Starfist - 13- Wings of Hell

by Dan Cragg

  Trotte was no dummy; he knew where the safest place for him was. He throttled back to keep from overflying the Skink starburst; if he could keep himself in the middle of the scattered enemy planes, they wouldn’t fire on him out of fear of hitting their own.

  Or so Trotte thought.

  Three Skink pilots spotted Trotte’s Raptor at almost the same instant and barked harsh words, telling the others to watch where their fire went. The first two didn’t aim, just pointed in the general direction of the Raptor and fired. The third took the time to line his guns on the target. The three were in different parts of the sky, two almost directly in line with the Raptor, opposite each other. One of those two was the one who took the time to line up his shot. He never got it off because the burst fired by the Skink aircraft opposite him pulverized his aircraft, instantly sending him to the Emperor’s ancestors.

  Trotte, meanwhile, had lined up on another Skink and sent a short burst from his plasma cannons at him. The plasma didn’t have quite the same velocity as the Skink rail guns but it wasn’t much slower. It was fast enough that he barely had to lead his target. His reflexes were fast and he was already jinking and searching for another target by the time the plasma stream gave him his sixth kill of the fight.

  When a Skink rail gun finally found and tore off the rear of Trotte’s Raptor, he had killed nine of them—and in their eagerness to be the one to down the brave Earthman pilot, the Skinks had downed another five of their own.

  Another one hundred and fifty Skink aircraft orbited west of NAS Gay at thirty thousand meters, waiting for the next Essays to make planetfall. They intended to intercept that planetfall by killing the Essays before they spiraled to the ground.

  But General Aguinaldo knew they were there through intelligence and the Marine had seen how Trotte had taken on a fifty-aircraft wave single-handedly. Based on those two things, Aguinaldo had issued an order to the fleets in orbit.

  So the Essays scheduled to bring antiaircraft guns down in the lazy three-orbit spiral favored by nearly everybody other than the Marines, who came down in a combat assault landing. And they carried Raptors, prepared to take flight when they were still at fifty thousand meters.

  As a side note, at the same time Aguinaldo issued that order, he put in strongly worded recommendations for the Confederation Medal of Heroism for the late Lieutenant (jg) Trotte and Corps of Engineers Sergeant Regis Alfonse—the highest decoration given by the armed forces of the Confederation of Human Worlds.

  The three orbiting carriers launched sixteen Essays, which went into formations near their respective starships and held station while each carrier trundled another sixteen Essays into its well deck. Each of the Essays contained three Confederation Navy A8E Raptors. At the same time, each of the two gator starships carrying the additional FISTS for the operation launched four Essays carrying a total of twenty Marine A8E Raptors.

  As soon as all 104 of the Essays were in their various formations, Rear Admiral Worthog, from his command center on the CNSS Raymond A. Spruance, commanded “Away All Boats” and the formations turned planetward, the Essays firing their engines in a carefully plotted sequence that would have all of them arriving twenty thousand meters above the orbiting Skink aircraft at the same time.

  In a straight-down line, the plunge would take approximately seventeen and a half minutes from the fleets’ thousand-kilometer orbiting altitude to the interface between the mesosphere and the stratosphere, where the Essays would commence braking maneuvers. But because none of the Essays were plunging straight down but rather at various acute angles, and they didn’t all begin at the same time, almost twenty-five minutes passed before the Essays turned their noses up and began turning into the spirals that would eat their downward velocity.

  That twenty-five minutes was more than enough time for the Skink intelligence operators watching the orbiting fleets to notice that the Essays were heading planetside in combat assault mode, and for the High Master who commanded the Skink air forces to alert his high-orbiting wings to change their tactics from attacking slow-moving shuttles to striking at fast-moving shuttles as they dove planetside, passing close to the wings waiting in ambush.

  The Essays began their braking maneuvers in a much more tight timing sequence than the formations had begun their plunges; they were closer to one another at fifty kilometers altitude than they had been in orbit. As soon as their spirals stabilized, the Essays’ crew chiefs pressed the levers that released the passenger Raptors from their firmholds. Firmholds released, the crew chiefs opened the ramps and the coxswains piloting the Essays tipped their noses planetward and fired their forward braking engines, then turned about, pointing their tails downward.

  No longer locked in place, when the decks below them abruptly slowed and slanted down the Raptors slid over the open ramps and into the thin upper atmosphere to begin their own unpowered plunges. Seconds later the pilots ignited the solid fuel that allowed powered flight at high altitude and took control of their plummeting aircraft.

  This was not a maneuver the Skinks were prepared for.

  The approximate twenty seconds from the time they dropped from the Essays until they plunged through the scrambling Skink aircraft was barely enough time for the Raptor pilots with the fastest reflexes to gain control of their aircraft, acquire targets, and fire off brief bursts of plasma bolts. But with an advantage of more than two to one in aircraft, the navy and Marine air didn’t need to have a terribly high proportion of their pilots get off aimed bursts to inflict serious damage on the enemy. So it was that approximately twenty seconds after the Raptors dropped from the Essays, the one hundred and fifty Skink aircraft were reduced to 107, and the 107 Skink pilots were monstrously confused; their ambush had somehow gone seriously awry.

  Lieutenant Arby Doremus, leader of the four Raptors of “Walleye division,” was one of the thirty-seven pilots who scored a kill on the first pass. Doremus’s call sign was “Walleye” after a facial deformity he suffered when a piece of shrapnel fractured his eye socket during what should have been a routine flyover on some rinky-dink little peacekeeping mission—the powers that be thought the mere sight of the ten Raptors of the squadron of a Marine FIST would be enough to cow the belligerent parties into backing off from killing each other. The powers that be were wrong, and the rinky-dink little peacekeeping mission turned into an eleven-standard-month deployment that saw many more Marines than a junior pilot get wounded—and some get killed. Afterward, then-ensign Doremus refused reconstructive surgery on his eye socket—the deformity didn’t affect his vision—because, he thought, the eye made him look more fearsomely warriorlike. Some insensitive pilots began calling him “Walleye.” The nickname stuck and he came to wear the sobriquet with pride.

  As soon as Walleye Doremus passed his kill he bounced, ignoring the bumps of debris rattling off his fuselage. His three division-mates bounced with him and in seconds the four Marine Raptors were again above the scattering Skinks, flying level in a tight circle, ready for another dive. Doremus was no glory hound; he wanted his wingmen to get their fair share of kills. He scanned the Skinks and spotted half a dozen speeding in a northward climb that would shortly bring them to the same altitude as Walleye division.

  “Walleye pups, this is the Walleye his own self. Azimuth, one-seven-two. Range, two-five and increasing. Six chicken-lickin’s. Fricassee their tails!”

  “Legs, breasts, and wings, too!” Lieutenant Robert Sandell, Walleye Three, said as the four Raptors peeled out of their circle and began pursuit.

  “I want a drumstick!” Ensign Caleb Haynes, Walleye Four, came back.

  “You and your drumsticks!” Ensign Albert Baumler, Walleye Two, said. “I’ll stick with the tits.”

  “Gotta fricassee ’em first, pups,” Doremus reminded his division. He increased throttle and the others began increasing their on-line intervals. They quickly closed the gap.

  But the Skinks weren’t fleeing the battlespace. Or they spotted their pursuit and decided to tu
rn back on it—after all, they were six, and only four were chasing them. As one, the six Skinks whipped into a Cobra turn, flying straight up, then rolling as they turned back to dive at the Raptors.

  Seeing the six enemy aircraft coming toward them and gaining speed, the Marine pilots executed barrel rolls to throw off the aim of their foes. The maneuver worked—all six Skinks fired rail guns, and all six missed.

  Then the aircraft passed one another and the Marines went into wide horizontal turns, only to find the Skinks executing yet another Cobra turn. The Marines tightened their turns and slanted upward to come at the Skinks on an angle. As the Skinks adjusted their approach to put the Raptors directly to their front, the Marines changed their own arcs to prevent the enemy from getting a fix on them.

  “Walleyes, turn before they reach us,” Doremus commanded. “We’ll weave on them.” The other pilots aye-aye’d. “Now!” Doremus ordered when the two groups were still two kilometers apart. He and Baumler broke right and turned sharply; Sandell and Haynes broke left. The Skinks tried to get off aimed bursts from their rail guns but the Marines’ maneuver was too fast and unexpected for them to get lined up.

  But they tried. And when the Marines completed their turns and were headed back toward the north, a Skink was on the tail of each flight of Raptors; the other four Skinks had overshot and were climbing into a loop to drop back behind the Marines.

  “Weave!” Doremus shouted into his radio as he began a wide turn to his right. Baumler began swinging wide to his left; the Skink took an instant to decide which to follow and went after Baumler. Doremus quickly switched his right turn into the arc of a circle to his left and Baumler did the same to his right. In seconds they passed each other, each having drawn half a circle. They immediately turned in the opposite direction, describing the opposite sides of another circle. But Doremus throttled back slightly so that Baumler and the Skink on his tail would both pass in front of him. Doremus got a lock on the Skink and fired a burst from his plasma cannon. The Skink ran right into it and exploded. Doremus flipped his Raptor’s nose up and bounced to get over the flame and debris from the disintegrating enemy aircraft.

  Baumler quickly followed, shouting, “You got him, you got him!”

  A few kilometers away, Sandell and Haynes executed the same maneuver, with Haynes getting the kill.

  But there were still four Skinks, and the Skinks were now behind the Marines, maneuvering to line up their guns on them.

  This time the Marines executed Cobra turns, whipping up and twisting around to dive on their opponents. They all fired, hoping the Skinks would fly through the streams of plasma their cannons spat out. Baumler got a kill but the others missed.

  Then it was a scramble, with the seven aircraft all flying solo, trying as hard to avoid colliding with one another as they were to line up on targets.

  Walleye Four was so intent on closing on a Skink’s tail, ready to hit him with a stream of plasma, that he didn’t see that another Skink, intently twisting to get a line on one of the other Raptors, was closing on him at a combined speed of close to Mach 2. Both pilots were so intent on the kills they thought they were about to score that neither noticed the other. Both were shocked when their wings clipped each other and their aircraft were thrown into uncontrollable spins.

  Suddenly it was over, with another Skink shot down and the lone survivor fleeing at top speed. Doremus took a last shot at him but the Skink jinked and the burst missed. Then three Marine Raptors turned back to where the main battle was ending.

  Even though the Essays had continued to fall planetward after releasing the Raptors they carried, past the altitude at which the Skink aircraft waited to ambush them, and before they managed to stop their drops and began to return to orbit, none of them were lost. The Skinks had been too busy fighting the Raptors to molest their intended victims.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Grand Master sat on his low chair on his dais, glowering at the three in front of him. The four Large Ones flanking him also looked sternly at the trio. One of the three was the High Master commanding the air forces; he knelt, sitting on his heels. A long, sharp knife lay on the matting before his knees. To one side of him was the Over Master who had commanded the force that struck the Earthman air base. He was also kneeling, but his forehead was lowered to the matting before him. To the High Master’s other side was the Over Master commanding the high air force charged with downing the Earthmen’s orbit-to-surface shuttles when they made their next planetfall. He was likewise semi-prostrate. A Large One, sword drawn and held across his body, stood behind the High Master.

  The Grand Master did not have a cup of steaming beverage at his side; the low table there was unadorned even by a single, perfect bloom. That lack of beverage and beauty clearly demonstrated his displeasure with the three officers before him.

  The three commanders had already delivered their reports to the Grand Master, and now he demanded answers to questions.

  First he demanded to know how one Earthman with one piece of heavy equipment could raise berms that protected Earthmen from the rail guns of the second wave, and then raise more berms that protected buildings from the rail guns of the third wave.

  The High Master lowered himself to touch his forehead to the matting, then raised himself to support his upper body on his outstretched arms. He had no answer for the Grand Master.

  Then the Grand Master demanded to know how one—one!—Earthman killer craft could be responsible for the deaths of fourteen killer craft of the People before being killed himself.

  The High Master pounded his forehead three times on the matting before again raising himself halfway up. Once more he had no answer.

  In a rasping bark, the Grand Master demanded answers to the same kinds of questions from the Over Master commanding the strike force. That Over Master raised his head far enough that the matting wouldn’t muffle his voice. He had no more of an answer than had the High Master.

  Then the Grand Master demanded to know how it was that the high force had not suspected that the Earthmen might be sending a responding strike force of killer craft to attack the high force when it was obvious from the way their shuttles plunged planetward that they were doing something unexpected.

  This time, when the High Master raised his head from pounding it on the matting, it was marked with blood from the force of his pounding. He had no more answers than before.

  Even surprised and outnumbered, the Grand Master demanded to know, how could the excellent pilots of the Emperor, in their nimble killer craft and with their superior weapons, have lost more than half their number while killing fewer than half that number of Earthmen?

  The High Master pounded his forehead on the matting until most of his face was streaked by the blood that flowed from his brow. But he still had no answer for the Grand Master.

  Neither did the Over Master in command of the high force when the Grand Master raspingly barked the same questions at him.

  The Grand Master glowered silently at the three for long moments before finally giving a harsh command.

  The High Master swallowed, then sat full up on his heels and picked up the long, sharp knife before his knees. He loosened his robes, baring his stomach. With a quick, sure stroke, he sliced his belly open so that his entrails tumbled out. The Large One behind him shifted his grip on his sword and gave it a powerful swing at the High Master’s neck. The High Master’s head flew off and bounced at the foot of the Grand Master’s dais. The Large One then beheaded the two Over Masters without according them the honor of first disemboweling themselves.

  The Grand Master snapped his fingers, and his chief of staff glided from where he’d been hidden behind one of the draperies covering the walls of the hall. Using few words, the Grand Master instructed his chief of staff on appointments to fill the now-vacant leadership positions in the air force. He used even fewer words to direct that the mess before him be cleaned up.

  He began to plan his next move.

  I
t takes time for 308 aircraft to land on two airfields—Beach Spaceport’s airfield was commandeered to assist in accepting the Confederation Raptors—especially when both runways still had damage suffered in the Skink air assaults. So much time, in fact, that the Essays on the gator starships carrying Thirteenth and Twenty-sixth FISTs, which hadn’t launched until the air battle had been decided, made planetfall before all the Raptors were down. The Essays off the carriers didn’t return home but went to the gator starships carrying the army divisions of XXX Corps to help ferry them planetside. The first of them were loaded and launched by the time the last Raptor from the Ninth Air Wing landed at NAS Gay.

  With the Earthman navy and its circle of sky-eyes in orbit, the Grand Master knew that moving large numbers of his Fighters by aircraft was too great a risk. But his sky-gazers had plotted the positions of the satellites in the circle of sky-eyes, along with their likely fields of view. Those likely fields of view included, not unexpectedly, all of the bases in which the Emperor’s army lay waiting for battle. But the Grand Master knew something the Earthmen didn’t know: The Emperor’s army had made good use of the lengthy time they had been on this world and had excavated extensive tunnels that extended far beyond the bases. All the way to within a few kilometers of the Earthman center at Sky City—and the Earthman air base and the bivouac area growing near the city and airfields.

  With that in mind, the Grand Master dispatched two divisions into the long tunnels to attack the Earthman bivouac while it was still in the chaos of getting organized. Then he sat back and folded his hands over his belly to wait for reports from what was about to become the front lines.

  “Move it! Move, move, movemove, move!” the sergeants shouted in the age-old cry of sergeants attempting to bring order to the chaos of large numbers of men attempting to get in formation, board vehicles, prepare camp, or advance to fire.