Starfist:Flashfire

by David Sherman; Dan Cragg

  Whistles pierced the din of battle, and masses of men surged over the lip of the shelf, scrambling for cover behind the boulders on the gently rising ground before the glacis. Kerr began picking them off.

  Major General Koval grinned tightly when he got Brigadier Sturgeon’s message. “That fox,” he murmured, then began snapping out orders. Satisfied that the bustling of his staff was meaningful, he turned his attention to the string-of-pearls feed that Sturgeon had so generously provided to him. Damn that Billie, he thought. There’s no good reason he has to keep the string-of-pearls feed to himself so that I have to piggyback on the Marines.

  The string-of-pearls display of the bay to the north made it clear why Sturgeon was complying in the most obstructionist manner possible with the Supreme Commander’s orders—and equally clear that Billie was absolutely incompetent as a commander. Koval had suspected before, but now he knew beyond reasonable doubt that Billie had gotten his promotions and his command because of political maneuvering and not through any merit as a soldier.

  He heard the distant screams of the Marine Raptors as they dove on the Coalition airborne troop carriers, and the monstrously loud cracking of the Marine artillery on top of the ridge. But he could see on the display how many targets the Raptors and artillery pieces had, and he knew how few Raptors and artillery pieces a FIST had.

  He snapped out another order to his artillery regiment commander.

  Will this be a first? he wondered.

  “T-take your time,” Corporal Doyle said into his comm. “Aim your s-shots, m-make them c-count.” Despite the stutter, his voice was calm, and his aim was steady, nearly every shot he took struck home on a scrambling soldier.

  “Yeah, sure,” PFC Summers muttered. He was firing as fast as he could, moving the muzzle of his blaster with each press of the firing lever. He wasn’t hitting with each shot, but he wasn’t missing by much, either, and the rebels he just missed tended to stay behind cover longer than they should have.

  “Take my time,” PFC Smedley repeated. “Make every shot count. Aye aye.” He didn’t stutter, but his voice was the highest pitched and most anxious of the three—it was his first combat, and he didn’t see how any of the Marines in the FIST could possibly survive the assault. His aim wasn’t good, he was trembling too hard for accuracy, and most of his shots missed.

  “St-steady,” Doyle said as he fired another bolt and decked another rebel soldier. “M-make your sh-shots count.” He stuttered, but if any part of his mind had been able to sit back and assess the situation, he would have realized that he was less frightened than in any previous battles in which he’d fought.

  This time, other Marines’ lives depended on his leadership; he didn’t have any time or energy to spare on fear.

  “St-steady. Make e-every shot c-count.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Sturgeon!” General Billie roared into his comm. “Why haven’t you moved your FIST yet?”

  “Sir,” Sturgeon replied laconically, “Thirty-fourth FIST is unable to move. We are fully engaged with a reinforced division that has our positions under assault.”

  Billie spat out the cigar he had clenched in the corner of his mouth. “What?” he squawked.

  “Thirty-fourth FIST is fully engaged. Check your string-of-pearls download.”

  Snarling in disbelief, muttering that he was going to relieve that insubordinate Marine, Billie looked at his string-of-pearls display. What he saw shocked him so much that if he hadn’t already spat out his cigar, he might have swallowed it. The visual display clearly showed a three-brigade beachhead engulfing 34th FIST’s position and overlapping onto the army battalions on the FIST’s flanks. Two more brigades were on top of the ridge, trying to fight their way into the tunnel system from the rear. He stared at the display for long moments before he realized that the main assault—at least, what he still believed was the main assault—had stalled in its advance. Just because he couldn’t see the follow-on forces that would exploit whatever breakthrough the initial assault forces made didn’t mean they weren’t there, they were just too well hidden for him to see. Of course.

  “That—!” his voice twisted and whatever imprecation he made was lost in an inarticulate squeal. He switched his comm to a different circuit and snarled, “Sorca, move your reserve brigade to reinforce the MLR. The damn Marines are pinned down by a diversionary attack.” Then to a third circuit. “Koval,” brusquely, “move a brigade to the MLR right now! Prepare the rest of your division to act if the Marines can’t hold against that diversion.” He clicked off each time before either division commander could even acknowledge the orders.

  “Sturgeon,” he snapped, back into the original circuit, “what is your situation? How long will it take for you to drive off that diversionary attack? I need your FIST at the MLR to defeat the main assault.”

  “General, this is the main assault, the assault against the MLR is the diversion. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a major battle to fight.” Sturgeon didn’t wait for the Supreme Commander, but broke the connection himself.

  General Billie’s jaws clamped so tightly he nearly cracked a tooth.

  When the artillery pulled off the top of the ridge, they withdrew into the three entrances to the tunnel complex on the back side of the ridge. The guns would be worthless there, because they had to be rolled out of the access tunnels to fire—if they were fired inside the enclosed spaces, they would cook their crews and their own electronics. Coalition forces poured down the backside of the ridge top and headed for the access tunnels. But there were only three tunnels, and the artillerymen were waiting with blasters ready for the attackers, sending far more firepower out than the attackers were able to answer. The rebels couldn’t get any of their crew-served weapons set up to fire into the access tunnels. They gave up trying after losing a dozen of them to the defenders’ fire.

  The attack on the reverse slope stalled.

  Corporal Claypoole could hardly believe his eyes when an entire company surged up in front of his fire team’s bunker and began flooding across the fifty meters of glacis straight at him.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!” he shrilled, shooting each time he yelled “fire.” The troops in front of him were so densely packed, he couldn’t miss unless he fired over their heads, and he wasn’t about to do that.

  On Claypoole’s left, Lance Corporal MacIlargie fired as rapidly as he did, opening a hole in the charging company with every plasma bolt. To Claypoole’s right, Lance Corporal Schultz fired so rapidly his blaster almost sounded like a gun. None of his shots missed, either.

  But there were so many of them, and they had so short a distance to go before reaching the front of the bunker, there was simply no way to stop the attack. Even if the three Marines managed to wipe out the entire company charging their position, there was another company charging the defensive wall to either side, between their bunker and the bunkers of the fire teams on their flanks.

  It was a hopeless situation, and that part of Claypoole’s mind that wasn’t occupied with fighting the desperate battle resigned itself to death—and resolved to take as many enemy soldiers with him as possible.

  “Teach them to beat me!” he shouted.

  Then an explosion threw him back from the aperture and knocked the blaster from his hands. A roaring followed the explosion. Then more roaring and more and more until it sounded like it would never end. The ground shook in beat with the roaring, rolling Claypoole around the floor of the bunker, flattening him everytime he tried to gain control of himself.

  Finally, the roaring stopped. Dazed, he rolled over and struggled to rise to hands and feet. He shook his head, and coughed, choking on the suddenly smoke-filled air in the bunker. Almost unconsciously, he remembered the air filters on his helmet and turned them on. He coughed a few more times, but breathing became easier. Still groggy, he slid his infra into place and looked around. He saw two large, moving blobs—Schultz and MacIlargie struggling to their feet; neither had been hit as directly by what
ever it was that slammed into Claypoole. He looked at the floor, closer to himself, and found his blaster by the glow from its barrel. He scrabblingly picked it up and made his way to the aperture, expecting that any second a fléchette rifle or laser rifle would poke through and kill him.

  But no such thing happened, and he reached the aperture without incident. Schultz and MacIlargie were there before him. Neither was firing. Claypoole looked out and gasped in stunned disbelief.

  Bodies and pieces of bodies were flung all about the glacis, covering it in meat and gore. The survivors were staggering across the rising land between the glacis and the shelf, bumping into boulders, tripping on bodies and rocks, picking themselves back up if they could, or crawling to the waterline when their legs would no longer hold them up. Nobody was shooting at them, the defenders were allowing them to depart without further abuse.

  “Allah’s pointed teeth,” Claypoole said softly when he found his voice. “What happened?”

  Neither Schultz nor MacIlargie answered, neither had any better idea than he did.

  Claypoole raised Sergeant Kerr on the helmet comm. Kerr was trying to find out himself, and would let him know when he did.

  It took another ten minutes, but word finally filtered down to the fire teams. Guided by the datastream from the string-of-pearls, Major General Koval had deployed the heavy weapons and artillery of the 27th Division and swept the attackers off the glacis. The foot soldiers of the division had counterattacked the two brigades stalled at the tunnel complex on the reverse side of the ridge and taken most of them prisoner.

  “Sonofabitch,” Claypoole said when Ensign Bass informed third platoon on the all-hands circuit. “The Marines have ridden to the army’s rescue often enough. Anybody ever hear of the army coming to rescue the Marines?”

  Nobody in third platoon replied in the affirmative.

  When Major General Koval saw how effective his counterattack had been, he smiled. He wasn’t sure it was the first time the army had ever ridden to the rescue of Marines, but he was more than willing to claim that singular honor for himself and the 27th Infantry Division.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  “Why is that unit familiar to me?” General Lyons asked Admiral Porter de Gauss, his operations officer. They were in the general’s mobile command trailer, embedded in some ruins on the outskirts of Ashburtonville. On the trid screen was a detailed blowup of an orbital surveillance of the coast between Phelps, Ashburtonville’s port, and Pohick Bay, where the Confederation forces were trapped.

  “They’re from Lannoy, Davis,” de Gauss replied, through a cloud of cigar smoke, using the general’s first name, a privilege the admiral had when they were alone and relaxed. “They’re known informally as the ‘Vigilante Battalion,’ probably because they have a bad reputation as a very undisciplined military unit.”

  “Umpf,” Lyons puffed on his cigar and nodded that de Gauss should continue.

  “The 4th Division, where they were assigned to begin with, is a composite unit made up of all the ash and trash that wouldn’t fit in anywhere else, but its commander, Major General Barksdale Sneed, has done wonders shaping it into a viable combat unit that has been providing security in our rear. This area of the coast is also within his tactical area of responsibility.”

  “I know Sneed,” Lyons nodded, “good soldier. I’ve been to Lannoy, too, did you know that Porter? It was a long time ago. Rough place, Lannoy, typical frontier settlement, little law and no respect for what they do have out there. I remember one night in a bar in one of the bigger cities, I can’t remember which one now, it was in the northern hemisphere, there was this fight over,” he shrugged, “something, nobody knew what, and these two guys almost killed each other. Instead of stopping them the other patrons placed bets on who’d win.” He shook his head.

  “How’d it end?”

  “Oh, they both collapsed from loss of blood.”

  De Gauss puffed on his cigar for a moment. “Well, Lannoy is not a lot different from some of the other worlds in our Coalition, General,” he laughed. “To some degree we all wipe our asses with sandpaper, don’t we? Or we like to think we do.”

  Lyons laughed. “Well, that’s what the rest of the Confederation of Human Worlds thinks we do. But you know, Porter, even so, we do obey a code of honor among ourselves, don’t we? We don’t just disrespect each other on general principles, do we? Now what was old Sneed’s beef with this MP battalion?”

  “They were deployed initially here, between Phelps and Ashburtonville, here, along the main supply route from the port to protect our supply lines from infiltrators but damn, they kept running amok among the civilians down there, abusing the women, taking things without paying, and fighting among themselves all the time. General Sneed said he had to form six general courts-martial boards in the first week they were there! Unbelievable! So he took the whole outfit and put them here.” He toggled a switch and the image on the trid screen zoomed in on a portion of the coast. “It’s very desolate out there,” de Gauss explained.

  “I know, I know, steep cliffs, high surf, high tides. But a whole battalion to watch this stretch of coast? That’s diverting a lot of manpower just to get them out of the way. You know damned well, Porter, I’ve been calling in ash and trash from all over to reinforce our position. We’re going to need every man jack when the big push comes. Why not just relieve the battalion commander and his subordinate officers, get some firebrands in there and shape those boys up into real soldiers? Besides, Porter, that coast is so rough nobody in his right mind would attempt a landing there. If Sneed wants someone to keep an eye on the area, send out some watchers and mine the beaches.”

  “Well, sir,” de Gauss switched to a more formal form of address because he saw an argument coming, “General Sneed thinks we’re vulnerable in that area. And it is within his Tactical Area of Operations,” he added, diplomatically.

  General Lyons puffed on his cigar. “Hell’s bells, Porter, we’re vulnerable to sabotage everywhere. Billie’s long-range recon people have been snooping and pooping all over the place, but they’re hardly capable of causing strategic mayhem. Well,” he added quickly, “I respect Barksdale’s judgment on how to deploy his troops, but no,” Lyons shook his head, “there won’t be any landings on that coast,” he said with finality.

  “Well, sir,” de Gauss began as diplomatically as he could, “I think it’s a good idea to keep an eye on that stretch of the coast out there. You’ve said yourself many times it’s a bad idea to underestimate your enemy, and you know your history better than I do: How many times has a force been defeated because its commanders thought certain routes of attack were impracticable to a determined enemy?”

  Lyons was silent for a long moment, regarding his cigar thoughtfully. “Porter, you’re right, I do know my history. More important than anything else in war is that you should know your opponent. Once you get inside your enemy’s head you’ve got him by the gonads, Porter. And I have Jason Billie right where I want him. He won’t try an end-run. He’s going to come straight at us. That’s the way his mind works. I’ve known that guy for years, and the only original thoughts he’s ever had were how to get himself promoted by backstabbing officers who were better leaders than he is. No, no, no, Porter, that area is secure,” he gestured at the trid and puffed on his cigar. “Besides,” he continued after a moment, “suppose they do put a force ashore there. Hell, three nuns and a boy could stop them by throwing rocks down the cliffs! And it’s not that far away from our main force, Porter. If by some miracle a force was able to get ashore out there intact, we could rush in reinforcements and destroy them before they ever got off the beaches.”

  “So you think the Seventh MPs are sufficient to secure that area?” de Gauss asked carefully.

  “Yes, Porter, and I’m thinking of telling Barksdale to withdraw all but a company. We’ll put them to patrolling the streets here, keep the troops out of the wine cellars,” Lyons laughed.

  “
If you can keep the MPs out of the wine cellars.” They both laughed. “Well, sir, there is one more thing about this issue and I feel compelled to advise you on it.”

  “And that is, Porter?” Lyons squinted at his operations officer through the cigar smoke wreathing his head.

  “Billie has a Confederation Marine contingent with his force. Now the Marines, as you know, are specially trained to make difficult landings, either from space or from land-based points. Remember how they landed on Diamunde during the war there? Straight in over the sea and right smack into the enemy’s positions at Oppalia. I was with the fleet when the landing force was launched. They didn’t expect us there either. Sir,” he leaned forward eagerly, “let’s put a reconnaissance company out there, back them up with air and artillery and some of those armored fighting vehicles we still have—they’re good artillery platforms when dug in properly—designate some units from our reserve force to reinforce them if the enemy tries to establish a beachhead. Just a precaution, sir. It’d let me sleep better.”

  Lyons had not participated in the Diamundian campaign. He waved smoke away from his face with a hand before making a reply. “Porter, if it was anybody else over there but Jason Billie, I’d be worried, yes, I would. But we need those troops here for when Billie’s big push comes. And Marines? He doesn’t have many, and believe me, those he does he’ll misuse. They had a good thing going with that attempted breakout the day the Marines arrived, that made me very nervous, Porter, I have to admit, but Billie called them back. No, no, no, Porter, there will be no seaborne invasion on that coastline. Now tell Sneed to withdraw the Seventh MPs, all but a company. I’ll make it a personal priority to see that those rascals shape up. And Porter? You’re my operations officer, you don’t get any sleep,” he laughed.

  “Yessir.” Admiral Porter smiled and stood up, saluted his commander and turned to go. He had given in to the inevitable, he’d done his best as a staff officer to apprise his commander of what he thought was a dangerous condition. But the decision had been made and it would be carried out. Besides, General Lyons was probably right. Still, as he made his way back to the underground bunker that served as the army’s tactical operations center, he could not shake the feeling that General Lyons had just made a serious mistake.