Starfist: Kingdom's Fury (15 page)

"Madam, who is to command this task force?" the Army Chief of Staff asked.

"General Aguinaldo." She turned to Aguinaldo, but as she spoke she gestured at the assembled chiefs, indicating her orders to him were orders to them as well. "First order of precedence: Brigadier Sturgeon gets from you whatever he needs to resolve the current crisis on Kingdom. Make it clear to him that he makes the tactical decisions as the man on the scene and we back him up. I think he already knows this, but I want you to emphasize that we understand he and his Marines are on the very tip of the sword between these creatures and the rest of humanity."

Rackstra and Tokis said nothing, waiting for the ax to fall. Now it did:

"Admiral Rackstra, I know I have your full cooperation. I want you to put your entire staff behind this effort. Marcus," she nodded at the Minister of War, "will give you all the assistance you need, including emergency funding."

Rackstra was almost perspiring with relief. "Yes, ma'am! You have it!"

"General Tokis, I know you will support General Aguinaldo in every way possible.

As far as his mission is concerned, there is no chain of command. He will confer with you as needed but his appointment is presidential and he reports directly to me, the same as Admiral Rackstra. But in all matters relating to these aliens, General Aguinaldo is the supreme commander."

Tokis silently breathed a long sigh of relief. "Yes, ma'am! Fully understood!

Brilliant decision! Excellent choice!"

"General Aguinaldo, is there anything you want to say right now? Anything you can think of on such short notice that I can do for you?"

"Yes, ma'am. I want to ask Sergeant Major Bambridge if he'd like to be assigned to my staff. He's the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps."

Chang-Sturdevant looked at Tokis, who happily nodded his assent. To his way of thinking, the entire situation was turning up roses. He was getting rid of two troublemakers, one a flag officer and the other the Marine Corps' senior enlisted man, both recalcitrant "warriors" who could never grasp the big picture of life above the worm's-eye view of the infantryman.

"One more thing, Madam, gentlemen," Aguinaldo said. "It'll be weeks before we can get this show on the road. Weeks before Brigadier Sturgeon even knows there's a show coming. In the meantime, Sturgeon and the two FISTs he commands on Kingdom are on their own. I have faith in Sturgeon and his men that they can hold out. But as potent as this alien force is, I just hope we aren't too late."

Chang-Sturdevant nodded. She understood very well the problems of communicating over the vast reaches of interstellar space. So did everyone else in the room. "All right, gentlemen." She stood. "Go do it. Marcus, I believe you want to have a few words with General Aguinaldo before our cabinet meeting." She walked into her private chambers to prepare for the meeting.

Berentus took Aguinaldo aside. "Andy, you know the only reason she didn't relieve those stuffed shirts on the spot is because she does need them until this crisis is over. As we used to say in the old 97th Tactical Fighter Squadron, ‘Why change shovels in the middle of the shit?’ Besides, they're holdovers from the previous administration, and since those appointments run for five years, they both still have some time to go before they become eligible for retirement. You know, military officers are supposed to be political neutrals, and it doesn't look good for a new President to fire the chief appointed by a predecessor.

"But I only have one thing to say that you don't already know. When the time is right, Madam President is going to advance your name as the next commandant."

Berentus smiled and extended a hand.

"Well," Aguinaldo began, shaking Berentus's hand vigorously, "this morning my career was over, and now . . . I'll tell you one thing, sir, I'm moving my task force headquarters way the hell out there, because with a few notable exceptions like yourself, I don't think I much care for the people I have to work with down here."

CHAPTER NINE

In a corner of the operations center of the Marine Expeditionary Forces, Kingdom, Brigadier Sturgeon stood quietly, arms folded over his chest. He wanted to watch the situation map develop as the patrol reports came without interfering with the work of the staff. He didn't like what he saw. Nearly all of the Army of the Lord platoons, each under the command of a Marine fire team or gun team, made contact with Skinks. In many cases the contact was so severe the patrols had to pull back before they reached suspected cave outlets they were sent to salt with surveillance devices. Kingdomite morale was even lower than he'd thought; about half of the soldiers broke and ran, or tried to, when they made contact with the Skinks.

Stragglers would probably continue to dribble in for the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, the Skinks continued to probe and raid the defensive positions around Haven and Interstellar City.

The situation was untenable. Despite their very high losses in the assault on Heaven's Heights and Hymnal Hill, the Skinks still seemed to number in the tens of thousands. On his side, Sturgeon had two understrength FISTs—fewer than two thousand Marines—and the Army of the Lord. His command of the army was shaky. Archbishop General Lambsblood, the Kingdomite commander, was only reluctantly under Sturgeon's command and couldn't be relied on to obey orders.

Even though the forces available to him had to outnumber the Skinks several times over, Sturgeon could only count on his own Marines to aggressively take the fight to the foe. The Skinks were always aggressive. The Marines and their allies stood to lose this fight. Unless . . .

Unless he could find a Skink center of gravity and hit it hard enough to hurt them—and spectacularly enough to give heart to the Army of the Lord.

He quietly slipped out of the operations center and returned to his office. There, he called for the FIST commanders and their intelligence and operations chiefs to join him and his own intel and ops chiefs.

"Gentlemen, I'll make this short and sweet," Sturgeon said when the eight officers crowded in. "I want to find a Skink COG—Center of Gravity. Headquarters, logistics hub, communications center. Anything that will give them a major hurt when we take it out." Nobody questioned his use of the word "when." They were Marines, they expected to give a major hurt to anybody foolish enough to go up against them.

"Put out all recon teams. Have your battalions reorganize their scout-sniper teams into recon teams. As long as we're in this static position, the infantry can spot for the big guns, so reorganize the artillery forward observer sections into recon teams and send them out as well. That'll give us fourteen recon teams. I want them all out there tonight. They will stay out until they find a target.

"We haven't lost any UAVs, so maybe the Skinks are buying their camouflage. Put your birds out, all but one company-level team per FIST. That team will cover the entire FIST defensive front. I know that'll put a crimp in your close-in surveillance, but finding a COG has top priority." His mouth twisted sourly. "The way the Skinks are hitting the lines, we can get by without the teams fairly easily; we're getting more use out of the surveillance devices outside the perimeter.

"I want to see your operations and coordination plans in three hours. Questions?"

There were none.

"Do it."

The commanders and staff officers left, and Sturgeon settled back in his chair.

Nobody had said anything, but they all knew the recon teams would probably have to go belowground to find a Skink COG. By the same time tomorrow, sixty-four of his Marines were going to begin entering the caves. That would cause many, probably most, of them to lose communications. It was likely that some of them wouldn't come back and that nobody would ever find out what happened to them.

Sometimes a commander had to send men to probable death. That was when being a commander was the hardest job a man could have.

Two days later Staff Sergeant Wu, 34th FIST's recon squad leader, lay burrowed into the muck and detritus under a dense bush overlooking a cave mouth on the high, steep bank of a small stream. His hands held no weapon. Recon's job was intelligence gathering. If a recon Marine had to fight, that meant his mission had failed. Like his men, Staff Sergeant Wu carried a hand-blaster and a knife, purely defensive weapons. He'd been on site for nearly four hours watching that hole in the ground. According to the string-of-pearls landsat data, the hole led into a cave complex. In six hours of observation he'd seen a score or more of smallish local animals poke their way into the cave, and more or less the same number come back out. He'd watched with interest a brief panic among the local fauna when a feral Earth pig went into the cave—that was the only entertainment he had in an otherwise boring watch.

The animals were the only activity he saw. None of the sensors the team had aimed at the cave detected anything other than those animals. The same had been true during the four-hour shifts of Corporal Steffan and Lance Corporal Sonj. Twelve hours' observation combined with lack of sign of human usage—Wu brought himself up short. What was he doing thinking of the Skinks as human? The lack of any sign of Skink usage, he corrected himself, meant that the cave mouth probably wasn't used for entry into the subsurface complex. Maybe the Skinks didn't know about it. Maybe it didn't lead into the complex. Maybe. Or maybe it was mined. Or it was a bolt-hole and was guarded inside. It probably wasn't guarded—not close to the surface, at any rate. If it was, he doubted so many animals would move in and out so casually. Whatever the situation was, there was only one way to find out.

Wu radioed in a report, then slithered out of the muck and joined the three recon Marines in their tight defensive position.

"We go in," he murmured just loud enough for them to hear.

"Send a minnie first?" Steffan asked.

"No need," Wu said. He looked toward the others. None of them had questions.

They all knew they'd have to go underground to find anything important to the Skinks. "Go," he said softly.

Steffan led the way downstream. He paused on the stream bank and probed with all his senses and sensors for danger before entering the water and cleaning the accumulated mud and debris off his chameleons. Muddy water drifted off on the current, away from the cave mouth. They were all filthy, even Lance Corporal Zhon, who hadn't taken a turn watching the cave. They had to wash off because the dirt made them visible. Cleaned, Steffan moved into cover on the stream's opposite side.

Wu went next, followed by Sonj. Zhon brought up the rear.

They moved inland and circled around to approach the cave from upstream. Their chameleons quickly dried as they walked, and they were again effectively invisible to the human eye.

Steffan approached the cave while the other three kept watch from inside the forest. The cave didn't look like much from the outside, just a split in a rock face that had been revealed by erosion of the high, steep bank. Steffan used his HUD to check the sensors still in place across the stream. They showed just the four Marines and some small animals. The split was wide enough for a man to sidle through, but low. Steffan angled his torso and started into the split but jerked back out when something skittered across his feet. He let out a breath of relief when something resembling a hedgehog scampered away. He bent again and slid into the cave.

A meter or so inside, the cave widened enough so he didn't have to sidle. His infra showed a few small animals hiding behind rocks or in corners of the cave's irregular walls. With his light-gatherer he saw rubble on the uneven floor—fallen rocks, scattered bones, droppings, a couple of nests. The dirt on the cave floor had been disturbed by the feral pig that visited recently, but showed nothing that resembled a Skink footprint. A few meters ahead the walls spread out, the floor rose, and the roof dropped so the cave was less than a meter high and nearly two shoulder widths wide. He lowered himself and looked through the narrow place. A wall was some distance beyond it, but he couldn't tell whether the cave ended there or turned before the wall. As he duck-walked forward to see through the narrowing, he was aware of someone entering the cave behind him. He had to lower himself to hands and knees to get close enough to see beyond the narrowing. Beyond it, the floor dipped, then rose again before the tunnel turned to the left.

He shifted aside to allow Staff Sergeant Wu to squeeze in beside him.

Wu touched helmets and asked, "Ready?"

"As I'll ever be."

"Go." Wu slid back to let Steffan pass, then followed. Sonj and Zhon trailed without having to be told.

Two or three turns in from the entrance the cave was pitch-black and their light-gatherer shields were worthless. So they used infrared torches to see by. The cave twisted and turned, rose and fell. In one place there was a sheer four-meter drop, in another a climb nearly as high. There were a couple of spots they only squeezed through with difficulty.

At least the big ones can't get through here, Wu thought. He shuddered at the memory of a close encounter he'd had with one of the giant Skinks earlier in the campaign.

Four hours later, after following three kilometers of twists and turns, they began to see farther than their infra lamps should have allowed. Steffan stopped and raised his infra shield. Yes, there was a faint red luminescence up ahead.

Wu looked over his shoulder. The light didn't seem to have a source, it simply was. To the best of Wu's knowledge, Kingdom didn't harbor any life-forms that generated red luminescence; the light had to be artificially generated.

Touching helmets with Steffan, he said, "Careful," then added over his helmet comm to everyone, "Lights off." The recon Marines turned off their infra lamps.

The Marines resumed their advance, stepping carefully. All senses at peak, they moved much slower than before, stepping with what naive observers would have thought as theatrical slowness.

The faint luminescence grew to a dim glow when Steffan went around a bend in the tunnel. Ahead he saw that it seemed to emanate from the cave wall. Voices and the whine of a motor began to echo in the cave. Ever so cautiously, he approached the light source. It came from a narrow chink in the tunnel wall. Stepping carefully so he didn't kick the chips of rock below the split, he looked through it and whispered one word into his helmet comm: "Paydirt." Then moved forward so Wu could move up and see what he'd found.