Starfist: FlashFire (37 page)

A distant roaring drew Kerr’s attention to a blank patch of sky. Automatically, he adjusted for the time lag of sound and looked lower. He saw the sparkles of Raptors diving on targets he could barely see at that distance. Streams of plasma were squirting almost straight down from the Raptors. Here and there, a gnatlike target bloomed into a crimson and gold ball as it was shredded by the plasma. But there were so many of the gnats and so few Raptors, Kerr knew their numbers wouldn’t be greatly reduced by the time they arrived on top of the Marines’ positions.

There was a monstrous
CRACK!
just overhead, and the stench of ozone flooded through the bunker’s aperture, flooding out from the streak of plasma fired by one of the artillery battery’s big guns, set on top of the ridge the bunkers were dug into. The magnifier automatically adjusted its polarization so the dazzling brilliance of the plasma ball that shot overhead wouldn’t blind him. He followed the plasma ball to the water spout where the ball hit. Looking around from there, he saw speckles on the water— the amphibious force coming at the Marines. He couldn’t tell if that first shot hit one of the boats, but the second strike did. But the artillery was like the Raptors, so few firing at so many.

Kerr looked into the sky again, then back at the water. The combined air-sea invasion force was big, and it was moving fast. No matter the absolute numbers of troop carriers or amphibious landing craft the Raptors and artillery knocked out, the vast majority of a reinforced division would shortly land on one Marine infantry battalion.

He repressed a shiver, and spoke into the squad circuit, “The bad guys are coming. Hold your fire until you have a walking, breathing target.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The landing craft came in waves, hundreds of them at high speed over the water. They didn’t maneuver to throw off the aim of the artillery on the ridge above the bunkers, but relied on speed to reach the beach. Although nearly every shot fired by the artillery scored, killing one of the amphibious craft, there were simply too many of them for the six guns of the FIST’s battery to reduce their numbers significantly in the ten minutes or so it took them to move from horizon to waterline. Especially when the artillery had to withdraw in the face of the approaching aerial troop carriers. The airborne force was smaller than the seaborne, and suffered more, but still the vast majority of the troop carriers touched down on the ridgetop at the same moment the first landing craft reached the waterline and began disgorging troops.

The heavy guns of each company’s assault platoon opened fire when the landing craft were still a kilometer out, the guns of the assault squads of the blaster platoons opened fire shortly after. The eighteen guns and eighteen heavy guns put out a hellacious amount of fire, but they were firing at hundreds upon hundreds of craft, and had only a minute to do their worst damage before they had to shift their aim to soldiers who were splashing through the surf.

The enemy quickly set up crew-served weapons—lasers powerful enough to chew through plasteel, and fléchette guns that spewed five thousand darts a minute. The crews hunkered down, aiming their weapons through cams so the men didn’t have to expose themselves to the fire coming at them from the Marine strongpoints. Their riflemen began dashing from boulder to boulder, closing on their objective. The Marines shot at them as fast as they saw them move, but more rebel soldiers were in movement at any time than there were Marines firing at them.

And some of the Marines had to concentrate on the crew-served weapons that were more immediately dangerous than the maneuvering soldiers.

Corporal Dean dropped; he’d seen a fléchette gun turning his way just in time to shout a warning to his men and drop to cover. The air in the bunker
r-i-i-i-pped
with the passage of a thousand fléchettes through the aperture. A thousand more hit around the edges of the aperture, with a sound like the hail storm at the end of the universe. Fléchettes
whapped
against the inside walls of the bunker, chipping plasteel and throwing chips about. Dean’s back was pelted, but he didn’t think any had penetrated his chameleons, much less his skin.

When he heard the fléchette gun’s fire move on, he groped for a Straight Arrow, found one, and rose to aim it through the aperture at the gun’s position. He found it just as it began swinging back his way and fired.

He didn’t see his rocket hit; a concussion wave slammed into him from behind, tried to blow him through the wall. Thunder to deafen the gods pummeled his ears and knocked him insensate. He wasn’t aware of it when Lance Corporal Godenov rolled him onto his back and over and over again to smother the flames building on the back of his chameleons.

“Let that be a lesson to you, new guy,” Godenov said on the fire team circuit. He didn’t know whether PFC McGinty heard him—he couldn’t hear his own voice, and didn’t know if that was because his comm was out, or if he’d been deafened by the roar of the Straight Arrow’s backblast. He had still been down, curled in a corner of the bunker, when Dean fired the tank killer, so he wasn’t hurt as badly as his fire team leader. He was pretty sure McGinty was curled up in the other corner and figured he should be all right as well.

Satisfied that Dean’s uniform wasn’t burning any longer and that his fire team leader was still alive, he looked for the new man and saw him on his feet, firing his blaster out through the aperture. He joined him. The fléchette gun Dean had fired at was a piece of twisted wreckage, and the boulder its crew had hidden behind was fractured. But most of the riflemen had reached the shelter of the shelf, and only the crew-served weapons still fired at the ridge. Godenov began aiming and firing at those parts of the weapons he could see, hoping to put some of them out of action. He did his best not to notice that the fire from the Marines seemed to be less than it had been.

Sergeant Kerr coldly and methodically fired ten times while the soldiers were maneuvering to the shelf, and every time he fired, a soldier dropped with a hole burned through him. Kerr would have fired many more times, but he’d had to drop down and scramble away from the aperture once when a heavy laser found it and began chewing a hole through its lip. Then again when a fléchette gun sent a multithousand burst onto and through the enlarged aperture, and a third time when another laser further enlarged the opening. When the soldiers reached the cover of the shelf, he began trying to take out the crew-served weapons that were chewing up the fronts of the bunkers, reaching inside them and killing or wounding Marines.

His shooting, ducking, and dodging were all automatic; Kerr was experienced enough he didn’t have to think about how to fight outnumbered from a fixed position. While his body functioned on automatic, and temporarily took out a heavy laser by hitting its muzzle at exactly the right angle to crack the barrel lens, his mind worked on the irony of his current position.

Kerr had been a fire team leader when he was nearly killed on Elneal. Since then, Corporal Ratliff was promoted to Sergeant and became a squad leader when then–Gunnery Sergeant Bass was made Platoon Commander and Sergeant Hyakowa was promoted to Staff Sergeant and made Platoon Sergeant. Corporals Leach, Saleski, and Keto were killed before Kerr rejoined 34th FIST and third platoon two years later. Sergeant Linsman, who wasn’t even with the platoon when Kerr was nearly killed, was a fire team leader when Kerr returned, and was promoted to squad leader over Kerr.

Now Kerr was squad leader. Corporal Dornhofer was the only fire team leader left from the peacemaking deployment to Elneal. Sergeant Eagle’s Cry was dead, killed on Diamunde, and Sergeant Bladon still hadn’t returned from Rehab after losing an arm on Kingdom. Both of the gun team leaders had been killed in action since Kerr had
almost
been killed.

Only five of the eleven sergeants and corporals who had been with the platoon those years ago were still alive and fighting. Kerr couldn’t help but wonder how many would still be alive at the end of the day’s fight.

Kerr was finally a squad leader, though it had taken too many deaths to get him there. And there he was, in his first action as a squad leader, and the positions his squad held left him stuck being merely an extra blaster in Corporal Chan’s fire team.

Whistles pierced the din of battle, and masses of men surged over the lip of the shelf, scrambling for cover behind the boulders on the gently rising ground before the glacis. Kerr began picking them off.

Major General Koval grinned tightly when he got Brigadier Sturgeon’s message. “That fox,” he murmured, then began snapping out orders. Satisfied that the bustling of his staff was meaningful, he turned his attention to the string-of-pearls feed that Sturgeon had so generously provided to him.
Damn that Billie,
he thought.
There’s no good reason he has to keep the string-of-pearls feed to himself so that I have to piggyback on the Marines.

The string-of-pearls display of the bay to the north made it clear why Sturgeon was complying in the most obstructionist manner possible with the Supreme Commander’s orders—and equally clear that Billie was absolutely incompetent as a commander. Koval had suspected before, but now he knew beyond reasonable doubt that Billie had gotten his promotions and his command because of political maneuvering and not through any merit as a soldier.

He heard the distant screams of the Marine Raptors as they dove on the Coalition airborne troop carriers, and the monstrously loud
crack
ing of the Marine artillery on top of the ridge. But he could see on the display how many targets the Raptors and artillery pieces had, and he knew how few Raptors and artillery pieces a FIST had.

He snapped out another order to his artillery regiment commander.

Will this be a first?
he wondered.

“T-take your time,” Corporal Doyle said into his comm. “Aim your s-shots, m-make them c-count.” Despite the stutter, his voice was calm, and his aim was steady, nearly every shot he took struck home on a scrambling soldier.

“Yeah, sure,” PFC Summers muttered. He was firing as fast as he could, moving the muzzle of his blaster with each press of the firing lever. He wasn’t hitting with each shot, but he wasn’t missing by much, either, and the rebels he just missed tended to stay behind cover longer than they should have.

“Take my time,” PFC Smedley repeated. “Make every shot count. Aye aye.” He didn’t stutter, but his voice was the highest pitched and most anxious of the three—it was his first combat, and he didn’t see how any of the Marines in the FIST could possibly survive the assault. His aim wasn’t good, he was trembling too hard for accuracy, and most of his shots missed.

“St-steady,” Doyle said as he fired another bolt and decked another rebel soldier. “M-make your shshots count.” He stuttered, but if any part of his mind had been able to sit back and assess the situation, he would have realized that he was less frightened than in any previous battles in which he’d fought.

This time, other Marines’ lives depended on his leadership; he didn’t have any time or energy to spare on fear.

“St-steady. Make e-every shot c-count.”

“What’s the matter with you, Sturgeon!” General Billie roared into his comm. “Why haven’t you moved your FIST yet?”

“Sir,” Sturgeon replied laconically, “Thirty-fourth FIST is unable to move. We are fully engaged with a reinforced division that has our positions under assault.”

Billie spat out the cigar he had clenched in the corner of his mouth. “
What?”
he squawked.

“Thirty-fourth FIST is fully engaged. Check your string-of-pearls download.”

Snarling in disbelief, muttering that he was going to relieve that insubordinate Marine, Billie looked at his string-of-pearls display. What he saw shocked him so much that if he hadn’t already spat out his cigar, he might have swallowed it. The visual display clearly showed a three-brigade beachhead engulfing 34th FIST’s position and overlapping onto the army battalions on the FIST’s flanks. Two more brigades were on top of the ridge, trying to fight their way into the tunnel system from the rear. He stared at the display for long moments before he realized that the main assault—at least, what he still believed was the main assault—had stalled in its advance. Just because he couldn’t see the follow-on forces that would exploit whatever breakthrough the initial assault forces made didn’t mean they weren’t there, they were just too well hidden for him to see. Of course.

“That—!” his voice twisted and whatever imprecation he made was lost in an inarticulate squeal. He switched his comm to a different circuit and snarled, “Sorca, move your reserve brigade to reinforce the MLR. The damn Marines are pinned down by a diversionary attack.” Then to a third circuit. “Koval,” brusquely, “move a brigade to the MLR right now! Prepare the rest of your division to act if the Marines can’t hold against that diversion.” He clicked off each time before either division commander could even acknowledge the orders.

“Sturgeon,” he snapped, back into the original circuit, “what is your situation? How long will it take for you to drive off that diversionary attack? I need your FIST at the MLR to defeat the main assault.”

“General,
this
is the main assault, the assault against the MLR is the diversion. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a major battle to fight.” Sturgeon didn’t wait for the Supreme Commander, but broke the connection himself.

General Billie’s jaws clamped so tightly he nearly cracked a tooth.

When the artillery pulled off the top of the ridge, they withdrew into the three entrances to the tunnel complex on the back side of the ridge. The guns would be worthless there, because they had to be rolled out of the access tunnels to fire—if they were fired inside the enclosed spaces, they would cook their crews and their own electronics. Coalition forces poured down the backside of the ridge top and headed for the access tunnels. But there were only three tunnels, and the artillerymen were waiting with blasters ready for the attackers, sending far more firepower out than the attackers were able to answer.