Starfist: Kingdom's Fury (7 page)

For a moment before the Dragons reached the infantry jump-off line, the Marine artillery concentrated its fire on Hymnal Hill's defensive line. Then the Dragons stuttered to a stop and their rear ramps dropped. The Marines bolted off, and even before they were all on line, Conorado gave the order to advance, and they ran uphill. The Dragons rumbled behind them. Taller than the running Marines, the Dragons would be seen by the Skinks first if they were with the line, and Conorado wanted his entire force to make contact simultaneously. He didn't want the Skinks warned by the Dragons that his infantrymen were coming. He radioed for the artillery to cease fire, and the artillery shifted its fire to Heaven's Heights.

Half a minute after the Dragons dropped their ramps, the Marines surged over the hilltop, and their momentum sent them crashing into Skinks, bowling the nearest ones over.

"Volley fire, point-blank!" Conorado screamed.

The Marines of Company L were lucky that the Skinks had not begun to organize a defense against a counterattack. They were stunned and totally disorganized. The pummeling they'd taken from the artillery was devastating, even though body armor had kept most of them alive. As many as had been slaughtered by the Marine scatter munitions and Kingdomite artillery, there were still far too many of them to take cover in the bunkers.

The Marines who could opened fire into the thick mass of enemy. Others were in physical contact and used their blasters like quarter staffs, battering the Skinks, breaking their bones, smashing their flesh into bloody pulp. The nearest Skinks shrilled and tried to back off far enough to bring their acid guns to bear on the Marines. Some a little farther back saw the counterattack and sprayed acid in the direction, but little of the fluid reached the Marines. Most of it spattered against their mates and tumbled them to the ground, screaming their death agonies.

A clear lane suddenly opened before the Marines, and they opened fire with their blasters. Along their front, Skinks flashed brightly into vapor—the body armor gave no defense against the plasma bolts. The Skinks were so tightly packed that each bolt flashed at least three of them. Hundreds flared in the first few seconds, but there were still many left. The brilliance of the flashes blinded the Marines and the heat of the flares stopped the Marine advance. A Skink barked a command, and hundreds of Skinks charged.

"Back off!" Conorado shouted. "Get down. Fire prone!"

The Marines withdrew a few meters and fell into prone positions. Their fire resumed, even heavier than before. Plasma bolts slashed into the Skinks.

Now, with the infantrymen out of their line of fire, the Dragons opened up with their guns, gouting huge streams of fire. The six guns of the blaster platoons and the heavier guns of the assault platoon were set up, and their fire, added to that of the Dragons, put up a plasma wall that vaporized most of the attackers. The blastermen picked their targets and fired. The flashes from the dying Skinks were dazzling, even to them.

The Skink charge staggered against the wall of fire and broke. Those nearest the fighting turned and ran panic-stricken at the Skinks behind them, trying to force their way through them to flee to safety. Marine fire—Dragons, guns, and blasters—pursued them. In seconds the mass of Skinks on the hilltop realized they were about to be wiped out, and nearly all of them ran. Masters and Leaders ran about, shrilling and barking orders for the Fighters to turn around and fight, but the Fighters were too shocked by the carnage they'd suffered to obey.

"To the bunkers," Conorado commanded as soon as he could see again. The Marines leaped up and sprinted, expecting the Skink buzz saws to open up on them before they could get under cover in the bunkers. They didn't know the Skinks had already withdrawn the buzz saws.

Conorado saw the Skinks in flight across the flats below Hymnal Hill and called in an artillery fire mission on them. The 82nd Division's artillery regiment responded faster than it had to its previous fire missions. Hundreds of Skinks died before they reached the safety of the wetlands and waterways.

A couple of the Marines of second platoon, Charlie Company, 26th FIST, had been killed when plasma bolts they'd fired at Skinks crowding in with them ricocheted off the walls and hit them. A couple more had been overwhelmed and killed by the sheer number of Skinks who crammed inside their bunkers. But most of them, though injured, were still alive.

Company L had no time to rest after beating off the attack on Hymnal Hill—Heaven's Heights was in imminent danger of being overrun, and they were the closest Marine infantry to the ridge. After checking for casualties, they scrambled back into their Dragons and roared off, relieved that their worst injury was a broken arm suffered by one of the new men in the mad melee when they first crashed into the Skinks.

Conorado got good news en route to Heaven's Heights.

"Twenty-sixth's cooks and bakers will meet you," Brigadier Sturgeon told him.

"They're under the command of the security section commander. You have operational command."

"Cooks and bakers." Half a millennium earlier, in a war that had engulfed most of Old Earth, the expression had been literal. It soon came to mean all rear echelon personnel. The Confederation Marine Corps believed, as had the United States Marines and the Royal Marines to whom it traced its ancestry, that every Marine was a blasterman first and a "cook and baker" second. The understrength company of clerks and supplymen, cooks and messmen, who met Company L at the bottom of the south end of Heaven's Heights were well-trained as infantry, even though few, other than the twenty Marines of the headquarters security section, had experience in combat.

The Dragons carrying the two companies didn't pause. They got smoothly on line and began their ascent of the ridge, Company L on the right, the cooks and bakers on the left.

"Lieutenant, it's down and dirty," Conorado said as soon as he established communications with the commander of his reinforcements. "There's no finesse involved, no tricky maneuvers. We dismount just before the Skinks come into sight, line up, and charge. It's the same kind of frontal assault armies have been using since the time of the Sumerians. Align on me and keep up. That's all there is to it.

Questions?"

"Sounds pretty straightforward." The lieutenant—Conorado didn't know his name—sounded nervously excited. Conorado assumed that the man hadn't seen action in a while.

"One more thing." The captain examined his latest sitmap. "They're still massed so densely it's hard to believe the artillery had any effect on them. You've never seen so many live bodies on a battlefield at one time before."

He'd barely finished speaking when the Dragons lurched to a halt and their rear ramps dropped. The Marines flooded out. Squad and fire team leaders shouted their men into line ahead of the Dragons. Conorado gave the order, and more than two hundred Marines ran on line up the slope. They clearly heard the din raised by the Skinks, even through the continuing explosions of artillery rounds.

The artillery, after firing a brief concentration over the southern end of the ridge, shifted its fire to the northern end before the infantry reached the top.

This time they didn't smash into the Skinks. The nearest were seventy meters away when the Marines came in sight of them. There were so many, it seemed all the Skinks in the universe were swarming over the defenses of Heaven's Heights.

"Volley fire, seventy meters!" Conorado shouted over the all-hands circuit.

"Advance . . . Fire! . . . Advance . . . Fire . . . Advance . . ."

The fire from the right side of the Marine line was smooth. The Marines of Company L fired in unison, took two steps forward and fired again on command.

Their volleys went true, a wall of fire slamming into the Skinks, vaporizing them by the score. The line's left side, the "cooks and bakers," was more ragged. Except for the security section, they weren't on a good line and their fire was uneven, with many bolts flying high. Still, by the time the Marines cut the distance to the first Skinks in half, they'd obliterated nearly all of the closest enemy soldiers.

The Skinks on Heaven's Heights, though, weren't as disorganized as they had been on Hymnal Hill. Even though the vastly outnumbered Marines in the bunkers fought valiantly, the twelve guns of the two FISTs' artillery batteries couldn't pound the ridge as intensely as they had the smaller hilltop, and the Skinks had suffered a much lower casualty rate. It didn't take long for the Skink commanders of the nearest units to organize a defense against this new threat. Commands were barked out and hundreds of Skinks charged the Marines.

In response, Conorado stopped the Marine advance and had his men fire volley after volley into the charging Skinks. The flashes from flaring Skinks were dazzling, but the foe kept coming until, just under fifty meters from the Marines, they dropped to the ground and began firing acid. Hundreds of streamers of the greenish fluid arced out over the ground between the opposing forces and splashed to the ground around and on the Marines; almost all of them were hit. The retardant that impregnated their chameleons worked, but some of the Marines in the cooks and bakers company screamed when the acid found its way inside improperly closed uniforms. With the Marines flat on the ground, the Dragons that had carried them up the ridge moved forward and added the fire of their big guns to the fray.

"Fire in front of them," Conorado shouted over the all-hands circuit. "Hit the dirt in front of them, go for ricochets! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!"

The ridge top strobed with flashes as the devastating fire put out by the Marines hit Skinks. Again, the fire from Company L on the right side of the Marine line was more effective than fire from the left. But there were thousands of Skinks, and only two hundred Marines. Every Skink in range of the Marines who was killed was almost immediately replaced by Skinks from the mass behind the line. The greenish fluid continued to stream unabated.

The Skink Senior Masters had space, and space gave them time to maneuver. The Marine artillery couldn't fire too closely to the southern end of the ridge top for fear of hitting the counterattacking Marines. The Senior Master in command of the forces at the northern part of the ridge ordered his Fighters south, out from under the artillery bombardment. The Senior Master in command of the central portion was caught in a squeeze and decided to aid the southern unit in dealing with the counterattack. Horrendous as their casualties had been, there were still thousands of Skinks left to move toward the ferocious fighting at the ridge's southern end.

More than two hundred blasters crack-sizzled at the nearby Skinks. Conorado ordered the ten Dragons to pour their fire into the mass of Skinks behind the line.

Still, the streamers of acid floated at the Marines. The mass of Skinks behind the line drew rapidly closer. They reached the line of shooters and charged through it. The infantrymen and the Dragons shifted their aim to meet this new threat, and so many charging Skinks flared that the shooters were hidden behind a wall of strobing light.

But there were too many Skinks, and some survived to close with the Marines.

Silhouetted against the flashes of their dying comrades, six Skinks emerged directly in front of first squad's third fire team. Corporal Joe Dean swung the muzzle of his blaster at one and pressed the firing lever. The Skink flared. Then Dean had to roll out of the way as another clubbed at him with the nozzle of his acid weapon.

"On your feet!" Dean shouted into his fire team's circuit—his first command in combat. He used the momentum of his roll to gain his feet. Another Skink was on him before he could shift aim. He swung the butt end of his blaster at the Skink and knocked him thudding to the ground. He shot it, and the flare when it vaporized sent him reeling back, which caused the strike from a Skink armed with a long knife to miss him. He recovered his balance in time to block a second knife chop, and followed through with the motion to slam the Skink across the chest. While the thing was staggering, Dean stepped back and blasted it. This time he was ready, and the flare didn't take him by surprise.

To Dean's left a Skink managed to knock Lance Corporal Izzy Godenov's blaster from his hands, then it leaped at him and tried to wrap the hose of its weapon around the Marine's neck. Godenov slugged the Skink in the chest—he'd meant to hit him in the stomach, but the thing was shorter than he realized. The Skink's body armor was hard enough that the blow stung Godenov's hand. Still, the Skink staggered back.

Godenov pounced and bore him to the ground, straddled him and wrenched the Skink's helmet off. The Skink tried to bite Godenov's hands, but the Marine clamped one hand under the Skink's jaw to hold it in place, then gouged out his eyes with the other. The Skink shrilled in agony and clamped hands over its damaged face.

Godenov jumped away, found his blaster, and vaporized his wounded opponent.

A few meters away, on Dean's other side, PFC Quick lived up to his name against two Skinks. He slammed the butt of his blaster into the juncture where one Skink's helmet met his body armor. He spun to his other attacker before the first one hit the ground and jabbed hard with the muzzle of his blaster. The Skink jumped backward to avoid the jab, and Quick pressed the firing lever. Instantly, he turned back to finish off the first Skink, who was still writhing on the ground.

"Buddha's balls!" Corporal Claypoole shouted as a group of Skinks appeared just meters in front of him and Lance Corporal Wolfman MacIlargie. He skittered backward and leaped to his feet before three converging Skinks managed to swarm him. He blasted one of them before the other two bowled him over. But Claypoole, a man of average height and strength—for a Marine—was much bigger and stronger than the Skinks. He let go of his blaster and used his size and strength to fling one Skink away from him, then twisted around on top of the other. Shoving down hard on the creature's head and chest, he pushed himself to his feet and stomped on it, but before he could do any real damage, the first Skink grappled with him. The Skink had lost its helmet when Claypoole threw him off, and now it tried to bite with sharp, triangular teeth. Claypoole grabbed its head and jerked as hard as he could.