by Dan Cragg
“You got lead in your pants, soldier? I said move it!”
“Your prom date ain’t waiting up for you, sonny. You don’t move any faster than that, Jodie’s gonna get in her pants!”
“Your feeble old grannie can erect a mod faster than that, soldier! Move like you mean it!”
There was no scientific proof that yelling ever inspired soldiers to make camp any quicker or more efficiently. But it did keep them from thinking about what came next, or wherever else they’d prefer being, or whatever else they’d rather be doing. And using their voices gave the sergeants the feeling that they were actually doing something. Whether the yelling had a positive effect or not, the soldiers of the Second of the 502nd, Twenty-fifth Mobile Infantry Division had their bivouac, some eight kilometers northwest of Sky City and NAS Gay, up with all the mods properly aligned and streets laid out in less than three-quarters of an hour. The battalion commander was happy, which made the company commanders and platoon commanders happy, and gave the sergeants that warm and fuzzy feeling; their yelling had actually accomplished something. As for the troops, they were just glad that nobody was yelling at them for the moment and they could pause for a breather.
Then an order came down that set the troops to grumbling: “Weapons and ammo inspection in twenty minutes.”
Nineteen minutes after the inspection order was passed, Sergeant First Class Rov Jaworski stood in front of his platoon, which had assembled in formation in front of its row of two-man modules, and gave them a quick eyeballing. He knew what the inspection would find; maybe not everybody’s weapon was sparkly enough to pass a garrison-world inspection, but every weapon was clean and functional, and every needle tin filled and in its carrying harness pouch.
“Stand easy until the officers get here,” he told his men. It was an admittedly feeble joke for the platoon sergeant of first platoon, Easy Company, but he always said it. It got the expected polite chuckles and mild groans.
Jaworski was a bit less confident about the blasters a quarter of his men carried. Major General Vermeil, the Twenty-fifth’s division commander, was mightily impressed with the supposed one-shot-one-kill capability of the Marines’ primary infantry weapon. Jaworski knew the Marines were crack troops but he’d been around long enough to know better than to believe everything they said about their combat prowess. Regardless of what a mere platoon sergeant thought might be the case, Vermeil had prevailed upon General Aguinaldo to issue him enough blasters for one man in every fire team to have one, and for every third machine gun to be replaced by a Marine assault gun, the automatic-fire plasma gun.
There was a sound of gunfire off to the left, in the direction of Howe Company, and Jaworski, fists jammed into his hips, turned to look toward it.
“What is it, Sarge?” somebody called out.
“Who’s shooting, Sarge?” another asked.
“How the hell do I know?” Jaworski snapped. They were in a combat zone, and nobody had told him about any scheduled familiarity firing. As far as he was concerned, that only meant one thing.
“Lock and load!” he commanded, drawing his own sidearm to make sure it was loaded and its safety on. “Look alert while I try to find out what’s happening.” He got out his comm and tried to raise Lieutenant Murray, the platoon commander. Murray didn’t respond, so Jaworski tried the company HQ, where he got a clerk. Dumbass clerk didn’t know what was going on, only that the first sergeant and all the officers had gone to the battalion HQ as soon as the shooting started.
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” Jaworski asked himself after signing off.
He figured it out in a hurry.
“Shit, Sarge!” a man in the platoon’s front rank shouted, looking beyond Jaworski. The soldier raised his blaster to his shoulder and fired a plasma bolt that passed so close to Jaworski that the platoon sergeant clearly felt the heat from the passing star stuff.
Jaworski spun to see what the soldier had fired at and caught sight of the fading flare of a vaporizing Skink. He simultaneously saw fifty or more Skinks on line, coming out of the forest a hundred meters distant. They were carrying the tank-and-hose arrangements that the intelligence briefings said were acid weapons.
“Get on line and kill them before they get in range!” Jaworski screamed. The intelligence briefings had said the acid shooters had a range of fifty meters. But he’d been around long enough to know that intelligence briefings weren’t necessarily accurate—he’d seen images of what that acid did to a human body, and he wanted those Skinks taken out before they got anywhere near his men.
First squad stayed in place and the soldiers began firing. Second squad ran to the left and third to the right. The entire platoon shifted formation faster than they’d moved when the sergeants were yelling at them to set up the bivouac. Jaworski had to hit the ground and crawl toward first squad to avoid getting hit by the flechette and plasma fire his men were pouring downrange. The fire was slackening a bit by the time he reached the squad and he was able to stand up and look over the ground between him and the forest’s edge. He didn’t see any Skinks.
“Cease fire!” he called out. “First platoon, cease fire!” There were a couple more whirrs of flechette fire and one crack-sizzle of a blaster and then the shooting was over. “Squad leaders, report!”
“First squad, no casualties.”
“Second squad, we’re all right.”
“Third squad. Everyone’s fine.”
“Damn,” somebody in first squad said. “Did you ever see anything go up in flame like those buggers did?” He hefted his blaster and looked at it admiringly.
“Flashed it righteously!” said the man next to him, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Hey, that one’s faking!” a blaster-armed soldier in second squad shouted. He raised his blaster and shot at one of the crumpled bodies that had been torn up by flechette fire.
“That one, too!” called out a man in third squad. He fired his blaster at another of the Skinks. In seconds, every blaster-armed soldier in the platoon was firing plasma bolts at the downed Skinks.
“Hey, let me get one!” a flechette-rifle-armed soldier called out, and grabbed for a blaster.
“’Toon, ten-hut!” Jaworski’s bellowed command cracked over his men like a whip, and they stopped shooting and snapped to attention. “Get back in formation!” he yelled. He stepped in front of the reassembling platoon. “Squad leaders, watch the forest.” He glowered at the men of his platoon and spoke in a low, ominous voice. “We are soldiers, not barbarians. We don’t shoot the dead, or vaporize them just because we can. We treat the dead with respect, no matter how inhuman they—”
“Sarge, more coming!” the first squad leader shouted.
Jaworski jerked around. This time there wasn’t any lousy fifty Skinks coming out of the forest, it was like the entire forest had come to life and was racing toward them.
“On line! Prone! Show them that the Second of the 502 is nobody to fuck with!”
Even faster than they had the first time, the twenty-seven men of first platoon got on line and began pouring fire into the mass of Skinks charging across the open. Skinks were falling all along the line, many flared up; some of the flaring Skinks ignited others running close by or already fallen.
Then a high-pitched whirr announced the arrival of the Skinks’ other infantry weapon—the rail gun. The first long burst whizzed over the heads of the prone members of first platoon without hitting anybody.
“Take cover!” Jaworski screamed. He scrabbled behind a nearby mod. He covered his ears to block the cut-off screams of standing soldiers who didn’t get under cover fast enough before the next burst tracked the line of first platoon’s position. Still, most of them made it, either to ripples in the ground, or behind mods that gave them brief protection from the rail gun’s pellets.
“Keep firing!” Jaworski shouted. “And change your position every time you do. Don’t let that rail gun zero in on you!”
Behind the mod, the platoon
sergeant couldn’t see all of his men, but he could hear the whirr of flechette rifles and crack-sizzle of blasters, so he knew they were obeying at least part of his orders.
Then three pellets hit the mod he was hunkered down behind and splinters and dust sprayed over him. With the the side of his face pressed to the ground, he saw three more mods to his left get pulverized. He realized his platoon couldn’t hold out for long with the rail gun shooting at them. He thought fast and remembered the instructions he’d been given earlier to zero in artillery. Well, he hadn’t done the zeroing yet, but he had the orders on his comp. Fumbling, he got his comp out of his pocket and keyed it, looking for the artillery instructions. There! He found them.
He grabbed his comm and contacted the division’s artillery fire control center. Once connected, he rattled off the coordinates for the zero check, gave his azimuth to the registry mark, and asked for three rounds to register.
Whoever was on comm at the fire control center told him to try again, to put his request in proper form.
Jaworski was in no mood for the petty shit. “We’re under attack by a rail gun, goddammit! Let’s get registered so I can guide you to the rail gun!”
After a few seconds of muffled voices, another voice came over the comm. “What’s your situation, Easy-One-Five. Over?”
“We are about to be overrun by Skinks in the open, and a rail gun has us pinned down. Over.”
The voice was muffled again for a moment, then Jaworski heard a distant booming over the comm, and the voice said, “Three spotter rounds coming downrange. Over.”
“I’ll adjust.” Jaworski began counting off the seconds. The artillery park was ten kilometers to his rear, and the rounds traveled at better than Mach 4. A quick mental calculation told him it would take the spotter rounds about seven and a half seconds from muzzle to impact.
At the count of eight, three explosions impacted in the forest four hundred meters away.
“On my azimuth, down three-five-zero,” Jaworski ordered into his comm. That would have the next rounds impacting a scant fifty meters away from his line—if the spotting was right. He hadn’t made any adjustments to verify the registration.
“Three spotter rounds, on the way,” the artillery voice came back a few seconds later. Then “Are you sure we were that far off?”
“I think you were right on. That adjustment was to get the Skinks that are about to overrun my position!”
“Holy mother of Buddha, I hope you got it right.”
“So do I.”
Less than eight seconds after the second three-round salvo was fired, a sharp whistling in the sky announced the arrival of three artillery rounds that impacted in front of first platoon, Easy Company. Shrapnel flew all about, shredding Skinks and thunking into the dirt. Jaworski heard a couple of screams from his men but couldn’t let that affect him, not while they still had a battle to fight—and that rail gun was still out there.
He poked his head up, taking a risk, to see if he should call “fire for effect.” Many Skinks were down but more were pouring out of the forest—and his men were still firing.
“Up fifty. Fire for effect!” Then he shouted to his men to shoot only the closest Skinks. Artillery rounds started exploding near the edge of the forest, some in the clear, some inside the trees. He remembered how the Skinks really did flare up when hit by plasma from the blasters, and how Skinks too close to their flaming comrades also burned. So he called in, “Use incendiaries!”
“My UPUD shows forest where we’re firing for effect,” the artilleryman replied. “Incendiaries will cause a forest fire.”
“I don’t give a damn. That forest is full of Skinks. The incendiaries will kill them faster than Hotel Echo will.”
“It’s your funeral pyre,” the artilleryman said.
Seconds later, flames began erupting in the forest and just outside it. When Jaworski looked up he was relieved to see torches going up, the flashing of burning Skinks. In a few moments Skinks stopped flooding into the open. Only a few who made it through the barrage entered the open area, where the soldiers of first platoon shot them down.
The rail gun had stopped firing; Jaworski thought its crew must have been hit by artillery. Then no more Skink survivors made it into the clearing.
“Cease fire!” Jaworski shouted. “Cease fire!”
Most of his men obeyed the order fairly quickly, but the ones with blasters kept shooting, hitting the dead bodies, flaring them up.
“Cease fire, I said, goddammit! Stop firing!” He jumped up and started running along the line of his platoon, yanking blasters out of the hands of the soldiers who were shooting at the dead.
When the fire finally stopped, Jaworski called for the squad leaders to report. He’d started the battle with twenty-seven healthy, fit soldiers under him. Eight were dead and five more were seriously wounded—effectively 50 percent casualties. But when he looked out over the open ground leading up to the forest edge, and saw the scorch marks left by flashed Skinks, the ground dug up by the three artillery rounds he’d called almost on top of his position, and the fires burning in the forest, and realized that his men and the artillery he called in must have killed hundreds of Skinks, he was surprised that more than half of first platoon had survived the battle. And they all would have died, he was certain of that, if they hadn’t been standing with weapons in hand and all ammo on hand, ready for an inspection, when the first Skinks charged at them.
He thought again of the platoon’s casualties, and said softly, but with enough volume to carry to all the survivors, “Burn them.” He watched with satisfaction as the blasters carried by his soldiers fired at the bodies in the open and flashed them all into vapor.
It’s sometimes the small, unanticipated things that make all the difference in a battle. And so it was here. The Skinks had expected to assault a battalion in the midst of setting up their bivouac, with most of the men separated from their weapons. Instead, they hit when the soldiers of the Second of the 502nd all had their weapons in their hands and ammunition on their bodies, and were all assembled in their proper units. Thus it was that seven hundred soldiers were able to defeat an attacking force nearly four times their size while suffering relatively few casualties of their own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Sergeant Queege,” Colonel Raggel announced one morning, “you are excused duty today. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” He grinned. “Lieutenant Judy Bell here and I are going to spend the night on patrol. I’ll need you to ride shotgun.” Lieutenant Bell was the Sky City police department’s liaison to the Seventh MPs. She grinned at Queege, whom she referred to as “PQ.” In the short time they’d been together the two had developed a friendship. “Be back at dusk, booted, belted, and spurred.”
“Well, what about you, sir?” Queege asked Raggel.
“I can sleep when I make brigadier general. Now scram until tonight.”
During these nighttime patrols Colonel Raggel tried to visit every outpost in the city. These visits kept the men on their toes and him apprised of how things in his city—that’s how he’d come to think of Sky City, now as “his”—were going. These were not inspection visits; he made them because a commander had to be seen by his troops, doing what they did, only doing it better. He insisted on driving with Lieutenant Bell riding shotgun and Queege in the back monitoring the onboard communications and sensor arrays. With the sophisticated communications system they had in the vehicle she could listen in on the chatter from the security outposts around NAS Gay and Beach Spaceport. While those activities were not within the Seventh MPs’ area of responsibility, being patched into those networks was important in case those defenses were probed by the enemy. She also monitored the periodic line checks to the duty officer at the battalion tactical operations center made by the MP patrols and static security points, as did Colonel Raggel.
Suddenly Puella sat up in her seat. “Sir, someone out on the MSR—”
“What?”
“Someone
out on the MSR is reporting—it’s garbled but I think they were reporting activity along the highway out there—no, they’ve gone off the net.” There was alarm in her voice. The main supply route to the forward units of the corps ran from Sky City down what they called Highway One to the southwest. Puella noted the time was three hours.
“We have a joint checkpoint on Townsend Bridge over the Tyber Creek,” Lieutenant Bell reported. “That’s right on the edge of the city where Highway One begins.”
“Right,” Colonel Raggel confirmed. “Six men: three of mine, three of yours. Sergeant Queege, what do they report?”
“Negative report, sir. All quiet.”
“Tell them to be on their toes. Hold on, we’re going over there. Queege, keep your ears open, see if Gay or Beach have anything. Inform the battalion TOC we’re going over to Townsend. Tell them to wake up the quick reaction force. Who’s in charge tonight?”
“Lieutenant Fearley, Fourth Company, sir,” Puella answered, her voice an octave above its normal pitch; the atmosphere inside the car had suddenly gone very tense.
“All right, you two,” Colonel Raggel said as he shifted the car into high gear, “get your infras on, lock and load. Be ready to deliver immediate fire.” The tension had now shifted from eyeballs-bright to sphincter-tight.
Colonel Raggel turned off the lights and let the car roll to a stop a hundred meters up the road from the checkpoint. Through their infras the occupants could make out the gray-green images of the two fortified guard posts on the bridge, one on each side of the hundred-meter span. They could not make images of anyone inside them.
Colonel Raggel came onto the net and identified himself as Raggers Six. There was no response from the guard posts. “Scramble the reaction force,” he told Puella. She felt a very uncomfortable sensation in her gut. “Okay, children. Judy, you take the right flank, Puella, the left, I’ll be point. Shoot at anything that moves.” Puella wanted to suggest they wait in the car until the reaction force arrived but her throat had gone so dry she couldn’t form the words.