Starfist: Kingdom's Fury (38 page)

He stood. "Officer of the Watch, the bridge is yours. I will be in my quarters. My compliments to Brigadier Sturgeon. Ask him to join me."

"Aye, sir. The bridge is mine. The commodore's compliments to Brigadier Sturgeon."

In his quarters, Borland opened a bottle of Corsican Special Reserve cognac and set it on the table next to two snifters. Sturgeon arrived a moment later.

Borland greeted the Marine, poured cognac into the snifters and handed one to Sturgeon. "Were you able to follow that action, Ted?" he asked.

"Yes I did, Roger, and with great interest. I've witnessed very few naval battles."

Sturgeon smiled. "This was the first battle I'd ever seen in which an amphibious ship attacked enemy shipping."

"Then you understand why I feel the need for a celebratory drink."

"I do indeed." They clinked glasses. "To more victories."

"Thank you."

They sniffed and sipped. The cognac delighted their palates and flowed easily down their throats. They enjoyed the sensation for a moment, then sipped again.

"Sit, please." Borland waved a hand at two captain's chairs arranged at a small table. They sat and put their snifters down. "You saw the big one get away."

"With what appeared to be significant damage, yes."

"We don't know where the smaller one went."

Sturgeon cocked an eyebrow.

"It didn't come back around, so it must have jumped. But we didn't detect any drive emanations."

Sturgeon nodded. "And there are still Skinks planet-side."

"That seems a reasonable assumption. At least the crews of those shuttles that turned back are still down there. We know they didn't launch again—their landing area is still in view. There could be more Skinks planetside, possibly a lot of them."

"Then I should take Marines planetside and root them out."

Borland nodded. He picked up his snifter and held it out. Sturgeon picked up his and they clinked.

"There's another thing we have to consider."

"I know. Where did the Skink ships go when they left orbit here?"

"Our mission was to stop the fighting on Kingdom. We did that, but now we're here."

"And the Skinks might have decided to take advantage of our absence and returned to Kingdom."

"That's not likely, but we have to consider it."

"I'd like the ground commander's view of splitting his forces."

"Land 34th FIST here and you go back to Kingdom with 26th FIST, just in case.

Come back if the Skinks aren't there."

"Thirty-fourth FIST will be isolated."

"FISTs are accustomed to fighting alone, unsupported. Let's do this thing."

The two commanders wished each other good hunting, and glasses clinked again.

"High speed on a bad road," was what the Marines called their method of planetfall. They boarded Dragons that were nestled by threes into the bellies of Essays and strapped themselves firmly in. The Essays were forcibly ejected from the starship transports, gathered in formation nearby, then headed planetside. Most planetfalls made by the Essays were relatively sedate affairs—the shuttles went into deteriorating orbits that normally spiraled them around a world three times from the top of the atmosphere to touchdown. Not when they landed Marines, though. With Marines aboard, the Essays aimed almost straight down and kicked in the afterburners. The initial forces vibrated the Essays and their embarked Marines wildly. As the atmosphere thickened, the vibrations turned to shaking, then rattling, and finally rolls so violent it felt like the Essays would tumble and crash. Anyone who had not been firmly strapped in returned to orbit with the Essay—and hoped he lived long enough to reach the starship's hospital.

Essays carrying Marines took not much longer to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface than the same trip took a meteorite. This was deliberate, done to reduce the time of entry and the exposure time to planet-based defenses.

Since Marines made planetfall via "high speed on a bad road" when making planetfall on any world, no matter how friendly, many Marines suspected the real reason was to make the trip so unpleasant they would be in a killing mood when they got where they were going. Whatever the real reason, when it seemed that a catastrophic deceleration encounter with the surface was inevitable, the Essays leveled off and extended stubby wings and their flight paths became speed-eating spirals. When the Essays' speed dropped enough, drogue chutes popped out of their rears to further slow them. At the end of the rough ride, the Essays set gently down—usually at sea, over the horizon from the nearest landmass.

The science and technology expedition that had investigated Society 362 a dozen years earlier nicknamed it "Quagmire" for good reason. It had no dry ground; it was covered in a tremendous thickness of mud. The Marines of 34th FIST who made planetfall on Society 362 didn't come down on an oceanic surface—Quagmire didn't have any oceans since it was too wet for an ocean basin to form and hold. Every time one began to develop, the sides collapsed and filled it in. There were rivers all over the planet. They ran into other rivers and into lakes that grew into temporary ocean basins. The only variations in the weather forecast anywhere on the planet were how low the overcast was and how heavy the rain was coming down.

High speed on a bad road to get here? the commander reflected. The Marines of 34th FIST would truly be ready to spill blood.

When decoys sent planetward failed to draw fire, the landing force was launched.

The Essays touched down twenty kilometers from the area where the Skink shuttles had launched and returned. The Dragons roared off the Essays and charged through a dripping forest of tall, widely spaced trees held up by spreading buttress roots.

Secure in their webbing in the bellies of the Dragons, the Marines couldn't see what the Dragon crews saw—the damnedest indigenous fauna they'd ever seen. Most of them, large and small, were hexapods. That wasn't as weird as the fact that none of them had heads! The Dragons were going so fast over the unknown and potentially treacherous landscape that the crews couldn't spare enough attention to notice the snouts that projected from high in the chests of the hexapods, or the eyestalks that popped up and down on their shoulders. They certainly didn't notice that the man-size creatures with torsos that reared up above the middle pair of legs carried spears.

The spear-bearing headless centauroids, eaten by curiosity and driven by anger, scampered after the Dragons. They couldn't scamper and clamber nearly as fast as the Dragons rushed, but they never had to stop and back up and go around an obstruction. They dropped behind, but even so, they reached the island of the murder-monsters close behind the strange new monsters.

And these new monsters were the strangest of all the monsters they'd seen. Or not seen, but that was a question for the shaman.

The hunters hunkered in the deep shadows beneath the roots of the forest giants, hid behind boles in the crooks of mid-size trees and watched a more amazing battle than any of them could ever have imagined. In the middle of the great island in the great river where they had established their base, the murderous monsters who enslaved and killed so many of the people lay or crouched behind the very hard nests that moved. They sprayed their evil acid at the near end of the island. The hunters watched the near end of the island very closely. The monsters they saw there—they were invisible, but rainwater sluiced over otherwise unseen forms—threw balls of lightning at the monsters that sprayed acid! Monsters they couldn't see except for the holes they made in the rain throwing balls of lightning. It was incredible, but were these monsters less believable than the monsters who murdered people and worked them to death? Or less believable than the other monsters who were there half a lifetime ago, who left behind so many strange and wonderful objects before departing for reasons knowable only to them?

"We live in interesting times," one of the hunters said. He was just giving voice to what was on the minds of many of them. Mature hunters were chilled by the thought.

The younger hunters were excited by it.

The battle between the evil monsters who sprayed flesh-eating acid and the invisible monsters who threw balls of lightning was fascinating. Especially when one of the murder-monsters was struck by a lightning ball—it vanished into a larger ball of lightning! The hunters watched spellbound. They didn't know anything about the monsters they couldn't see, but they hoped they'd win this battle since they hated the murder-monsters.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Kilo Company was stuck on the downstream end of the four-kilometer-long island.

The constant rain was leaching the acid retardant from their chameleons—which they discovered when three of them went down with acid wounds—so they couldn't just get on line and move through the Skink positions. And the Skinks were firing from behind massive vehicles, and so didn't have to expose themselves to fire. The Marines had put concentrated fire on the vehicles in an attempt to slag or even melt them. But the vehicles were too big, too hard, and the rain kept dissipating the heat anyway.

Neither were the Dragons much help for flanking maneuvers. The flora on the sides of the river was too dense for them to get through without burning their way, and too wet to burn without plasma fire. The Dragons had attempted to swim the river itself to flank the Skink positions, but the Skinks had some bigger acid shooters that could reach across the river. Concentrated fire from the acid shooters had eaten through the armor of one Dragon and sent it to the bottom. Two others were damaged.

Company M sat in its Dragons half a klick downriver, waiting for orders. It couldn't come up to help Kilo Company because there wasn't enough room on the end of the island. Company L was dismounted and advancing through the growth fifty meters deep from the left bank of the river, but the foliage was thick and tangled, and the ground slippery and soft. The going was hard, and it would be a while before they got to a position to pour flanking fire on the Skinks.

Corporal Claypoole put his right foot on yet another knee-high buttress root and stepped up. The bark under his boot sloughed off and he yelped as his foot slid and his knee turned in a way it wasn't supposed to. He yelped louder when the twisted knee slammed against the root.

He dropped his blaster and swore, "Buddha's sweaty balls!" He massaged the injured joint with both hands.

"More like Christ on a crutch," Lance Corporal MacIlargie said. "I think you just got an idiot stripe. You're bleeding."

MacIlargie sloshed close and picked up the dropped blaster. "It's a good thing for you Staff Sergeant Hyakowa didn't see you drop this," he said. "Or I'd be the new fire team leader and you'd be following my orders."

Claypoole snarled and snatched the blaster back. "I'm fire team leader, Boot," he said as he stood erect and lifted his injured leg over the root. He flinched as he put his weight on the leg, but the knee held as he lifted his left leg over. "Don't you ever forget that."

"Sure thing," MacIlargie said. He wished Claypoole could see his grin behind the chameleon screen.

"Close it up, second squad," Sergeant Linsman said on the squad circuit.

Muttering to himself, Claypoole limped after the rest of the squad, careful not to step on any more roots.

Lance Corporal Schultz, on the point, didn't make any missteps. He'd never before been in a forest quite like this one, but he'd been in enough rain forests that he didn't find it a totally alien environment. It reminded him more of the swamps of Kingdom than of rain forests. He stepped over roots rather than around them, and put his mass over his lead foot before applying all of his weight to it. He took care to walk on an automatic level; all his senses were directed outward. So far as the Marines knew, all of the Skinks were on the island, pinned down by Kilo Company.

But that didn't mean there weren't any on the land on this side of the river. He kept himself oriented by listening to the sounds of the battle that raged on the island—the company was too far inland to see the water through the trees.

It was slow going in the forest. Captain Conorado followed between third and first platoons with a truncated command group: himself, Gunnery Sergeant Thatcher, Corporal Escarpo on comm, and a fire controller from the artillery battery. He didn't think he'd have any use for the artillery controller except as an extra blaster—if the battery had managed to clear enough trees forward of their position to fire, he was sure they'd already be firing in support of Kilo Company. By the sounds of the battle on the island, he judged the command group was nearly parallel to Kilo Company's position. When Company L advanced far enough that second platoon was slightly to the rear of the Skinks, he'd call a halt and change formation—third platoon would form a defensive arc upstream and inland, with first platoon doing the same from the opposite direction, while second platoon moved closer to the river to fire into the Skinks. Nobody knew whether there were more Skinks somewhere; when Company L joined in the battle, the Marines had to be prepared to fight in all directions.

The battle didn't seem to favor either side. Fewer of the murderous monsters were turning into lightning from the lightning balls thrown by the invisible monsters, and no more of the invisible monsters were being killed or injured either. The chief hunter left the other hunters where they watched the fight and clambered upstream through the trees. He went in search of a way he and his hunters could tip the tide in favor of the invisible monsters.

At its upstream end, well above the fighting, the island grew close to the far bank and the water ran slowly over a shallow bottom. When he was sure none of the monsters were looking in his direction, the chief hunter slithered into the river and swam to the shallow channel. Once there, hunkered low, he crawled onto the point of the island. There were many, many—the chief hunter's vocabulary didn't have words for the things—many things on the island. So many that the fight at the downstream end wasn't visible through them, and the lightning thrown by the invisible monsters couldn't get through them. A hunter could lie in ambush here safe from sight and injury. But lying there wasn't good enough; it was not possible to reach the murder-monsters, to injure or kill them.