Starfist - 13- Wings of Hell

by Dan Cragg

  Bass also let his Marines out to stretch their legs for the last time in what might be many hours. The tunnel widened slightly here. Its floor started sloping downward a few meters before it met the water, and the water met the floor across the entire width of the tunnel.

  “How deep is it?” Bass asked Sergeant Steffan, the recon ream leader.

  “The ramp continues to slope at the same angle until the water’s a bit more than a meter and a half deep.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any underwater gear, so I couldn’t check it any farther than that.”

  Bass grunted; a sheen on Steffan’s chameleons showed that he’d recently gone into the water to shoulder depth. “Deep enough to float a boat.”

  Steffan nodded.

  “Where’s your minnie?”

  “I sent it ahead. Minnies don’t swim well. We lost contact with it after a hundred meters or so. It probably drowned.”

  Bass peered down the tunnel; he could see a few hundred meters. It was water all the way, and no ripples. He looked at the overhead and felt the faint breeze on his face. The susurration of ventilators provided a background noise.

  “What have you found out about the ventilation?” he asked.

  “There’s large fans in the overhead every quarter klick. One blows up, the next down. None of them are at high speed, just enough to keep fresh air flowing. They’re concealed from topside somehow. At any rate we couldn’t see through them to the surface.”

  “All right. Let’s go. Marines, saddle up!”

  In seconds they were on the way again, leaving a rooster tail that rose high enough to splash against the overhead.

  It was crowded in the Dragon. Even though the Dragon could carry twenty fully outfitted Marine blastermen and it only had eighteen, it also had a gun, which took up one space. And they were going a very long way; there was little room to stretch muscles that, after several hours, would threaten to cramp.

  Every few hundred meters, Sergeant Steffan dropped another comm relay in a flotation device so they could maintain contact with the rest of the company where it waited outside the tunnel. A hundred kilometers into the tunnel, Steffan told Bass he was out of relays. Bass ordered a halt and contacted Captain Conorado to ask for instructions. It only took a couple of minutes for Conorado to come back with “Continue the mission.”

  So they continued on, unable to contact anybody on the surface, going an unknown distance, into an unknown situation.

  Six hours in, Bass called a halt and had Corporal Duguid, the Dragon’s crew chief, lower the ramp so the Marines could stretch the kinks out of their muscles and void their bladders into the water. After ten minutes they moved on.

  They reached the end of the tunnel. It emptied into a cavern, large enough that the Dragon’s lamps couldn’t fill it with light. A gravel beach bordered the cavern, and hundreds of boats were pulled onto the beach or lashed to pilings sticking out of the water. The ceiling of the cavern was high enough that they had to be under the mountains—which jibed with the inertial positioning shown on the platoon’s UPUD.

  Bass ordered Corporal Duguid to drive onto the beach and turn parallel to the wall. The ramp dropped and the Marines piled out, automatically setting a defensive perimeter around the Dragon. They paid little overt attention to the boats that had been crushed by the Dragon passing over them to gain the beach.

  “Where the hell’s the door?” Bass asked over the platoon circuit, into which he’d patched the recon team. The only egress he could see from the cavern was the tunnel by which they’d entered. Nobody else could see one, either. The exit was very skillfully hidden or it was underwater.

  “By fire teams, piss break,” Bass ordered.

  Bass took his break with the Dragon team. Most of the Marines used uncrushed boats as the receptacles for their bodily wastes. While he pondered what to do next, Bass gave his Marines a fifteen-minute meal break. Then he huddled with Sergeant Kerr, Sergeant Steffan, and Corporal Duguid to discuss what he wanted to do next.

  “Did anybody find entrances or exits that I don’t know about?” Bass asked.

  The three NCOs exchanged glances and shook their heads.

  Bass looked at the quiet, boat-filled pool. “Must be underwater,” he said. “Remember Society 437?” he asked Kerr.

  Kerr nodded. “Yeah, they had a tunnel that led from the lake into their caves. Probably the same thing here.”

  Bass looked at the boats again. “I’m not going to look for any tunnels here, but we can’t leave the boats for the Skinks to use to come after us. We’ll burn them, then get back in our Dragon and take off.”

  “Aye aye,” the NCOs agreed, grinning at the prospect.

  “Let’s do this thing.”

  Finished with the leaders’ meeting, Bass had the boats set afire. Then the Marines reboarded the Dragon and headed back the way they’d come. A growing fire blazed behind them.

  Good, Bass thought. Now they won’t be able to follow us.

  Fifty kilometers down the tunnel, the Dragon stopped under an up-drawing fan set. Lieutenant Bass and Sergeant Steffan climbed on top of the Dragon and examined the fans. The overhead was low, and even when they kneeled their helmet tops brushed stone. The fan was large, its blades more than two meters in diameter, and it moved slowly, but the strong breeze being drawn implied there were more fans above it. Bass shined a light between the blades and saw another fan the same size two meters higher, which was also moving slowly. He was pretty sure he could make out another fan above that.

  “Do you think you can climb between the blades?” Bass asked the recon team leader.

  “It’d be a lot easier if I could stop them,” Steffan answered as he examined the fan’s mechanism.

  Suddenly a disembodied hand shot upward and plunged a metal rod into the hub of the fan. The blades screamed to a stop.

  Bass looked where the hand came from and saw Lance Corporal Schultz through his raised helmet screens. Schultz looked a question at Bass. Bass considered, and nodded.

  Schultz stood between two now-immobile fan blades and reached up to jam another metal rod into its workings. The fan shrieked as it came to a halt. He climbed up, standing on the bases of two blades, then pulled himself up onto the next fan. Bass heard the screech of another fan. And then another. That was followed by the sounds of a body moving away from them, and then silence for a few minutes. Then they heard the moving body again, and a moment later Schultz dropped back onto the top of the Dragon.

  “Good camouflage,” Schultz said. “I pinged the string-of-pearls.”

  “Good man,” Bass said, punching at where he thought Schultz’s shoulder was. He didn’t miss by much. “I’m going topside and report.” He began scrambling to the surface. Steffan and Schultz followed.

  Lieutenant Bass quickly located the string-of-pearls and bounced his comm off it to contact Captain Conorado.

  “I’m glad to hear from you, Charlie,” Conorado said when he came on. “What did you find?” He listened while Bass described the boat chamber and its lack of visible exits; he chuckled grimly when Bass told him about burning the boats. “All right, I’ve got a fix on your location now.” While listening, Conorado had Corporal Escarpo, his comm man, use the UPUD to locate Bass’s position. “Get all of your people topside. A few hours ago we got the word to move up. The army needs some help. We’ll rendezvous with you. Stand by for more. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have further instructions. Lima Six-Actual out.”

  In fifteen minutes, all the Marines except for the Dragon crew were on the ground above the well-camouflaged ventilation fan set. Soon after that, Conorado called.

  “Bring the Dragon crew up. The engineers are blowing the mouth of your tunnel. We should be at your location in an hour. It’ll be a little tight getting you in the rest of the vehicles, but we won’t have far to go.”

  Before heading for the surface, the Dragon crew set their main plasma supply to erupt. They gave themselves a ten-minute window to get clear.

  CHAP
TER THIRTY

  The Dragons and Battle Cars were crowded, just as Captain Conorado predicted, but, as he’d said, the ride wasn’t far. As for the help the army needed…

  First platoon, Easy Company, Second of the 502nd, heading north at high speed in its Battle Cars, was the first element of the Twenty-fifth Mobile Infantry to encounter the Skinks, four kilometers south of the underground complex the division was headed for. The platoon’s earlier losses, when the Skinks had attacked the forming main line outside Sky City, had been replaced, which didn’t exactly thrill Sergeant First Class Jaworski. Not that he wasn’t glad to have the platoon back up to strength. The problem as he saw it, and it was a problem, was that the new men hadn’t trained with the platoon’s survivors—or even with one another. So he knew there were going to be problems when the fighting started. He hoped Lieutenant Murray, the platoon commander, wouldn’t expect the platoon to act like the well-oiled machine it had been before getting hit so hard.

  First platoon was in four Battle Cars rather than its normal three because Jaworski had managed—don’t ask how—to score a Marine plasma gun, and extra soldiers to man it. That first battle had convinced him of the value of plasma weapons—at least against the Skinks. He only wished he’d been able to come up with more blasters so his entire platoon could be armed with them. But the plasma gun, that would go a long way toward giving first platoon the firepower—he chuckled at fire, it was so literal now—it needed to defeat this enemy.

  Jaworski was riding in the second Battle Car with second squad, mulling over how to keep the LT from expecting too much of the platoon once the shooting started so he had a ringside seat when a rail gun shredded the lead Battle Car.

  “Sharp right!” Jaworski yelled at his Battle Car’s driver. “Hard right!” The vehicle yawed wildly, almost tipping over, before the driver got control. It barely got out of the way of the next rail gun burst, which took off a rear corner of the troop compartment.

  “Is everybody all right back there?” Jaworski yelled into the comm.

  “No casualties,” Staff Sergeant Wynn, the squad leader, shouted back.

  Jaworski looked and saw a thick clump of trees just ahead. “Pull behind those trees and open up,” he ordered the driver. “We’re about to stop and open up,” Jaworski told Wynn. “Everybody out and take cover.” Only then did he get on the comm to Lieutenant Murray.

  “The LT’s hit bad,” Staff Sergeant Cunningham, third squad leader, answered. “Looks like you’re in command.”

  Jaworski swore, then asked about other casualties; Murray was the only one in the third Battle Car who was hit. “Get your people out, under cover, and start returning fire,” he ordered. Then he contacted the fourth Battle Car, but those soldiers were already dismounted and were trying to get their unfamiliar weapon set up to return fire at the rail gun.

  Swearing under his breath, Jaworski skittered, then bent over far enough that he had to use one hand to keep from falling on his face, to where the gun crew was. The crew got it up and firing a few seconds before he reached it.

  “Move that thing!” the platoon sergeant ordered. He could see it wasn’t firing at where the rail gun was, and knew the Skinks would try to take it out right away. He plowed into the crew when they didn’t move fast enough and grabbed the gun to bear it out of the likely rail gun fire. He made it just in time, but only two soldiers from its crew came with him—the third was killed by the burst that had been meant for the gun.

  Jaworski swore again; one hand had partly gripped the barrel of the gun and he suffered second-degree burns before he managed to shift his grip. “Follow me,” he snarled at the two remaining crewmen, then headed at a crouch back to where he’d left second squad. Wynn had the squad on line, firing into the forest to their front. So far, the only fire that had come their way was from the rail gun, and they hadn’t seen any Skinks yet.

  “Just keep moving!” Jaworski told Wynn. “Don’t let that lizard zero in on you.” He ran to the far end of the squad’s line and set up the gun, faster than the assigned crew had. The rail gun didn’t give out a blazing trail, like the blasters did, nor did the gun smoke or steam. But he’d figured out how to find it when first platoon came under attack the first time. The rail gun was shooting through the undergrowth; he watched for the green fuzz of leaves being blown away by passing pellets, and followed the track back to where the pellets came from. There! He had them! He aimed and squeezed the firing lever, and a solid bar of plasma shot out from the muzzle of the gun to where he believed the rail gun was located.

  He must have been right, because he saw a brilliant flash that wasn’t plasma, and the enemy stopped firing.

  Only then did he become aware of the voice calling on his comm. It was the company commander wanting a report. He gave it: the LT down, first squad gone, one other soldier killed in action, one Battle Car destroyed. One rail gun taken out, no other enemy sighted.

  “Stand by. The rest of the company has dismounted. We’ll advance to your position on line. The entire battalion is going to move forward on line to attack whoever else is in front of us.”

  In ten minutes, the entire Second of the 502nd was advancing on line, laying down a steady, light fire to their front. No flashes of vaporizing Skinks met any of their blaster bolts, and no one returned fire. Not at first.

  But they knew it would happen.

  And when it did, they were ready for it.

  An opening whirr of rail gun fire splattered a few soldiers over the forest green, but most of the troopers hit the ground and were down by the time more rail guns opened up. Streamers of greenish fluid arced out of the trees toward the soldiers—and expended themselves against foliage or fell short.

  Sergeant First Class Jaworski grinned; it was obvious to him that a nervous rail gunner had opened fire too soon, before the soldiers were in range of the acid shooters.

  The soldiers of the 502 put up a wall of flechette and blaster fire. Flares went off in the forest to their front, almost one every time a blaster bolt flew at the Skinks.

  Gods in heaven, Jaworski thought, they must be shoulder to shoulder!

  He still had the gun and got it set up. He found where one rail gun must be to his left and looked for another to his right. When he found it, he began firing a long traverse, from one gun to the other. A row of brief torches lit up along the traverse, and the soldiers of first platoon cheered. The volume of fire coming at them dropped precipitously. They didn’t need any urging to increase the rate of their own fire, and soon nobody was shooting at them anymore.

  The Twenty-fifth Mobile Infantry Division resumed its advance, along with the rest of the XXX Corps and the XVIII Corps. The soldiers and their commanders didn’t know it, but they had inflicted severe casualties on the Skinks.

  The help the army needed wasn’t to avoid being overrun, but to finish off the Skinks fast.

  The mood in the Grand Master’s hall was somber. The Grand Master himself was a study in stone, his face so totally expressionless that it might have been carved from the same granite from which was hewn the battlements of the Emperor’s High Castle. He wore armor. Not shiny ceremonial armor, but battle-scarred armor, riveted where bands had been broken by enemy swords. He held a sword across his knees. The sword had the slight, graceful curve of all proper swords, but it wasn’t a graceful thing that he held; even a casual glance revealed it as a killing tool.

  No delicate flower stood graceful in the delicate vase on the low table at the Grand Master’s side. The diminutive female who served him and tasted his beverage huddled in sackcloth. The cup on the table was made from crudely thrown clay and was unglazed. The beverage it held did not steam. It was not a soothing drink; it was a clear, distilled beverage that increased strength and aggressiveness.

  No females knelt gracefully between the Great Masters, High Masters, and Over Masters who sat on their ankles before the Grand Master. Instead they were grouped together behind the dais, overseen by a Large One. The tables between them
were barren. In formal settings, each of these ranking Masters had an assigned mat on which to sit. Many of the assigned mats were unoccupied, especially those of the Over Masters, though several of the High Masters, and even one of the Great Masters, were missing. The missing had gone before the living to join their ancestors—should they be allowed to join them after they reported their failure to the spirits of the Emperors past.

  The Grand Master spoke, his voice rasping because of his dry, atrophied gill slits. He told the assembled commanders and senior staff what they already knew or suspected: that the Earthman Army had just inflicted such severe casualties on the Emperor’s army on this planet that the latter was no longer capable of fulfilling its mission. He told the assemblage that he had prepared a message, that the message was even then being loaded into all the drones the corps had. The drones would all be launched at once, with the expectation that at least one of them would get through the cordon of the orbiting Earthman fleet and find its way to Home.

  Then he told them what they were going to do.

  When the Grand Master finished talking, he raised his unglazed cup in salute to the Emperor, and barked one word. The assembled commanders and staff withdrew flasks from within their garments. The Grand Master quaffed the contents of his cup; the commanders and staff drank deeply from their flasks. The Grand Master stood without another word and marched from the great hall. His guardian Large Ones marched at his side. The assembled Great Master, High Masters, and Over Masters rose and marched behind them. The Masters and Leaders who provided true security in the hall stepped from behind the draperies and joined the parade. After the last of them entered the tunnel that would lead the procession to the surface, and glory at the hands of the Earthmen, a fire flared briefly in the hall as the remaining Large One immolated himself and the females.