Company L assembled in a large chamber that had matting on the floor and a low dais at one end. A chair with a low seat, oddly elegant despite its lack of ornamentation, stood on the dais.
The two units of third platoon were jubilant at rejoining. They admired the buzz saw each had captured. Each group was only slightly disappointed that the other had figured out how the weapon worked, and neither was able to show off its superior skills.
“Listen up,” Captain Conorado shouted. He had his helmet off so his men could see him. Everyone except the few who were assigned to watch the entrances to the chamber looked at the company commander.
“Don’t think we’ve got this fight won yet,” Conorado said sternly. “All we’ve done so far is clear a few entrances to this complex. You’ve seen the maps, so you have an idea how big it is. We’ve barely gotten inside. There’s a lot more fighting ahead of us. Some Marines are going to die and some will be crippled before we’re finished. I want as few of those dead or crippled Marines as possible to be from Company L.” He transmitted the current situation map to the platoon commanders and platoon sergeants. His voice lost its harsh edge and he continued. “Here’s where we are and where we’re going next. Show it to your people.”
Throughout the chamber, Marines clustered around their squad leaders to study the maps they projected into the air.
Conorado checked the time. Lacking communications between companies, the operation was being coordinated by the clock.
“Rest up a bit,” he said. “We’re moving out in one-four minutes. Any questions?”
“Send more Skinks!” Corporal Dean shouted.
“Don’t worry about it, Dean,” Conorado said above the laughter. “We’ve got quite enough of them ahead of us.”
The two Marines of a scout-sniper team, breathless from running, arrived less than two minutes before Conorado gave the order for Company L to move out.
“Company L!” he shouted. “New orders. We are withdrawing. The Skinks have launched an armor attack on Haven.”
Armor. The word shot through the Marines like a jolt of electricity. Most of them had fought in the campaign on Diamunde, the first war in centuries in which heavy armor was used in combat. They shuddered when they remembered the monster vehicles that had been so hard to kill and had killed so many members of the company. That war had been fought by six FISTs and an entire army and was supported by navy Air. Even then, the outcome had been in doubt for weeks. Here, there were only two FISTs, no army backing them up, and no navy Air in support.
Armor! Christ on a crutch? It was more like Buddha’s blue balls locked in Mohammed’s pointed teeth!
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Free from worry about rail guns, half of the Marine Raptors stopped firing Jerichos at the Skinks battling the Army of the Lord and took flight after the armor, which began massing as soon as it left the wetlands. The small tanks were nimble enough to avoid most of the point-target missiles the Raptors fired. The Marines quickly shifted back to Jerichos and found them very effective against the little armored vehicles.
Artillery, Marine and Kingdomite, began pounding the Skink armor as soon as it got in range. As imposing as they looked to men on foot, the Skink tanks’ armor was thin, and so highly vulnerable to area-denial munitions. Between the Jerichos and the artillery, they died by the dozens. The survivors fled back for their underground homes, reaching the marshes and swamps, only to encounter the Marine infantry. The captured buzz saws simply shredded the tanks. The guns of blaster platoons and the bigger guns of the assault platoons easily burned through the thin armor with long bursts and vaporized the crews. Blastermen who evaded detection found that a fire team that concentrated its three blasters’ fire had enough power to burn through the thin armor at the backs of the tanks. Almost none of the tanks of the Skink counterattack made it back underground.
“Now I know why they didn’t use their armor against us earlier,” Brigadier Sturgeon said. He wondered what other surprises the Skinks had in store. That futile attack had to have been a diversion. But a diversion for what?
He ordered the infantry to return to Haven. He made sure Commodore Borland understood the situation the same way he did, then composed messages to dispatch to the Combined Chiefs, Commandant Tokis, and Assistant Commandant Aguinaldo to travel in the same drone Borland was using to send messages to the Combined Chiefs, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Minister of War.
The staffs of Marine Expeditionary Forces, Kingdom, and the two FISTs worked on defense plans. They assumed the worst—that Skink reinforcements superior in number to the original Skink invasion force were on their way.
All Raptors returned to base to preserve the remaining Jerichos. The Hoppers, with less effective area weapons, replaced the Raptors in support of the Army of the Lord on the western fringes of the Skink stronghold. Marine artillery was moved into position and added its support. It wasn’t long before the Skink resistance completely collapsed. Sturgeon ordered Archbishop General Lambsblood to return his divisions to Haven.
Lambsblood was furious. He wanted to pursue the demons into their Hades and expel them back to the hell they had come from. Unwillingly and protesting, he complied with Sturgeon’s orders. Twelve hours after the collapse of the Skinks’ western resistance, the badly battered divisions that had participated in that assault were integrated into the Haven defenses, which looked a great deal different from how they had earlier.
Twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes after the Skink drone launched, a starship the size of a Crowe-class Amphibious Battle Cruiser popped out of Beamspace into orbit within visual range of the fast frigate CNSS Admiral J. P. Jones. The J. P. Jones was so surprised by a starship entering Space-3 that deep in a gravity well, it didn’t immediately take defensive action. By the time it did it was too late—missiles fired by the Skink starship had already been fired and were closing on the J. P. Jones. The J. P. Jones got off one shot from its laser battery before the incoming missiles destroyed it. The debris cloud left by the fast frigate began its slow expansion.
The Grandar Bay, in orbit on the opposite side of Kingdom, was shocked by the abrupt arrival of the Skink starship in orbit and the destruction of the J. P. Jones. Battle stations were called immediately and the Grandar Bay prepaired to defend itself. But the strange starship didn’t attack. It dropped shuttles that popped in and out of Beamspace on their way around the globe to the Skink stronghold.
The Marines gritted their teeth. Those so inclined prayed to whatever gods they believed in. They did whatever they could to prepare themselves for a fight they expected would be fiercer than any they’d ever been in before.
The Soldiers of the Lord weren’t told about the arrival of the Skink starship and the impossible descent of the shuttles. Lambsblood was too afraid of panic in the ranks and mass desertions.
The first shuttles touched down in the wetlands. On the Grandar Bay, the Laser Gunnery Division locked on targets and fired.
“What do you mean, missed?” demanded the gunnery officer.
“The targets are still there,” the senior chief petty officer who was the gunnery chief said. “Must be a glitch in the aiming program.”
The gunnery officer checked the visual, radar, and emissions displays. The lasers had fired at an array of six shiny shuttles on the ground. The six shuttles were still there, apparently intact and unharmed.
“Run diagnostics on the computer and debug the program,” the gunnery officer ordered. “And while you’re at it, fire another salvo at those shuttles.”
“Aye aye,” the chief said.
The gunnery officer watched the displays as the lasers fired the salvo. He nodded to himself. The cloud of mist that rose from the ground made it obvious that the lasers hadn’t missed. Then he watched in utter astonishment as five shuttles rose above the mist and blinked into Beamspace. When the mist cleared, he saw one shuttle still sitting there. He adjusted his visual display to show the shuttle in the high
est resolution possible. The resolution wasn’t fine enough for him to be certain, but it appeared that the shuttle’s ramp was down and that there was significant charring around the open ramp.
“Missed again, sir,” the gunnery chief said.
“Show me.” His display flicked to another view, and he saw six shuttles rise and blink out. He adjusted the resolution and could just make out evidence of laser damage in the bit of marsh he looked at. He located another half-dozen shuttles and watched while tiny dots representing Skinks boiled out of the water and onto the shuttles. The shuttles rose into the air and blinked out.
“They aren’t bringing in reinforcements!” he exclaimed. “They’re pulling out. Get me the bridge. Watch the targets. Try to shoot when their ramps are down.”
While the Laser Gunnery Division was struggling to kill the Skink shuttles, Grandar Bay’s Orbital Missile Division struggled to kill the Skink starship. But every time the starship launched a flight of shuttles, it blinked into Beamspace, only to return at a different place to recover a flight of shuttles. Each time it returned to orbit around Kingdom, it launched two salvos of missiles of its own. One salvo, aimed at the string-of-pearls, knocked out satellite after satellite. The other went at the Grandar Bay, which couldn’t jump into Beamspace to get out of the way. The Laser Gunnery Division was diverted from its attacks on the shuttles to defensive fire against the Skink orbital missiles. None of the Skink missiles got through the laser fire.
The debris from the destruction of the Skink missiles was another matter. Each destroyed missile burst into a cloud of fragments. Some of the debris plunged into lower orbits and burned up in Kingdom’s atmosphere. Other bits lost part of their velocity, and their orbits decayed until they also burned up in the atmosphere. Detonating warheads imparted enough velocity to some fragments to send them upward at escape velocity, and they disappeared into interplanetary space. But there were chunks that continued on their original trajectories and peppered the hull of the Grandar Bay.
All nonessential compartments on the side of the Grandar Bay facing the missiles were evacuated, secured, and their atmospheres pumped out. The Damage Control Division went into red status. The Grandar Bay was double-hulled to reduce the chance of catastrophic interior rupture. Vacuum-suited sailors worked swiftly in the tween’ull space between the starship’s outer and inner hulls to patch holes. Fortunately, few of the fragments struck the Grandar Bay with enough kinetic energy to pierce the inner hull.
Then a warhead that failed to detonate went unrecognized into a parabolic orbit that put it on a collision course with the navy starship. By the time the tracking system realized the fragment coming at the Grandar Bay was a warhead, it was only a few hundred meters away. The close-in guns, designed to destroy oversized hunks of space debris or hostile shuttles attempting to board the starship, had trouble hitting a target as small as the warhead, and it was less than two hundred meters away when it was finally hit and detonated. The tiny fragments that hit the Grandar Bay were negligible.
The Orbital Missile Division stopped trying to fix on the Skink starship and send targeted missiles at it. Instead it launched salvos of missiles armed with proximity-attraction fuses in the hope that the Skinks would reenter Space-3 close enough to one of the missiles for it to divert to the starship and hit it before it could jump back into Beamspace. One finally did get a lock. The Skink starship’s jump back and the missile’s explosion were so close together that the Grandar Bay’s computers couldn’t tell if the missile hit it or not.
Whichever, the starship didn’t return. No Skink shuttles were planetside. It was conjectured that it might not have returned because its evacuation mission was over. The Grandar Bay sent Essays into the debris cloud left by the Admiral J. P. Jones to search for survivors. Only sailors who were already in vaccuum suits when the starship was hit could possibly have survived. There were a few, but precious few.
Brigadier Sturgeon immediately summoned his two FIST commanders and Archbishop General Lambsblood.
His orders to them were succinct: “Brigadier Sparen, Colonel Ramadan, prepare your FISTs for immediate embarkation on the Grandar Bay. I believe I know where the Skink starship went. We’re going after it. Archbishop General, there may still be Skinks underground. You have the best maps of the Skink complex we have available. Send a division to search it thoroughly and root out any Skinks who remained behind.”
Lambsblood slapped his open hand on the tabletop. “NO!” he bellowed. “You are only trying to sacrifice the Soldiers of the Lord. Send your Marines underground. They have been in the tunnels, they know how to search the caves. If the Soldiers of the Lord go into the bowels of the earth, they risk everlasting damnation at the talons of the demons below!”
Sturgeon waited for Lambsblood to finish, then said in a deceptively calm voice, “Archbishop General, you heard my orders for my Marines. The invasion here is over. We are going in pursuit of the enemy. Mopping up any remnants of their forces is your responsibility. And, if I remember correctly, yesterday you argued strongly against pulling your army back to Haven because you wanted to pursue the Skinks into their caves.”
Lambsblood ignored Sturgeon’s reminder of what he’d said the day before and focused instead on the Marines’ departure. “No! By all that’s holy, I know what you are up to. You wish to weaken the Army of the Lord. That has been your objective on every assignment you have given the Army of the Lord since you arrived on Kingdom. Our casualties have been horrendous. We are already too weak to perform all of our normal duties.”
Sturgeon held up a hand to cut him off. “Your casualties dropped dramatically once my Marines started training with them and leading them. Your casualties when the Skinks launched their major assault against the Haven perimeter were severe, but without my Marines, the Skinks would have totally wiped out your defenses and captured Haven. Yes, you suffered badly in Operation Slay Demons. They would have been less if you had stopped when I told you to! But no, you had to keep going until the Skinks could hit your fragmented forces from all directions.
“Archbishop General, the severe damage your army has suffered has been the result of incompetent leadership, inadequate training on your part, and poor tactics. The only thing I could have done more than I did to save your army was to dismiss you and your entire officer corps!
“Now, we are leaving to pursue the invader and destroy their ability to launch another invasion. If any Skinks remain on Kingdom, finding and neutralizing them is your responsibility. Any harm that comes to the people of Kingdom from any remaining Skinks who aren’t hunted down is on your head.”
Furious, Lambsblood blustered, but couldn’t find anything coherent to say. He finally stood so abruptly that he knocked his chair over, then he stormed out.
“Well spoken, Ted,” Ramadan said when the Kingdomite commander was gone.
Sturgeon’s only reply was an annoyed growl.
“How soon will the navy be ready for us to board?” Sparen asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t told Commodore Borland what we’re going to do.”
Brigadier Sturgeon caught a shuttle to the Grandar Bay to tell Commodore Borland what he wanted in person. The commodore received him in the captain’s dining salon. The room was lined with what looked like real mahogany wainscotting; painted portraits of ships and navy officers hung on its walls. They sat at a table covered by a white linen cloth with a damasked pattern. The coffee and cake service settings and napkin holders before them appeared to be sterling silver. The coffee a steward poured into china cups, Sturgeon was sure, was from Earth-grown beans. He thought of the Flag Clubs he’d been to on brief visits to Headquarters, Marine Corps, at Fargo on Earth, and other major Marine Corps and navy bases. The captain’s dining salon appeared to be as richly appointed as any of them. The navy does take care of itself, he thought. He didn’t recognize the flavor of the cake.
“They killed the Jones,” Borland started. He was obviously shaken by the loss of the fast friga
te; it was rare for a Confederation Navy starship to be lost in orbital battle. “That ship had a crew of two hundred officers and men.” He shook his head. “We only found seventeen of them alive.” He straightened up and forced the pain from his face; the Marines had suffered far worse casualties. “But that’s my problem, not yours. You had something you want to discuss with me.”
Sturgeon nodded. “I’m sorry for your losses, Roger, I truly am.” After a brief pause, he gave the reason for his visit.
The commodore had two reasons for saying no.
“My starship took hull damage during the Skink evacuation,” was the first. “We need repairs, the kind we can only get in a navy shipyard.”
“Is the Grandar Bay crippled?” Sturgeon knew it wasn’t.
“Crippled? No. But the outer hull was breached in numerous places. The patches are intended as temporary expedients, not as permanent repairs. We need a shipyard for that.”
“But those temporary repairs will hold long enough to make a trip all the way back to Earth, plus a three-lights’ side trip, won’t they?” Again Sturgeon knew the answer.
So Borland hauled out his second reason. “I have messages from a civilian starship approaching Society 362—”
“Ambassador Spears showed me his message from Fundy’s Tide. I know about what may have been a rail gun that fired on the ship.”
Borland cocked an eyebrow at Sturgeon. He hadn’t known that the ambassador also received a message. Then, “Did you know the Fundy’s Tide hasn’t been heard from since?”
Sturgeon hadn’t known.
“Did the ambassador’s message mention the flotilla of unidentified vessels in orbit around Society 362?”
This was the first Sturgeon had heard about the orbiting ships.
“And that one of them appeared to be the size of a Crowe-class Amphibious Battle Cruiser?”
Starfist: Kingdom's Fury Page 27
