Issue In Doubt (17 page)

The Marines were very bulky in the armored vacuum suits that had been waiting for them at the foot of McKinzie —it turned out that they hadn’t been delivered to India Company’s supply sergeant. The armor’s weight—armor, no matter how light, is always heavy—was offset by servos in the main joints that not only allowed the Marines to move as easily as they would unarmored, but added to their strength.

“When your bird lands, the flight commander will tell you if he wants you outside or to stay in. If he tells you outside, be ready to fight right off. Now, you outta know, the flight commander is an officer, the pilot is a first class, the crew chief is a third class, and the—.”

Tripp suddenly looked away from the Marines, pulled his headset’s earpieces forward and rotated the mike to his mouth. He listened for a moment, murmured a reply, then looked back up.

“Ah right, who’s first? Pegasus One is docked and waiting for you.” His drawl disappeared and he became all business. He stepped to the airlock’s hatch, which was closed.

“First Marines, that’s you. Come with me.” Chief Tripp led them to the entrance to the docking chute.

“Line up by fire teams,” Sergeant Martin ordered his squad, and took a position on the other side of the airlock from the chief.

Corporal Adriance stood between them facing the hatch. Lance Corporal Mackie took position behind him, and glanced back to make sure PFCs Orndoff and Zion were in place.

“We’re ready, Chief,” Martin told Tripp as soon as the squad was in line.

Tripp tapped a three touch code on the hatch’s lock, and it slid aside. “Go!” he barked. Adriance stepped forward, and the rest of the squad followed. Martin brought up the rear.

Inside the Pegasus a crewman, anonymous in a vacuum suit with a reflective faceplate, directed the Marines to narrow benches along the sides of the cabin.

“No space between you,” he said. “We’re so tight some of you might have to sit on the deck. Close it up and keep it close!”

Mackie reflexively shook his head when he saw the interior of the cabin. It looked barely big enough to hold an armored vacuum suited fire team, much less an entire squad. “Are we really going to be sitting on each other’s laps?” he asked nobody in particular, then when nobody answered: “That’s what I thought.”

The Marines jammed themselves in. Six squeezed onto the bench along each side. They weren’t able to sit straight with their backs against the bulkhead, but twisted their torsos so they overlapped, one man’s shoulder in front of the next one’s. There was little space between their knees and the knees of the Marines on the opposite side. Martin and Private Frank Hill, the squad’s newest and most junior man, managed to find space on the floor amid the feet and knees.

“Hold on, we’re about to move,” the anonymous crewman alerted them from his station, which was out of sight from the main cabin. “Hold on tight so you don’t get banged around.”

“Hold onto what?” Orndoff muttered over the fire team circuit.

“Your ass, that’s what,” Mackie answered.

Adriance snorted, then ordered, “Shitcan the grabass, people. This is serious.”

But Orndoff was right; there wasn’t anything to grab hold of.

The search and rescue craft lurched, separating from the elevator airlock, throwing the Marines against each other. But they were already tight enough that nobody built enough momentum to injure himself or the Marine he bumped into. Slow acceleration eased Pegasus One away from the geosync station. There were no ports to look through, no display panels to show what was outside; no way to tell where they were, what direction they were headed, how fast they were going, how much time was passing. All the Marines could do was wait, with greater or lesser degrees of patience.

After an indeterminate length of time the anonymous crewman announced from his unseen station, “Halfway there.”

Wherever
there
was, and however far
halfway
might be.

Eventually a different voice came to the Marines. “We’re going down,” the voice—the flight commander?—said. “When we hit, the rear hatch will drop, and I need you to get out there instantly. It looks like bad guys are closing on Piranha 14’s position.”

When the voice—the pilot? the SAR commander?—didn’t say anything more, Sergeant Martin demanded, “How many of them are there? What direction are they coming from? Do they have armor or are they on foot or what? Come on, man, we need more data or we’re stepping into an ambush!”

“No time!” the voice said. “We’re down.” There was a jolt of impact as the Pegasus hit the ground. The hatch in the compartment’s rear dropped and became a ramp.

The major joints of the armored vacuum suits had servo motors, made necessary by the mass of the suits. The Marines had been sitting in cramped positions without being able to move. Third platoon’s first squad looked clumsy scrambling down the ramp, but without the servos, they couldn’t have even stood to shamble off until full circulation returned to their limbs.

“Where are they?” Sergeant Martin demanded as he looked around in attempt to find the foe.

“I’m sending you our feed now,” the unidentified voice said.

Martin put it on his HUD for a quick study, and swore. He began shouting orders.

Chapter Twelve

Mini Mouse, LZ 1

“First fire team, get to that Kestrel!” Sergeant Martin shouted. “Second and third, lay down fire on those vehicles!”

The downed Kestrel was a hundred meters away to the northeast. To the north-northeast, two vehicles of an alien design were bouncing toward them at a high rate of speed from less than two kilometers away.

“First fire team, let’s go!” Corporal Adriance shouted, and began the shuffling low-gravity walk men had used since Neil Armstrong first stepped on Earth’s moon centuries earlier.

Three crewmen from the Pegasus were already on their way, driving a motorized litter to carry the pilot back.

Second and third fire teams began firing on the approaching vehicles. The Marines’ rifles were loaded with alternating armor piercing and explosive rounds. The armor piercing bullets bounced off the armored fronts of the vehicles, the explosive ones barely pitted the surface. The enemy didn’t give immediate return fire; maybe they didn’t have a mechanism that would compensate for the bouncing.

First fire team reached the Kestrel just as the rescue men were loading the unmoving pilot onto the litter; the Marines couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not, or even if he was still alive.

Adriance saw how ineffective the fire from the rest of the squad was, and knew that adding fire from four more rifles on their fronts wouldn’t do anything to stop the alien vehicles. He decided to do something else.

“First fire team, try to ricochet your rounds to the undercarriage of the one on the left,” he ordered, and began firing into the regolith in front of the vehicle, sending fragments of stone bouncing into its lower front and underneath it. In an instant, the other three Marines began firing the same.

“Our armored vehicles have their strongest armor on their fronts,” Adriance explained absently as he maintained steady fire, “and the weakest on the bottom. If these bad guys build theirs the same way, we might be able to break through.”

Maybe, maybe not, but it was worth a try—and it was. Something broke in the vehicle. Gases began venting from its bottom. It slewed to a stop, turning its side to the Marines. The vehicle on the right had to swerve violently to its left to avoid running into its damaged mate, throwing up a curtain of dust and gravel before pointing back toward the humans.

Sergeant Martin saw what first fire team did. “Second and third fire teams,” he shouted, “did you see what they did? Do the same thing—bounce your rounds underneath the one that’s still coming at us.”

By then, the occupants of the first vehicle, a dozen of them, had scrambled out of it and were charging in high, jinking bounds at the Marines by the Kestrel. The shape of their vacuum suits would have stunned the Marines had they not already seen the vids and stills brought back by Force Recon, and sent during the original alien attack on Troy. The legs were long, and bent the wrong way; the arms were too short; forward-jutting heads stuck out on very long necks. A large bulge on the rear of the suits counter-balanced the heads. They ran bent at the hips almost parallel to the ground.

The charging aliens were firing rifles, but their shots were wild and none seemed to come near the Marines. They were closing fast, their run was much faster than the Marines’ shuffle, but they didn’t seem to be as well trained at low gravity movement. Or maybe their jinking wasn’t suitable for rapid movement in low gravity. They kept stumbling and tripping.

The Marines of first fire team took advantage of the stumbles and trips to take aim during the brief seconds their targets were relatively motionless. The armor piercing bullets mostly glanced off the aliens’ armor, but some of the explosive bullets punctured them, venting air.

“First fire team, get back here,” Martin ordered when the litter was halfway back to the Pegasus.

“Let’s go!” Adriance repeated the order to his men. He looked to see that they were obeying. “That includes you, Zion.”

But Zion didn’t move; he was half sitting, folded over his rifle.

Adriance swore. “Mackie, check Zion!”

Mackie had already began the shuffle-run back to the Pegasus and had to turn back. Adriance didn’t wait for him, he was already kneeling over Zion when Mackie reached him.

Adriance’s face was barely visible through his faceplate when he looked at Mackie, but his expression was grim. Not all of the aliens’ shots had gone wild.

“Marines don’t leave their dead,” the fire team leader said, thick-voiced. “Give me a hand.”

When the two of them raised Zion, Mackie saw where a hole had been punched through the neck of the other’s armor where it was jointed to his chest plate. Air had vented explosively, blowing the hole much larger. Blood had vented as well from a wound in Zion’s throat, staining the edges of the hole red. They draped his arms over their shoulders and ran, with Adriance carrying Zion’s rifle.

By then, fire from the rest of the squad had crippled the second vehicle, and the Marines were firing at the bounding, jinking, stumbling aliens. Only a dozen were still making the mad charge. But not all of the dozen who were down had been hit; at least four of them had gone prone to give aimed return fire.

“Let’s move it, first fire team!” Martin shouted. “This bird is almost ready to fly away. The squids’ll leave you if you aren’t here when they’re ready to go!” He looked at the prone aliens giving return fire, and ordered, “Second fire team, take him out.” He fired a shot himself at one of the shooters to show who he meant. In seconds, four more bullets struck that one, and he stopped shooting.

“Now get the other shooters!”

The lead running aliens reached the Pegasus at the same time as Adriance and Mackie, and one of them barreled into the two of them and their burden, knocking them down.

Mackie kicked out as he fell, smashing an armored foot into the alien’s backward-bending knee, felling him. The Marine jumped up and stomped on the alien’s helmet, then grasped his rifle with one hand behind the receiver and the other in the middle of the forestock. He saw another alien rushing at him with his weapon pointed like a spear. Mackie pirouetted out of the way of the lunge, and slammed the butt of his rifle at his assailant’s head. But the momentum of his spin carried him around and off balance, so his blow barely staggered the alien. But that slight stagger was enough to allow Adriance to swing his rifle around in a wicked blow that shattered the alien’s facemask.

With two down at their feet, Mackie and Adriance had a few seconds to take in the entire fight. It was one-on-one, man-to-man close combat—man to alien; they had to be aliens, there was no way a human being could jam into one of their vacuum suits without breaking bones and disjointing limbs.

No one was shooting in the melee; the combatants faced too much danger of hitting their own if they did. They were all using their weapons as clubs, quarterstaffs, or thrusting spears.

Just a couple of meters away, Orndoff was being forced backward by an alien jabbing and thrusting at him. Mackie and Adriance both stepped toward the two. Adriance swung the butt of his rifle in a golf club stroke at the alien’s low-slung head while Mackie reversed his weapon and slammed its butt into the alien’s side. Orndoff’s attacker fell away in an uncontrolled tumble, and came to rest twisted in ways that couldn’t be natural for its kind.

Corporal Button, the third fire team leader, went down clutching his abdomen. The alien who had knocked him down jumped on his helmet, but in the low gravity lacked the force necessary to break anything. Button rolled away but wasn’t able to regain his feet as the alien pursued him with repeated, rapid kicks. Adriance leaped in Button’s direction to help him.

Mackie shuffled to the aid of second fire team’s PFC Harry Harvey, who was closer and parrying off rapid blows from another alien.

Orndoff screamed a war cry, heard only by the Marines through their helmet comms. He leaped at the back of one of two aliens attacking Lance Corporal Fernando L. Garcia. He misjudged in the low gravity and sailed over the alien, but managed to slam his rifle’s butt downward onto the alien’s neck, jarring him. The alien whipped his head around to see what had hit him and saw Orndoff, off balance from hitting him, thud onto the regolith and tumble. The alien leaped at the Marine, freeing Garcia to concentrate on his other attacker.

Orndoff twisted to turn his tumble into a controlled roll, so he was facing up when the alien pounced at him. The alien’s jump was better than Orndoff’s had been, but he still flew high and came down slowly in the low gravity. The Marine had time to twist his body to the side to miss the worst of the alien’s jump, and brace himself to lunge upward with his rifle. The alien already realized that swinging his rifle club-like would throw him off balance; he came down with his rifle pointed straight down, to spear his opponent. He missed Orndoff’s twisting body, but the Marine connected with his target when he lunged up and plunged the muzzle of his rifle into the joint where the elongated helmet met the top plate of the neck armor. The alien’s limbs shot out away from its body, then it jerked its hands to its throat and clutched at Orndoff’s rifle barrel. He crashed onto his side, yanking the rifle out of the Marine’s grip. Orndoff jumped to his feet and tried to retrieve his rifle, but it was jammed too tightly into the alien’s armor.