Starfist: FlashFire (29 page)

“Choose your targets and start picking them off,” Ratliff’s voice said in his earpieces.

Pasquin sighted in on a tank moving across his front at a slight angle. “Watch my hit,” he said on the fire team circuit. “Longfellow, take out the one to my left, Shoup, get the one to my right.” Satisfied with his sight picture, he fired. The Straight Arrow roared and an instant later fire enveloped one of the tanks. It shuddered to a stop, hatches flew open, and burning crewmen struggled out. One man rolled on the ground to put out the flames that enveloped him, another ran like a human torch until he dropped, the third didn’t move after he hit the ground.

Longfellow and Shoup fired simultaneously. Pasquin swore for the third time since looking over the coral outcropping; Longfellow’s aim was low and his Straight Arrow erupted in the treads of the vehicle he’d fired at. At least the tank couldn’t maneuver. It was a sitting duck for anyone who wanted to fire at it. Shoup yelled in frustration, his rocket lodged between the barrel and forward armor of his tank and fell off unexploded when the tank swiveled its turret toward them.

“Down!” Pasquin shouted, and slid back several meters. The tank’s first shot struck the forward slope of the outcropping between his position and Shoup’s. It exploded, throwing rock shards all over, some impacted behind the ridge and Pasquin felt them pepper the backs of his legs and glance off his helmet. He didn’t have time to think about whether any of the shards tore through his chameleons and into his flesh, because more cannon rounds exploded against the forward face and rained more shards and chips onto the Marines.

“Get your fire going!” Ratliff shouted into the squad circuit. “Hit enough of them and they’ll break off. They aren’t suicidal.”

I hope not,
Pasquin thought.
If they are, we can’t kill all of them, and the ones we don’t will do for us.
Out loud, he said, “Let’s get back up there and kill some bad guys.” He scrambled to a position a few meters to the left of where he’d originally fired from. On the way, he reminded Longfellow and Shoup to shift their positions as well; it sounded like the tanks were concentrating their fire on the spots from which they’d already fired. Next round, all three of them got kills.

Corporal Kerr did his best not to think about the boulder field second squad was in. The boulders were good protection against the infantry weapons they were facing, but a tank barrage could shatter the boulders and send sharp rocky shrapnel flying thick enough to wipe out the entire squad. He had positioned Corporal Doyle and PFC Summers before finding a spot for himself behind a large, slab-sided stone. Or he’d positioned Summers. Corporal Doyle had picked a spot that Kerr wished he had himself: closely hemmed in on all sides, it provided cover from most hits that weren’t directly on him, while giving him two good directions in which to fire and three easy routes out if he had to leave in a hurry, and he had space for the backblast to diffuse without bouncing back on him.

Kerr looked around the side of his boulder. A tank had advanced to within a hundred and fifty meters of second squad. A boulder to Kerr’s front partly obstructed his view of the tank, but he had a clear view of its turret. He aimed his first Straight Arrow to barely skim the top of the obstructing boulder and fired. The rocket cleared the boulder by centimeters before dropping out of his view. Then it hit, stopping the tank and rocking it backward. After a few seconds, secondary explosions threw the turret into the air, where it crashed upside down onto the tank.

To the left of his kill, where Kerr couldn’t see, there was another explosion, from Corporal Doyle’s shot; Kerr’s kill clanged when fragments of jagged armor pelted it.

“I hit the gun!” Summers shouted excitedly a second after another explosion to the right of Kerr’s kill.

Kerr risked rising up to take a look. Twenty meters from his dead tank, another lumbered backward with its cannon jutting out of the turret at an odd angle—that one needed its barrel, and maybe its entire turret, replaced before it could return to duty.

A flash of light made Kerr drop back down—the infantry supporting the tanks was beginning to fire at the Marines.
Where are our guns?
Kerr wondered.

Sergeant Kelly positioned his guns, first gun team in the middle of first squad on the coral outcropping, second gun team on the right flank of first squad in the boulder field. He didn’t like the position of either gun, but there was no place he could position them where they wouldn’t be too exposed to return fire from both the infantry and the tanks. But he had confidence in Corporals Barber and Taylor; they’d keep their guns from getting killed too easily.

Corporal Taylor didn’t like second gun team’s position any better than Kelly did. There was no way he could bring his gun to bear on the rebel infantry without rising above the boulders. Not for the first time in his career as a gunner, he wished for a gun capable of indirect fire. But plasma guns were strictly line-of-sight. The boulders were aggregate, mixes of coral and sandstone. If he’d had the time, he could have used the gun to slag boulders and provide firing lines that didn’t force his gun to rise above all cover, but the enemy was too close, and he didn’t have the time.

He peeked around the side of a boulder and saw a squad of infantrymen crowded close to a tank! He grabbed one of his team’s Straight Arrows, took quick aim, and fired. His years of spotting for his gun, and being gunner before that, paid off—his aim was true.

The Straight Arrow slammed into the front of a tread, shattering it and the wheels behind it, throwing out killing shrapnel. The tank made a half turn in the direction of the broken tread before the driver stopped it, but not before it ran over two soldiers knocked down by the shrapnel, and banged hard into three more who were still on their feet. Immobile, that tank was easy picking, and its crowded, supporting squad was almost wiped out.

“Kindrachuk,” Taylor said to his gunner, “here, you’ve got a shot now.” He looked to his left front and described an arc of fire to his gunner.

Lance Corporal Kindrachuk followed Taylor’s instructions and opened up on the infantry supporting a tank platoon that was approaching the gap between the platoon’s two blaster squads. He fired controlled bursts into the infantrymen, sending them to ground.

Taylor grabbed another Straight Arrow and killed a second tank before he had Kindrachuk drop back into cover. In little more than a minute of fighting, second gun team had accounted for two tanks and more than a platoon of infantry.

Corporal Barber and his first gun team had a less exposed position than second gun team. At least, the gun was able to send enfilading fire into the infantry to its left without being directly exposed to fire from its front. Barber positioned himself a few meters to the right of the gun where he could direct its fire while keeping a lookout to the front and left for good targets as well as danger from those directions. He saw a tank swivel its gun to fire on the gun’s position and hefted a Straight Arrow to his shoulder, simultaneously ordering Lance Corporal Tischler and PFC Yi, the assistant gunner, to take cover. Barber aimed more deliberately than Taylor had, and scored a killing hit on the tank’s side before the beast could get off a second shot at the gun team’s position. Secondary explosions from the tank’s ammunition shattered the armored vehicle.

“Get back up there!” Barber ordered after a quick scan failed to show any other tanks taking aim on their position. First gun team resumed fire.

“Shit-shit-shit!” Corporal Claypoole repeated as if the word were a mantra. He’d never wanted Schultz in his fire team to begin with—he was afraid of the man. But now that the Hammer wasn’t there, he wished he was. Claypoole was a good Marine, he knew that, and he knew that Lance Corporal MacIlargie was a good Marine, too. At least they were as fighters, even if both of them lacked something as garrison Marines. But both of them combined weren’t as good at fighting as Schultz was all by himself. Shit-shit-
shit
! but Claypoole felt vulnerable without the steadying presence of Schultz.

Claypoole fired off Straight Arrows, shifting his position from boulder to boulder with each shot, while MacIlargie used his blaster to protect his fire team leader from the infantry advancing with the tanks.

But one lousy platoon of Marines against an entire tank battalion supported by an entire infantry battalion? Was somebody crazy somewhere? Where was the rest of the company? Maybe if the entire company was defending they’d have a chance of slowing the attackers long enough for enough blasters and tank killers to arrive to drive them off. But one lousy platoon?

Claypoole didn’t know that the rest of the company was there, facing an entire armored regiment supported by an infantry regiment.

Claypoole thought the situation was like that time on Kingdom, when he and Wolfman were sent out to patrol with a platoon of Kingdomite soldiers. Then he wanted to know why he and MacIlargie were being sent on a suicide mission. Well, they survived that patrol, but only because they didn’t run into as many Skinks as he’d been afraid they would. But here, he didn’t have to imagine how many enemy third platoon was up against—he could see them.

A whole fucking armor battalion and a whole goddamn infantry battalion.

And third platoon wasn’t even whole, they were short four men, casualties from the previous day’s fighting.

Right, the previous day’s fighting. The company had air cover yesterday. Yesterday it was the whole company up against infantry without a tank to be seen. Today they’ve got tanks, so where the hell is air?

Claypoole fired another Straight Arrow and scooted to a new position without sticking around to see if he’d hit his target.

He reached over his shoulder for another Straight Arrow. He groped over his shoulder for another. He twisted around and
looked
over his shoulder.
He didn’t have another Straight Arrow!
Manically, he looked around, he must have dropped a few of them somewhere. He asked MacIlargie for his.

MacIlargie looked at him oddly. “You already fired mine,” he said, then turned back and shot another rebel rifleman.

Claypoole scrambled back the way he’d come, searching for dropped tank killers. He couldn’t find any. Had he fired all of them?

He risked a quick pop up to look over the boulder he was behind. The quick pop up lasted longer than he’d meant it to: Spread out in front of second squad’s boulder field was more than a company’s worth of smoldering tanks. He had to have killed some of those tanks himself. But
six
of them? Tanks were still advancing and firing at them, but nowhere near as many as when the fight started. And the infantry wasn’t just marching along in support of the tanks, the soldiers were advancing by fire and maneuver— and a lot of them were just lying there, neither firing nor maneuvering.

Three lines of brilliant light flickered past Claypoole’s peripheral vision almost too fast to register, and he suddenly remembered he was exposing himself to enemy fire. He ducked back into cover and shifted position, closer to MacIlargie.

“Wolfman, how are you holding out?” he called.

“I’m okay, oh great-killer-of-tanks,” MacIlargie called back. “Too bad you don’t have any more of those rockets.”

Great-killer-of-tanks?
Had Claypoole really fired six Straight Arrows and gotten six kills? He unslung his blaster and looked around the side of his boulder. An infantryman jumped up to advance another few meters and Claypoole snapped off a shot. The infantryman went back down and didn’t move.

“Shit, is Hammer back with us?” MacIlargie asked. “That was a Schultz shot!”

A Schultz shot?
Claypoole looked for another target and another infantryman fell to his shot.

But there were still too damn many tanks.

Corporal Dean didn’t take all of his fire team’s Straight Arrows for himself, he kept his own three and left Godenov with his three. The two fired their blasters, or set them aside in favor of the tank killers when they had a good shot. Between them they killed five tanks and damaged another. Dean had no idea how many soldiers they’d accounted for. But there were so
many
of the rebels coming at them. It was impossible for one platoon to hold out for very long against the combined force they were facing. Even if they’d had enough Straight Arrows to kill the entire tank battalion, the enemy had too short a distance to cover when the battle began for the Marines to win the fight.

Well, Dean, for one, was going to sell his life dearly. He ignored the cries of “Corpsman Up” and snapped off another bolt; yet another rebel would never rise again.

An unexpected aerial screaming made him duck into a fetal ball before he realized what it was. He looked up and couldn’t hold back a scream of glee.

Sunlight glinted off four dots high above and growing fast as they dropped—Raptors! Marine air finally showed up! The Raptors began firing plasma cannons while they were still high. The ground in front of third platoon gouted and erupted with the plasma strikes. Infantrymen where the bolts hit were incinerated, out a few meters from the strikes, their uniforms ignited into torches. Tanks that were hit erupted massively. Tanks a few meters behind a strike rolled into the steaming craters blasted out by the bolt, and not all of them climbed back out.

By the time the Raptors reached the bottom of their dives and bounced back, the infantry was in full rout, and the surviving tanks were turning to run as well. The Marines of third platoon stood up and fired their remaining Straight Arrows, then used their blasters on the running soldiers until Ensign Bass ordered them to cease fire. They’d won.

But how high was the butcher’s bill?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The corpsmen patched up the casualties and loaded them all onto one Dragon, which sped them back into the tunnel system, where the wounded were transferred to a logistics truck, which trundled them off to the battalion aid station.

“Damn, I hope I’m not making a habit of this,” Corporal Pasquin grumbled. He was on a gurney at the battalion aid station while HM1 Horner tweezed bits of shrapnel out of the back of his body from shoulder to calf.

“What habit is that?” Horner asked, twisting a fifteen-millimeter fragment that resisted simple plucking.

Pasquin gasped, then gritted his teeth and said, “Getting wounded. This is the second consecutive deployment I’ve been wounded on.”

The shard clinked when Horner dropped it into the pan he was collecting the fragments in. “Stop your complaining, Marine,” he said as he daubed at the blood oozing from the wound and applied a touch of synthskin to the cut, “or I’ll write you up for a wound stripe for every one of these booboos.”

“Please don’t do that, Doc! I’ve got enough dumb-stripes on my sleeve now.” The movement of the tweezers changed as Horner shrugged, sending a spasm through Pasquin’s back.

“Then how about if I write you up only for the ones in your ass?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Why not? You’re not the first Marine who got shot in the ass . . .” he paused while he did a quick count of the wounds in Pasquin’s posterior, “. . . twenty times.” He paused again, then amended, “Or maybe you are. I think the current record for ass-wound-stripes is seventeen, held by some staff sergeant in 11th FIST who pissed off the corpsman who was cleaning shrapnel out of his ass.”

“Doc, don’t do that to me. I promise, I’ll be a model patient. What do you want me to do?”

“Just lie quietly and let me do my job. And if we ever find ourselves in the same card game, let me win a hand or two.”

“You got it, Doc.”

Corporal Pasquin wasn’t the only casualty in third platoon. Fortunately, none of the Marines were killed. The most serious injury was to first squad’s Lance Corporal Zumwald, who had taken a laser beam through the shoulder. The planetside navy medical unit didn’t have the facilities to regenerate the muscle and bone that were vaporized by the laser, and he had to be evacuated to the
Lance Corporal Keith Lopez
in orbit. Other wounds were lesser, and those Marines could be returned to duty immediately if necessary, in two or three days if there was time for them to recuperate.

Unfortunately, the Coalition forces didn’t give the wounded the convalescence time. They launched another attack.

Ensign Charlie Bass listened to the message from Captain Conorado, then spoke into his all-hands circuit, “Third platoon, saddle up! Assemble on your squad leaders.
Now!
” He turned to Staff Sergeant Hyakowa. “Go to the BAS and bring back any of our people who are fit for duty. Bad guys are in the tunnels, and we have to go and kick them out.”

“Aye, aye,” Hyakowa said, and took off at a run for the battalion aid station, only a couple of hundred meters away in an adjoining tunnel.