Starfist - 13- Wings of Hell

by Dan Cragg

  Colonel Raggel established joint patrols throughout the city, his men with the local security officers; he set up surveillance equipment and manned checkpoints and put guards on critical facilities. He ensured that his men were spliced into the communications net that kept all the military security forces around Sky City, the naval air station, and the spaceport in constant touch. Since there was little real crime in Sky City, he let the civilian courts continue to operate, under his jurisdiction. He seldom disagreed with their dispositions. He saw no reason to interfere with the civil authorities if they could keep drunken brawls and other misdemeanor infractions under control. His enforcement was strict but humane and, aside from the dusk-to-dawn curfew, affected very few of the citizens of Sky City.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AC2 Jerri Wait had been on duty in the control tower at NAS George Gay since before midnight. There’d been little air traffic at the field since a flight of Raptors had returned some hours before from a short bombing mission at targets several hundred kilometers to the south of Sky City. She was almost dozing off at her console when a huge blip appeared on one screen. “Lieutenant!” She called out to Lieutenant (jg) Klinker, the control tower OIC, who’d been staring at her unobtrusively over the rim of his coffee cup as she bent over her console.

  “Yeah, Jerri?” He liked the way she had gathered her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck. He also liked the way she fit into her pants.

  “There’s a lot of aircraft approaching from the southwest.” She straightened up, fully awake now. “I mean a lot of them.”

  “Don’t worry, honey, it’s probably the Eighth Air Wing’s birds. Come on, Jerri, wake up, you knew they were coming.”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “They’re supposed to be joining us here at”—he glanced at his watch—“hmmmm. They’re early.” His brow furrowed. They weren’t supposed to be in until after he went off duty. “How long you been watching them?”

  “Couple of minutes. Yeah, sir, I thought they were the Eighth, but, Lieutenant, they’re moving so fast. And there really are a lot of them.”

  Klinker spun around slowly and opened his own screen. “Why the hell didn’t anyone tell us there’s been a change to the—goddamned typical military screwup.” He gasped when he saw the readouts. There were more blips than there were Raptors in the Eighth Wing and they were moving very fast. And they were moving in two waves. “Oh, shit! Call the ready room!” he shouted.

  Julie Holcom, forty-two, had worked for the Inkydo Mining Conglomerate on Haulover for ten years. This seventh-day morning (no holidays for mining company employees on Haulover) she was walking to the Shamhat Building, the Inkydo office-residential complex for senior executives, and she was worried she’d be late. But it was such a beautiful morning she couldn’t drive herself to hurry. She was due in Mr. Miner’s office at eight o’clock sharp. She’d gotten a late start because her fiancé, Josh Hardinat, had just gotten off his shift in Mine No. 3 and she just couldn’t leave him without saying a long good-bye. She felt like whistling and there was a spring in her step that morning that wasn’t usually there as she trudged to work. She glanced at her watch. She wouldn’t be late. It was precisely 7:48.

  She was startled by a sudden popping noise in the sky far above her. That was followed immediately by a whooshing roar as something, a hurtling black object, left her peripheral vision so fast she almost didn’t see it. The object, which could only be some type of aircraft, left in its wake a large green cloud that slowly descended. Julie smiled. Must be some kind of aerial demonstration put on by the recently arrived Confederation forces to surprise and amuse the civilians. Boy, she thought, did Mr. Miner hate the military! That was all right by Julie. If her boss didn’t like the military, she loved them! The green cloud began descending very fast as it neared the surface, coming down like a rainy mist. A drop plopped on her shoulder. Julie Holcom had just enough time left to emit a shriek of pain and terror before a mist of the greenish fluid settled on her, soaking her hair and clothes, melting the hair and flesh on her head, then liquefying her internal organs.

  Smelt Miner and his wife, Shanna, occupied a penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Shamhat Building, as befitted the most senior executive. From their patio they had a 360-degree view of the countryside surrounding Sky City. On a clear day they could see for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Miner took his breakfast on the patio when the weather permitted. That morning the day was perfectly clear. He sat in his nightclothes, sipping his coffee and enjoying the view. Julie would be there shortly but she could wait. Shanna liked Julie. He’d let the girls gab while he finished his coffee. Yesterday he’d let Julie handle promulgating General Carano’s martial law orders while he sent screaming hot messages back to Earth via the company’s FTL drones. He’d burn the hide off that ridiculous Carano. He smiled. He liked a good fight, especially a one-sided fight.

  Something on the horizon to the southwest suddenly caught his eye. Slowly he lowered his coffee cup. After a few moments the object, moving very fast, resolved into many black objects. “Goddamned flyboys,” he hissed. All day those jockeys from NAS George Gay flitted around in their toys. The approaching aircraft, he feared, were traveling faster than the speed of sound, so there’d be more of those thunderclaps as they passed over. “Goddamned adolescent tomfoolery,” he muttered. He’d sure complain to Carano about this display.

  Miner suddenly stiffened and his mouth fell open in amazement. Something was seriously wrong with the picture unfolding before his eyes. There were dozens, no, hundreds of aircraft rushing at him, bright lights winking, and they seemed to be using the Shamhat Building as their focal point.

  The blast that tore apart his apartment, his wife, and forty years of their marriage, hurled Smelt Miner to the floor and knocked him unconscious.

  Sergeant Dowling Hamsum, gun chief of No. 3 gun in Thirty-fourth FIST’s antiaircraft platoon, knew he and the five men under him would have plenty of time to smoke and joke in their position on the north edge of NAS George Gay, where the engineers had built revetments for Thirty-fourth and Twenty-sixth FISTs’ Raptors. But Hamsum was the type of NCO who believed Marines never received enough training and on this seventh-day morning, as soon as his Bowman M3A1 mobile, independent rapid-fire-control plasma cannon had been sighted and activated, he put his men in a “relaxed alert status,” as he called it. The men were veterans, though, and knew their jobs. They’d all seen action on Ravenette and some had been on Kingdom and Diamunde before that. He’d never served with a better crew.

  “This is bullshit, chief,” Corporal Jack Newman, Hamsum’s gunner, muttered as he lit a cigarillo. He offered the pack to Hamsum, who politely shook his head. “Best we can expect is a ground probe and I bet we don’t even see that,” he said, disgustedly. “Ol’ Betsy here”—he patted the M3A1 affectionately—“ain’t gonna get much action this deployment, is my bet.” It was well known that the Skinks did not have effective close-air-support capability. On Kingdom the M3s had been employed in ground support roles, at which they proved very effective, adding tremendous firepower to the FISTs’ artillery.

  “You’re probably right, Jack, but one more time, I want a double-check of all systems.”

  “Aw, Sarge!”

  “Power module and umbilicals?”

  “Firm contact, power up to max!” Corporal Renny Aldridge reported. As assistant gunner he was responsible for maintaining the Bowman’s two-hundred-ampere independent power module, or the “plug-in” function, as the gunners called it.

  “Target acquisition module?”

  “Horizontal visuals out to a thousand meters. I can see a kwangduk shit if he’s out there; radar, infras, all vectors and azimuths to the horizon. Vertical, all vectors, thirty thousand meters,” Corporal Newman reported.

  “Good. Tracking?”

  “Standstill to Mach two,” Aldridge replied. “Visual resolution, twenty/twenty.”

  “Sighting?”

  �
�Ready!” Corporal Frank Rushin, the assistant gunner replied. “All registrations to all horizons recorded and on the screens.”

  “Vid recorders?”

  “All recorders go,” Rushin replied. For AA gun crews, video recordings of hits in a fast-moving, target-rich environment with many batteries engaging the enemy were essential to confirm a gun’s accuracy. It was the vid record more than computerized scores that confirmed a gun’s accuracy and resolved conflicting claims with other gun crews. Each destroyed target earned a gun a white band around its muzzle and that’s how the team got its bragging rights. On Ravenette, Hamsum’s gun had earned ten white bands, the highest in the platoon but four short of “Ace” classification.

  Sergeant Hamsum went down the prefiring checklist list item by item until he was sure his gun was ready to go into action. “Okay, people, stand down but keep your positions and keep an eye on those screens. We’ll rotate to chow beginning at eight hours.” His mission was to keep his gun manned and ready 24/7. In a pinch three well-trained men could fire the M3 and his men were well trained.

  “Geez, Dowly,” Corporal Newman sighed. “You know the lieutenant told us we’re to monitor ground activity, primarily. You sure—”

  “Jack, this here is an antiaircraft gun and as long as I’m gun chief she’ll be ready to perform in both modes, 24/7, 365. That’s what we’re paid to do when we’re in a combat zone, and that’s what we’re in right now. Remember those guys on Kingdom who didn’t give surveillance one hundred percent?”

  “Um, yeah,” Newman said. The entire crew was found sprayed with acid by a Skink infiltrator. Not much was left of the men to send home.

  Each Marine FIST’s squadron had its own antiaircraft gun platoon. Each platoon, commanded by a lieutenant, had a battery of three gun teams consisting of a rapid-fire M3A1 Bowman plasma gun capable of hitting any target within line of sight. The guns could be used mounted on special-purpose vehicles or in static positions, which was how Hamsum’s gun was mounted. Each gun with its ancillary equipment weighed 4,300 kilos.

  The M3s could fire in bursts of ten, thirty, sixty, or one hundred “rounds,” as the bolts were called, or sometimes “shells,” harking back to the days of gunpowder weapons; or they could fire continuous bursts of one thousand rounds. Their fire control systems could be set up to operate independently or linked to a fire control center. Since the Bowmans were performing in a ground support role at NAS Gay, their fire control systems were rigged independently so the individual gunners could select targets of opportunity as they were identified. Men and vehicles move a lot slower than aircraft and are much easier to acquire. But in an antiaircraft role such as on Ravenette or in the war on Diamunde, the guns are linked to a central fire control module that is more effective in acquiring fast movers and coordinating fires of multiple weapons. In that mode, the gunners’ main responsibility is to keep the weapon firing smoothly or fixing malfunctions when they occur. But a really good gunner with excellent reflexes operating in the independent mode could, theoretically, track and shoot down an aircraft moving faster than the speed of sound.

  Each gun team has a sergeant as gun chief, a corporal gunner and assistant gunner, and a crew consisting of one more corporal and two privates first class. Brigadiers Sturgeon and Sparen had integrated their AA teams and set them up on the north end of NAS Gay in such a way that if there ever was an attack from the air they could put up a devastating umbrella of plasma bolts through which any enemy would have to maneuver. If the Skinks mounted a ground attack against the station, the Bowmans could be employed as deadly antipersonnel weapons in support of the infantrymen in their ground security role.

  “Well,” Hamsum drawled, “just hold your pants up, Jack. My guess is once the XXX Corps gets here and we move against the Skinks, we’ll mount up and go out with the infantry. We’ll get into it, never you fear. Who knows, maybe the little bastards grew wings since we kicked their asses on Kingdom.” He glanced at his watch. It was 7:48, almost time for chow. He yawned and stretched.

  “Hey, Sarge,” Corporal Rushin called from his radar console, “I’ve got a large blip comin’ in from the south—damn, from the north, too!”

  “Ain’t the Twenty-sixth Wing due in today?” Newman asked, shifting his cigarillo to the opposite side of his mouth as he spoke. For some reason a cold chill raced up his backbone. He came alert now.

  “That’s not the Twenty-sixth!” Hamsum shouted. “Get the gun on line! Call the lieutenant! We’re being attacked!”

  In the next few minutes, NAS George Gay turned into a seething cauldron of fire and death as the field was raked from two directions by fast-moving attack aircraft, their onboard rail guns firing a devastating hail of pellets into the Fourteenth Wing’s Raptors, all neatly parked and fully exposed on the apron; the maintenance facilities and fuel dumps also went up in greasy clouds of billowing fire. But the revetments Sturgeon and Sparen had ordered built by the army engineers worked. And the Skinks did not use acid.

  The damage would have been far worse that morning if the Skink preattack reconnaissance had been up-to-date. Evidently they were not sure of the exact positions the XVIII Corps had established upon their landing, which had taken place only two days before the attack. So the waves of aircraft that struck that morning were after military targets of opportunity. Unfortunately, the Raptors of the Fourteenth Wing afforded them that opportunity.

  When it was all over, the six men in Hamsum’s team could only gaze with unbelieving eyes at the destruction. “We got some,” Newman croaked. “The vids will confirm that, but we got some, chief, we got some. We’re Aces now, Marines.” But there was no elation in his voice. The other men were too awed to say anything.

  Hamsum stared at his assistant. His cigarillo had long since gone out, but throughout the fight it had clung stubbornly to the corner of his mouth, where it still dangled incongruously. That’s the image of the raid on NAS Gay that stuck in his mind ever after. For his own part, Newman resolved never to question his gun chief again. “Yeah,” he said at last. “The goddamned lizards wised up since we kicked their asses on Kingdom.”

  The attack had lasted less than ten minutes.

  Unnoticed by the six Marines in their gun position, huge clouds of smoke and flames hung over Sky City on the horizon. Targets in the city had been carefully marked by Skink reconnaissance. Civilian casualties were very heavy.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Newly promoted Lieutenant Charlie Bass, Staff Sergeant Hyakowa, and third platoon’s squad leaders joined Captain Conorado at Company L’s command post when Commander Usner, Thirty-fourth FIST’s F3 operations officer, came to brief them on their raid into the back door of the Skink base. Conorado sat on the ground next to Usner. Three sappers stood behind them. The five Marines from third platoon formed a semicircle in front of them. The Marines all had their helmets and gloves off and their sleeves rolled up so they could see one another in the visible.

  “You need to know up front,” Usner said, looking each of third platoon’s leaders in the eye, “that Brigadier Sturgeon selected Lima Three for this mission. You have the most experience of anybody fighting Skinks and taking them down in their own caves. He absolutely did not choose you because you are in the least bit expendable. Got that?” He held each one’s eye until he got a nod.

  “Good. Now, the defile seems to be clear at this time. At any rate, the string-of-pearls doesn’t show anybody in it.” He showed them the live infrared satellite feed on his UPUD’s display, a clear view of a cut in the mountainside where recon had discovered a back door to the underground complex. “Unless the Skinks have done more tunneling, we know their layout. This is the section we want to go into.” He projected a hologram map onto the ground in the middle of their ellipse and oriented it so that the entrance faced Bass. “Captain Conorado already has a copy of this and he’ll give it to you at the end of this briefing,” he told them.

  “This area is beans and bandages,” he said, using a pointer to indi
cate a large cavern with an entrance two hundred meters inside the cave, beyond a dogleg turn. The cavern was perpendicular to the tunnel and ran deep under the mountain. The map didn’t show any other entrances to it.

  “We’re more interested in this one.” He pointed out a cavern on the other side of the tunnel. Its entrance was a hundred meters beyond the first. “It’s filled with canister-on-packboard arrangements that we believe are compressed air and acid for the Skink small arms. We want a sample, and we want the weapons in the chamber destroyed—that’s why these sappers are going with you. On the way out, if you have time, we also want the sappers to do some serious damage in the beans-and-bandages cavern.

  “You’ve got your chameleons, so there shouldn’t be any danger of you getting spotted—the back door was unguarded on both occasions recon was there, and the tunnel in that area seems to be lightly traveled except for a few Skinks occasionally taking an outside break. And if anybody does come along, the tunnels have crates along the walls; you can duck behind them. Given what’s going on right now, the Skinks all seem to be staying in.”

  Usner noticed the quizzical looks he got, and explained what he meant. “Right, I guess you haven’t heard. The Skinks are running waves of air attacks on Sky City and the XVIII Corps positions around the city. That’s why the brigadier and the Corps CG think this is a good time to hit their base. The Skinks don’t know that we’re here, and all their attention is focused to the south. So this should be quick and easy.”

  Usner looked at the Marines from third platoon. “Questions?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bass said. “I see four entrances to that armory. How are they secured, or are they open?”