The Fires of Coventry

by Rick Shelley

  There was a lot of confused talk on the noncoms’ channel. Alpha had been split three ways by the Federation breakthrough. They had heavy casualties, but were still trying to keep between the Feddies and the civilians—with less and less success. Part of Delta was pushing through behind, along with H&S, trying to catch up with the Feddies, while the rest of Delta was swinging around the end, trying to get as many men as possible between the Feddies and their shuttles. Squads were getting separated from their platoons; platoons were getting separated from their companies. All over the place individual Marines were losing touch with their mates.

  A right bloody mess, Alfie thought. The I&R platoon was together, at least.

  A burst of gunfire made first squad take cover. The Feddies were leaving behind ambushes to slow down the pursuit. They would shoot, then withdraw, sometimes under cover of a series of grenades.

  “They’ve broken free of the forest,” an anonymous voice said on the noncoms’ channel. “They’re heading for the houses.”

  Noel and his volunteers, including the uninvited Al Bailey, saw camouflaged uniforms coming out of the forest.

  The first to emerge were Commonwealth Marines, breaking to either side, withdrawing slowly, still fighting, trying to stop the Federation soldiers from breaking clear of the encirclement.

  “Those are Commonwealth men!” Noel shouted as one of the men in line with him started to raise his rifle. “Hold on. It’s the folks they’re shooting at that we want a piece of. Wait until they come out into the open where we can get clear shots at them.” It was no more than fifty yards from the thirty-inch high stone wall they were crouched behind to the edge of the trees.

  A dozen Marines sprinted toward the wall and took up positions to the right of the civilians. The Marines gave Noel’s group a close look, but no one said anything to the civilians. They merely got into firing positions and waited, rifles pointed into the gap between two other groups of Marines.

  Neither Marines nor civilians had long to wait.

  Al recognized the different camouflage pattern at once, even before he could see the outline of the Federation crest on the sides of the new helmets—the crest was also in camouflage colors and almost impossible to make out at a distance.

  A wedge of Federation soldiers went into prone firing positions right at the edge of the forest, most taking cover behind trees. They opened fire together. Noel shouted a command for his civilians to return the fire. The Marines also opened up, though their orders were not heard by the civilians.

  Al had knocked one rock out of the wall in front of him. That let him keep more of himself behind cover, so that the entire top of his head wasn’t exposed. He rested the barrel of his revolver in the notch. He could sight and fire, and only a little of his head, and his hand, were exposed to enemy fire.

  He had never fired a pistol before. The recoil of the first shot surprised him. The gun came up off of the rock ledge. It was clear that he had not hit anything with it. At fifty yards, he wasn’t certain that he would be able to hit a standingtarget, let alone one lying on the ground exposing so little. But he kept shooting, aiming as carefully as he could, just over the helmets he could see, estimating the ballistic fall of his shots. But the only basis he had for that was the .17 caliber pellet gun that he had received for his last birthday, and the two weapons were certainly not comparable.

  After emptying the revolver, Al pulled back to reload. He felt disgusted with himself. As far as he could tell, he had not scored a single hit, not even a minor wound. His hands were trembling as he reloaded, an awkward operation done for the first time.

  I’ve got to be more careful, he told himself. I know what it feels like now. I can do better. He closed the cylinder and pulled back the hammer before he moved into position to start shooting again. He was only barely aware of a slight whooshing noise, nearly to the far end of the squad of Marines. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he did see a couple of those Marines throw themselves flat on the ground next to the wall.

  It was pure reflex that made Al start to dive sideways as well, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. He really did not hear the sound of the grenade exploding behind the Marines. All that he was aware of was the agony as bits of hot shrapnel tore into his unprotected body.

  Noel Wittington had been marking his shots carefully. Conscious of how few rounds of ammunition he had, he was particularly determined to make them count. He was certain that he had hit at least one Feddie. The bullet had struck the man’s shoulder, from the top, right next to his helmet. Noel hoped that the bullet had gone on to do massive damage inside, but he could not simply watch to see if the man moved. He looked to his next target instead.

  He heard the grenade explode off to his right. Noel looked that way and saw Marines and civilians fall. Just as he looked back out toward the Feddies, he saw an object arcing through the air toward him, a thrown grenade, not one fired from a launcher.

  His next actions were not the product of Home Defense Force drills or conscious thought. They came from someinstinct too primal for reflection or fear. Noel tracked the grenade as he might have tracked a cricket ball. He did not try to catch it though. As it hit the ground on his side of the wall—where it would have made casualties of the rest of his volunteers, Noel threw himself over the grenade, smothered it under him.

  He was not aware of the explosion.

  28

  With Patrick Baker permanently out of the picture, and Ramsey Duncan not yet returned to duty from his injuries, there was little point in continuing to run I&R’s first squad as two fire teams. Fourth squad had also been reduced to, effectively, one fire team. Second and third had each lost a single man in the fighting.

  Geoffrey Dayle set the pace for first squad now, and indirectly for the entire platoon. For once, Tory did not try to rein Dayle in. That was less because he thought it might be a waste of breath and more because speed was critical now. But the speed brought its own problems. A few men in the platoon had trouble keeping up with the Coventry native, tripping over exposed tree roots or falling into tangled underbrush.

  The men took risks they might not have in other circumstances. Here and there, the Feddies had left land mines behind to stall the Commonwealth pursuit. But Dayle seemed to have a charmed life. The one time he did come within range of a mine, he spotted it before it could go off, and dove to the ground as he shouted a warning, then detonated the mine with a single rifle shot.

  A sergeant from Alpha Company provided commentary on the Federation breakthrough on an open noncoms’ circuit. The Feddies were heading directly for the nearest houses. There were more civilian casualties. A group of locals had come out with weapons to try to help stem the Feddie movement. Those civilians and a squad of Marines had been caught between two RPG explosions. Although no one had been able to check yet, it appeared as though there might be more dead than wounded in both groups.

  Just minutes later, there was another update from the sergeant. The Feddies had not taken cover in the houses or started to torch them. They had merely grabbed as many uninjured civilians as they could find out of the houses, holding them on the side of their formation facing the woods, and out in front, using them as human shields. The Feddies were headed south, obviously trying to win through to their shuttles so they could escape from Coventry.

  The Feddies moved south between the two lines of houses, not out in the road, but in front of the houses on the west side of it, using the buildings for cover as well, leapfrogging from one to the next—fire and maneuver—with more men providing the covering fire than were moving at any given time.

  More Commonwealth Marines were emerging from the forest, or stopping just before the trees ended, keeping pace with the Feddies, and even getting a little ahead of them. But they could not stop them. There were too many civilians to permit random fire into the Feddie ranks. Everything was single shot, not fully automatic.

  Tory brought his platoon out from the forest north of the Federation soldiers, behind
them. He had new instructions from Captain McAuliffe. Once more, the platoon was being asked to do more than their share, a lot of hard physical effort that would be followed—almost certainly—with more difficult fighting. I&R moved across the road. For a moment, they came under fire from the Feddies, but from a range of more than two hundred yards. That fire was not especially accurate.

  John McGregor fell as the platoon crossed the road. He tumbled to the ground, hard, knocking the air out of his lungs. At first, he wasn’t aware that he had been hit. He thought that he had simply tripped. It was only when he tried to get back up and found that his legs would not support him that he looked and saw the blood gushing from his left thigh.

  “I’m hit,” he called over the platoon channel. The others had gone past him.

  Alfie dove to the ground where he was, then turned to look back. “How bad?”

  “My leg. I think the artery’s bust.”

  The rest of first squad stopped to provide covering fire. Alfie crawled back toward McGregor while the rest of the platoon got to the low stone wall on the east side of the road and helped cover him. By the time Alfie got to McGregor, the man from Bannockburn had lost consciousness from loss of blood.

  “Hang on, lad,” Alfie said. “I’ll take care of you.” Alfie worked frantically. The blood that McGregor had lost worried him. A man could bleed to death in a hurry from a severed artery. He stripped the sling from McGregor’s rifle and tied a tourniquet around the upper thigh. That was far more urgent than getting the two of them out of the way of the gunfire.

  Eugene Wegener slid to the ground on the other side of the wounded man. “He would be the biggest man in the platoon,” Wegener grumbled. “It’ll take the both of us to move him.”

  “Let’s hit it. Grab him up and let’s scoot,” Alfie said.

  With their own rifles slung, Edwards and Wegener got up, hauling McGregor with them. They started to move east even before they were fully erect.

  John McGregor’s weight seemed to increase with each step. Before they were halfway to the cover of the low stone wall that fronted the road, Alfie found himself wondering whether they would be able to make it. Deadweight, he thought. How’d he get so bloody heavy? Then Alfie pitched over toward the left, last domino in a chain reaction as the other two fell into him. Alfie hit the ground hard. For an instant, he lost consciousness, but came awake even as the other two were being pulled off of him and dragged the rest of the way to cover.

  “What happened?” Alfie asked.

  “McGregor’s dead, and Wegener’s in bad shape. I don’t know if he’s going to make it,” Tory said once they were behind the wall. “You’re not bleeding at any rate. How do you feel?”

  “Like someone dropped a bleeding tank on top of me.” But Alfie started to raise himself up.

  “Don’t get too high. We’ve only got about twenty-four inches of wall between us and the Feddies. Give it another moment until they’re farther off.”

  Tory gave his men just one minute before they ran on to the cover of the nearest house on the east side of the road, carrying Wegener with them, and laying him with several civilian casualties who had been lined up there.

  “We’ve got a long haul now,” Tory told his men. “The captain wants us to go around and get in front of the Feddies, set up a cross fire so that they’re stuck. We’re to be careful about the civilians, but the idea is to get guns on so many sides of the Feddies that the hostages aren’t enough for them.”

  Tory knew that there would be casualties among the hostages, almost certainly. There had been already. That could not be helped. The Federation soldiers—there appeared to be about three hundred of them left, slightly less than the number of effectives that the three companies of Marines could still muster—would be stopped, whatever it took. That was the order.

  The I&R platoon could not race along behind the houses at full speed for long. When they crossed the gaps between houses, which varied between thirty and one hundred yards, they were in full view of the enemy, within eighty yards of them at their nearest approach, and they drew fire each time they came in view. The platoon had to provide its own covering fire, one squad moving across the gap while the rest did the shooting, trying to aim more carefully than they normally did during that kind of maneuver; they had to try to avoid hitting civilians. The Feddies were under no restrictions. They didn’t worry about creating civilian casualties, but used all of their weapons. Several of the houses took hits from RPGs or antiaircraft missiles.

  It took Tory and his men until the last house along the road before they got ahead of the Feddies, and even then it was only by a matter of a few dozen yards, scarcely enough to matter. The platoon took up positions to fire into the

  Feddies, who finally had to stop, with the last house shielding them from the west. Their cover was about to run out. There were no more buildings, and the gap before the road moved into forest was nearly two hundred yards, with more than half of the Commonwealth Marines now in position to reach them.

  This is where they’ve got to give it up, Alfie thought. They must know they can’t make it across that gap. It’s quit or die. After the day he had had, Alfie desperately wanted the confrontation to end soon. But he did not need long to decide that he was wrong, that the Federation soldiers were still going to try to escape. The hostages were moved about, some put in front, others shifted to the left side. There weren’t enough to provide a solid wall around the Feddies, but the hostages were spaced out as best they could be.

  None of the Marines could hear the order that was given, but the Feddies came up from their firing positions and started forward again, pushing and dragging their hostages along. A few, a very few, civilians managed to pull free and run off to one side or the other before diving for cover. No attempt was made to recapture them.

  “I don’t believe it!” Alfie said as he started shooting again. The Feddies had not moved into the courtyard of the house behind them. That would have given them good cover on two sides and fair cover on the other two. It would have given them a chance to hold out … for a time. “They’re still going to try for their bloody shuttles.”

  Soldiers and hostages fell. The formation continued to move south, closing over the gaps in its ranks as possible. Almost from the start, the Feddies were losing a dozen men or more for each pace south they made. There was no question of the outcome. By the time the group reached the midpoint between the last house and the cover of the forest, there were no more than thirty soldiers and a half dozen civilians still on their feet. The civilians were dragged to the ground, the Feddies continuing to use them as shields, as ramparts around a makeshift perimeter. They rested rifles on the backs of the hostages and used them as shooting rests. But it was only a matter of minutes before the last Federationsoldiers stopped firing. They were out of ammunition. Slowly, very slowly, seven soldiers got up, their hands above their heads.

  The I&R platoon was the nearest Commonwealth unit. Several of the men got up almost as soon as the Feddies did. Tory was too busy watching the last surviving enemy soldiers, too horrified at what had happened in the last few minutes to give enough thought to his own men, to think of the possibility.

  Geoffrey Dayle had just slipped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He needed less than a second to empty it into the seven men who had just surrendered.

  Dayle dropped his rifle just as Tory Kepner swung his own weapon to knock the gun from Geoffrey’s hands. Then Tory brought his rifle butt up and across, smashing it into Dayle’s helmet, knocking him to the ground.

  In space, the cat-and-mouse game continued. While the Commonwealth task force was over Coventry, reports came up from the surface. Hawthorne was the first contested site to be won. Over the next eight hours, several other units reported an end to hostilities in their areas. Some Federation shuttles did get off the ground, mostly from towns where there had been no Commonwealth presence. Fewer than half of those shuttles made it back to their transports, though. Commonwealth Spacehawks
went hunting, and shuttles had little chance of escaping those birds of prey.

  Sunset moved across the major settlements of Coventry. Fighting continued in Coventry City, South York, and The Dales. But not for long. Before midnight, local time, the last Federation units on the ground had surrendered. Two hours earlier, the Federation battle group had retreated into Q-space. It had not returned.

  On the flag bridge of HMS Sheffield, men and women turned to look at Admiral Greene when news of the last troop surrender was relayed by CIC. The bridge watch stared, waiting for the admiral’s reaction to the news.

  Paul Greene remained motionless. Not even the expression on his face changed. For nearly a minute, he didn’t somuch as blink. It took time for the news to register on a mind numbed by exhaustion and the tension of the past days. The blink came, finally. Then another. Greene squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and let out his breath. The fight was over, on the ground, at least. In space? He opened his eyes.

  “CIC, is there any trace of that Feddie fleet yet?”

  “No sign at all, Admiral, not as far out as we can scan.”

  “Do you think they’ve gone home, Admiral?” Greene’s aide asked. “Is it over?”

  Greene’s answer was slow in coming, and was preceded by a deep sigh. “I don’t know. I hope so. Maybe that’s why the Feddies on the ground finally started to surrender instead of fighting on. Maybe they were told that their fleet was leaving.” He paused and looked around the bridge, his glance stopping briefly on each of the people there, as if he had never seen any of them before.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated. After another shorter pause, he said, “We’ll maintain battle watches through the night. If the enemy battle group hasn’t returned by local dawn in Coventry City, we’ll proceed on the assumption that the Feddies aren’t going to return.”

  He frowned. “There’s still a lot of work to be done here, and it will take time before Buckingham can send in all of the specialists and materials that are going to be needed. For the time being, it will be up to us.”