Starfist: A World of Hurt (28 page)

"SECOND SQUAD, SECOND SQUAD!" Sergeant Linsman's voice boomed on the squad circuit. "Volley fire, seven meters. NOW!"

Ten blasters fired simultaneously, the bolts striking the ground a scant seven meters in front of the Marines and the damp ground erupting in veils of steam as the Marines moved their aiming points from side to side and kept firing. Some bolts sank into the moist dirt and slowly fizzled out; others smacked into trees, thick roots, or vines, and lanced heat into drying wood, raising its temperature to ignition point; other bits of star-stuff ricocheted and arced farther into the forest. All that plasma fire hitting so close caused steam to rise from the uniforms of the Marines and raised copious sweat on their bodies.

But there were no flashes of vaporizing Skinks.

"Second Squad, volley fire, ten meters!" Linsman ordered, and the Marines shifted their fire farther from their positions.

The acid arcs coming at second squad decreased, and Linsman shifted the aiming line again.

What's going on? Claypoole wondered. Why aren't they flaring? Who are we fighting?

Captain Conorado followed his company's fight with everything at his command. On his squad override circuit he heard the commands and questions of every one of the squad leaders as well as those of the platoon commanders and platoon sergeants. His UPUD

visual showed the positions of every one of his Marines, as did its motion detector--but the thing didn't give a hint of the enemy positions, except for the brief tracks the motion detector showed of the acid streams arcing at his men. In less than a minute the entire company was fully engaged. There wasn't anybody he could send on a flanking maneuver--even if he could find an enemy flank to maneuver to.

Where had the Skinks come from? The attack first came from ground the Marines had already walked over. This wasn't a marsh or swamp like the Skinks liked to hide out in; they'd only passed a few trickles of water so narrow and shallow they barely deserved to be called waterways. Was the floor of the valley honeycombed with caves? Had the Skinks dug a tunnel network? Were they hiding in spider traps, individual fighting holes with camouflaged covers? Small fires were breaking out in the forest where the firing was heaviest.

Something smacked into his left side. He rolled away and looked to his left. Liquid glistened in the growing light where he'd lain on the forest floor; it looked faintly green in the dim light.

As he looked he saw a line of viscous, greenish fluid arc through the air at HM3 Hough, one of the company's corpsmen. The Skinks were inside the company formation!

One of the assault gunners, closer to where the arc came from than Conorado was, also saw the acid arc and sent a spray of plasma pulses at the ground fifteen meters from the gun. The heat from the assault gun strike washed over Conorado.

"DaCruz!" he shouted into the command group circuit. "Cease assault gun fire!"

Staff Sergeant DaCruz was already ordering his assault gunners to hold their fire.

"Blasters and hand-blasters only!" he ordered, but not before the assault gun had caused flames to begin licking up the trunk of the tree that had taken the brunt of the assault gun's burst.

"Plasma shields up!" Conorado ordered over the all-hands circuit. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to order his company to power up the shields that protected them from plasma bolts, but if the Skinks were inside the company's perimeter, there was danger of his Marines shooting each other by accident.

He saw an arc of acid and fired several shots at where he thought it came from with his hand-blaster.

Then he heard another report that chilled him: first platoon was under fire from its flank and rear. Seconds later third platoon also reported it was under fire from all directions.

Company L was totally surrounded and the enemy was inside their perimeter! He ordered DaCruz to deploy his assault gun section in support of first and third platoons, leaving one man from each gun squad as a blasterman to support the headquarters element.

Corporal Claypoole reacted violently when something liquid slopped across his calves--he jerked and rolled and spun about, his hand pressing his blaster's trigger lever repeatedly as soon as its muzzle cleared Schultz.

No flares met his fire and he saw no bodies charging at him through the trees.

In his peripheral vision he saw a viscous line arcing toward Schultz. Before he could shout a warning, the big man twisted out of the way and fired back.

More acid arcs came at Claypoole, Schultz, and MacIlargie. Rapidly, almost frantically, the Marines returned fire, seeking targets, seeing none except where the arcs came from.

But no one was there when they fired.

Claypoole turned his head to his left when he heard footsteps pounding toward him, and his eyes widened when he didn't see anyone. Then he thought to use his infra screen, and saw two Marines with an assault gun stop to set up between MacIlargie and Linsman.

"Third fire team," Linsman said on the squad circuit, "heads up! An assault gun is going to fire over you."

Claypoole was already flat on the ground. He wiggled and managed to lower his profile a few more nanometers. The assault gun began to fire a steady stream of plasma pulses that began in front of first squad and swung around the front of second squad, around its side, and to the rear, completely enveloping its perimeter before the gunner paused to change barrels before his overheated barrel melted. When he resumed firing, it was in shorter bursts that wouldn't quickly melt the gun's barrel.

The incoming arcs of acid ebbed until only a few continued to come, and those from greater distances than the earlier streamers. Small fires licked here and there where plasma bolts and the larger pulses of the assault gun struck dry wood. The smell of smoke began to mask other odors.

"Second platoon," Ensign Molina called on his all-hands circuit, "cease fire! Second platoon, cease fire!" The acid streamers had stopped arcing in. "Squad leaders, turn half of your men around to support the command group!"

In seconds the fire from second platoon was cut by more than half, as half of its Marines held their fire and prepared to repel another assault, and the others turned about to deliver slower, more disciplined fire at the force attacking the company command group. There were a few brief strobes of light as plasma bolts hit Marines, but none of them took enough hits for their shields to be overwhelmed, and the command group suffered no casualties from friendly fire.

Heavier fire erupted from the lead platoons as the three assault guns of Staff Sergeant DaCruz's section joined in their fight. Captain Conorado continued to monitor the company's situation while directing the defense of the command group. In only a few more minutes fire ebbed from all Marine positions. Smoke from burning trees and brush was beginning to obscure vision.

"Cease fire," he said into his all-hands circuit. "Company L, cease fire." When three seconds passed without a
crack-sizzle,
he said, "Platoon leaders report."

"First platoon, no casualties. Enemy situation unknown, but I've got some fires out here,"

came Antoni's report.

"Second platoon, no casualties," Molina reported. "We've got a lot of fires in front of us.

Enemy sit unknown."

"Third platoon," Ensign Bass replied, "no casualties. They're gone for now, but we've got fires too."

Conorado considered briefly. His company was whole and suffered no casualties, thanks to their acid-proof chameleons and the fact that all of their plasma shields worked. But he had no idea what kind of harm they'd done the enemy or where that enemy had gone. Given that, they should get to their feet and search the ground they'd just fought over for enemy casualties, cast-off equipment, or signs of where they'd gone. But everywhere he looked, he saw only small blazes started by the intense fire thrown out by his Marines. If the company stayed where it was, it was possible they'd be trapped in front of a rapidly moving forest fire.

A retrograde was the better move. They'd be out of the way of a possible forest fire. If the Skinks who attacked them from the rear had withdrawn, the Marines might catch them in that narrow open area between the forest edge and the sides of the valley. Or chase them out of the valley altogether, to where they'd have to face Kilo Company.

He checked the battalion net. Mike Company was withdrawing in the face of a growing forest fire. That merely reinforced what he'd already decided to do.

"Company L," he said into his all-hands. "Retrograde movement. First and second platoons, in the lead, lines of squad columns. Third platoon, bring up the rear behind the command group, squad columns. Assault squads, remain with the platoons you're with. One, let me know when you're on line with Two." Having the squads in line parallel to each other wasn't a very efficient formation for putting out fire power, but it allowed the company to move faster with more cohesiveness; also, if an ambush came from the flank, the company could respond to it better than if it was spread out on one line, as they'd been when they entered the forest. Conorado checked his map and drew their route while he waited for the platoons to get into position.

A couple of minutes after he gave the marching order, first and second platoons were on line and ready to move out. "Here's our route of march and rally points," Conorado said on the command circuit, and transmitted the map overlay he'd drawn. "Acknowledge receipt."

In a moment all platoon commanders acknowledged receipt of the route order.

"We're heading back to where we came in," Conorado said on the all-hands circuit. "Be alert, they're probably still out there, and they might be sitting in an ambush waiting for us.

Move out."

The Marines of Company L began their retrograde. They started by moving to the side, around the fire growing between them and the valley wall.

Bushes and saplings snapped and crackled as flames chomped at them, and bark popped as fire ate its way up tree trunks. Smoke hung in the air, eddying until breezes caught it and swirled it away. Steam began rising from damp mud heated by the growing blazes. Full day had come to the forest floor, but the smoke and steam combined to reduce visibility to what it had been when only the treetops were in sunlight. The fires made the Marines' infras worthless. Flame glare reduced the ability of the light gatherer shields to see into shadows. The Marines were forced to rely on their naked eyes to see in the dimness, to search for danger. And the growing denseness of the smoke forced them to keep chameleon screens in place so they'd have some clear air to breathe, further limiting their vision.

Conorado kept his UPUD set on the visual download from the string-of-pearls so he could monitor the progress of his company--and the growing forest fire. The fire didn't progress en masse or in surges; it jumped hither and yon and shot a line here and a line here, making narrow lanes of fire. Conorado had seen forest fires before, not only in trids and vids, but nearby on the ground. He'd never seen one that spread the way this one was spreading.

"Keep it moving, second squad," Sergeant Linsman ordered. "You can step over that, it won't hurt you."

"Go ahead, Summers," Corporal Kerr said.

PFC Summers, on his first combat mission, hesitated a second longer, looking at the burning vine that lay across his path. It looked so damn
strange!
Its surface visibly knotted in moving swells under the flames that danced on it; not moving in regular pulses, like blood pumping through an artery, but in irregular humps, like a liquid was sloshing--or bubbling--inside a flexible tube. But no steam rose from the vine. And it had just been lying there until all of a sudden fire zapped along its entire length.
Weird.
He then stepped forward and over the vine.

Corporal Kerr followed quickly, and Corporal Doyle stepped over the vine almost timidly.

Linsman resisted the temptation to step
on
the burning vine; the flames that ran its length were only inches high and couldn't possibly burn through his boot in the second or so he'd be in contact. But he'd been around long enough and been on enough missions in enough strange places to know that the most innocuous-seeming things could prove deadly.

Lance Corporal Schultz, walking backward on the squad's rear point, only occasionally looking around to check his path and make sure he was still in contact with Corporal Claypoole, was the only one to see what happened when the skin of the vine finally burned through and spilled its contents on the ground.

Fire spread to the sides of the vine, igniting the surrounding brush.

He nodded to himself, but didn't say anything.

Sparks flew when bark popped, tongues of fire wafting in the breezes as burning leaves broke free from branches and lifted into the air. Most of them landed in places still too damp to catch fire and harmlessly went out. Some set down on dry places and smoldered until they spread to living wood and foliage. The thick vines that curled across the ground, or dangled, wrapping around the trees, acted like lines of flammable liquid when they ignited--inches-high fire shot their entire lengths so fast a casual observer might not be able to tell from which end the burning started. The vines burned until the flames ate through to their cores, then they broke open and spread their contents, spreading fire to anything they were near. Vine-cluttered trees lit up like gas torches. The fire spread in patches and chunks and lines, mostly along the ground-covering vines. The fire totally engulfed the area where Company L had its firefight, shot veins deeper into the forest, wide to the sides of the battlefield. Racing lines sped ahead of the Marines toward the edge of the forest and the valley's side.

Smoke thickened, blocked sight, infiltrated the acid-tight seams of the Marines'

chameleons, seeped into their helmets where they began choking as they breathed it. It gave them an ersatz visibility, hollow ghost figures, partially visible, moving through the white drifts of smoke.

Captain Conorado looked at the real-time download on his UPUD and saw fire growing to the company's front, blocking the Marines' way. But there was a passage--if it held open.