Starfist - 14 - Double Jeopardy

by Dan Cragg

  * * *

  The right side of the Fuzzies’ line was held by fighters from the Crawling Vines Clan of the Starwarmth Union. Their leader was Junior. Junior contemplated the high casualties his fighters had suffered in the failed frontal assault against the Naked Ones camp and seethed. When the representatives of the Brilliant Coalition had first come to the Crawling Vines Clan to request alliance against the common foe, Junior had argued against it in private council among the leaders of the Crawling Vines Clan. Junior was not a Clan Father, or even a Burrow Father. But he was a bold and daring fighter, so he was brought into the discussions because his opinion on matters of warfare was valued.

  The Brilliant Coalition cannot be trusted, Junior had argued. They’ll send our fighters into battle first, to fight and die before they join in. And then, after we’ve driven off the Naked Ones, they’ll attack and destroy us.

  But the Clan Mother and Clan Father had not agreed with Junior. The Clan Father had led the fighters of Crawling Vines Clan against the clan fighters of the Brilliant Coalition many times in the past. In both victory and the occasional defeat, he knew the fighters of the Brilliant Coalition to be honorable. He did not believe they would do such a thing as Junior said they would. Then let the major battle leaders be from the Starwarmth Union, Junior argued.

  No, the Clan Mother had said. It was fighters from the Brilliant Coalition who first fought the Naked Ones and defeated them. It was the Brilliant Coalition that sought to make peace with the Starwarmth Union. And other clans of the Starwarmth Union had already joined in alliance with the Brilliant Coalition, and their fighters had fought alongside the fighters of the former enemy. Never had the Clan Fathers of the Brilliant Coalition sent the fighters of the Starwarmth Union ahead to fight and die before engaging their own fighters.

  Indeed, said the Clan Father, the Clan Fathers of the Brilliant Coalition were more likely to send their own fighters ahead and bring in the fighters of the Starwarmth Union after battle had been joined. Junior was wrong, the Clan Father insisted.

  Even though Junior had argued forcefully against an alliance with the Brilliant Coalition, he was still a renowned fighter, and a war subleader under the Crawling Vines Clan Father, so he was given a command of his own in the allied army. And so it happened that Junior was the leader of the more than one hundred fighters of the Crawling Vines Clan that waited in the Safe Nights burrow for the call to action when Lester brought in his report of a new Naked Ones camp, much closer than the large camp that had been known.

  On the second day of the march to the new Naked Ones camp, when scouts reported that the Naked Ones who had abandoned the People of the Rock Flower Clan were on a path that would lead them to the new camp, he’d urged Mercury to change direction and attack those Naked Ones while they were in the open. He’d been on attacks against two Naked Ones camps and believed that it was only their defensive works that made them so strong and so hard to defeat, that they would be easily defeated if caught in the open. But Mercury had refused to do so; he wanted to take the new camp before the other Naked Ones reached it. Then, Mercury had said, we will have the defenses and be even more easily able to defeat the larger force of Naked Ones, who would be in the open.

  Junior gritted his teeth, but he was sworn by his Clan Mother and Clan Father to obey the orders of the Brilliant Coalition war leader.

  But Mercury had been wrong, and the large force of Naked Ones reached the small camp before the army of the People did and had the advantage of the defensive works. And too many fighters had died in Mercury’s ill-advised frontal assault.

  Junior was tired of obeying the orders of this Brilliant Coalition war leader, who threw away too many lives. Now he was going to fight this battle the way he knew it should be fought.

  Lieutenant Charlie Bass stood behind the trench and wall, facing the scrub to the west. Out there, even though he couldn’t see them, he knew there were hundreds of Fuzzies waiting for the Marines to make a mistake. Well, Charlie Bass wasn’t about to accommodate them.

  But, dammit, he had to know what they were doing. In their place, he wouldn’t simply be lying there, waiting for his enemy to make a mistake, or waiting until dark when he might have an advantage, or waiting for reinforcements. Especially not if he knew his foe might have reinforcements on their way, and knew his opponent could call in fire from the sky.

  But he couldn’t tell what the Fuzzies were doing from where he was.

  He turned and looked at the tower. It was high enough to give him the information he needed, but the one time he’d sent somebody up after the battle had begun, that man had been severely wounded, and might yet die. Still, he needed to know. But he wasn’t about to expose somebody else to the kind of fire that had almost killed the mercenary.

  “Wang,” Bass said on the command circuit, “come to me. Bring Captain Fassbender.” He kept watching outward while he waited.

  “What’s up, boss,” Hyakowa said when he reached Bass.

  “Radios off, screens up,” Bass said, putting his words to action. “I don’t want anybody overhearing what I’m about to say.” The three men stood close, face to bare face. Sweat began beading and then flowed in the heat.

  “I have to know what’s happening out there,” Bass said. “So I’m going up the watchtower. No argument,” he said, holding up a hand to stop what Hyakowa was about to say. “After the last one, I can’t send somebody else. I have to do it myself. But I’ll take a little extra precaution.”

  He looked at Fassbender. “If anything happens to me, Staff Sergeant Hyakowa is in command. Do you understand?”

  Fassbender hesitated, but finally said, “Yes, sir. Your platoon sergeant will be in command if you are incapacitated.”

  “Good. Here’s how I’m going to do it.…”

  * * *

  Little more than fifteen minutes later, Lieutenant Bass stood at the base of the tower. Like the Sharp Edge trooper, whose name he still didn’t know, he had extra armor wrapped around his arms and legs to protect them. Beyond that, he and Hyakowa had disassembled another set of armor so it made narrower strips than a full jacket or pants. Hyakowa affixed them around all the places where two pieces of armor came together and might allow a flechette or bullet through if Bass turned the wrong way.

  Bass bent his arms and legs to make sure he had sufficient movement to be able to climb the tower, turned his head, and twisted his body to make sure he wasn’t limited to looking straight ahead.

  “Loosen this one, Wang,” he told Hyakowa, lifting his left arm and showing that the elbow only bent halfway. Hyakowa did, and Bass went through his bends and twists again. He ignored the Marines and mercenaries who were watching.

  “All right, here I go,” he finally said.

  “Sir!” came Sergeant Kerr’s voice over the radio. “Wait a minute.”

  Bass looked and saw the squad leader trotting toward him. He waited.

  “Listen, boss,” Kerr said when he reached Bass, “you shouldn’t do that. We can’t afford to lose you. Let me do it.”

  “Sorry, Tim,” Bass said, shaking his head. “You’re too damn big a target. It would take too damn long to get me out of this and you into it. Besides, you almost got killed once, no need to tempt fate. But thanks for the offer.”

  “Just being in the Marines has me tempting fate.”

  But Bass ignored him and, without another word, started climbing. Flechettes and bullets from the Fuzzies started hitting him before he was halfway to the perch.

  It was an awkward climb; the extra armor around Bass’s shoulders, elbows, and knees cut into their range of motion. He climbed high enough that he could lean the backs of his thighs against the front of the perch, and looked out over the scrub. It was as the man off the Dayzee Mae had said; Bass could see Fuzzies lying prone under and behind bushes. Through his magnifier screen, he could make out some of them aiming their weapons at him. He controlled his flinches when the occasional bullet smacked into his armor; he barely felt the impact
of the flechettes. He turned to his right to look over the scrub in that direction, but overbalanced and had to grab hold of the perch to keep from falling off. He tried again: This time he held the perch with his right hand and swung his left foot out from the ladder. The landscape to the right was the same as to the front—scraggly bushes dotting red dirt. This time his examination didn’t show any Fuzzies. Still moving cautiously, he brought his left foot back onto the ladder, gripped the perch with his left hand, and swung his right leg out so he could twist to his left.

  The brush-speckled red dirt to the left of Camp Godenov looked the same as the landscape to the front and the right. Unlike the ground to the right, and very much like the ground to the front, there were Fuzzies on the left. They were crawling through the scrub, far enough out and too low to the ground to be seen from ground level. The Fuzzies farthest to the left had already stopped moving and were facing the Marine defenses. He couldn’t tell with any certainty, but it looked like nearly a hundred Fuzzies were flanking the position.

  Bass toggled his all-hands circuit. “Third platoon, pivot left! Fuzzies are flanking us. Five, have the Sharp Edge officer move all of his troops to replace us on the front line. I’ll stay up here to direct.”

  Mercury had smiled with relief when he saw the Naked Ones’ lookout topple from the watchtower. He wondered why it had taken so many shots to kill the Naked One. Were his fighters so excited at the prospect of shooting such an easy target that they forgot to aim? Maybe he needed to increase marksmanship training. But that would have to wait until they returned to Safe Nights burrow. First, they had to kill these Naked Ones, and get their weapons—especially the fire weapons.

  After a short while passed, Mercury watched as another Naked One clumsily climbed the watchtower. Again, fighters shot at him, but fewer than had shot at the first lookout. Their bullets and projectiles seemed to be missing, just as when they shot at the first lookout. Soon Mercury would have to order them to stop shooting lest they use up too much ammunition before he ordered the next assault on the Naked Ones’ camp.

  It was then that he realized that none of the fighters to his right were shooting at the lookout. They were the Crawling Vines fighters, under the command of Junior. Mercury needed to know what was happening with the Crawling Vines fighters. Keeping low, he scrabbled to his right.

  Junior and his Crawling Vines fighters weren’t there.

  Where were they? Had they run away? Mercury crawled back to the last fighter in the line and asked him what he knew. The fighter told him they had gone off to the right; he thought they were going to encircle the Naked Ones’ camp. Wasn’t that what Mercury had ordered them to do?

  Mercury was furious at Junior for going off on his own, without even informing the war leader. He started to scrabble in the direction the fighter said they had gone, but sudden increased fire both from his own fighters and the Naked Ones’ camp made him stop and rise up high enough to see over the brush. He saw Naked Ones running to the right and firing their fire weapons into the brush on that side. He heard bullet and flechette fire from the right of the Naked Ones’ camp.

  That fool! Mercury swore. Now the main force had to support the flanking attack, or it would fail, and Mercury would have to break off and take his fighters back to Safe Nights burrow.

  First gun team was on the far left flank of the defensive line. Corporal Kindrachuck’s head snapped to the left when he heard Bass’s all-hands.

  “Tischler, gun left!” he shouted, and raised his blaster to his shoulder to fire at the mass of Fuzzies who were erupting through the scrub little more than a hundred meters to his side.

  In seconds, Lance Corporal Tischler had shifted his gun and was spraying plasma in an arc at the oncoming Fuzzies. PFC Yi, the assistant gunner, readied to load a fresh battery into the gun and would switch in a fresh barrel when the one on the gun glowed too brightly. Flechettes splatted into their body armor; bullets slapped almost hard enough to knock them backward.

  Second squad pounded up to form a line alongside the gun team, but they had to run through a hail of bullets and flechettes to get there.

  A flechette found its way through the seam between Corporal Chan’s armor jacket and pants, but Chan barely felt it—until he’d taken a prone position and was firing at the onrushing Fuzzies. The blood loss made him light-headed.

  A flurry of bullets and flechettes hit low on PFC Summers’s helmet, knocking it loose enough for a bullet to tear along the side of his neck. He fell before he reached the new line.

  Lance Corporal MacIlargie flopped to the ground when a ground-hugging bullet hit his boot and tore through his ankle. He crawled the rest of the way, swearing at the pain.

  The other seven Marines reached the line and dropped into firing positions in the trench without injury. They added their fire to that from the gun.

  The Fuzzies’ charge staggered, and shuddered to a stop as they fell to the ground and fired from whatever cover they could find. Many of them had been killed or wounded, because the Marines had opened fire on them earlier than they had expected—they’d neglected to consider that Lieutenant Bass, from his vantage on the watchtower, would see them and alert his Marines.

  Bass was still up high and began directing the fire of the gun, to inflict the greatest possible damage on the flanking element. The rate of flechettes and bullets striking him increased dramatically as the Fuzzies to the front began pouring supporting fire at the camp. A bullet hit the ladder rung he was standing on, splintering it. He was shifting his weight, moving his feet to a different rung, when another bullet slammed into the wrist of the hand with which he was holding on to the perch, with numbing force even through the armor wrapped around it. His grip loosened and he fell off the ladder. He landed on his shoulder and rolled, but his landing was hard enough that he cried out in pain as he struggled to his knees.

  “Keep your fire low,” Captain Fassbender yelled to his men. “Watch where they hop up, and shoot where they drop back down!”

  Even before third platoon’s first squad reached the defensive trench on the left, the Fuzzies to the front had begun advancing, firing as they came. They didn’t stand up and charge the way they had originally; instead they advanced in something that resembled fire and maneuver. Individually, they rose to all fours and hopped forward a meter or two before dropping back down to fire their weapons. They were never up long enough for a man to see and aim before they were back down again. The air between the men and the Fuzzies began to fog with leaf and twig fragments hit and thrown skyward by flying flechettes and bullets. Few of the flechettes fired by either side made it far enough through the scrub to reach the opposing line, but bullets from the Fuzzies’ single-shot rifles did, and the Sharp Edge medic was soon busy rushing along the defensive line, patching up wounds.

  Doc Hough found Summers, who was struggling to make his damaged helmet fit right, and bandaged his neck. Then he slithered forward where he found MacIlargie and his bleeding ankle. Hough bandaged him, then went in search of more casualties. Chan was unconscious and going into shock by the time he reached him.

  “Is anyone else wounded?” he asked on the platoon circuit. When nobody acknowledged an injury, he began dragging Chan back from the line. He needed to get the corporal to the command bunker to treat him for shock and to stop the bleeding. He wished he had another stasis bag to put him into. Before Hough and his seriously injured patient reached the bunker, he got a call from the platoon sergeant.

  “The boss is down, Doc,” Staff Sergeant Hyakowa said. “I think he’s got a broken shoulder.”

  “I’m on my way to the CP bunker with Chan,” Hough said. “He’s pretty bad off and I can’t leave him. Is the boss able to move on his own?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Then get him to me. I’ll deal with his shoulder as soon as I’ve got Chan stabilized.”

  First squad reached the line without suffering any casualties. Few flechettes were making it through the scrub, and the bullet
s were all fired blind, so many went high. The Marines couldn’t see where the Fuzzies were firing from.

  “Tim,” Sergeant Ratliff called on the squad leaders’ circuit, “how far out are they?”

  “They were about a hundred meters out when they went to cover, Rabbit,” Sergeant Kerr answered. “They might have crawled closer, I don’t know.”

  “I’m going for volley fire,” Ratliff said.

  “Good idea. I’ll stagger volley fire with you.”

  “First squad,” Ratliff said on his squad circuit, “the Fuzzies are no more than a hundred meters out. Maybe closer. Volley fire, skimming the ground. Shift your aiming points between volleys. Fire!”

  First squad sent a volley of ten plasma bolts downrange, sizzling through the brush.

  “Fire!” Kerr shouted right after first squad fired its first volley.

  “Fire!” Ratliff ordered first squad.

  “Fire!” Second squad shot another volley.

  Some bolts glanced off woody stems and bounced high over the scrub. Other bolts fragmented when they hit stems, sending a shotgun spray of bits into the dirt, into the air, off on odd angles to the front. More blasted through foliage, burning narrow tunnels until they hit something that deflected their forward motion. Here and there a shrill scream told that a bolt or fragment struck home on a Fuzzy.

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  But the Marines’ fire cleared enough of the brush that more flechettes began making their way through to impact on the Marines’ helmets, arms, and shoulders.