Starfist - 13- Wings of Hell

by Dan Cragg

  Doyle realized he needed to distract himself. He slid his infra into place and looked to his sides. The red blurs representing PFCs Summers and Johnson were visible in position right where he expected them to be. The rational part of his mind told him the shaking he saw in them was an illusion, that they seemed to be shaking only because his own trembling distorted his view. The frightened part of his mind insisted that his men were as nervous as he was about the hundreds of Skinks passing so close to their front.

  He swallowed. He had to steady his men and reassure himself that they were all right, that they weren’t as frightened as he was. If they were as frightened as he was, then he would have to steady himself so he could calm them. If they weren’t, then he needed to show them that he also wasn’t frightened.

  He looked to his left and said into his fire team circuit, “Summers, are you all right?”

  “Maintaining, Corporal Doyle,” PFC Summers answered. “Just waiting for the word to burn some Skinks.”

  Doyle nodded to himself. Summers sounded relaxed. He took a deep breath, and said, “Be patient, it’ll happen.” He turned to his right. “Johnson, you?”

  “I’m cool, Corporal Doyle.” Johnson didn’t sound as calm as Summers; there was a slight tremor in his voice. Doyle thought he could use some bucking up.

  “Hang in there, Johnson. It’ll happen any minute now.”

  “Right. Thanks, Corporal Doyle.”

  There was a moment of silence, then, “Corporal Doyle?”

  “Yes, Johnson?”

  “I was nervous before. Hearing your voice helped.”

  “You’re not nervous now?”

  “Not so much, no.”

  Doyle didn’t say anything else. He turned off his comm and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The rational part of his mind told him he’d done exactly the right thing in checking on his men. The frightened part of his mind was still there, it just didn’t have anything to say on the matter. He turned on his comm.

  It felt a lot longer to most of the Marines of third platoon than it actually was, but the second and assault platoons finally got into position. Captain Conorado was with them and took a position behind the middle of his company’s line.

  “Company L,” Conorado said into the all-hands circuit, “get ready. On my command, fire!”

  Almost as one, the blasters and guns of two platoons, and the heavier guns of the assault platoon, all opened fire.

  The stream of Skinks flowing into the tunnel mouth lit up in gaudy flashes of pyrotechnics. Hundreds of the enemy were vaporized in less than a minute. Those who weren’t immediately incinerated ran, trying to reach the safety of the tunnel mouth. Very few of them made it. If any of them attempted to turn toward the Marines and charge to within range of their own weapons, they didn’t get far enough for anybody to notice what they were trying to do.

  It was a slaughter. The Skinks in the open never had a chance.

  The firefight was so one-sided that after a few bolts, Lance Corporal Schultz kept shooting only because his company commander had told him to open fire, and nobody had told him he could stop shooting yet.

  “Cease fire!” Conorado shouted into his all-hands. “Cease fire!”

  The company commander looked and listened, but saw no more Skinks approaching the tunnel mouth, or lying prone in the thin brush that partly covered the scorched killing ground where so many of them had just died.

  Corporal Doyle kept shooting until the cease-fire order came, then flung all of his screens back and violently threw up. He wasn’t the only Marine sickened by the massive killing; both of his men were as well, and Doyle heard retching from beyond their positions.

  “Second and third platoons, on line,” Conorado ordered. “We’re going to sweep through the area. If any of them think they can hide from us, we’re going to show them just how wrong they are. On your feet. Watch your dress. Let’s move out!”

  They found no living Skinks, only scorch marks where the enemy soldiers had burned so hot and briefly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Lieutenant (jg) McPherson listened to the orders he was receiving from the Combat Information Center, aye-aye’d, and hung up his talker. “Chief,” he said, loudly enough for the two petty officers at their stations in front of Chief Petty Officer Nome to hear, “the jar-heads planetside found something and Fleet wants us to find out if it’s the only one.”

  Chief Nome’s jaw moved side to side as he shifted the stub of a one-inch hemp cable clamped between his teeth from one side of his mouth to the other. “What and where is it, and where should we look for more?”

  The Surveillance and Radar Division commander diddled buttons on the arm of his chair and changed the scale of the large display showing the current area of operations planetside, to focus more tightly on the section where the Skinks were attacking the Fifty-fourth Light Infantry Division and the Marines were counterattacking the Skinks from their rear. The positions of the soldiers on the line showed clear in infra; the Marines’ chameleons had limited infrared damping effect, so they were less clear—but the plasma bolts from their weapons showed up exceedingly bright. The Skinks barely showed; the main indicator of where they were was the flickering strobes made by the pellets thrown out by their rail guns.

  “The Marines found a tunnel mouth here,” McPherson said. He touched buttons that put an icon where Corporal Pasquin had discovered the Skink tunnel. “Fleet wants us to find out if there are any other tunnel mouths in the area.”

  SRA2 Hummfree broke discipline and swiveled around in his chair to face his division commander.

  “Sir, you realize, of course, that Fleet’s asking the impossible. I mean, unless there are more tunnel mouths and lots of Skinks start pouring in or out of them.”

  Chief Nome removed the stub of rope from his mouth, preparatory to reaming Hummfree a new one for speaking out of line, but McPherson spoke first.

  “Yes, Hummfree, I do realize that. And that’s why I’m assigning the two best surveillance and radar analysts in the entire navy to the job.”

  Hummfree’s mouth pursed as he looked at the officer. Then he glanced at SRA2 Auperson in the chair next to his, and shook his head as he swiveled back to his displays. He could hardly protest being asked to do the near impossible after publicly being called one of the two best SRAs in the entire navy. But if, Hummfree thought, I’m one of the two best, how come I’m still a second—

  His musing was interrupted by McPherson adding, “You know, Hummfree, that the skipper has put you in for first class. If you find what Fleet wants, that’ll almost guarantee a meritorious promotion.”

  He hadn’t known, but if it was true…

  The first thing Hummfree did was focus on the discovered tunnel mouth and examine the image in all frequencies so he’d know the signs that would help him find what he was looking for. He had SRA2 Auperson, the other of the two best SRAs, do the same thing.

  Chief Nome stuck the stub of hemp back in his mouth and leaned back in his chair with his arms folded across his massive chest to watch the two work their magic.

  It took some time, because the tunnel mouths were very well camouflaged to prevent detection from orbit, but SRA2s Hummfree and Auperson found three more tunnel mouths before the Marines broke the Skink attack. Then they switched to following the faint traces of the retreating Skinks and found where they disappeared into two more hidden tunnels.

  “Chief?” Auperson suddenly said.

  Chief Nome grunted permission for Auperson to speak, and rolled the stub of hemp rope to another place in his teeth.

  “Something just occurred to me, Chief.”

  Nome snarled something that might have meant “Stop wasting my time, Auperson. Spit it out!”

  “Right, Chief. Like I said, it just occurred to me—”

  Nome removed the rope from his mouth and growled, “Yeah, I know something just occurred to you. You’ve said that. Now what was it?” He chomped back on his rope.

  Auperson sw
allowed. “Well, Chief, it’s this.” He rushed on before Nome could get on him again for repeating himself instead of getting where he was going. “Those places we spotted earlier, you know, the ones we thought might be smaller Skink bases close to NAS Gay? I think some of these might be some of the same places.”

  Hummfree hadn’t been paying much attention to the exchange between his fellow SRA and Chief Nome, but he caught that last. He jerked and felt like kicking himself for not noticing what Auperson had. His fingers danced over the controls on his panel, and an overlay came up, showing the suspect locations that had been found earlier. Five of the nine matched one of the tunnel mouths the two of them had found over the past few hours. It was a matter of minutes before he matched another to a known tunnel mouth.

  “Check the rest of ’em,” Nome growled around his rope stub.

  In less than ten minutes, all nine of the suspect locations were matched.

  “Keep looking, gentlemen,” Lieutenant (jg) McPherson told them. “I have a feeling there are a lot more of those hidden tunnel mouths.”

  Hummfree straightened in his chair and stretched side to side to work the kinks out of his back, then settled in to search some more. Auperson aped him and moved his search to a different area. They kept to it long enough for McPherson and Chief Nome to take turns leaving for mess and for McPherson to go out for a division commanders’ call. They worked not only through their entire shifts but halfway through the next shift before McPherson called a break.

  “Grab a meal, a shower, and a few hours’ sleep,” he told them. “You did damn good.”

  As they had—they’d found another dozen hidden tunnel mouths. Fleet was quite pleased with what they had done. The ground commander was even more pleased.

  “The navy’s really come through for us, Doc,” General Anders Aguinaldo said to Major General Donnie McKillan, his chief of staff.

  McKillan nodded. “It’s that SRA off the Fairfax County, the one Ted Sturgeon recommended.”

  “SRA2 Hummfree,” Aguinaldo agreed. “I’ll drop a not-so-subtle hint to Admiral Chandler to give him an ‘attaboy.’”

  McKillan chuckled. The army and navy gave medals for exemplary duty performance. The Marines expected exemplary duty performance, so they didn’t award meritorious service medals, and referred to those given by the other services by the derogatory “attaboy.” “So what are we going to do with the information Hummfree got for us?”

  “Assemble my staff, and round up Generals Carano and Almond with their senior commanders and staff. By the time everybody’s together, I should know.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” McKillan left to do his boss’s bidding.

  As soon as his chief of staff was gone, the overall Confederation commander contacted Ensign Jak Daly, the army’s recon commander, and gave him instructions.

  It was a couple of hours before all the commanders and staff officers General Aguinaldo had called for were able to assemble in Aguinaldo’s headquarters, which gave Ensign Daly’s recon people time to get a good start on fulfilling Aguinaldo’s orders.

  “Gentlemen,” Aguinaldo began without preamble, “at this moment, recon minnies disguised as Norway brown rats are in the tunnels, following them to wherever they go. In the normal course of events, we wouldn’t know what they find until they exit the tunnels back into direct control of the recon units that deployed them. But they are being followed into the tunnels by recon Marines, who are in contact with the minnies and are emplacing comm repeaters along their route so we can receive real-time intelligence from them. Look at this.”

  Aguinaldo nodded to Lieutenant Quaticatl, who turned on a 2-D display. The image was grainy, and bounced about, but it was clearly the light-amplified view of a tunnel along which the source of the image was moving. A window in the lower left corner of the display showed a series of numbers, detailing the speed of the minnie, its distance from the tunnel entrance, and environmental data. The image was accompanied by susurration that sounded like a ventilation system. There may have been an undercurrent of rushing water in the sound, but at the moment the ventilator susurration masked it too much.

  Aguinaldo nodded at his aide again, and the image changed to a surface map. The known tunnel mouths were marked, and paths indicated, showing the routes taken by the minnies inside the tunnels. All paths led generally to the north.

  “Based on this very preliminary intelligence, I believe that the tunnels lead all the way to the underground Skink complexes a thousand klicks north of Sky City. Unfortunately, given the speed of the minnies, it’d take about ten days for them to go that far. We shouldn’t give the Skinks ten days to recuperate from the defeat they suffered in the pincer between the Fifty-fourth Division and the Marines—or allow them that time to prepare and launch another assault. Instead, I want to strike back at them as quickly as possible.

  “Between the two corps, we’ve got ten divisions. I want two divisions to station themselves outside each of the five known Skink complexes and be prepared to enter and clear those complexes. I want the Marines to break down into companies and enter twelve of the tunnel complexes and follow them to their end in Dragons and Battle Cars. There are more tunnels than Marine companies, so the Corps of Engineers and the combat engineers will enter the remaining tunnels and collapse them to a depth of one kilometer. Draw up your plans and have them for my review by ten hours tomorrow.”

  Major General McKillan called all present to attention when Aguinaldo stepped away from the dais to exit the room. When the top commander was gone, he looked at the two corps commanders and said, “Gentlemen, you have limited time. Dismissed.” The assembled commanders and staff scrambled.

  Company L was in positions covering the mouth of the tunnel where they’d ambushed the Skinks. If the Skinks tried to come back out, they would be met by the full firepower of a Marine company. None of the Marines thought the Skinks stood a chance if they tried it.

  The command came down, and the Marines boarded Dragons and Battle Cars. The three stronger, heavily armed Dragons entered the tunnel, followed by the Battle Cars. The Dragons carried third platoon, one section of the assault platoon, and the company command element.

  The column was three kilometers in when an order came from Battalion to halt. Commander van Winkle spoke to all of his company commanders on his comm.

  “Recon reports that all tunnels are flooded,” van Winkle said, “beginning about eleven kilometers in. The flooding is nothing that the Dragons can’t handle, but the water’s too deep for the Battle Cars. So Corps has scrapped the idea of a Marine assault at the northern termini of the tunnels. But we still need to know where they go. So here are your new orders.

  “Return all Battle Cars to the surface immediately. I say again: return all Battle Cars to the surface immediately. The Dragons will proceed to where the tunnels are flooded. Once they reach the water, two Dragons will return to the surface. One, I say again, one Dragon will pick up the recon element it will meet at the water’s edge and proceed at top speed to the terminus of the tunnel. Recon will drop comm repeaters at appropriate intervals so that contact can be maintained. Upon reaching the tunnel terminus, the Dragon will report what it finds. The Dragon and the Marines it carries are not, I say again, are not to initiate contact with the enemy. Do you understand?”

  One by one, the company commanders replied that they understood their orders.

  “One more thing,” van Winkle said. “Company commanders are not to go with the Dragon heading deeper. You will remain with the bulk of your company outside the tunnel mouth. Understood?”

  Again the company commanders replied that they understood—but there was a certain reluctance in their voices.

  “All right, then, do it.” Van Winkle signed off.

  Captain Conorado, from his position in the second Dragon, gnawed over the orders. He didn’t like them, neither the part about sending twenty of his Marines a thousand klicks into unknown territory, nor the part about not going with them. He was their co
mpany commander. If he was sending them into harm’s way, he should go with them! But his orders were clear, and he had acknowledged them; he had no choice but to obey them. He got onto the company command circuit and spoke to the company’s officers and senior NCOs.

  “Listen up. The tunnel is flooded up ahead. The Dragons can handle the water, but the Battle Cars can’t. When I give the order, everybody but the lead Dragon will reverse and head for the surface. The lead Dragon will continue on to the water, where it will pick up the recon element, and continue to whatever is there and report back. That one Dragon and its Marines are not to initiate contact with the enemy. Questions?”

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Bass, whose men were in the lead Dragon, said, “do you realize that if the tunnel goes all the way to the enemy complexes that we know about, it’ll take almost eleven hours for us to get there?”

  Conorado nodded. He hadn’t made the calculation himself, but he’d understood from the time he’d gotten the original orders to enter the tunnel that it would be a long ride if they went all the way north. “I know that, Lieutenant. I also know that these orders came from Corps. And when a lieutenant general gives orders—”

  “Captains and lieutenants obey,” Bass completed. “I understand our orders, sir. Will do upon your command.”

  “All right, then,” Conorado said. “Let’s do these things.”

  Before he departed, Conorado had one last thing to say to Bass—on the private circuit. “Good hunting, Charlie.”

  “Thanks, Skipper.”

  The Battle Cars and the Dragons leaving the tunnel reversed and headed for sunlight. A lone Dragon moved out.

  Before they headed onward, Bass had shifted people around to put himself, second squad, and one gun team in the Dragon heading deeper into the tunnel. He picked second squad over first partly because first squad had an inexperienced fire team leader, Lance Corporal Longfellow, who was leading a thrown-together fire team that couldn’t be expected to function as well as one that had trained together. And second squad had Lance Corporal Schultz. Going to an unknown location, into an unknown situation, the one Marine whom Bass wanted at his side more than any other was Hammer Schultz. Four Marines from the FIST’s recon squad were waiting for them at the water’s edge. Bass got out to examine the area. There was no light; the Dragon had to turn on its floodlights for him to see by.