into Newman’s chest, and the air in his suit spurted out, mixed with globules of blood and flecks of meat. He toppled backward, tripping Sergeant Dowling, knocking him down and to his right. That saved Dowling, as the slug that would have hit him in his lower left side continued and exploded on the side of a crate on the opposite side of the aisle, spewing a cloud of wrapping-material fragments and pulverized vacuum-packed foodstuffs.

  The Marines behind Newman and Dowling fired down the length of the aisle. Some of their plasma bolts went the entire length to splatter against the far bulkhead, while others skittered along crates, charring them.

  Dowling looked at where Newman was hit and where the next slug had struck the crate and realized that the mercenaries had to be above them.

  “Climb!” he shouted into his comm. Putting action to words, he slung his blaster over his shoulder, grabbed handholds on a crate above his head, and began scaling the stack of crates on the right side of the aisle. He wasn’t worried about being seen and shot by the mercenaries; even if they had infrared glasses that allowed them to see the Marines’ heat signatures, they were on top of the crates he was climbing and so probably couldn’t get a good shot at him without exposing themselves.

  Behind him, Newman’s wound wasn’t life threatening in itself, but the venting of air from his vacuum suit would kill him in minutes. His suit automatically sealed off the neck of his helmet so that he could continue to breathe, but capillaries were bursting close to the hole in his chest plate and he was starting to bleed internally.

  Corporal Renny Aldridge stopped to slap a seal on the chest of Newman’s suit, but Staff Sergeant Fred Knox, the platoon sergeant, grabbed his arm and sent him climbing the pallets with the rest of his gun team. Knox knelt to apply the seal himself, then assigned two Marines to take Newman to the tween hulls for the burner crew to move back to the THB and the Essay for return to the Grandar Bay. More explosive slugs erupted into the lower crates on the left side of the aisle, enlarging th
e cloud of pulverized material and leaving outlines of the chameleoned Marines. It also coated their armored vacuum suits, turning them into ghostlike effigies. Two more vacuum suits were hit, and the Marines in them were quickly evacuated.

  Dowling heaved himself to the top of the stack of crates, rolled away from the edge, and unslung his blaster as he did. Looking in-board, he saw a smudge of red near where he thought the slugs had come from, far less than would be given off by a body.

  “But just enough to be a reflection,” he muttered to himself. He said aloud into his comm, “First gun team, line on me.” He felt the slight vibrations that told him his three remaining men were scrabbling across the top of the crates.

  “Straight ahead, along the edge. See the glow?” he asked when the vibrations stopped. The three Marines acknowledged. “I think that’s where they are. Scoot right and we’ll flank them.”

  The four Marines began edging forward and to their right, pressed close to the tops of the crates because of the closeness of the overhead.

  Slugs suddenly tore at them, coming from their left front—the other side of the aisle. There was a groan. Somebody had been hit. Dowling looked for the source of the incoming fire and saw a man-shaped red splotch lying on top of the crates. He snapped a plasma bolt at the form, the first shot his gun team had fired since climbing to the top. He wasn’t the only one to fire, and at least one plasma bolt struck the shooter. He stopped firing. But the brief exchange had alerted the nest the Marines were approaching, and weapons were raised above its edge; wild fire came in their general direction. Dowling knew that one of his men had been hit but couldn’t take the time to see to the casualty, not when so much fire was coming at them.

  “Take them out,” Dowling ordered.