Starfist: A World of Hurt (41 page)

Footing was uncertain on the pile, which consisted of irregular stony granules, mostly smaller than the last joint of a man's little finger. Climbing it was like ascending a dune of coarse-grained sand.

"This is refinery tailings," Lance Corporal Rising Star said when they reached the top and paused to look around. Nobody questioned him, they all knew his family were metal workers and his own degree was in metallurgy. "Look." He pointed up, to where an inverted funnel hung over the top of the tailings heap. The funnel was at the end of a wide pipe that led from a domed building built around a large smokestack. No smoke rose from the stack.

Bhophar turned his sniffer to sample the air currents. "I'm not picking up any living bodies but us," he reported. "No animal decay either. There is something odd I can't identify, though."

"Could it be metal?" Nu asked. "Rising Star, check it."

Rising Star took the sniffer and hooked it in to his own jack. "Antimony, lead, zinc," he said as he read the display. "Cobalt, copper, iron." He whistled. "Rare earths and transuranics, lots of them." He unhooked the sniffer and handed it back. "This has been a very active refinery. But I don't pick up any sign of current activity."

"Movement?" Oconor asked.

Juliete was carrying a motion detector. "Only normal background noise. If there's anybody out there, they've got good movement discipline."

"Come on down, let's look inside," Staff Sergeant Nu ordered.

"Very strange," Lance Corporal Rising Star said, looking around before he ski-footed down the trailings.

"Got that right," Juliete agreed.

Projectile and explosive weapons had been used there. The bark was torn off trees, branches were broken and splintered--some small trees had fallen, their trunks shattered.

Craters pocked the ground. It was the first time Juliete had been on a battlefield that had seen such heavy use of projectiles and explosives. In its own way, he found it more horrifying than the burned-out landscape of the Haltia valley.

"Does anybody see any blood on the ground?" Nu asked on the platoon circuit. Nobody answered. "Well, look for some! With all the metal that flew around this place, we should be finding body parts everywhere we step."

They should have, but they didn't. It was a very strange battlefield indeed.

Then they entered the first of the structures.

Every external wall was pockmarked by hundreds of fléchette hits. The high windows on the structures were similarly scarred, and some were shattered.

Nu ordered Oconor to keep one fire team and the gun team outside for security while he went inside with the other two fire teams. The interior was huge and filled with machinery that nobody but Rising Star could identify, and even he didn't know what all of it was. After standing for fifteen minutes, they decided the building was vacant and probably had been for a week or more.

"It takes several days for the furnaces to cool down this far," Rising Star said, "and these are cooled down to maintenance temp."

Nu raised his screens and looked a question at him.

"Warm enough to keep them from reaching ambient air temp," Rising Star explained. "If they get that cold, it'll take too long for them to come back to working temperature. It's economical too--it takes more energy to raise the furnaces back from ambient temp than is needed to keep them warm."

Nu grunted; someone planned to come back and use the installation again. But who?

They entered the other industrial buildings, but stayed in each only long enough for Rising Star to determine that they hadn't been used for several days. They saved the administration building for last.

Unlike the other buildings in the complex, power was still on in the admin building. Lights went on in each room as the Marines entered, so they went very cautiously, blasters at the ready and fingers on the firing levers. They found plenty of evidence that somebody had been there recently--somebody other than the invading troops.

One wing of the admin building was living quarters. There was fresh produce and fruit in the pantries and unfrozen meat in a cooling box. Five sleeping chambers had beds that had recently been slept on.

"Got something!" Corporal Juliete called when he entered a sleeping chamber.

"What ya got?" Staff Sergeant Nu asked as he joined him.

Juliete didn't bother to answer. Nu saw the blood as soon as he reached the room's doorway. There was a spray of blood about chest high on the wall above a small desk, and a smear on the floor between the desk and the door. The blood didn't trail out into the hallway.

"They took the time to bandage him before they took him out of here," Nu observed.

Juliete nodded. "Probably wasn't badly wounded; there isn't that much blood."

But search as they might, they found no bodies or other signs of casualties from the fierce fighting around the industrial site. The only other thing they found of interest was a lightly camouflaged shuttle landing field two kilometers southwest of the buildings. But no shuttles were on it, and it looked like it hadn't been used for a couple of weeks or more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"Look alive, people, company's coming," Ensign Charlie Bass said softly into third platoon's all-hands circuit. All along their line, third platoon and the rest of Company L got into position.

"Where are they, Rabbit?" Corporal Joe Dean asked on the squad circuit. "I don't hear any fire."

"Your guess is as good as mine," Sergeant Ratliff answered. And he didn't have any good answers. If the rest of the battalion was chasing the enemy toward the anvil that Company L

formed, the other companies should have been hammering them. So should the FIST's Raptors. But Ratliff heard no sounds of combat.

Dean turned his ears to maximum, but all that did was make the buzzing of the insectoids and cries of the avians so loud that the noise numbed his eardrums. When he used his magnifier screen, he saw the specks of Raptors circling and darting in the distance. He could tell none of them was attacking; they looked more like they were herding.

Then he saw them. Flickers of tan and brown camouflage flashed through the treelines ahead of him. He slid his magnifier screen into place and made out armored vehicles crashing through distant treelines. He couldn't make out their formation; they seemed to be moving independently of each other. And they were small. They didn't look big enough to hold an entire squad in addition to their crews.

"Great Buddha's balls," Lance Corporal MacIlargie swore on the fire team circuit. "We don't have any antiarmor weapons!"

"What do we do when they get here?" PFC Quick asked.

Dean heard the uncertainty in his junior man's voice. Quick had fought bravely against the Skinks on Kingdom, but he'd never fought armor. Dean had. He wanted to dig a deep hole to crawl into and haul the entryway in after himself.

The Marines in the path of the armor still didn't hear any pursuing fire, and the Raptors buzzing above were not firing at the vehicles. The armored vehicles crashed closer until there was only one treeline area left between them and Company L. Then the Raptors shot high up into the air, rolled over, and plunged back toward earth, firing their guns--

--into the ground to the right front of the armor.

The vehicles veered to their left to avoid the monstrous plasma bolts as the Raptors clawed for altitude to dive again. That was when the hoppers returned, all armed and firing assault guns, creating a barrier of plasma to the armor's right front. The leading enemy vehicles burst and scattered through the final treeline area. They were not in formation; they seemed to be in panicked flight.

Company L was no longer in their path, they were going past, still headed west at high speed. The aircraft stopped firing and continued circling.

Moments later the armored mass reached the foot of the forested mountains behind Company L. Before they could skirt the mountain flanks, the aircraft opened fire again, making a fence of plasma to pin them against the mountains. The vehicles milled about, slamming into each other and crashing into trees. Some stopped. Several turned and raced uphill, away from the corralling fire.

The forest canopy hid the climbing vehicles for a few seconds. By the time they were visible again, they were more scattered than they'd been on the flat. Some of the hoppers fired blocking bursts from their assault guns, but the vehicles wouldn't stop their scramble for altitude--they climbed up and over, into the valley.

The oncoming dreadnought opened the fighting with a salvo of mixed energy weapons and missiles before the
Grandar Bay
could launch the last wave of the landing force. The starship's shields and defensive weaponry had no trouble absorbing or destroying most of the incoming fire; the rest missed, but some of it could have hit the Essays.

Brigadier Sturgeon was in a bind. He needed to be planetside with his FIST, but Commodore Boreland couldn't risk any of his Essays by launching them while enemy weaponry might hit the shuttles.

"You can't do much even if you are down there," Boreland told Sturgeon when the Marine commander insisted on taking his chances. "Without the string-of-pearls in place, you can't see the battlefield, you'll have to rely on internal communications and trust in the accuracy of everybody's inertial maps."

Sturgeon took a deep breath and said, "We're Marines. We fought using paper maps long before we had access to rings of satellites. We can do it again."

Boreland gave him a wry smile. "Ted, that was way back in the twentieth century. I suspect you're rusty."

Sturgeon pursed his lips; Boreland was all too right. It was probable that none of the officers of 34th FIST had participated in an exercise without satellites since they were in Officer Candidate College.

Boreland looked at the display that showed the approaching fleet. "I think we've got a little bit of time," he mused. "We'll slingshot around Maugham's Station and drop a couple of Essays to lay a string-of-pearls. You and your staff go with them. When the satellites are in place, they'll take you planetside."

"Oh, gods," Commander van Winkle sighed when he got the report of twenty-five of the fleeing armored vehicles going into the valley. "Two, do we have any reason to believe that valley isn't like the valleys near Ammon?" he asked Captain Rhu-Anh, his intelligence officer.

"Sir, we have no data at all on the flora and fauna on this side of the planet," Rhu-Anh answered.

Van Winkle swore softly again, then ordered Captain Kitchikummi, "Tell air I want eyes-in-the-sky over that valley, but high enough so they don't spook the people in it."

"Aye aye." The battalion operations officer got on the radio to the squadron to pass the order along.

"Have we established contact with them yet?" van Winkle asked Rhu-Anh.

"Negative, sir. We know their freqs, but they haven't answered any of our calls."

"Give me." Van Winkle reached for the radio and checked the display that showed him his forces deployment. Kilo Company, in Dragons, was moving into position on the south side of the armored mass, as was Mike Company to the east of the enemy. Hoppers were picking up Company L to take it to the north flank.

"Armored force commander," van Winkle said into the radio, "this is Commander van Winkle of the Confederation Marine Corps ground forces facing you. Over." He waited, then repeated his message when he got no response. And a third time. Finally he said, "We have your force surrounded, north, east, south, and overhead. There are only two things you can do: talk to me, or go over the mountains. My forces have not fired on you except to redirect your movement away from my units. There may be serious danger to your forces on the other side of the mountains. Your better course is to talk to me.

"What do the eyes-in-the-sky say?" he asked Rhu-Anh.

"The vehicles in the valley tried to go into the forest, but it's too dense. Now they're circumnavigating it."

Van Winkle grunted and sat back to wait for a reaction from the still unidentified armored force.

As soon as the Essay carrying Brigadier Sturgeon finished laying its arc of observation and communications satellites, it heeled over and fired its main thrusters, sending it into a planetward plunge. The coxswain didn't aim for an over-ocean touchdown, he headed for a landing a scant two kilometers behind the Marine line west of the mountains--with all the satellites and their launch system, there hadn't been room in the Essay's cargo bay for Sturgeon's command Dragon. The Marine commander, his staff, and their most essential equipment were secured in webbing normally used by people making the more sedate, spiraling landings favored by everybody but the Marines. Commodore Boreland had assured Sturgeon the webbing was strong enough to withstand the stresses of a combat assault landing. That hadn't dissuaded Sturgeon from double-checking with the Essay's coxswain.

"Sir, I'd trust this webbing to keep my own granny safe," the coxswain assured him.

Sturgeon cocked an eyebrow and sardonically asked, "Ah, but then the question is, do you
like
your granny?"

The coxswain laughed. "My granny Troycott, I do, sir. And she's the one I'd trust the webbing with."

"That's good enough for me."

"Sir," Captain Rhu-Anh said excitedly, "we have string-of-pearls!"

"Show me," Commander van Winkle said, turning to the S-2 comm team.

"Here, sir," Lance Corporal Striker said, leaning out of the way so the infantry battalion commander could look at the satellite communication displays.

Van Winkle saw a welter of displays: images in visual, infra, radar, and several others; graphs and charts and scrolling strings of numbers. "Give me a visual of the inside of the valley," he ordered.

Striker leaned back in and worked the controls on his station. "Upper right, sir," he said. A large screen morphed from an array of smaller screens and gave a sharply angled overhead view of the valley. The string-of-pearls was equatorial, so not all of the valley was visible; the mountains on the south side occluded part of the view of the valley's southern edge, and the tall trees to the north blocked vision of the northern edge of the valley's bottom.