A World of Hurt

by David Sherman

  "At ease!" he snapped. He gave his men a couple of seconds to relax from attention, and quickly swept his gaze about to see everybody looking intently at him. "Here's the situation. Nobody knows what the situation is planetside. We're going in blind. So we had best be ready for anything. Even then, 'anything' is liable to jump up and bite us on the ass. But if we don't let things turn into a cluster fuck down there, we'll make it through all right.

  "One more thing." He smiled grimly. "We aren't going to cross the beach on Dragons, we're going in on hoppers. We'll swing in around the fighting and set up as a blocking force. I know few of you have crossed the beach in hoppers recently, but we're Marines, we do what we're told, and we do it right the first time.

  "Questions?"

  "Yessir," Corporal Dean asked. "Who are we fighting?"

  The lights dimmed before Bass had a chance to answer. Their lumination rose and fell for several seconds before returning to normal.

  "If anybody doesn't know," Bass said to the platoon when the lights returned to normal, "that was the Grandar Bay's defensive shields blocking energy weapons being fired at us." He paused for a few seconds to let that sink in, then went on, "To answer your question, Corporal Dean, offhand I'd say we're going to be fighting the ground forces of whoever it was that just took a shot at our ship. Seeing as how we don't know who they are to begin with, we'll just take on whoever wants to fight us when we get planetside." He looked about once more, then said, "Squad leaders, with me," and turned to lead Hyakowa and the squad leaders to where he could brief them.

  "I've never crossed the beach on a hopper," Corporal Claypoole muttered nervously when Bass and the senior NCOs had gone.

  Corporal Chan heard him. "I have," he said. "It's just like on a Dragon, except we exit the Essays at a thousand meters instead of on the deck."

  "It's that thousand meters that bothers me," Claypoole muttered.

  Corporal Kerr, third platoon's most experienced fire team leader, overheard the exchange. He was one of the few members of the platoon who had crossed the beach in a hopper, and he knew from their looks that most of the Marines were nervous about the prospect of riding into combat in a way they'd never rehearsed. Since nervousness could develop into fear, he decided to deal with it immediately.

  "We've all made combat assaults on hoppers," he said to Claypoole, loud enough for everyone to hear. "What we're doing here is called an 'envelopment.' That means we don't go in hot, we go to someplace where the enemy will come to us. I've done it before--believe me, it's safer than riding the Dragons across the beach."

  Lance Corporal MacIlargie, voicing Claypoole's concern, said, "Don't the hoppers leave the Essays at a thousand meters? Is that safe?" He ignored the look Lance Corporal Schultz gave him.

  "Sure it is," Kerr answered calmly. "It's been done thousands of times; the navy knows how to drop hoppers without breaking them. And if anything does go wrong, the hopper's got a thousand meters to recover in. I've done it, and I'm still here." His visible hands patted his invisible chest and hips.

  "I've done it too," Corporal Pasquin growled. "Not only is it safe, riding in a hopper is more comfortable than in a Dragon pounding across the water."

  Quickly, Corporals Dornhofer, Barber, and Taylor spoke up, reassuring the other Marines that they'd made planetfall on hoppers and everything would be copacetic. Most of the Marines began to feel a little better. Of course, had they known what the corporals really thought about launching hoppers from Essays...

  It wasn't long before the Marines were headed for the welldeck. They began filing in by company, where the FIST's Dragons, hoppers, and Raptors awaited them, already in Essays. The Marines lined up at the Essays' ramps and awaited the order to board.

  When the order to embark came, third platoon and Company L's assault platoon boarded one Essay and filed into the three hoppers that waited inside to receive them.

  Corporal Claypoole looked at the webbing cocoons stretched across the interior of the hopper and felt like backing out and finding an Essay with a Dragon that had an open slot for him to slip into. He was accustomed to the web couches Marines rested in during assault landings in Dragons. The cocoons in the hoppers didn't look strong enough to take the violent shaking the Essays experienced during their descent down the rocky road of the atmosphere. Intellectually, he knew hoppers made landings all the time. Emotionally, he had trouble believing hoppers could stay in the air at all, much less be flung out of Essays at altitude and not injure or kill the Marines riding in them.

  And the cocoons...Straps attached them to the overhead, straps attached them to the side walls, and more straps anchored them to the deck. Nothing held them from moving fore and aft. They looked like they'd make a very unstable ride. He looked, but didn't see the cupped tubes Dragons carried for Marines to regurgitate into if their stomachs got too queasy to hold their contents down.

  "Secure your men, Corporal," Sergeant Linsman said harshly into Claypoole's ear.

  Claypoole jumped. "Aye aye, Sergeant."

  Lance Corporal Schultz had paused to help Lance Corporal MacIlargie into his cocoon before casually climbing into his own. With their weight in place, upchuck tubes dropped from the overhead and settled on their shoulders. But they were supine, and Claypoole knew that if someone threw up in that position, he could choke to death on his vomitus. He swallowed to keep his own gorge from rising.

  He checked the webbing and saw that both of his men were properly strapped in. At least, he thought they were. He'd been oriented on hopper webbing, but had only used the webbing on ground-to-ground hops. Then he climbed into his own cocoon and found the straps easier to lock in place than they appeared. Sergeant Linsman came around to check everybody in his squad.

  "See, it's not so hard," he said when he reached Claypoole.

  Claypoole didn't respond; he didn't believe the worst was past.

  Shortly, the alert came to stand by for null-g. The atmosphere was sucked out of the welldeck, then the great doors slid open, exposing the Essays to space. On signal, the Essays were plunged out of the welldeck. They maneuvered away from their still-moving home to group in formation, then began their straight-down descent to the surface of Maugham's Station. The "rough ride on a rocky road" had begun.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The ride down through the layers of the atmosphere wasn't as bad as Corporal Claypoole had feared, it was merely as rough as the ride was for the Marines in the Dragons inside other Essays--until the Essays dropped to an altitude of five thousand meters. Then they flared into a wide breaking spiral, slowing their descent as well as their airspeed, and flipped about so their front-facing ramps were pointed to the rear. The Essays' engines fired in short bursts, tap-tap-tap, slowing them more, and the small attitude thrusters on their bottoms fired, further slowing their descent. When the Essays passed two thousand meters, they lowered their ramps, their cargo holds filled with the roar of air rushing past, and, sucking the air out of the holds, the hoppers strained against their tie-downs. At fifteen hundred meters the attitude thrusters changed their pattern of fire and the main engines cut off. The Essays tipped nose downward. At a thousand meters the Essays fired their forward attitude thrusters to increase their airspeed, and the tie-downs holding the hoppers in place released their grips.

  The hoppers rolled out of the Essays and began to plummet uncontrolled toward the ground. As soon as they dropped the hoppers, the Essays spun about, fired their main engines, and headed back to the Grandar Bay.

  The hoppers didn't drop for long. Every aircraft commander had performed that maneuver many times in the past, as had the copilots. Before the hoppers dropped a hundred meters, their engines were firing and the pilots were bringing them under control. They worked their way into formation by the time they reached five hundred meters. The flight commander ran a comm check with the other hoppers and with the Dragons, which were already speeding westward across the ocean to the shore, which was over their horizon. The land was visible from the
altitude of the hoppers.

  Assured that everything was in order, the flight commander turned his ten-hopper formation to the north and sped off. Fifty kilometers on, the hopper flight swung through a ninety degree turn and sped west another two hundred kilometers before swinging through another ninety degree turn south. Not much more than half an hour after being flung from the Essays, the hoppers touched down, well inland from the fighting forces that were being approached by the rest of the battalion from the coast.

  "Say again?" Commodore Boreland said incredulously.

  "She's the Goin'on, sir," McPherson repeated, "of the We're Here! navy. We're Here! is--"

  "I know what We're Here! is, Mr. McPherson," Boreland interrupted. "That's why I'm surprised. We're Here! is one of the least aggressive worlds in the Confederation. Why in the cosmos would they be making war on Maugham's Station?"

  McPherson was equally baffled, so he said nothing.

  "Does she show any sign of coming back for another pass?"

  "Negative, sir. After her first salvo, she changed course to planetary south and followed the transports. She's still receding. Looks like she's running away."

  "A wise move," Boreland murmured. An Omaha-class light cruiser had neither the fire power nor the armor to stand up to an unmodified Mandalay, much less to the weaponry the Grandar Bay's engineers had modified to fight the Skink starships at Society 419 at the end of the Kingdom campaign. "What about the starships coming behind us?"

  "Sir, we've resolved them well enough to know the class of most of them."

  "Tell me."

  "In addition to the King-class dreadnought, there are two Mallorys and three Freemonts, along with three smaller starships we haven't identified yet."

  "The Mallory cruisers are even older than Omahas, I know that, but what is the Freemont class?"

  "Three-generation-old destroyers, sir. The last of them was retired before my parents even met." McPherson couldn't hold back a short bark of laughter.

  "Have you ID'd the King yet?"

  "We think she was the Trefalgar before she was retired."

  "Let me guess, sold to We're Here!"

  "Yessir. And our records show that We're Here! also bought two Mallorys and three Freemonts."

  Boreland could hardly believe it. The Grandar Bay was being attacked by a task force of ships so old they'd all been retired before he joined the navy. The Trefalgar, or whatever she was called now, was the only one that stood a prayer against the Grandar Bay's weapons as they were now configured. The only threat the task force altogether posed was in strength of numbers. And that was only if their weapons and armor had been well maintained, which he seriously doubted. He knew that if he fought them, he was going to feel like a bully. But he couldn't simply let them regroup, cross his T, and fire broadside after broadside into his shields where he couldn't fire back. Could he?

  Corporal Claypoole hadn't been the only member of third platoon's second squad to find out how the regurgitation tubes in the hoppers worked. The webbing sensed when a Marine's abdominal wall rippled in the pattern typical of pending regurgitation. When the regurge tube sensed it was being placed over the Marine's mouth, some of the web cocoon's straps shortened and others lengthened, turning the man facedown, allowing him to vomit without choking.

  By the time the hoppers settled into level flight, Sergeant Linsman, Corporal Kerr, and Lance Corporal Schultz were the only members of the squad who hadn't vacated their stomachs, but far more of them lost it during the violent maneuvers after the hoppers were thrown out of the Essays than during the plunge down from the Grandar Bay. The interior of the hopper stank for a while, until the air scrubbers did their job, but the tubes managed to catch all the ejecta, so the aftermath was less unpleasant than it might have been.

  All were relieved when the hoppers set down and they were able to scramble off into an open landscape that was broken up with treelines. Low mountains rose a couple of kilometers behind the company.

  "Third platoon, squad leaders, check your you-are-here," Ensign Charlie Bass called on the platoon's command circuit. The squad leaders synchronized their HUD maps with their platoon commander's map; their you-are-here icons were all in the right place. "Put your people in the treeline here," Bass told them. He transmitted an overlay that he had already marked on his HUD map to the squad leaders. The squad leaders led their men to the trees and set them in place facing east.

  "Wolfman, are you linked with second fire team?" Corporal Claypoole called.

  "I'm in contact with Corporal Doyle," Lance Corporal MacIlargie answered.

  "Good. Cover from ten o'clock to two o'clock," Claypoole said, assigning MacIlargie his primary field of fire. "Make sure you're overlapped with Doyle."

  "Roger," MacIlargie said, and turned to his right to ask Doyle what his field of fire was.

  "Hammer!" Claypoole turned to his left, then paused. He had to lower his infra screen to find his other man; Lance Corporal Schultz wasn't in the treeline area facing east. Claypoole finally found him just behind it facing south. "Ah, right," Claypoole said aloud to himself, "watch the flank, good idea." Then to Schultz, "Hammer, watch the flank."

  Schultz raised his helmet screens and languidly spat to his front. He was on the company's extreme left flank, where else was he going to watch?

  "I'll cover to my nine. Does that overlap with your field of fire?" Claypoole asked, trying not to sound nervous. He took Schultz's grunt to be an affirmative. "Right. Now we wait." He silently groaned, hoping that didn't sound too dumb.

  "Everybody linked here?" Sergeant Linsman asked as he dropped to a knee next to Claypoole.

  "Sure are, Rat," Claypoole said. "Wolfman's overlapping with Doyle, I'm overlapping with him and Hammer. Hammer's watching the left flank."

  "Good." Linsman clapped a hand on Claypoole's shoulder and started to rise.

  "What's the situation out there?"

  Linsman paused. "Don't know. The last I heard was when we were still on the hoppers and the rest of the battalion hadn't made contact yet. So we wait." He thought for a moment. "There's no string-of-pearls, so we're pretty much blind beyond eyeball range. Tell you what. Until I get other word, one-third alert." He patted Claypoole on the shoulder and left before the corporal could ask another question.

  Claypoole swore about the lack of information, then realized nothing was developing fast, otherwise Linsman wouldn't have told him only one man at a time in the fire team had to keep watch.

  "Hammer, Wolfman, one-third alert. Who wants first watch?"

  There was a long moment's silence, then MacIlargie said, "I'll take it."

  "You got it." Claypoole relaxed. If Schultz didn't want first watch, trouble must still be some distance off.

  Corporal Doyle didn't think going off one hundred percent watch was such a good idea. There was an unknown number of unknown enemy soldiers out there somewhere. He knew those enemy soldiers badly outnumbered Company L. Worse, he knew he was smack in the center of their advance. Who were they? Nobody had told him, all everybody said was, "We don't know." Were they Skinks? Thirty-fourth FIST came to Maugham's Station in the first place looking for Skinks. Instead of Skinks, they found acid-spitting vines and flesh-eating plants and wound up almost getting killed in a forest fire. But they were looking for Skinks--were the Skinks here now? Is that why everybody kept saying they didn't know who they were up against, so the troops who had to fight them wouldn't get too scared while they waited for the enemy to show up?

  No, that didn't make any sense; if they were waiting to intercept Skinks, they could prepare, because they knew that's who was coming. He wasn't sure how they could prepare for the Skinks, but he knew they could do something. So what was really going on?

  Worrying was tiring, and Doyle's guts were still unsettled from the ride down. He realized he was too tired and unsettled to keep worrying about it all. Corporal Kerr said he'd take the first watch. If Corporal Kerr was watching, Doyle knew, they were all right, he wouldn't let any b
ad guys sneak up on them. Corporal Kerr was just about the best Marine Doyle had ever seen. And he knew Lance Corporal MacIlargie was on watch to his left. MacIlargie wasn't as good as Kerr, but he was still pretty good.

  Doyle relaxed and rolled onto his back to rest, maybe catch a quick nap. His eyes slipped slowly closed, then snapped open again.

  Right in front of him, only a couple of kilometers away, were some low mountains. He sat up to take a better look at them. It wasn't a long range, only a few kilometers from end to end. But the ends weren't ends, they curved as if they formed an arc of a circle, or an oval. They looked just like that circle of mountains where the company had run into the killer plants that shot streams of acid that were like the Skink acid guns.

  Corporal Doyle whimpered.

  The Dragons carrying Kilo and Mike Companies hit the beach at a densely forested estuary and sped upstream on the river until the forest thinned out enough to allow movement on land, where the long column split into three. One column remained on the river, the other two flanked it to either side on land. A hundred twenty-five kilometers inland the three columns made a quarter left turn and left the river behind. A few kilometers beyond, they spread out on line. Minutes later the Raptor section of FIST's composite squadron roared by low overhead in the same direction.

  Commander van Winkle was the very image of calmness as he sat in his racing command-and-control Dragon. He had to project image; everybody was nervous about rushing blind into harm's way. He knew that as long as he appeared calm, his presence calmed his men--even those who thought his calmness was because he didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.