Starfist: Wings of Hell (27 page)

The crews of the few remaining antiaircraft guns had begun putting out a thin, painfully thin, wall of plasma bolts as soon as the first wave of Skink aircraft began their strafing run. Thirteen pilots scrambled from the ready room and raced for their aircraft, wanting to get into the sky before they, the base, or the Raptors were killed. A few of them made it; not all of them who did found that their aircraft were still flight-ready. Four navy Raptors launched in jump mode, straight up from their reventmented shelters—and straight into the path of the oncoming second wave of fifty aircraft, coming fast with rail guns blazing. Most of the Skinks continued their strafing run, demolishing revetments, but a few briefly diverted to strike at the launching Raptors.

One Raptor made it to safety above the enemy attack wave. The pilot was about to turn tail up and dive on the attackers when he saw the third wave coming fast behind the second. Instead of going tail up, he went tail down and climbed for the clouds. Even a junior-grade lieutenant brave enough to make a solo attack on a fifty-aircraft formation isn’t brave enough to take on two such waves simultaneously.

But one wave at a time…

Lieutenant (jg) Jon Trotte didn’t stay in the clouds; he checked his radar and timed his dive to hit the Skink third wave from behind. His dive began while the lead aircraft of the wave were still slightly short of his position. Even though he was much farther above them than they were from directly below him, his diving speed was so much faster than their attack speed that he was on them before the last of the enemy had passed below. He lined up on one aircraft and opened fire with his plasma cannons. After a short burst he switched his aim to a second and gave that one a short burst. By then he had to hit his reverse engines and bounce out of his dive to avoid slamming through the attacking formation and into the ground below.

Back up at altitude, Trotte twisted his Raptor to a steep attack angle and closed on the rear of the formation from above and behind. He got off three bursts before he had to level off and come at the Skinks on their own level.

By this time, the Over Master who was the senior of the two squadron commanders in the Skinks’ third wave realized that he had five aircraft fewer than he had when his strafing run began. He crisply ordered his wave to break into flights and scramble, to find whoever was killing his aircraft, and kill
him.
The forty-five-aircraft formation broke into a starburst as pairs scattered in different directions, with some looping up and over, heading back the way they’d come in search of whoever was hitting them from the rear.

Trotte was no dummy; he knew where the safest place for him was. He throttled back to keep from overflying the Skink starburst; if he could keep himself in the middle of the scattered enemy planes, they wouldn’t fire on him out of fear of hitting their own.

Or so Trotte thought.

Three Skink pilots spotted Trotte’s Raptor at almost the same instant and barked harsh words, telling the others to watch where their fire went. The first two didn’t aim, just pointed in the general direction of the Raptor and fired. The third took the time to line his guns on the target. The three were in different parts of the sky, two almost directly in line with the Raptor, opposite each other. One of those two was the one who took the time to line up his shot. He never got it off because the burst fired by the Skink aircraft opposite him pulverized his aircraft, instantly sending him to the Emperor’s ancestors.

Trotte, meanwhile, had lined up on another Skink and sent a short burst from his plasma cannons at him. The plasma didn’t have quite the same velocity as the Skink rail guns but it wasn’t much slower. It was fast enough that he barely had to lead his target. His reflexes were fast and he was already jinking and searching for another target by the time the plasma stream gave him his sixth kill of the fight.

When a Skink rail gun finally found and tore off the rear of Trotte’s Raptor, he had killed nine of them—and in their eagerness to be the one to down the brave Earthman pilot, the Skinks had downed another five of their own.

Another one hundred and fifty Skink aircraft orbited west of NAS Gay at thirty thousand meters, waiting for the next Essays to make planetfall. They intended to intercept that planetfall by killing the Essays before they spiraled to the ground.

But General Aguinaldo knew they were there through intelligence and the Marine had seen how Trotte had taken on a fifty-aircraft wave single-handedly. Based on those two things, Aguinaldo had issued an order to the fleets in orbit.

So the Essays scheduled to bring antiaircraft guns down in the lazy three-orbit spiral favored by nearly everybody other than the Marines, who came down in a combat assault landing. And they carried Raptors, prepared to take flight when they were still at fifty thousand meters.

As a side note, at the same time Aguinaldo issued that order, he put in strongly worded recommendations for the Confederation Medal of Heroism for the late Lieutenant (jg) Trotte and Corps of Engineers Sergeant Regis Alfonse—the highest decoration given by the armed forces of the Confederation of Human Worlds.

The three orbiting carriers launched sixteen Essays, which went into formations near their respective starships and held station while each carrier trundled another sixteen Essays into its well deck. Each of the Essays contained three Confederation Navy A8E Raptors. At the same time, each of the two gator starships carrying the additional FISTS for the operation launched four Essays carrying a total of twenty Marine A8E Raptors.

As soon as all 104 of the Essays were in their various formations, Rear Admiral Worthog, from his command center on the CNSS
Raymond A. Spruance,
commanded “Away All Boats” and the formations turned planetward, the Essays firing their engines in a carefully plotted sequence that would have all of them arriving twenty thousand meters above the orbiting Skink aircraft at the same time.

In a straight-down line, the plunge would take approximately seventeen and a half minutes from the fleets’ thousand-kilometer orbiting altitude to the interface between the mesosphere and the stratosphere, where the Essays would commence braking maneuvers. But because none of the Essays were plunging straight down but rather at various acute angles, and they didn’t all begin at the same time, almost twenty-five minutes passed before the Essays turned their noses up and began turning into the spirals that would eat their downward velocity.

That twenty-five minutes was more than enough time for the Skink intelligence operators watching the orbiting fleets to notice that the Essays were heading planetside in combat assault mode, and for the High Master who commanded the Skink air forces to alert his high-orbiting wings to change their tactics from attacking slow-moving shuttles to striking at fast-moving shuttles as they dove planetside, passing close to the wings waiting in ambush.

The Essays began their braking maneuvers in a much more tight timing sequence than the formations had begun their plunges; they were closer to one another at fifty kilometers altitude than they had been in orbit. As soon as their spirals stabilized, the Essays’ crew chiefs pressed the levers that released the passenger Raptors from their firmholds. Firmholds released, the crew chiefs opened the ramps and the coxswains piloting the Essays tipped their noses planetward and fired their forward braking engines, then turned about, pointing their tails downward.

No longer locked in place, when the decks below them abruptly slowed and slanted down the Raptors slid over the open ramps and into the thin upper atmosphere to begin their own unpowered plunges. Seconds later the pilots ignited the solid fuel that allowed powered flight at high altitude and took control of their plummeting aircraft.

This was
not
a maneuver the Skinks were prepared for.

The approximate twenty seconds from the time they dropped from the Essays until they plunged through the scrambling Skink aircraft was barely enough time for the Raptor pilots with the fastest reflexes to gain control of their aircraft, acquire targets, and fire off brief bursts of plasma bolts. But with an advantage of more than two to one in aircraft, the navy and Marine air didn’t need to have a terribly high proportion of their pilots get off aimed bursts to inflict serious damage on the enemy. So it was that approximately twenty seconds after the Raptors dropped from the Essays, the one hundred and fifty Skink aircraft were reduced to 107, and the 107 Skink pilots were monstrously confused; their ambush had somehow gone seriously awry.

Lieutenant Arby Doremus, leader of the four Raptors of “Walleye division,” was one of the thirty-seven pilots who scored a kill on the first pass. Doremus’s call sign was “Walleye” after a facial deformity he suffered when a piece of shrapnel fractured his eye socket during what should have been a routine flyover on some rinky-dink little peacekeeping mission—the powers that be thought the mere sight of the ten Raptors of the squadron of a Marine FIST would be enough to cow the belligerent parties into backing off from killing each other. The powers that be were wrong, and the rinky-dink little peacekeeping mission turned into an eleven-standard-month deployment that saw many more Marines than a junior pilot get wounded—and some get killed. Afterward, then-ensign Doremus refused reconstructive surgery on his eye socket—the deformity didn’t affect his vision—because, he thought, the eye made him look more fearsomely warriorlike. Some insensitive pilots began calling him “Walleye.” The nickname stuck and he came to wear the sobriquet with pride.

As soon as Walleye Doremus passed his kill he bounced, ignoring the bumps of debris rattling off his fuselage. His three division-mates bounced with him and in seconds the four Marine Raptors were again above the scattering Skinks, flying level in a tight circle, ready for another dive. Doremus was no glory hound; he wanted his wingmen to get their fair share of kills. He scanned the Skinks and spotted half a dozen speeding in a northward climb that would shortly bring them to the same altitude as Walleye division.

“Walleye pups, this is the Walleye his own self. Azimuth, one-seven-two. Range, two-five and increasing. Six chicken-lickin’s. Fricassee their tails!”

“Legs, breasts, and wings, too!” Lieutenant Robert Sandell, Walleye Three, said as the four Raptors peeled out of their circle and began pursuit.

“I want a drumstick!” Ensign Caleb Haynes, Walleye Four, came back.

“You and your drumsticks!” Ensign Albert Baumler, Walleye Two, said. “I’ll stick with the tits.”

“Gotta fricassee ’em first, pups,” Doremus reminded his division. He increased throttle and the others began increasing their on-line intervals. They quickly closed the gap.

But the Skinks weren’t fleeing the battlespace. Or they spotted their pursuit and decided to turn back on it—after all, they were six, and only four were chasing them. As one, the six Skinks whipped into a Cobra turn, flying straight up, then rolling as they turned back to dive at the Raptors.

Seeing the six enemy aircraft coming toward them and gaining speed, the Marine pilots executed barrel rolls to throw off the aim of their foes. The maneuver worked—all six Skinks fired rail guns, and all six missed.

Then the aircraft passed one another and the Marines went into wide horizontal turns, only to find the Skinks executing yet another Cobra turn. The Marines tightened their turns and slanted upward to come at the Skinks on an angle. As the Skinks adjusted their approach to put the Raptors directly to their front, the Marines changed their own arcs to prevent the enemy from getting a fix on them.

“Walleyes, turn before they reach us,” Doremus commanded. “We’ll weave on them.” The other pilots aye-aye’d. “Now!” Doremus ordered when the two groups were still two kilometers apart. He and Baumler broke right and turned sharply; Sandell and Haynes broke left. The Skinks tried to get off aimed bursts from their rail guns but the Marines’ maneuver was too fast and unexpected for them to get lined up.

But they tried. And when the Marines completed their turns and were headed back toward the north, a Skink was on the tail of each flight of Raptors; the other four Skinks had overshot and were climbing into a loop to drop back behind the Marines.