Starfist: Wings of Hell (29 page)

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.

In the instant she stepped outside the car she caught, in the corner of her eye, movement in the bushes along the stream bank. She drew her weapon and fired. There was a scream. She went to one knee and began firing methodically at multiple targets emerging from along the stream bank. She fired her magazine empty and reloaded without even realizing she was doing it. She heard a horrible scream from somewhere and the reports of other weapons being fired. She could clearly hear liquid splashing across the hood of the car, hear the metal sizzling and smell the acrid odor of burning paint. Someone belly-flopped onto the pavement beside her. It was Colonel Raggel. “Holy shit!” he said, firing at targets advancing at them from the opposite side of the bridge. “They’re
everywhere
!”

Puella saw her first Skink close up, its convex face and small size. It was coming straight at her out of the bushes along the water’s edge, something like a fire hose clutched in its hands. Maybe all she really saw was a gray shape; maybe the clear images were just what she remembered from training classes and she only thought she could see the thing’s face clearly in the darkness, but she was sure it was a Skink. She continued firing methodically but she knew that if the reaction force didn’t get there soon…

Starbell’s Coffee Shop, although it was right across the street from the Shamhat Building, had somehow escaped significant damage during the air raid. The front window had been smashed by a fragment of concrete from the exploding penthouse, but that was all, and it had been replaced by a piece of plywood until a glazier could be found to make the necessary repairs. Needless to say, glaziers, masons, all kinds of craftsmen were overworked just then at Sky City.

The few times Puella and Billy Oakley had found time to visit, the house coffee and the pastries were excellent. The latter were baked fresh each morning in the back of the shop. But they had not found much time to relax since the Seventh MPs had established themselves in Sky City, especially since Puella had spent some time in the hospital recovering from the wounds she’d sustained in the ambush at Townsend Bridge.

“Well, look at it this way, kid,” Oakley was saying, regarding Puella over the rim of a steaming coffee cup. “You’ve got a wound badge to add to your collection of gongs. That’ll give you five points on the civil service examination if you should ever decide to become a civil serpent. Bet yer growing hash marks, like an old soldier.”

“Yeah.” She flexed her right arm. It was almost back to normal where several drops of Skink acid had burned through the flesh. Colonel Raggel, who had come out of the fight unscathed, had dug them out with a knife before they burned all the way through her arm, and had done it under fire. But poor Lieutenant Bell, she’d caught a stream of acid right in her face and would need extensive surgery to repair what had been burned away. One good thing, if there was any, was that evidently the acids used by the Skink infiltrators had not been as potent as that fired from their aircraft. Puella had missed the air raid since she’d been reposing peacefully in a stasis unit in orbit when that occurred.

“And I wouldn’t doubt you’ll get an oak-leaf cluster to that Bronze Star medal of yours for what you did on Townsend Bridge that night. Guess my marksmanship training came in handy.” He grinned.

“I hardly remember any of it, Billy. I just kept shooting at the targets, you know? Then that gun car from the reaction force showed up.” She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “And that’s the last I remember. Oh, I remember Colonel Raggers digging that shit out of my arm all right.” Her face reddened. “But I switched hands and fired left-handed I was so intent on gettin’ more Skinks before they got me. I was sure we were being overrun. But I don’t even want to remember that much.”

Oakley reached across the table and took her hand in his. “You did good, Annie. You’ve turned into one damned fine soldier.”

Puella smiled. “Well, you know, I guess I found a home in the service, now, the colonel, Top, you…” Her face reddened again. Oakley squeezed her hand; he was slightly amused at how readily she showed her emotions. “My folks sorta threw me out when I said I was gonna join the army, you know? They wanted me to marry some asshole, have a batch of grandkids, the whole nine yards. I thought I was pretty hot shit when I got assigned to the Seventh MPs with their badass reputation. Then when the Marines captured me, I saw what a real army was like.”

“How well I remember! I also remember that bet with the slimies, you and that fucking first sergeant of yours. Colonel Raggel canned his ass mighty quick.”

“Well, he wasn’t that bad, Billy, and we was both pretty drunk that night.”

“But now you’ve found a home in the army.”

“Well, not right away, not until after I come to Arsenault with the battalion, got to work for the colonel, met General Aguinaldo, uh, met you.” She shrugged again.

“And now you’re gonna leave us?”

“I been thinkin’ ’bout that.”

“I’ll tell you what, Annie. I’m gonna miss ya, miss you a
lot.
” He said that with feeling and now it was his face that flushed. “Yeah, I always thought you were a, well, a jerk, an airhead out of her depth, the kind of person the old Seventh MPs attracted like shit attracts flies, the kind of soldier who came to the Seventh because nobody else would take them. The only person I ever respected was Steiner, and I had my training schedules to keep me from thinkin’ too much why they’d sent
me
to the Seventh MPs. But damn, when you sobered up and I got to know you better”—he gestured helplessly with one hand—“you sorta
grew
on me, know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“And I’ll miss you when all this is over.”

“Yeah.” She stuffed the remains of a doughnut into her mouth and said around it, “Let’s go see the colonel.”

“Yeah. Let’s.” They got up from the table.

“I want to see the general,” Smelt Miner demanded.

“Well, it might be a long wait, sir,” Ensign Jak Daly replied. He’d answered for the receptionist, a young corporal who obviously did not know how to handle the obstreperous Miner. Daly had just come out of the general’s office after making a report on the attempted in-filtration of Sky City by a Skink reconnaissance force and had been chatting up the pretty corporal when Miner barged into the anteroom.

“Ah, yes, Ensign Daly, isn’t it?” Miner asked. Somehow he didn’t look quite like the blustering executive Daly had come to know since his arrival on Haulover. He seemed more restrained. “Uh, I’ll wait.”
Well,
Daly thought,
that’s different!

“May we tell him what this is about, Mr. Miner?” Daly asked.

“Yes, I wish a few moments of his time. I, uh, want to discuss something with him in private, Ensign.” Miner appeared embarrassed as he spoke.

There was something in Miner’s attitude that registered with Daly. The Miner he’d come to know would’ve been demanding, pounding on the desk, to get into Carano’s presence. But this version just sat quietly and said he’d wait?

“What, Mr. Miner? What do you wish to talk to him about? I can’t get you in there, as busy as he is right now, without telling him what it is you want.”

Miner cleared his throat. “Well, I want to—I—I want to offer him my—my
cooperation.
” The embarrassment in Miner’s voice was evident.