Starfist - 14 - Double Jeopardy

by Dan Cragg

  He wondered if he could use the same tactic here. But here the Fuzzies were attacking across dirt, studded with low-lying vegetation, not bare limestone. Could concentrated blaster fire make the dirt run like lava?

  He might have to bet his life—and the lives of his Marines—on it.

  Then second squad burst through the perimeter. Staff Sergeant Hyakowa had them dump the flechette rifles they carried, and hustled them into line on the trenches and bunkers. Even before they were all in place, someone called out, “Corpsman up!” Doc Hough grabbed his med kit and dashed to tend to the wounded Marine.

  “Volley fire, four hundred!” Bass shouted. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Holes appeared in the mass of Fuzzies, but there were too many of them for the thin fire from the Marines to make serious numbers of casualties.

  “Put your bolts into the dirt in front of them,” Bass yelled. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  The bolts hit the dirt and brush in a staggered line, skittering forward along the ground, snagging on bushes and igniting them, splitting into multiple bits of star stuff, bouncing high and into or over the rear ranks of Fuzzies. More of the aliens fell, but still they came on, their excited chittering coming clear through the air, along with more and more flechette needles, and bullets from single-shot rifles.

  “Kelly, see if you can get a fire line going. Wang, take over running the volleying.”

  Bass crawled to Kelly while the gun squad leader was directing his guns to put their fire into bushes in front of the charging Fuzzies, to see if they’d ignite.

  Hyakowa took up the rhythmic cry of “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  “Listen, Hound,” Bass said when he reached Kelly, “do you think concentrated fire can melt the dirt here? Turn it into something like lava?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly answered, watching his guns’ fire slowly igniting bushes. “The dirt’s got a head start, as hot as it is here. But those bushes don’t want to burn easily, so maybe not.”

  Bass looked at the Fuzzies again. They were 350 meters away and coming fast. It was too late to try to melt the ground in front of them. “Pour your fire into the mass; kill enough of them that we can beat them man-to-man when they breach our perimeter.”

  “Right,” Kelly said. He gulped. When, Bass had said, not if. Bass wouldn’t say when unless he thought the situation was really dire.

  Bass got up and ran doubled over to the rear of the perimeter, where Fassbender barely had his men under control, so he didn’t see the Fuzzies drop to their bellies and begin to crawl toward the Marines’ perimeter, firing as they advanced.

  “Captain, move your people forward and arm them,” Bass said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Fassbender said, jumping to his feet. “You heard the man,” he shouted at his company. “On your feet and get your weapons. We have a battle to win!”

  Most of the mercenaries dashed to where their flechette rifles lay. Nobody tried to locate his own; they just grabbed the first they came to and began blasting away at the Fuzzies. But there weren’t enough weapons to go around.

  Fassbender looked at the score of men who didn’t obey his order. “Cowards!” he snarled. “If you don’t fight, you don’t have a chance, and you’ll just die right where you are.” He turned to the fight and looked for a rifle so he could join in.

  “We weren’t able to get all of your weapons,” Bass told him. “See those men?” He pointed at a group of unarmed Sharp Edge troops, huddled behind the firing line. “Organize them into stretcher teams. If any of your people get hit, you can use your stretcher bearers as replacements on the line.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fassbender said, and shouted at his unarmed men to join him. About then, a few of the men he’d called cowards dashed toward the weapons and joined their captain and the other unarmed mercenaries.

  The Fuzzies didn’t crawl well; crawling was a submissive, awkward movement, made by an inferior before a superior. Their shoulders hunched, forcing their arms forward, and their legs turned outward at the hip. They pushed their flechette rifles ahead of themselves and fired randomly. Many of their needles went high; others spent themselves in the dirt or the stems of bushes before reaching the perimeter. But enough got through to force the defenders to stay down.

  The mercenaries fired equally randomly into the brush, unable to see exactly where the Fuzzies were, except when one had to cross a patch of bare ground. All they had to go on to locate the attackers was the Fuzzies’ constant chittering, and the chittering came from too many directions and was too muffled for them to get an accurate fix on any one Fuzzy. Hardly more than a hundred flechette rifles firing into the brush that hid hundreds of Fuzzies weren’t enough to stop the advance.

  The Marines hardly fared better with their fire. They didn’t see the Fuzzies any clearer than the Sharp Edge troops did. Their main advantage was that they were trying to fire into the dirt in front of the advance, trying to skitter the plasma bolts along the ground, trying to fragment the bolts so that bits of plasma would spread out, covering more ground per shot. But many bolts and fragments ricocheted high, and some stuck in the bushes and smoldered, igniting small fires that didn’t spread. And there were fewer than thirty Marines throwing plasma at the hundreds of Fuzzies.

  “Medic, over here!” came the call from the mercenaries, again and again, “Medic, medic!” Along with occasional cries of “Corpsman up!” from the Marines.

  It was a full minute before anybody noticed that the chittering and fire from the Fuzzies had stopped.

  “Cease fire!” Lieutenant Bass shouted.

  “Cease fire!” the squad leaders repeated.

  “Cease fire!” the fire team leaders echoed.

  “Cease fire!” Captain Fassbender yelled, and his lieutenants and sergeants shouted in turn.

  “I said stop shooting, goddammit!” Fassbender roared when some of the mercenaries kept firing.

  The fire from Camp Godenov slowed and stopped.

  “Did we get them all?” one of the mercenaries shouted.

  “No,” Bass said softly. Then loud enough for everybody to hear, he said, “No, we didn’t get them all. They’re still out there, waiting for us to make a mistake. Everybody, maintain your positions. Squad leaders report.”

  The reports filtered in. None of the Marines was in full body armor, and some weren’t wearing any body armor, so there were casualties among them. Corporal Doyle and Lance Corporal Little had been wounded while they were running back to the perimeter with the Sharp Edge rifles, but their injuries had already been tended to and were minor enough that they could continue fighting. During the fight, Sergeant Ratliff and Sergeant Kerr were both wounded, as were Corporal Kindred from the gun squad, and PFC Shoup. All of them had been patched up and were able to continue.

  PFC Sturges, the Marine brought in from Whiskey Company after Corporal Pasquin was wounded, was hit the worst. He’d been shot several times and lost a lot of blood. Doc Hough had him in a stasis bag.

  The casualty situation for Sharp Edge was worse, even though the mercenaries hadn’t been in the fight for as long. None of them had body armor, and they weren’t behind cover as good as the Marines had—many were altogether out in the open. Captain Fassbender’s report came in slow; his company wasn’t as well organized as third platoon. He finally reported three dead and eighteen wounded. When Doc Hough finished with the injured Marines, he helped the Sharp Edge medic in tending their wounded.

  Bass called for a medevac—and gunships to protect it. He was told it might take awhile; all the hoppers were out on other missions.

  Mercury’s force was close to the Naked Ones. Even though they greatly outnumbered the defenders, he realized he was taking too many casualties. If they continued the assault, even when they won the battle and killed all the Naked Ones, there would be far too many dead among the People’s fighters. Perhaps two hundred had already been killed or wounded, and the closer they got to the Naked Ones, the heavier their casualties became. He knew his fighters
had caused casualties among the Naked Ones, but not enough to severely reduce their rate of fire—especially not of the horrible fireball weapons.

  He chittered a series of orders, and his fighters stopped firing and reversed their direction, crawling back far enough to increase their distance from the Naked Ones by half. There they would wait until nightfall, or until the Naked Ones made a mistake, a mistake that the fighters would take advantage of in order to kill them all.

  Lieutenant Bass and Staff Sergeant Hyakowa huddled together in the command bunker; its tent cover was badly shredded by flechettes.

  “They’re still out there,” Bass said. “We killed or wounded a lot of them, but most of them are still there.”

  Hyakowa nodded. “I agree. The question is, what are they waiting for? If they’d kept coming, they would have overrun us with their numbers.”

  “They could be waiting for reinforcements, or they might be moving to hit us from a different direction, or even moving to surround us. We need to get a look at where they are, what they’re doing.”

  “The sky-eye.”

  Bass nodded. “If one of Chief Nome’s aces is on duty. If he can pick the Fuzzies out from the background heat. It might be impossible if the Fuzzies are under the brush.” Bass looked in the direction the Fuzzies had come from. “It’s worth a try. Where’s Groth?”

  “I’ve got another idea, sir,” Captain Fassbender said. He’d come up to them while they were talking, and now hunkered down.

  “Tell me,” Bass said.

  “Somebody should climb the tower and take a look. I haven’t been up there but I know that in this kind of landscape you get a much better view of the ground from an elevation.”

  Bass stared at him. “I already thought of that,” he said, “and rejected the idea. It would be suicide.”

  “I’ve got six cowards back there.” Fassbender hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Men who refused to join in the fight. If one of them goes up the tower and gets killed, it won’t be a loss. Especially if he can tell us anything about the Fuzzies’ deployment before he dies.”

  Bass shook his head. “Marines sometimes send men into situations where they’re probably going to get killed, but we always have the hope that they might survive. We don’t send men into situations where they will get killed.”

  Fassbender shrugged. “All right. You’ve got body armor. Dress up one of those cowards in the body armor, and he’s got a chance.”

  Bass stared at the Sharp Edge officer for a long moment. “How are you going to pick someone to go up?” he finally asked.

  “Draw straws.”

  “And if the loser refuses?”

  Fassbender shook his head. “Summary justice.” Summary justice for someone disobeying a direct order in combat was often summary execution. But a commander who ordered it better be prepared to defend his actions before a court-martial.

  Bass looked deeply into Fassbender’s eyes. “Pick your man,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Both of the Grandar Bay’s best Surface Radar Analysis techs were beginning to study the area a kilometer around Camp Godenov when Captain Fassbender returned with a terrified looking Sharp Edge soldier.

  “He’s one of the new ones off the Dayzee Mae,” Fassbender said.

  Bass signed for the man to sit and sent Staff Sergeant Hyakowa to get body armor. “Two sets,” Bass said. He didn’t speak to the mercenary or even look at him after the first glance.

  Hyakowa was back in a couple of minutes. He tossed a set of body armor at the seated merc and said, “Put these on.” He had to help the man get into the unfamiliar protective gear. Once the mercenary was in the body armor, Hyakowa wrapped additional sections of armor to the man’s arms and other parts of his body that weren’t covered by the main set and secured them with the same ties the Marines used to secure prisoners. “That’ll give you extra protection,” he told the frightened man. “Now you don’t have to worry about anything worse than an arm or leg wound that’ll put you on light duty for a week or two, and probably not even that.” He squeezed his shoulder through the armor and gave him a reassuring smile.

  “You might have a lot of Fuzzies shooting at you,” Bass said. “All this should protect you from penetrating shots, although you might have a lot of bruises tomorrow.”

  Last, Hyakowa put a helmet on the man’s head. “The comm is already set to the platoon command circuit, so all you have to do is talk, and we’ll hear you. Any voices you hear will be either me or the lieutenant.”

  Bass looked at the extra set of body armor, and then at Hyakowa.

  “Sturges’s,” the platoon sergeant said.

  Bass nodded. Right, the new man. He was in a stasis bag and wouldn’t be needing his helmet. He looked at the mercenary, who was looking ill.

  “You throw up in that helmet, you clean it.” He turned to Fassbender. “He’s your man. Get him up the tower.”

  “You’ve got your orders,” Fassbender said. “Climb.”

  The man stepped close and raised a trembling hand to the ladder.

  “If I don’t have to worry about anything worse than light duty, why don’t one of you do it?” the man muttered, but he started up the ladder without further complaint.

  Individual Fuzzies started shooting at him before he reached the perch at the top of the tower. Most of the shots missed, but the flechettes that splatted against the armor, and a couple of bullets that thudded into it, made him flinch. He didn’t climb all the way onto the perch, but stood clutching the ladder, just high enough to see over the small platform at the top.

  “You’re going to have a few bruises,” Bass called up to him. “That’s all. Now look around and tell us what you see.”

  The man peered outward. “It’s hard to tell,” he finally said. “It looks like most of them are under bushes, maybe three hundred meters out. I can’t see any of them closer than that.”

  “What about the flanks? Are any of them moving to flank us?”

  The man looked carefully to his right. “I don’t see anyone, or any movement there,” he said in a quaking voice. He turned his head to the left and looked long and hard. “Nobody the—” He lost his grip on the ladder to fall groundward.

  Bass and Hyakowa managed to catch him enough to break his fall without getting injured themselves.

  “Why’d you let go?” Bass demanded. Through his faceplate, Bass saw the man’s lips moving, but no sounds came out.

  “Oh, shit, he’s hit,” Hyakowa said. “Corpsman! By the tower.” The platoon sergeant unfastened the body armor around the man’s neck and blood spurted out. Hyakowa pressed his thumb on the man’s throat. “Looks like a flechette got through and nipped his carotid,” he said when Doc Hough arrived.

  “Keep the pressure on,” Hough said as he dropped to his knees next to the mercenary’s shoulder and opened his med kit. In seconds he had what he needed positioned above the wound. “Move your hand,” he told Hyakowa. Bright red blood spurted as soon as the platoon sergeant’s thumb lifted. Hough suctioned blood out of the wound so he could see what he was doing.

  “Shit!” he swore. “That flechette really ripped in there.” Blood spurted again, once more filling the gaping hole, but Hough had seen enough. He clamped the artery below the wound to stop the blood, then used a tweezer to extract the flechette. Working swiftly, but with a delicate touch, he cleaned the torn edges of the carotid and tacked them together. Then he brought the lips of the wound together and applied a synthskin patch. Only then did he look at the man’s face. He swore again at how pale his face was. He looked beyond at the ground and swore once more.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, and is in danger of exsanguination, if my patch doesn’t hold. He should be in a stasis bag.” He looked up at Bass. “But both of ours are in use.” He turned his head to Fassbender. “Do you have any stasis bags?”

  The Sharp Edge officer shook his head. “We had to concentrate on carrying water and food, so I had my men leave everythi
ng not absolutely essential. I didn’t think we’d need heavy-duty medical equipment.” He looked away. “I was wrong.”

  “I have some blood plasma,” Hough said. “Someone give me a hand here. I have to bare his arms.” Staff Sergeant Hyakowa was still kneeling on the man’s other side. Working together, the two of them removed the armor tied onto the soldier’s arms, broke the seals on his sleeve cuffs, and rolled them back to expose the inner sides of his elbows.

  Hough went back into his med kit and drew out two flat containers, each of which held half a liter of blood plasma. He stripped a protective backing off one container and pressed the newly exposed surface to the man’s inner elbow, then did something to the container’s top surface.

  When the corpsman went to work on the other container and elbow, Fassbender asked, “What about tubes and drips?”

  Hough kept working as he answered, “Confederation milspec. The bags have integral needles that inject when I do this.…” He did the something to the top of the second bag, which he’d already affixed to the mercenary’s inner elbow. “The needles find the vein and insert themselves into it. No need for tubes or drips.” He and Hyakowa rolled the man’s sleeves back down and resealed the cuffs.

  “That should hold him until he gets to a surgeon,” Hough said, standing up. “As long as the seal on the artery holds.” He shook his head, wishing he had another stasis bag. He looked around unhappily. “That’s a big tear. It’s not safe to move him. We’re going to have to leave him right here until he gets medevaced.” Then he said to Fassbender, “Have some of your men make a barrier of some sort between him and the Fuzzies, to give him some protection from their fire.”

  “Right,” Fassbender said, somewhat taken aback. Sharp Edge medics didn’t give orders to officers, they made suggestions. Evidently it was different with Marines and their navy corpsmen. Or maybe it was because the corpsman didn’t acknowledge a private army officer as a real officer. Well, Fassbender thought, not only am I not in his chain of command, I’m technically a prisoner. He asked Lieutenant Bass what he could use to make a protective barrier for his wounded man, whom he’d stopped thinking of as a coward.