Starfist - 14 - Double Jeopardy

by Dan Cragg

  Borland chuckled. “That’s one of the benefits of having your own starship,” he said as Sturgeon poured the coffee and offered cream and sugar.

  Borland doctored his coffee to his taste—Sturgeon drank his straight—and the two took a sip before Sturgeon returned to the question Borland had asked as they entered the office.

  “Morale in Thirty-fourth FIST is the lowest I’ve ever seen in a FIST. Most of my Marines have been here for longer than the length of a regular enlistment.” He looked at the other commander. “Just like your sailors. Damn that quarantine.” The last sentence was said softly. “And I’ve got forty or fifty past their anticipated retirement dates. What’s more, they’ve had two major engagements in the past two years—wars, actually. They’re tired and need rest. And quite a few of them need a change of scenery. They’ve gone up against the Skinks twice, three times in the case of one platoon.

  “In the end, though, they’re Marines, and they’ll come through. They’ve beaten the Skinks every time they’ve gone up against them. They’ll do it again.”

  “Do you really think it’s Skinks on Ishtar?”

  Sturgeon shrugged. “Good question. Ishtar is too hot and dry for regular human habitation. The Skinks seem to like it hot, but they also like it wet. Ishtar seems to be a very strange place for them. Why would they be on an unoccupied planet, unless they were using it as a staging base for an assault on another planet?”

  “Like they used Society 419 to stage for their attack on Kingdom.”

  Sturgeon nodded. “Ah, yes. Society 419, Quagmire, as the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation team that went there called it. A very apt name. And there’s the business of these ‘Skinks’ being used by mercs to mine gems.” He shook his head. “I have conceptual trouble with that one. The Skinks always attack without warning and always fight to the death.”

  “So it might well not be Skinks.”

  “It might well not. We have to be prepared for Skinks, or for an alien sentience about whom we know absolutely nothing.”

  They were silent for a moment, considering the difficulty of planning a mission when they didn’t actually know whom they were going up against.

  “When do you want to begin embarking?”

  “I need three days to get everybody and everything ready. The first supplies and equipment can begin boarding tomorrow, with the rest following on over the next two days, and the men on the last day. Is that good for you, or would a week be better?”

  “The Grandar Bay can be ready in three days, but a week would be better for the crew’s morale.”

  It was the end of the month and Raidly had promptly paid Parsells his thousand-credit stipend as well as a bonus of another thousand for the information about Ishtar. So flush with the cash, Parsells was out to enjoy himself.

  At their meeting earlier in the day, Raidly had warned Parsells of indications that corporate counterintelligence was very active in Worthington recently so he, Parsells, should lie low. But Parsells was beginning to like his role as an asset and once or twice he had been less than discreet when prompting a patron. That troubled Raidly but not Parsells. He knew too many people and had been around Worthington too long to feel vulnerable as he plied his customers from behind the bar.

  But tonight he would celebrate month’s end by engaging a very special lady at Madame Betty’s. He’d first seen her there a couple of weeks ago, a new girl who went under the fetching name of Artemisia, and what a girl! He’d enjoyed her company several times since. When he had visited drunk, he remembered having had a good time with her; but sober, he was clay in her hands and wished he could stay in her cubicle forever. Artemisia was the kind of buxom, powerful, Rubens type of woman Parsells particularly liked: big breasts and hips, cream complexion, long, raven tresses. Her only defect was the size of her slightly masculine hands, but, he told himself, he didn’t make love to a woman’s hands.

  “Can you afford me?” Artemisia said with a pouting smile when he greeted her that night. “You look like a potential heart attack, old man.”

  “Least I’d die with a smile on my face, my little coitus blossom. Can you take this?” Parsells leered, placing a hand over his crotch.

  “I can take any man,” Artemisia said, “but I’ve been waiting just for someone special like you.” She unfolded herself from the couch, took Parsells by the hand, and led him upstairs.

  Fifteen minutes later Parsells lay on the bed, pleasantly sweaty and drained.

  “Didn’t I tell you I could take any man?” Artemisia growled in her sexy, turn-on voice. Parsells disgusted her. She couldn’t wait to get rid of the bum and wash up. But she had to do what she had to do. “I’ve got news for you, Mr. Limp Dick.”

  “Ummm?” Parsells’s mind was still replaying the previous fifteen minutes.

  “I’ve got a message for you, lover boy,” she said, reaching behind her for something Parsells dreamily thought was an envelope. He half turned his head to look up at her. “My real name’s Judith and I bring greetings from Sharp Edge, motherfucker.” She expertly slipped a thin wire noose around Parsells’s neck and, pinning him fast with her powerful legs in a scissors hold, used her considerable weight and leverage to slowly strangle him. The last things Parsells remembered in this life were the burning pain of the wire cutting into his throat and Judith’s hot, pleasantly scented breath over the bald spot on the top of his head.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Ah, yes,” Sergeant Kerr murmured. “This is in the Grand Tradition.” He lifted his screens long enough to hawk into the brackish swamp water he stood in.

  “What ‘Grand Tradition’?” Corporal Claypoole, Kerr’s second fire team leader, asked. He’d kept his screens down, sealing his helmet to maintain climate control inside his uniform—the atmosphere of the swamp was debilitatingly hot and humid. But he had his ears turned up all the way and had heard Kerr’s voice through the air.

  “The Grand Tradition of training for the last war,” Kerr answered, speaking this time into the squad circuit of his helmet comm.

  Corporal Chan, the squad’s first fire team leader, chuckled. He hadn’t heard the original exchange between Kerr and Claypoole but he had been in the Marines long enough to know the reference; armies always train for the last war.

  “But you heard what Gunny Thatcher said,” Lance Corporal MacIlargie said. “The Skinks are supposed to be from a hot, swampy world. And we know they’ve got aircraft. So …” He paused for a couple of beats, long enough that, if Claypoole was using his infra, his fire team leader could step close and whap him upside his helmet, then added, “And we all know that Gunny Thatcher is always right.”

  Claypoole wished he had been using his infras, so he could have whapped MacIlargie upside the helmet.

  Lance Corporal Schultz didn’t have to crack the seal on his helmet to hawk into the swamp water; he had his screens up to begin with. Schultz didn’t want anything to interfere with his ability to sense his surroundings directly. It wasn’t much more than forty degrees centigrade; he could handle that heat easily enough.

  “We’ll get there eventually, people,” Lieutenant Bass broke in—he’d been eavesdropping on second squad’s circuit. “Even if not the next time. And when we do, we damn well better be able to defend ourselves against air attack in a swamp.”

  Kerr felt somehow vindicated by that. Claypoole tried to pull his head down between his shoulders.

  “Heads up!” came Staff Sergeant Hyakowa’s voice over the platoon circuit. “Fast movers, southwest, heading in our direction.”

  “Altitude and range?” Bass asked.

  “Twelve thousand and dropping, twenty-five klicks. Closing at one K.”

  “Third platoon, take cover and prepare to defend,” Bass ordered. Third platoon had less than a minute and a half before the aircraft were on them. Less than that to get positive ID on them and begin defensive fire if they were bad guys.

  Even though many of them were carrying unfamiliar weapons
and equipment, the Marines smoothly got behind anything that might have a chance of giving them cover from Skink rail guns, or at least concealing them from detection—although every one of the Marines knew that if the fast movers were descending in their direction, they’d already been spotted.

  “Second fire team, tell me when you’re ready,” Kerr ordered.

  Claypoole looked in Schultz’s direction. The big man already had the scattergun set up and pointed in the general direction of the approaching aircraft. “Second fire team, ready for directions,” Claypoole said to Kerr.

  Hyakowa was already transmitting targeting information to the squad leaders and their antiaircraft gun teams. And Schultz was already adjusting his aim.

  “Locked,” the big man said as his data display showed the incoming aircraft fixed in the aiming block.

  “Locked,” Claypoole repeated to Kerr, who was already reporting, “Second squad locked,” to Bass.

  “Unidentified IFF,” Hyakowa said on the squad leaders’ circuit; only Bass and the squad leaders heard him—a control measure to keep the gunners from firing before the targets were within kill range.

  “Wait for my order,” Bass said on the all-hands circuit.

  The Marines waited tensely for the command to open fire, when two scattergun antiaircraft weapons and both of the platoons’ organic guns would open up on the incoming craft.

  The seconds dragged, but the aircraft were finally only five klicks away. Lights strobed under their wings, simulating the fire of Skink rail guns.

  “Fire!” Bass shouted.

  Several of the Marines added their blaster fire to the mass of fire being put out by the bigger guns, trying to build a wall of plasma for the enemy aircraft to run into. Fire from the Marines rapidly fell off as red lights began blinking on their helmets and their weapons stopped functioning.

  Seconds later, a four-aircraft division of Raptors from Thirty-fourth FIST’s squadron roared overhead at treetop level, with their electronic simulated rail guns still firing. By then, most of the Marines were blinking red and their weapons had stopped working.

  “Cease fire and stand by,” Bass ordered into the all-hands circuit. He listened intently to the company command circuit, waiting for word from above on how his platoon had fared against the “attacking” aircraft.

  He swore when Captain Conorado gave him the bad news.

  “Third platoon, on me,” he ordered. He removed his helmet and held up one bare arm for his men to guide on. It took a minute for everyone to assemble in a semicircle in front of their platoon commander. Sweat popped out on the Marines when they removed their helmets.

  Bass’s face was expressionless as he looked from man to man. He gave them enough time for a few to start fidgeting. Then he said, “Take a look at everybody’s helmets.”

  Many of them started when they saw how many helmets had red lights blinking—even their platoon commander and platoon sergeant were casualties. Schultz was almost the only one who didn’t flinch at seeing the red lights on nearly everybody in the platoon.

  Of course, Schultz’s helmet was one of a very few that didn’t have a red light on it.

  “FIST reports that one, count it, one of the attackers suffered damage. Not enough to take it out,” Bass said conversationally.

  “In other words, people, we flunked!” His voice went from mild to full-throated roar over those six words.

  Most of the Marines looked chagrined. Lance Corporal Longfellow, who had fired first squad’s scattergun, and the gun squad’s two gunners, looked angry.

  “Do you know how big a Raptor is?” Bass bellowed. “I don’t give a pimple on Buddha’s ass how fast they were moving, they were coming straight at us! How in Dante’s nine circles could you have missed? What, have you all gone army on me?”

  Now all of the Marines looked angry: not mad about missing the Raptors, but at their platoon commander’s insult. Gone army indeed. They were Marines, the best marksmen in the known universe!

  So how did they miss those big and growing targets that were coming straight at them?

  And how did almost all of them get killed by the simulated rail guns?

  The answer to the second question was easy—there simply wasn’t anything in the swamp big enough and strong enough to stop the pellets thrown out at two-tenths of the speed of light. The only way any of them could survive a rail gun strike was to be missed.

  But how in hell had they missed their own targets?

  Bass suddenly lifted his helmet and tipped his head to listen to an incoming message from company headquarters. He acknowledged, then said to the platoon, “Button up, people. We’ve been resurrected, and more bad guys are coming after us.

  “This time, bunch up a little less. If we’re spread out more, they might not be able to kill as many of us.”

  Bass was right; not as many of them got “killed” by the next Raptor division they encountered. But they still didn’t manage to kill an enemy aircraft.

  Six times that day and into the night, third platoon encountered a division of enemy aircraft. Six times most of the platoon got killed. Six times third platoon failed to score a kill of its own.

  “I don’t consider it to be any consolation at all,” Bass growled when third platoon was finally allowed to return to its bivouac, “that no other platoon in the battalion suffered less than seventy-five percent casualties on any encounter, or that nobody else scored a kill, either. All I’m concerned with is how piss-poor third platoon did!”

  The exercise was called off in the morning.

  The swamp was on Sumpig, a medium-size, bowl-shaped equatorial island almost twenty kilometers in diameter. The bowl was actually the caldera of an ancient volcano, and the small mountains that ringed about 80 percent of the island’s periphery were what remained of the volcano’s rim. When it rained, as it did frequently, the water that fell on the inside of the mountains had nowhere to flow but into the ancient caldera. Over the eons since the volcano had gone dormant, the part of the caldera that had been below mean sea level filled with the detritus of dead vegetation, erosion from the rim, and the droppings of the sea avians that nested on the mountainsides. So the excess rainwater drained away through the side of the island that didn’t have a mountain wall, but it drained slowly, and the floor of the caldera was uneven. In the interior of the island, where the Marines were training, the water averaged thigh deep on a man of average height.

  But that was only an average. There were places where fallen vegetation mounded up into miniature islands as much as an acre in area and up to two meters high. And there were places where if even a very tall man touched bottom, he’d be a long time coming back to the surface.

  Trees grew in the swamp, mostly less than ten meters high, though there were a few giants of nearly fifty meters. All but the youngest trees were kept upright courtesy of buttress roots, and many drooped tendrils that became secondary trunks. Smaller plants, many adapted to life mostly in water, proliferated wherever sunlight penetrated to the surface between the trees.

  All that vegetation provided food for insectoids that proliferated in the swamp and in turn provided food for avians that nested on the rim.

  Amphibians, mostly small but some more than half a meter in length, divided their time between the water and the tussocky islands, as did water-adapted reptiloids. The amphibians and reptiloids fed mostly on the insectoids, though some fed on one another. The larger among them fed on the smaller, and sometimes on the avians. Many of the insectoids in turn fed on them, and the largest avians fed on the smaller reptiloids.

  Fortunately, most of the amphibians and reptiloids knew enough to avoid humans. Equally fortunately, the insectoids were unable to penetrate the Marines’ uniforms when they were sealed.

  But the water depth, which could vary by meters in the space of two paces, made for difficult slogging.

  The exercise may have been called off, but the Marines didn’t leave Sumpig Island. Instead a range was set up to give the Ma
rines more experience firing the scattergun, formally designated the M247 antiaircraft gun, man-pack.

  The M247 got its nickname because it looked like an oversize, slug-firing shotgun. It utilized some of the still poorly understood technology that R&D had been able to ferret out of the Skink rail gun that had been captured by the Marines on Kingdom. It put out a pattern of six thousand small pellets per minute at one-tenth the speed of light, half the speed of the Skink rail guns. It was called a “man-pack” because its weight—twenty-eight kilograms, plus ammunition case—was considered light enough to be carried by a man in the field. Still, preliminary tests at Aberdeen on Earth and on Arsenault had indicated that a strike with even two of the pellets would pulverize an armored aircraft and a hit by one pellet anywhere on a body would send fatal shock waves through the casualty. Unfortunately, it was as yet almost impossible to target properly and it frequently jammed.

  The purpose of the range exercise was to give the Marines additional practice in firing the weapon under field conditions and in clearing the jams that were almost certain to happen. The targets were set up on the western rim of the caldera. The firing lines were located in various terrains ranging from three to five kilometers from the targets. To compensate for the fact that the targets were stationary rather than moving, they were pop-up; the Marine shooters had five seconds to spot a target, aim, and fire. At a tenth of a percent of light speed, they didn’t need to take muzzle-to-target transit time into consideration, not at these distances. Sergeant Souavi was range master. He stood at a console that controlled which target went up and when. A display on the console told him whether the target was hit, and if so, by how many pellets.

  First squad went first; Corporal Dornhofer was the best shot in his fire team, so he manned its scattergun. The first firing line was in an open area three and a half kilometers from the caldera’s rim and the hidden targets.