The Fires of Coventry

by Rick Shelley

  Captain McAuliffe wasted ten seconds swearing before he switched to his all-hands channel and passed the news. “Try to get the civilians to cover. Then I want everyone down, out of sight, in case the Feddies come straight in.” There could be fighters and shuttles, and it might not take them long to arrive.

  McAuliffe linked on with the commanders of Alpha and Delta, arranging for the disposition of their men. They might not have much time to assemble defensive positions.

  “We’ll move back into the burned out section north of here,” McAuliffe decided. “If there is fighting, we’ll try to keep it away from the houses that haven’t been destroyed. That might limit civilian casualties as well.” Alpha and Delta would recall their patrols. McAuliffe told Spencer to get the I&R platoon back in as well.

  The captain stood and looked around as Marines and civilians went into action. No more than ten percent of the refugees who had gathered could possibly be crowded into the houses along this stretch of road. The rest would have to be dispersed, preferably into the forest to the east, where they would be out of sight of any aircraft, and as far as possible from the enemy troops who had moved to thesouthwest. McAuliffe passed the word to tell the civilians that, and to tell them that they should move as quickly as they could, that enemy fighters or shuttles could be down in less than twenty minutes.

  “Captain!” McAuliffe turned back toward Spencer. “Kepner’s lads have spotted those Feddies we chased off. They’re headed this way, at the double. Kep says there’s at least three hundred and fifty.”

  “Bloody hell. That means they’re in communication with their fleet, and it means we’re going to get hit fast.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I figured too.”

  “We can’t let the Feddies back into this area, Spencer. They’ll start torching houses again, and this time they might not bother to make sure they’re empty first.”

  McAuliffe got on the radio to stop Alpha and Delta from moving in the other direction. Then he lifted his visor to talk with Spencer again. “We’ll set up west of the houses, and across the end of the line, try to either hold the Feddies or make them slide along our front toward the areas they’ve already burned. If we can get them moving north, we’ll leapfrog units from one end of our line to the other, try to stay ahead of them.”

  “Yes, sir. What about I&R?”

  “How far from the Feddies are they?”

  “No more than a hundred yards when I talked to Kep. Behind them now, I suspect.”

  “Tell Kepner … no, I’ll tell him myself. Hold on.”

  Tory listened to the captain’s instructions with something approaching disbelief. Blood seemed to drain from his head. He doesn’t want Marines, he wants bloody cartoon superheroes, Tory thought. But when the captain finished, all Tory said was, “Yes, sir. We’ll do our best.”

  He pulled in the fire teams. The platoon had been spread over more than a half mile, so it took a few minutes.

  “We’ve got to slow those sods down long enough to let the rest of our blokes get in position. And worry that there might be more Feddies dropping in our laps any minute.”

  “One shot-up platoon to stop two companies?” Alfie asked. “That’s bloody suicide.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Tory said. “We’ll hit them from behind, at maximum range, then do our best to stay out of their way. We’ll nip along the side and hit them again while they’re still looking where we used to be. Move and fight, then move again, at the double. Let’s go before they find more houses to burn.”

  Even at a run in a forest, I&R men could move relatively silently. When they had closed to within 150 yards of the rear elements of the Feddie formation, Kepner brought his platoon to a stop and got them down.

  “Fire!” he ordered. His own trigger was the first squeezed.

  Through the first ten seconds, there was no return fire. Only a couple of Feddies appeared to go down hit, but more took cover. When the return fire did start, it was uncoordinated at first, aimed around a full semicircle. It took a moment more before the Feddies spotted where the ambush had come from and concentrated their response.

  “They didn’t all stop,” Alfie said from his position at the extreme right end of the platoon. “Most kept moving.”

  “Right. Then that’s what we’ve got to do,” Tory said. “Up and off to the north. Stop firing before you start moving.”

  First squad was the last out, covering the rest until they had put more distance between themselves and the enemy.

  “Okay, Alfie-lad,” Tory said. “Time for us to catch them up. Take your team. We’ll be three seconds behind you.”

  Tory’s fire team increased its rate of fire, then started moving after the others. They had only gone a few steps when Ramsey Duncan pitched forward, smashing his shoulder into a tree trunk. Kepner and Dayle went down on either side of Duncan. His left leg was bleeding. A bullet had gone through the meat behind the bone. While Dayle turned to make certain that no Feddies sneaked up on them, Kepner slapped med-patches over both of Duncan’s wounds, then wrapped an elastic around the leg to help stop the bleeding.

  “I think my shoulder’s broken too,” Duncan whisperedthrough gritted teeth. “Broken or dislocated. You’ll have to go on without me, Sarge.”

  “Not a chance.” Tory lowered his visor long enough to call Will Cordamon. “You’ve got the platoon for now, Will. The Ram’s hurt bad. It’ll take Dayle and me both to get him in.” While he was talking, he slapped an anesthetic patch on Duncan’s shoulder. There wasn’t time to do any more, and it was going to hurt like hell when they moved him.

  Most of the Marines under Captain McAuliffe’s command had taken cover in the woods west of the road, a hundred yards from the nearest houses. A few platoons were still moving toward their positions, off to the left, the south, to block that end of the road. When McAuliffe heard the first sonic booms, he looked back toward the road and houses. There were still far too many civilians visible. Many, perhaps most, had been slow to take the advice to get into the woods on the far side of the road. Many hadn’t even started to move until they heard the sounds of aircraft coming in hot. Then they ran, either for whatever protection they might find at the sides of houses, or for the woods. There were hundreds of refugees, perhaps close to a thousand, between those houses and the forest.

  The first aircraft in were fighters, a pair of them. They made a run from south to north, firing rockets and then cannon—after they had reduced their speed enough to make cannon fire safe for themselves. Two houses were hit by missiles, but mostly the pilots aimed for the people who were running across the fields behind the houses, strafing through them before they pulled up to turn and come back.

  Any civilians who could still move hurried to make it to the tree line before the fighters came back, strafing again. A lot of the refugees did not make it back to their feet.

  The dozen shuttles that came in right after the fighters made their second pass landed farther south, beyond the last houses on the road.

  23

  Reggie Bailey watched from an upstairs window in the house where his family had been taken in while the Federation aircraft strafed the refugees outside. He felt sick to his stomach, but was unable to pull himself away from the window. It wasn’t until Reggie heard the first missile explosions, two houses to the south, that he felt any immediate fear for himself and for his family.

  “We’d better get downstairs,” he said, a tight throat making his voice squeaky. He and Al were with Joseph Evans, their host.

  Evans nodded. “Once this ruckus eases off a mite, we’ll have to see if we can help any of those folks out there.” Having been spared the destruction of his house and weeks as a refugee in the forest, the invasion had not felt completely real to Evans before. It had touched him only peripherally, a minor annoyance. But watching people die made the blood drain from his face. His voice remained under control, but just barely.

  “The Marines must be better equipped for that than we are,” Regg
ie said, swallowing heavily, as they moved out to the hallway and the stairs leading down to the main floor.

  “We can still do our part,” Evans said. “We need to do for ourselves as much as we can.”

  One of the two windows along the stairway had been starred by a bullet from one of the aircrafts’ cannon, leaving a spiderweb pattern that made it almost impossible to see through the pane. Joseph Evans stopped next to that window, arrested by the sight. He touched the inner surface. It still felt smooth, but no longer flat. The damage was all onthe outer layer. For a moment, Joseph seemed to forget that there were people behind him on the stairs. He stared at the window and shook his head.

  “It nearly penetrated,” he said finally, speaking softly, to himself. That starred window made more of an impression than the scores, perhaps hundreds, of people he had just seen killed by the same cannon fire.

  “And those missiles will penetrate anything we have,” Reggie said. “One of your neighbors just found that out.”

  Reggie’s voice snapped Joseph from his reverie. He blinked, then resumed his course down the stairs. But Al paused at the window, not to wonder at the damage to the pane, but to try to see through it.

  “Dad!” Al shouted. “There are shuttles coming down. Federation shuttles.”

  The I&R platoon had stopped its movement paralleling the Federation soldiers on the ground as soon as the enemy shuttles were spotted. Captain McAuliffe had new instructions for them. They were to get into position to see how many soldiers came off of the landers and what direction they took.

  “A dozen shuttles, those could carry four full companies,” Alfie commented when Tory passed the word to his noncoms. “Seven hundred men or more.”

  “All the more reason to find out for sure,” Tory said.

  The landing zone was a half mile south of the last houses on the road. Tory had to take his platoon about the same distance to get into position. It appeared that the shuttles had landed right in the road. There was forest to either side. The I&R platoon moved by fire team, spread out in a double skirmish line. There was enough distance between the two lines that even if the new Feddie troops hit the lead line hard, the second line would be able to get word back to the captain.

  Alfie pushed his men. The sooner they could get the information they needed, the sooner they would be able to head back to the rest of their mates. With so many Feddies on the ground, Alfie did not fancy mucking around with justa few men, out where capture—or worse—was an immediate threat. Federation troops were not noted for their humanity in dealing with prisoners. Captured enemies were likely to be killed out of hand to save their captors the bother of guarding them.

  By the time that Alfie and a few of the others reached the edge of the wooded area, off to the west of the road, and could see the Federation LZ, the shuttles had already been emptied. But there was no clear perimeter around the shuttles. Squads had been posted near the corners of the zone, with the rest of the troops held in a group near the center, where the bulk of the shuttles gave them some protection from ground attack.

  “Slide off to that side,” Alfie whispered, gesturing right. “I need a better hole to look through.” After a few more seconds of looking, Alfie switched channels. “Tory, do you see? Those shuttles didn’t come in full. There can’t be more than three hundred Feddies out there, two short companies.”

  “Unless the rest are still inside the landers,” Tory said. “We can’t see up those ramps from here.”

  “Even Feddies can’t be that stupid. Stay inside a shuttle on the ground where there’s enemy troops close?”

  “They might have brought supplies for the ones already here, the way we had supplies landed.”

  “Maybe,” Alfie conceded. “But there’s another possibility. Maybe they came in to get the other sods out.”

  “Don’t get your hopes too high. Hang on a minute. I’ve got to report to the captain.” Tory switched channels to tell Captain McAuliffe what they had seen, and he mentioned all three of the possible explanations for half-empty shuttles—including the one he himself thought least likely, that half of the Feddies were still inside them. “I don’t know if it’s important or not, Captain,” Tory said, “but that’s what we’ve got.”

  “You see any sign that they’re getting ready to move away from the shuttles?” McAuliffe asked.

  “Not so far. But they’re formed up for something, not in defensive positions.”

  “Keep watching. If they show any sign that they’re moving away from the shuttles, give me a shout. Make sure you’re far enough under cover that they don’t spot you first, but stay close enough to see what’s going on.”

  “They’d be sitting ducks if one or two Spacehawks came along,” Alfie said after the platoon had moved back from the edge. “A couple of birds could wipe out the lot of them in a single pass.”

  “Save your breath, Alfie,” Tory advised. “We don’t get miracles like that. The Spacehawks will all be busy upstairs. There’s not much chance we’ll see one soon enough to help.”

  Alfie had no chance to reply to that. Three men made the same call at once on the platoon channel. “They’re moving!”

  Tory looked for himself, then called the captain. “They’re heading right down the road toward you.”

  “All right,” McAuliffe said. “Get your lads back as quickly as you can. If the two lots of Feddies meet before you get past them, you may have to invent a new route in.”

  A hundred yards south of the last houses, the forest took over, leaning in close on both sides of the road. In places, the underbrush was impossibly thick. The lane was the only possible route for a large formation of soldiers to use if they wanted to move at any speed.

  Captain McAuliffe had shifted his men as far as he could in the available time. The defensive line resembled a shepherd’s crook, with the longer section of the staff along the west side of the houses, hooking around the south end and going only a hundred yards north on the east side. H&S Company was on the east and manned part of the hook. Delta was next in line, with Alpha stretched back as far as possible on the west.

  No civilians had come out of their houses yet. After seeing what had happened to those who had been caught in the open by the Feddie aircraft, few would have obeyed a direct order to leave their homes, not that McAuliffe ever considered that. The civilians were safer now where they were.

  The Marines had little time to dig in or erect barricades. The line was in the edge of the forest, all around. Only across the road itself was it possible to set up physical barriers. Those were lightly manned. The possibility of Feddie aircraft returning was too great.

  The original Federation force, the one that had been on the ground from the beginning and had already fought the Marines of the First Battalion, had stopped moving. They were waiting, four hundred yards west of the road, approximately opposite the junction between Alpha and Delta companies.

  Paul Greene felt physically ill. Only by sheer willpower, and considerable acting, was he able to keep his discomfort from showing to the men and women around him. He walked slowly onto the flag bridge just before ordering the task force to transit to Q-space. It was essential that he be at his duty post, where people could see that he was not panicked by the thought of what might lie ahead. But the personal history he had to live up to was not too difficult. Greene had never been noted as a jovial commander. He was not given to jokes or charades the way some officers—such as Admiral Stasys Truscott, his onetime commander—were. Greene always maintained a serious demeanor on duty. The pose of dignity could cover a lot, especially when that was what the men and women under his command expected.

  His initial deployment for the coming battle had been selected, and everyone knew what was expected of them. Only the first few minutes could be fully scripted in advance, of course. They would not know precisely what they would be able to do, or what they might be forced to do, until they emerged from Q-space over Coventry and discovered the latest positions and courses o
f the Federation ships.

  Greene leaned back in his chair at the rear of the flag bridge. The console in front of him duplicated the captain’s console on Sheffield’s bridge, but also offered additional functions to facilitate communication with the other ships under his command, and six extra monitors. As was hishabit, he keyed in the automatic diagnostics for the system. Fifteen seconds later, he had confirmation that everything was working properly.

  “Transmit the execute order to the fleet,” Greene said. The crews of all the ships were already at battle stations. When the task force came out of Q-space in several minutes, it would be instantly ready for action.

  The automatic warning for Q-space insertion sounded. Greene took a deep breath, then expelled it slowly as Sheffield’s Nilssen generators slid the ship into a private universe.

  Collision warnings sounded aboard HMS Hull less than two seconds after it emerged from Q-space over Coventry. Red lights flashed to accompany the Klaxon. Arriving in normal space traveling at nearly 26,000 miles per hour, Hull found itself coming up directly behind a Federation frigate, no more than sixty miles ahead. The frigate’s velocity was more than 7,000 mph slower—orbital speed—which gave Hull less than thirty seconds to avoid collision, or prepare for it as best as she could. Thirty seconds meant that there was no chance to jump back into Q-space to escape. The minimum of ninety seconds between jumps was absolute.

  Automatic collision-avoidance systems fired maneuvering thrusters at full power, working to slow Hull and attempt the course correction that offered the best chance for success, even if the frigate took no evasive action of its own. If the frigate ducked in the wrong direction, though, there would be no way to avert disaster.

  “Fire everything we have that bears on that frigate,” Ian Shrikes ordered. “Blast it out of our way.”

  That was highly unlikely, to say the least, but Ian kept his voice at a reasonable level. There was no hint of panic that might distract the bridge watch. On a ship the size of Hull, even firing all of the ship’s weapons at once would produce no noticeable recoil motion, but the accumulated reactions from dozens of particle and energy beam weapons being fired continuously in the same direction would add a minute amount to the efforts to avoid collision. And a sufficientnumber of powerful antiship missiles hitting the frigate might at least weaken it enough structurally to mitigate the damage to Hull if the crash could not be averted completely.